Thank You

A Very Brief Message

This is just a quick note to say how happy I am that you're here and how thankful I am that I get to write things for a living.

It's been a grim year. Here at BANNED IN YOUR STATE we clutch no pearls and pull no punches, which means I don't intend to send any rally-the-troops, it's-not-as-bad-as-it-seems polemics. We are going down a dark road. Things will get worse and I don't know when they'll get better. There will be actions we can take, we are far from helpless, but we can't stop everything that's coming.

A few days ago, I went to a friend’s house for tea. She's an alcoholic with years of sobriety under her belt, she's done the hard work. We were talking about…everything…and she said, one of the things she's learned is that we can't be who we should be. We can only be who we are.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. It's not an excuse to lay down and rot, or to surrender to our worst instincts. It's an admonition not to hate ourselves so much for not being superhuman, to do our best with what we have. I should have listened. Three days later I had a road rage incident for the first time in years. I am not at my best when I feel wronged, helpless, or trapped, and I have been feeling all three of those things almost all the time lately -- by politics, by a family medical emergency that has me far from home, by the temporal impossibility of doing everything I want and need to do right now.

AA infamously has that serenity prayer: letting go of the things we can't change, changing the things we can, having the wisdom to know the difference. Like me, this friend trends towards cynicism -- she's a dedicated old-school goth with an encyclopedic knowledge of industrial music -- and she's told me the most annoying thing about the program is how all these little sayings sound super hokey and are all really, really true. Life-changing, even.

The myth this holiday is based upon is not just hokey, it whitewashes one of America's ugliest historical sins. I don't think anyone is gathering around the family table today in celebration of that myth. Whether you're celebrating this holiday with family, friends, or by yourself, whether today is fraught or life-giving or somewhere in between, odds are you're celebrating good food, connection, and the bounty of our lives. There's a lot to be said for being safe and warm and full of turkey. It's a good holiday.

I'm thankful to be of sound body and relatively sound mind, for my various platforms, for the skillset I'm carrying with me into the future. I'm thankful to know so many good people, and I'm thankful for all the good people I don't know. For good editors and good friends. I'm thankful to the people who make this Substack possible and for every single person who has ever read it.

Most of all, as I will be every year, I am thankful to be alive. I plan to continue that tradition for at least a few more decades and I hope that you can too. This is a rough time of year for a lot of people. If you're spending this holiday season by yourself, you're in good company, even if the whole world is talking about family. I'm at Friendsgiving far from home this year but my tradition is to roast a Thanksgiving chicken and play video games. It's fantastic. Hope you can do something similarly fulfilling, with or without your family.

Thank you for being here. As you are, not as you should be.