Turn! Turn! Turn!

It was finally announced today that the people of the United States have denied Donald Trump a second term as President.  America has told him his time is up. For the first time in 4 years, I can breathe again.  For the first time in four years, I don't feel like the country is in a free-fall with no net.  I could feel myself exhale deeply for the first time in four years.  The minute the BBC alert came through on my phone, I could feel my body relax.  I would feel ridiculous for feeling this way, but then I turn on the news and it looks like the celebration scene at the end of "Return of the Jedi" with church bells ringing in Paris and fireworks in London and massive celebrations in the streets of every city (as if VE-Day (Victory in Europe Day) had just been announced) and I realize perhaps it's not just me.  Also, I'm not gonna lie.  The story about the Rudy Giuliani Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference (between the crematorium and the Fantasy Island adult book shop) brought me more joy and laughter than it had any right to.  It just summed up so much about this administration.

But the other feeling that I'm feeling right now is how mind bending it is how that election 4 years ago changed me.  That election triggered a chain of events that caused me to turn huge, fundamental portions of how I see my identity inside out.  I'm not sure that I actually am that different, but the way I see myself and see my life is dramatically different.  Five years ago, I considered myself to be a politically conservative fundamentalist evangelical Christian.  I don't think that's really true.  But, I think I hadn't looked at myself close enough and thought about it hard enough yet to realize it wasn't and hadn't been for a long time.

Part of me would love to get to get to January 21 and just pretend this is like one of those movies where the main character wakes up and realizes it had all just been a bad dream.  I wish this made all of the human suffering the last four years has unleashed and the ugly truths it revealed about a segment of the American electorate and political system could just vanish.  But, the truth is that a change of address for Joe Biden and Donald Trump doesn't make that happen.  I can't step back through the looking glass.

The reality is that this moment 4 years ago shoved me down a path.  It was a path to discover who I really am, what kind of person I wanted to be, and where did I really come from, who I could really trust and respect.  And then I had the rude awakening that the side I'd spent my life aligned with didn't actually remotely align with any of that and so I had to switch political and cultural teams.  And with that came a grieving process (with all of its phases from denial to anger to bargaining).

But, going down that path also set me on a process to inspect more about myself.  My sexuality.  My faith. My friendships. My past.  My future.  The way I'm just generally living my life and have treated myself and why.  I've spent the past two years sifting through it all trying to understand it all after realizing large swaths of it aren't what I thought.  Some of it much better.  Some of it much worse.  Some of it just different from what I thought.  But, I can't step back through that looking glass either.  My world is completely upside down, but I can't and shouldn't put it back.  The sifting and understanding and healing and growing has to continue.  I'm not where I need to be, and I can't go back where I came from.  

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 tells us the following:

There is a time for everything,
    and a season for every activity under the heavens:

2 

    a time to be born and a time to die,
    a time to plant and a time to uproot,

3 

    a time to kill and a time to heal,
    a time to tear down and a time to build,

4 

    a time to weep and a time to laugh,
    a time to mourn and a time to dance,

5 

    a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
    a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

6 

    a time to search and a time to give up,
    a time to keep and a time to throw away,

7 

    a time to tear and a time to mend,
    a time to be silent and a time to speak,

8 

    a time to love and a time to hate,
    a time for war and a time for peace.

I feel like I've experienced almost everything on this list in the last 4 years, which I suppose is the point of the passage.  There's been a lot of death and rebirth and uprooting and planting and loving and hating and mourning and dancing in these last 4 years.  And now it's time to heal and embrace  and build.

Two years ago, when I came out as gay to some friends for the first time, I remember expressing fear that I was about to turn my life upside down.  What they told me that I'll never forget is that it was more likely that I had likely been living with everything turned upside down and was finally setting it all right side up.  This alternate universe I stumbled into 4 years ago is where I belonged to begin with.   And so I go to therapy and I read my Richard Dawkins and my Nietzsche and I work on figuring out what I do and don't believe, who I am, how I want to live, and just generally which way is right side up.  And that's ok.  Some things will start to go back to the way they were before this date 4 years ago.  But, some things won't, can't, and shouldn't ever be the same.  And that's ok.

So, in that sense, thanks Donald Trump.  If you weren't such a horrible and corrupting person I never would have started down this path.  I would still be stuck, head down, ignoring the world and ignoring a lot of my own pain and refusing to live my life.  I wouldn't have fully appreciated just how kind, wise, and loyal my friends and part of my family is.  I wouldn't be working on healing from wounds and problems I'd spent decades refusing to acknowledge.  So, in a twisted way, you changed my life for the better.

Song