Lost and Found

I see the potential for so much in life. And I see the darkness too.

I have stood at the edge of the water and felt the pull of it. The grey. The murkiness. The going under. I know that place. I have lived there before, more than once, in more than one body of water.

And I came back.

That the darkness is not the end of the story. It is the middle. It is the necessary middle, and there is no skipping it.

Let me be clear. I am sad right now. And I am allowing myself to be sad in a way I rarely permit. About what is being taken. About what we are losing, day by day, breath by breath. The democracy that was imperfect but ours. The future I believed my daughter and son would inherit. The version of America I taught myself to love even as I watched it fail people who looked nothing like me. I am grieving all of it.

And grief is not surrender.

Here is something I have come to understand. Our institutions were never actually the protection we thought they were. They were the mind’s attempt to contain what the heart had never fully processed. They held the shape of the world together for a while. But they were always structure in place of healing, form in place of truth. And now they are failing, and the mind is terrified, because it built those structures to keep itself safe and it doesn’t know how to exist without them.

This is why it feels like the ground itself is gone. Because for many of us, it is.

This is the thing they don’t tell you. Sadness is not the opposite of strength. It is the proof of it. You can only grieve what you loved. And I loved this. The idea of it. The wild, improbable, unfinished idea of it.

I think about the life I’ve lived. The good times, the painful ones, the struggles inside my family and with friends and the beauty woven through all of it. Even the hard times made me something I could not have become without them. More empathetic. More humble. More real.

I was eleven once, wading in a drainage canal, pond scum on my arms, crayfish at my feet. I was free in a way I would not be again for many decades. Then the world crashed in. The bullying. The long years of shrinking. Of becoming acceptable. Of surviving by becoming someone else.

I thought I was lost forever. I wasn’t.

The tide doesn’t mourn low tide. It simply goes out. It does its invisible work. And then it returns.

Winter doesn’t apologize for the bare field. Something is happening underground that no one can see. Roots are deciding. Life is reorganizing. The field knows something the frost doesn’t.

I think civilization is eleven years old right now. Standing at the edge of the canal, about to be told that everything about her is wrong. Her clothes are wrong. Her values are wrong. Her belief in dignity and care and the commons, wrong. And she is going to spend some years shrinking. Some years surviving. Some years being someone she is not.

But she will come back.

I am not saying this to comfort you. I am not selling you hope like a product. I am telling you what I know from having been lost for decades inside my own life. The wild and fierce child doesn’t die. She goes underground. She waits. She does her work where no one can see.

What is asked of us right now is the hardest thing. To stay. To grieve without collapsing into it. To say: I see the hands of darkness around the throat of everything I love, and I am not walking into the ocean. I am standing here, on the shore, bearing witness.

Because someone has to know what it looked like before. Someone has to carry that.

I will write it down. I will say what I saw. I will carry the memory of what was true and good and the moments when we actually grew, when we chose each other, when all living beings were held as worthy so that whoever comes after has something to build forward from.

That is what the found part is. Not rescue. Not a return to what was. We cannot go back. But we can remember what was real, the genuine growth, the expanding circle of dignity, the times we got it right and carry that forward into something we haven’t imagined yet. Something better than what we lost. Something that could only be built by people who survived the losing.

I am sad today. I am letting myself be sad.

And I am not going anywhere.