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

by R. Eric Thomas

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. —MARY OLIVER, “DON’T HESITATE”

As a child I liked certainty, and order, and clear explanations,

and I’ll probably end up lying in my grave going, “Ugh, I feel like there’s something I should be doing right now. I wonder if everyone is angry at me. Oh my God, how long is this going to take? And what happens next?”

Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?” The words that I found in these books were a person calling out from a page, “I am worthy of being heard and you are worthy of hearing my story.”

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.

I had been good in all the ways you were supposed to be good.

Is there such a thing as internal validation? I know we’re not supposed to hang our hopes on external validation. “Love yourself!” everyone says. “Or at least like yourself. Tolerate yourself!” But a lot of the time, being told that everyone else—or anyone else—finds worth in you carries more weight than telling yourself that you’re worth it.

If I don’t know what I want, how will I know if I’ve got it or if it’s lost forever?

I think it’s important to revel in the small things that make us joyful, to indulge when possible and not problematic, to steal laughter and hoard it.

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.

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things,” Didion writes in her essay “Goodbye to All That,” “and harder to see the ends.”

And this is why, I think to myself as past and present and future collapse on themselves. Hope. This is the liberation that waits for us through the smoke. And isn’t that holy? Isn’t that love? Isn’t that worth living for?

Things are going to happen, some of them good, a lot of them bad. People will die. People will break your heart. You’ll disappoint people. You’ll disappoint yourself even more. You’ll try things that don’t work. You’ll dare to hope and sometimes that will be rewarded and sometimes it will be mocked.