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

by R. Eric Thomas

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.”

I don’t know if anyone is actually tracking the movement of the moral universe, but I’d wager that bend is a lot longer than any of us can bear. This is not to suggest that Dr. King’s famous quote is wrong. Rather, justice may be a lot farther than we think. I’m a Bend Truther.

That’s the goal. You work hard so that your children are able to live a life somewhat free from the burdens that plagued you.

I know that my parents wanted me to live in a better world than they had, but they must have also desperately hoped I’d be prepared to live in the real world. Why else would they teach me to raise my voice against injustice, to write letters, to make hard choices?

As they prepared me for the world, they prepared the world for me, one difficult decision at a time.

With a crush, after all, there are sort of only two outcomes when you get down to it: it will bloom or it will wither. But love? 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.

I think the simplest way of putting it is that nothing I’d arrived thinking felt true anymore.

The feeling of being alone, I’ve found, is the poison that has no taste. It seeps in slowly and easily; it never seems unusual. Isolation presents as an undesired state but nothing serious, nothing permanent, until the lonely nights become lonely months. Community goes from being a distant goal to a forgotten idea.

I am more at home in myself than ever, and it’s due in large part to those experiences, the people in those spaces who accepted me in all my unresolvedness and problematicness and taught me how to tell the truth about who I am, without burying it in a joke.

the “secret” of my storytelling, which, as I understood it, was just to tell the truth because you had no other choice. I would remind people in my classes that the storyteller gets to choose the beginning and the end, often despite what happens in life. And that you have to tell your listener what you, the protagonist, want. This connects directly to the “why” of it all. The impetus for raising your voice to speak. There’s a power and a clarity in saying, “This is where it begins for me, and this is where it ends,” and knowing why. The why is the most crucial. It’s what elevates an anecdote to a story; it’s the thing that makes people lean forward with anticipation, their pulses quickening, accepting the invitation of empathy. “Why are you telling this story?” I asked the people in my workshops. I said it over and over again, in conference rooms and classrooms; I wrote it on whiteboards in messy penmanship, but I wasn’t living it.

I couldn’t start a new story until I gave words to the why of it, even if it hurt, even if it felt too messy, even if it wasn’t the story I set out to tell. It was my story and it was all I had.

It’s easy, I guess, to look back now and say that everything turned out okay and Jay has moved on and I’m married and we all lived happily ever after, as if none of the sadness left a mark, as if winter never came, as if now is all that matters. 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.

My father was the man who puzzled through questions with me for hours, whose house had open doors and open arms inside, and who welcomed the doubt that is necessary for true belief.

The thing is, the promise of church is community, salvation, and a relationship with God. If the gay music minister and the person with AIDS cannot be part of the church, where do they find God?

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?

I call my senator, a lot. Just to chat. I write letters and commentary to stake a claim for the things I believe in. I vote. I march. I tap-dance for justice. 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.

The problem is doomsday isn’t coming. And I don’t think we can turn back the hands of time or whisper to the cloud of dust, as much as I’d like to. I think we’re obsessed with dystopian or apocalyptic scenarios because, despite their darkness, they’re comparatively easy outs. Kind of like how sometimes you wish your company would just go out of business so that you’d have to go on unemployment and finally finish your novel or paint the study or hike the Appalachian Trail like you’ve always wanted. 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...