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

by R. Eric Thomas

When it all goes south, I want to be remembered, not relied on.

Actually living, getting up every day with all the fears and tragedies and challenges and potential joys of being a human in regular old neutral-smelling, depressing times, is hard enough. But it’s what we’re given: flowers and sunshine and push alerts on our phones and midterm elections; pop-up restaurants and flawed history books and strangers in offices who become parts of our lives. There’s fighting for social justice and being brokenhearted about deaths that could have been avoided and being terrified about bringing a kid into this world and being even more terrified about leaving a kid in this world and trying to figure out how to wake up every day not thinking that the world is going to end. Even though it will. I’m here for that. That mid-topian life.

How are we supposed to live without a meteor bearing down on us? How are we supposed to find the best parts of humanity without a brutal regime at the door? How are we supposed to tell the people we love that we love them if we’re not five minutes from being destroyed? That’s the challenge of being alive.

This experience, too, was magical. Unruly and confusing. Apparently good. I can remember how all of it began for me. That’s easy. But I find it hard to put a finger on the point when it changed.

I love Pride. I love a party, I love a family reunion, I love getting flyers and magnets from local vendors. I love Pride, too, because it began as a riot. That’s important to me; every step, every shimmy, every wave, is a gesture of triumph but also defiance. The first time I went to Pride, I wasn’t legally allowed to get married. I could be fired from my job because of my sexual orientation. My future husband couldn’t be ordained in the church. And yet we were living in markedly better times than we’d lived in before. There was so much to dance about.

me toting a sign that read, “I Love Bread.” (Pride is about love and this is who I am, okay?)

I realize that this night in this church is the world that they will know, this is the world they will see as normal, this is the world they will inherit. A world made by people of all colors and sexualities and ages and faiths and gender expressions who have traveled many roads toward hope. And though we crowd the dance floor in the space that has been made specifically for us, our presence seems to create even more space, for those like us, for those yet to be. All heaven has broken out.

SEVENTY-FIVE You know what a caftan accentuates? NINETEEN What? SEVENTY-FIVE How happy your butt is to not be trapped in pants. Look at me: I’m basically lying in bed, wrapped in a blanket, but also upright. I am living my full Nancy Meyers–heroine truth right now.

You say you want a happy ending, but neither of those words is really what you’re searching for. For instance, you will not live to see a just world. But you will live to see acts of justice. NINETEEN And that’s good enough? SEVENTY-FIVE That’s extraordinary. Life will take your breath away. Life will— Oh! Chocolate éclairs! Grab me one of those. NINETEEN Wow, we really are unbearable. SEVENTY-FIVE 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. Every page in the story is successive; they’re all numbered and bound like a book.

Well, I don’t know how it’s supposed to be for anyone else. 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. And in so doing, manifest the things that we need, the things that fulfill us, the things that give us life when we fear that all is lost.