I’m in a weird place this week.
That sentence could have been written in almost any of the weeks of the last fifteen months. The world has gone strange on us, as frightening news and bile and threats and unhinged behavior seem to be running rampant.
A large percentage of my fellow Americans seem to live in a world entirely different from my own, and while this has always been true, I’ve never felt so under seige by that world as I do today.
It has beaten me down.
I don’t want to run away. I want to be strong in the face of adversity, to stand up to all the things that are wrong in the world. But my world has been flooded with an overwhelming tide of nastiness and filth, and I can’t swim in it anymore.
And so I retreat.
Our little home is a sanctuary, a place where normal reality re-exerts itself, where the rules of human decency and kindness and love still apply. Here I can breathe. Here I can remember what the world was like before. Here I can let new hopes start to germinate.
Things will not always be like this.
There is still good and love and decency in people.
We are being tested in this terrible time, and we will rise to meet that test.
For now, I am keeping out the world, licking my wounds, trying to heal. Trying to come to terms with what has happened to us, and what can be done about it.
One day soon, I will go out again. I will brave the world, to fight for change, to turn back the tide of hatred and anger that threatens to engulf us all.
One day soon, I will rise.