How Not to Despair

Despair has come to define my life these days and maybe yours, too. Trump, Covid, climate change, Ukraine, Gaza, nuclear weaponized hate both online and off, the drudgery of just plodding from day to day to day when who knows if we'll be here in a decade or two or if our social security will, assuming we somehow survive the impending apocalypse marked by fracking fires and flag-draped vigilantes armed with semi-automatic weapons and some new wet market biohazard that leaps from the overstuffed Pandora's box into our fragile, alveoli-sponged lungs. In my case, this has all been compounded by trauma that, like a bus blowing through a red light, I never saw coming and that I'm struggling to somehow manage. Sorry to vaguepost, but I can't say more. Suffice to say, I'm paralyzed by PTSD.

I realize this all sounds very heavy and a wee bit self-pitying (not a good look for a blogger), so I'm going to tell you a story that is blackly humorous to keep you scrolling and maybe to console you somewhat. To assure you that you're not alone and to give you a chance to laugh at someone who is even more pathetic than you are, that person being me.

Losing my non-driver ID

The other day, I had to renew my non-driver ID (I don't drive, but since there's only room for one humiliating story in this post, we'll save that for another day.) This involved going on to the DMV website and filling out a PDF that I had to pay to download with various pieces of information, including my old non-driver ID number. Which meant taking the old card out of my wallet to check the number and typing it into the document.

That wasn't too hard, even in my traumatized state. I finished the document, which needed to be mailed in with the old non-driver ID. But then I wandered away to make a cup of tea and then wandered back to check I'd replaced the card in my wallet. It wasn't there. OK, so it's on the desk or the bed. No. Not there. Panic took hold and the rest of the morning I looked under and behind the desk, the bed and the nightstand, revealing all sorts of dustbunnies and detritus in the process, stripped the sheets, pulled up the mattress, peered again and again into the wallet as if the card would appear like a bean from a magic beanstalk. Still not there.

How, short of the sky splitting in two and some alternate reality appearing in my dim bedroom, could this be? Hours were spent down on all fours, yanking out drawers and pawing through the anachronistic contents (checkbooks, cables to tossed devices, paperclips). Still nothing. I am at such a low point that this caused me to question whether I even deserved to live, non-non-driver-ID'ed in the world and with no way to change my fate.

My husband murmured all the appropriate things. It will turn up. Don't panic. It has to be here somewhere. Etc. None of which had the desired effect. I don't exist in the eyes of New York State and thus the universe! Don't you see! I have had everything stolen from me in the last month and now my identity is gone, too! (An aside: Since the Great Trauma, my iPhone no longer recognizes my face, which lands as a particularly cruel and surreal blow)

Finding my non-driver ID

Somehow I managed to soldier on and watch with my reassuring husband an episode of Inspector Lewis involving a Stasi informant and an André Balazs-like private club mogul with a South African accent. And then it was time for bed, and as I was getting undressed, I felt something hard in my bra. Yes. It was the non-driver ID, somehow tucked in the lining. So the whole time I was wandering around my bedroom muttering to myself, "Hot or cold?" the answer was always, "Scalding hot, you moron."

This is what trauma does to you. It lets you drop a non-driver ID down your undergarments, blissfully unaware, and then tear up your apartment trying to find what is, in fact, pressed up to your skin like a bandage, like a kiss, not even a millimeter away from you. I'm apparently as stupid these days as a dust-encrusted baseboard, something I've seen a lot of up close lately. But no matter. The important thing, to quote the most overused hymn of all time, is that this crucial bit of plastic, "was lost but now is found."

The moral of this story is right up against me, too. Don't give up. Keep searching for hope in the unlikeliest of places, even if that place is your bra. Trite, for sure. But trite is better than anguished when it comes right down to it, and I have been pretty anguished lately. So that's a win, albeit an embarrassing one.

Finding something else

I adore George Saunders. (Lincoln in the Bardo starts off like that old Spectrum TV commercial with the ghouls playing charades but ends in a place so profound you have to read it yourself to know what I mean, and A Swim in the Pond in the Rain will teach you how to read all over again, as if you'd never been taught what the letter Z looks like, much less a sentence.)

He was recently quoted in an interview on the topic of despair. Here's what he had to say. "It might seem tough, but I truly think that everything going on with us can be turned around. My students are already doing it. They're trying to ensure that the flame doesn't go out, trying to be a little kinder every tay. That's my only goal right now. Be more loving, more present and more honest every day. Accept the complexity of the world without despairing—despair is our worst enemy. Perhaps that's why all the cynical forces out there love it. Let's keep our distance from them."

I made a mistake. I did not keep my distance from them and wound up being consumed by rage that was reflected back at me one million-fold by people who aren't actual people but featureless blobs of hate with arms and legs and ugly, ranting maws and marching orders from a hate command center masquerading as a justice-seeking non-profit. A spark from my lit match met with their Bhopal blowback and exploded in my face like an inferno, singeing it right off. No wonder my iPhone doesn't recognize me.

I have experienced more unwarranted viciousness in the last six weeks than in the last six decades, and it has been brutal and relentless. If you think there is a lot of hate in the world, you have no idea. Hate bigger than the Tarantula Nebula, which spans 1,000 light years, and that is expanding just as quickly. I learned my lesson. I won't feed the flame again. I will try very hard to be more loving, and more present and more honest every day, and one of those days I will wake up to something as soul-soothing as a swim in a pond in the rain. Please, God, let that be so.

It sucks to be a human being but it's also fucking beautiful if you can just manage to hang on and hang in and find a reason to move beyond the horror and find love in the world again. I want to find love the world again. Even if it takes as long as it seemed to take to find my non-driver ID and even if it turns out that it was right here the whole time, pressed up against my heart that, against the odds and all those who wish otherwise, hasn't stop beating yet.

Special shout-out to my friend Liz, who gave me the idea to write this.