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

by R. Eric Thomas

the same hopes: to be seen, to be heard, to exist.

We must all, even in some small way, be angling toward hope.

If there’s a copse, there’s a corpse, I always say. (I am a delight at parties.)

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.

I was fascinated by Kanye’s then-most-recent release, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,

his substance abuse, and his thoughts of suicide. It’s like if Virginia Woolf wrote bangers.

Kanye’s return to music with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Why are you telling this story?

I did want things: I wanted to express myself; I wanted to get out of my dead-end job; I wanted to feel loved; I wanted to love myself; I wanted to know that this was not the end.

Gayborhood.

Sweeney Todd.

A relationship was supposed to be a refuge, I thought.

Boo Weather, as in the perfect temperature to get boo’d up and hunker down under a duvet with a warm body.

Love, Actually.

You’ve heard of spring cleaning? This was fall hoarding.

You’ve got to be always thinking of how you’ll turn life events into #content, and it’s a known fact that engagements, the first baby, some new jobs, winning Big Brother, and photos with celebrities are the gold standards of social media reaction-getters.

Joy Harjo, which begins “The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.”

“This is home and you’re welcome here as you are.” 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.

Years as a bar manager taught me that it was a fool’s errand to try to do this kind of work without one. Clipboard: essential.

Easter is about salvation, and salvation is free and available to everyone. Yet so many churches put barriers around it. If our religions aren’t about the business of achieving justice in our time, in this world, for everyone, what are they doing?

Some say that’s the beauty of the nation; that’s the American dream, as if we are all Jacob pummeling the biblical angel for a new name.

You will find a way to gather yourself up and push yourself into the next day. And sometimes that will feel like a blessing, sometimes a burden.

You’re exactly who you need to be. Each of you. It may not feel like it; it may seem like it would be much easier being anyone else. You may look back at the person you were at one point and wish that you could instead be the person you are now at that far distant, unreachable point in the past. But you had to be who you were to get to who you

are.

The only story I can tell you is my own. And in that story, you keep turning the pages. That’s hope. We hope with words and we hope with deeds.