Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

by R. Eric Thomas

She called it her death suit because if she was wearing it, “either someone is already dead or someone’s going to die.”

If you’re going to kill me, I want to expect it. That’s the real American dream.

Have you ever slept in a house that was so quiet you could hear a clock ticking in another room? WHY? If I wanted a soundtrack for my existential dread, I’d download a bunch of Ben Folds songs on iTunes like a normal person.

But if you were inclined to get to know someone, to show them a piece of yourself, to perhaps fall a little bit in love, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better way than by spending hours picking up books, flipping them open, and talking about what you find inside.

Love seems to have infinite possible beginnings, endings, permutations, subtle shifts, and seismic changes. Love, I’ve learned, is different every time you look at it. Love is every possible love story all at once. Love is a library. And nothing is as fat with possibility as a library.

When one tells a story, one has to choose where to stop. So, for every story, there’s an infinite number of endings, a library’s worth of endings, every book a new chance. Perhaps, for us, for all of us, there are so many endings that they can’t all be heartbreaking and baffling. There must be a place to stop that is just a step into a new possibility.

The feeling of being alone, I’ve found, is the poison that has no taste.

When the fact of your being is used as a weapon against you, the process of relearning who you are and what your value is, is a long one.

Indeed, Beethoven once said, “I will take fate by the throat. It will never bend me completely.”

But that place in me that compulsively cried to everyone who would listen is still in me; the bad times don’t go away just because times are good. We say these things build character; they make us who we are. And that’s true. But that doesn’t mean they don’t suck. It doesn’t mean winter isn’t cold.

I think it’s important to note that that takes work: family doesn’t just happen; welcome isn’t a neutral state. We have to tend to these things.

And, in the end, I know that we are not at war with our terrible leaders. Instead, we are fighting against nihilism itself. We are fighting to care. What makes you happy or sad or brings you joy or makes you feel anything at all—it matters.

We are not going to band together and listen to a bunch of scientists to save humanity like Jake Gyllenhaal in a disaster movie. Sorry. You know how I know? Because a bunch of scientists are telling us how to save the world right now, and half the world isn’t listening to them.