Letter to Someone Like My Dad
<<05/01/2020: This article was written and published one year ago, and it is my most-shared article. While on some level it still makes sense to me (ideologically), the central theme of generational blame is one that I have had to move on from in my own life in order to move towards healthy and sustaining relationships. I leave it up, unedited, because it is still a nice piece of writing, and in the hope that it may illuminate part of our problem as a society, for those who read it.>>
I. To Whom it May Concern
Dear boomer,
Dear conservative friend,
Dear parent, aunt, uncle, or second cousin,
Dear former client, dear boss,
Dear contractor, neighbor, landlord —
…
My Dad recently asked me: “How are my politics harming you?”
I’ve been angry with conservative America for so long for harming me, and for ignoring it,
that I’m frankly shocked to be asked this question.
Mitigating the harm you are doing — on myself, on my community, on the world — has become so much of my life’s work. The harm you are doing has become the context of my everyday life. So I’m not even sure I know how to answer the question anymore.
Asking me how your politics are hurting me and/or are going to hurt me is like asking a fish about the water, a bird about the wind, a field mouse about the grass. Your choices, in particular your political ones, are what have defined my reality since I came into this world. So much of my political organizing, and most of the science and advocacy I’ve done so far, have been an attempt to mitigate the harm that your politics are doing. The prospect of explaining to you how this is the case is a daunting one.
Maybe it’s less like the bird and the fish… It’s more like a man stepping on an anthill every day on his walk in the woods, and the ants rebuild the anthill every night, and then the man comes and smashes it again in the morning. And when asked about crushing the anthill, the man says: “Well, they need to learn to work and build, so yes, I think it’s fine for me to step wherever I want.” And then one day, he leans over to the anthill and quietly asks, “Am I harming you in some way?”
On one level, I’m incensed to be asked this by you. It’s like, you’re the one crushing me on the daily. How is it my job to explain this to you? I also don’t trust that you’re asking in good faith — I think you’re only asking so that you can pick apart my experience, find a way to rationalize it away, so that you can continue stepping on me and mine, and go on feeling ok about it again.
Even if it is asked in earnest (which, again, is very hard to trust, and maybe not wise to trust) it sounds like a lot of work. This whole thing is a lot of work already. Far too much. To ask me to do more work on it from the person who’s making the problem is a circumstance full of bitter irony.
And yet, there is a chance, however remote, that it might help. I foolishly hope that you, boomer, will do a little less harm once you’ve considered the position of people like me — your son, your employee, your renter, your niece, your customer. To even write this is to engage in an act of faith in someone’s good intentions, when that person has, over and over again, demonstrated that they are not acting on good will, not when it comes to politics. But here I go, because ultimately, we’re in this thing together. Because there’s no getting away from this conflict — I can’t beat you and be done with it; and you can’t beat me and be done with it.
I am also doing the work to answer your question because you are someone who I respect and appreciate on a personal level, or with whom I desire a better relationship. I care about you enough to do this extra work, but the irony of that is not lost on me. Mostly, I’m just happy that you asked. After years of trying to explain something to someone, having them actually ask you about the thing is a big relief.
So I’m treating this less as a letter to you, Dad, and more as an open letter to the conservative person of your generation. Or to the conservative American in general. I am also treating it as an opportunity to explain to myself where I think all this despair and rage is coming from.
II. One Alone, or One Together
In order to begin to answer the question of how your politics is harming me, we’re going to have to start by establishing some common terms. There’s a difference between what we do as individuals, and what we do as groups of people. I’m hoping you’ll have the flexibility to roll with the following terms when it comes to this difference, at least for the duration of this essay:
Individual action — an action by one person
Collective action — an action that can only be done by many people. Either intentionally, in an organized fashion; or unintentionally, as the sum of many actions undertaken individually
Most of what you respect are forms of individual action. Running a business, giving money to a charity or a person in need, building a house, performing a daring rescue, bringing a pie to the neighbors, pushing a stranger’s car out of a snowbank… these are all individual actions that we might say are positive. We might call other individual actions negative — rudeness, embezzlement, robbery, assault, abandonment, destruction of property, et cetera. It’s easy to see the immediate results of individual action, and generally it’s easier to assign accountability.
Collective action is much different. It can be of two kinds: Organized and Unintentional. Organized collective action is easier to understand, and we’re all familiar with examples that range in size from humble to vast: a book club; a sports event; political organizing; a church; a corporation; a city government; the military; other Federal government bodies; even social movements.
Unintentional collective action is a little harder to get our heads around. The kind of unintentional collective action we are the most aware of is the free market — in pursuit of our own individual interests, we end up supporting each other, and creating problems for each other, in ways that are not part of our motivation for doing what we do. This makes the market a form of unintentional collective action.
Environmental destruction also often takes place in the form of unintentional collective action. Climate change is the ultimate example of this — there is no problem with one person driving a car that kicks out CO2 as exhaust. But hundreds of millions of people driving cars? That goes beyond the atmosphere’s ability to absorb, and creates a problem for the stability of the planet’s weather systems.
A noticeable thing about collective action is that we don’t always know what the consequences are of what we do. An individual action might be good for those around it (e.g. a capitalist opens up a factory and creates jobs) while the collective action might create problems for those involved or others (e.g. a pollutant in the manufacturing process gets in the water, raising the levels of cancer for the next 100 years downstream). So we can’t always predict outcomes. But sometimes the information is out there, and we can actually find out what the consequences of our actions are going to be. It’s just a question of whether we want to know — knowledge of unintentional collective action raises a lot of questions about what one’s own responsibilities are.
Now that I’ve laid out some terms to distinguish between individual, organized collective, and unintentional collective action (thanks for going along with those), I think we can move forward to answering the question you raised.
There are multiple ways that your politics are harming me and my community. Here, I am going to write about two that I believe have the biggest impact on me personally.
III. A Condemned Generation
For thirty years or more, scientists who study climate have been telling us that the various gases produced by our agricultural, industrial, and consumer processes, chiefly Carbon Dioxide and Methane, are in the process of radically altering the Earth’s climate by changing the way the atmosphere traps and releases solar energy. In the decades since they started telling us this, more and more evidence has accumulated indicating that they are correct, and the scientific consensus has grown to near 100% on the issue (which seldom happens with anything).
Those of us who were raised knowing this about our future are kind of fucked up about it. Rising sea levels will probably trigger mass migration from coastal areas to inland. Think the Syrian migrant crisis, but at many times the scale — there’s a pretty good chance that’s what the US is going to look like. Meanwhile, climatic instability means that no assumptions can be made about agriculture, except that it is going to have to change radically. How does a farmer in Michigan know what to plant if, in the spring, he doesn’t know if he’s going to have Nova Scotia’s summer, or South Carolina’s? Let alone make decades-long investments like planting orchards or vineyards. Best case scenario, this unpredictability will lead to increasing production costs, which leads to increasing food costs. Worst case scenario, our entire system of agriculture collapses, and we enter a state of permanent famine until our population dies off to the point where it can survive in a less stable world.
These are just a couple of the long-term consequences of Climate Change. Toss in more severe and unpredictable storms, flooding, hurricanes, drought, and wildfire. Add changing ocean temperature and pH, and the rapid collapse of the reefs and the fisheries. I could go on.
But it would do no good to go on — We do not live in a system that is designed to handle that information. It’s hard for us to digest or accept, even though the evidence is overwhelming. We have largely ignored these predictions, or taken small steps to mitigate it that don’t match the scale of the problem. This isn’t just the US — people around the world are struggling with it — that many of our energy and food sources, including most of the really efficient and powerful energy sources, are, collectively, destroying our capacity as a civilization to survive. When we have needed those energy sources to create safety and prosperity, and to compete with other countries economically or militarily, this is a Catch-22. How do we adapt collectively?
While the rest of the world has been, to varying degrees, struggling with this question, a few nations sit on one end of the debate with their thumb up their ass, acting as if the problem doesn’t exist. One of these is the United States of America. Part of the reason for this is that some of the earliest discoverers of the phenomenon in the US were in private industry. Their employers, rather than sharing the information and working to solve the problem, started a massive propaganda campaign to create needless uncertainty around the issue, in order to protect their short- and medium-term interests. So we’ve had a corrupted debate about it from day one. Another reason that we haven’t taken action may be that Americans just like cars, planes, and cheeseburgers better than anyone else, so we have a harder time accepting that the way we produce and run these things is going to kill us.
But for whatever reason, the US remains the one advanced economy on Earth which has a mainstream party who continues to be successful, while denying this basic reality of our time. That party — the Republican party — has therefore become the greatest obstructing force on the planet to our civilization adapting to its reality. The party even has a leader, at present, who claims that my generation’s great challenge is a hoax by the Chinese. The Republican administration has scrubbed Federal government websites of the phrase “Climate Change,” as well as hiding much information about its consequences, as if covering up a crime. Because of these things, the first thing that a person can do to ensure a stable future for my generation is to defeat the Republicans and keep them out of power. Because of them, their oil company allies, and the disinformation surrounding both to the American people, we have made almost no progress curbing our emissions. Because we’re the second-worst greenhouse-gas polluter (unless you calculate it per-capita, and then we’re the worst by far) this gives tacit permission to other countries to exercise the same negligence.
You once told me about the Greatest Generation, about how they were willing to put the survival and freedom of this country above their own personal interests, willing to sacrifice for the greater good. You told me that (and I still don’t understand this) voting for Trump was supposed to take us closer to that kind of attitude of mutual support and self-sacrifice.
But the nearest parallel between what that generation went through, and what mine is starting to go through, is this: It is as if Nazis were landing on our shores, taking territory in Florida and Maine, entirely unopposed. Meanwhile one of the two major political parties — along with their media allies, and a third of Americans, categorically denies any such landing or invasion. That party continues to block progress on mobilizing to meet the threat. And so the Germans continue to gain ground, every day making it harder and harder for the military to organize an appropriate response.
Meanwhile we are losing time. Every year that goes by without radically altering our society and economy to meet the threat — which, by the way, we will have to do someday one way or the other — guarantees that the disaster will be worse.
And, knowing all this, you insist on voting Republican every election.
Why should I save for my retirement?
Why should I bother getting what people think of as a “decent job?”
Why would I go out of my way to have kids?
Why would I intentionally participate in an economy that is, still, suicidal in its structure?
The basic stability in weather that human beings have enjoyed for the last 10,000 years is being knocked over, gleefully, by your politics. As a result, I don’t know whether famine, mass migration, complete societal breakdown and anarchy, and mass death, will be happening 30 years from now.
So, is all this danger and fear and despair your fault? Not individually, no. There are a lot of factors at play, and a lot of bad actors. But one of the major factors at play is, in fact, the decisions made by the electorate. Which includes you. If you live in Michigan, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania, and you voted Republican in 2016, then you and your 30,000 best friends did an incalculable amount of damage. Together, your collective action on that fateful November day did at least as much to destroy my generation’s future than a nuclear bomb over Seattle would have — in terms of likely casualties, economic impact, and the resulting fear and despair. The same is true, by the way, if you were supporting Republicans during and leading up to the Reagan administration or either Bush administration. These are all times that we should have been taking collective action to transform our society to meet this present threat, but instead chose to follow people who pretended it didn’t exist.
Carter put solar panels up on the White House. That was the time to follow his lead and get started on this problem. But he only won one term, and Reagan took them down as soon as he moved in. In some sense, we have been fucked since then. The Paris agreement we signed on to in 2015 would have been a good first step back in the 80’s. By 2015, it was already too little, too late. And now, because of your choices in 2016, the US is backing out, and the world is taking its cue from us.
What I’m saying is, my generation is ready to make the kind of sacrifices you talked about the WWII generation making. We’re ready to give and work for the benefit of all, to meet this challenge together. Many of us already have been, but the systems of power supported by your politics continue to frustrate our efforts. It’s no longer just a “difference of opinion.” Every time you get in our way, every time the Republicans (and yes, a lot of Democrats) delay the work that needs to be done and you support them — which, again, has been going on for forty years — you condemn our generation to an even worse future.
So it’s personal. Very personal. It’s not a difference of opinion — it’s a betrayal of my ability to survive. I cannot agree to disagree. As long as you are willing to fuck my generation over, we are going to be at odds (at best) or enemies (at worst). Whatever your reasons for doing so.
If you do care about the context in which our future occurs, I have a few suggestions of what you might do, of collective action you might participate in: use the wealth you’ve accumulated (wealth that the middle class of my generation will never have, but that’s a whole other thing) to push the carbon-free energy revolution forward. Call your Congresspeople demanding solutions. Invest your money in clean energy. Put solar panels on the roof, add a charger to the garage and drive electric, pay Consumers the extra to guarantee that your power is coming from a renewable source. Before you get to the voting booth, you could find out who the biggest proponent of a clean energy economy is, and vote for them.
I don’t know what you should do, but these are some ideas. The point is, if you wanted to help, you have options. But, as far as I have been able to tell, you don’t want to help. As far as I can see by the way you act, you may care about some individuals in younger generations (family, friends, etc.) but you don’t care about the conditions that we are inheriting.
Instead of stopping to think about how to make a decent world for us, you’ve decided to believe in the boogeyman — Mexicans, Muslims, Liberals, Queers, whoever the flavor of the day is. Rather than rising to meet the real threat — something you tell me is the mark of our greatest moments as Americans — you put your vote into those who want to divide us when we desperately need to unite. Not only are you ignoring the actual challenge that our generation must rise to meet, you are actively obstructing our ability to meet it. You do this in part by putting people in power who make the problem worse instead of better. Who won’t admit that it’s even happening, let alone bring to bear the will, strategy, and perseverance that has been needed, and lacking, for forty years.
You want to know how your politics is harming me? By choking my generation’s efforts to create a good world for ourselves and future generations.
IV. Hunter and Hunted
The second way that your politics are harming me is a lot harder to talk about.
It is one that I’m very confident I will not be able to get through your head.
But you did ask.
So, let me just explain how I feel and go from there:
I feel terrified.
I feel like I am living in an episode of the Twilight Zone.
I have watched my parents piss on the values that they taught me, and show me that those values don’t matter to them as much as — what? White identity?
I have watched my parents display, in full view, with no sense of irony, that they don’t have to abide by their own religion. This, by the way, is the religion that they are very sad that I don’t follow. I have watched them throw the way of living taught by Jesus Christ into a meatgrinder, and then shame me for not following His path.
I have watched the same warnings that I walk out into the world with, the warnings they put into my mind in the first place. There is advice that they have filled my head with from a young age, which is one of the anchors of my life. They are now showing me how much of that advice was complete bullshit.
I have watched them get glued to a screen that is filling their heads with fear and their hearts with hate.
I have watched as a third of the country did the same, like a frog in water slowly heating to a boil.
I have watched the people who were in a rage twenty years ago over someone having a consensual blowjob at work, because it offended their sense of decency, today decide that rape and sexual assault by a person holding the same office were just fine by them.
I have watched millions of my countrymen shout and cheer for a raving madman, raising their fists and chanting slogans whose content is an expression of their worst and most baseless fears and suspicions. I have watched their jubilant faces and have been afraid.
I have watched you, my neighbors, my family, decide that there is no such thing as the truth, only power. That anyone who wants the facts (scientists, journalists, any other person who has made exposing the truth into their profession) is a conspirator against you, and anyone who challenges your assumptions must be the devil. I have watched you decide that your worst instincts are to be trusted, and your best instincts are to be ignored.
I have seen you blissfully carried down the path to hell, dragging the rest of us along, even as we scream in protest. I have watched you ignore, over and over, my warnings. I have watched a reality tv star — who violates the values you tell me you hold dear — invent a religion and put you under hypnosis. You follow him, drooling, muttering “deep state conspiracy” and “her emails” and “build the wall” to your own destruction, and mine.
Dad, I’m scared.
As I have said to you, again and again.
And you continue to ignore me, and feed the beast who threatens me, and then wonder why we can’t have a decent relationship.
Maybe it isn’t possible for you to understand what I’m saying, because you’re too deep into it.
The fear that this kind of movement creates for everyone not involved in it is both a) part of its appeal and b) impossible to understand for those who are inside the movement. I can tell you that I am afraid. There is a knot deep in my gut whenever I hear the clown you made President speak, a knot which tightens every time you parrot his bile to me. It tightens further when I learn what monstrous activities are going on under his protection and yours.
Do you even remember when he first started running? You thought he was disgusting. You were committed to keeping him away from the nomination. You thought he was foul and violent. We talked about it.
But now you’re a believer. What happened to you?
It must feel so good, to be welcomed into something like that. To push down your doubts, drown your reason, and just go with it. Such a sense of belonging it must give you, long lacking.
But let’s remember how these kinds of movements end. Not always, but often — with the imprisonment, enslavement, torture, and/or mass murder of whichever out-group can be made into a fitting enemy.
I am a liberal, a queer, an intellectual, and an unrepentant pagan. Am I part of your club? Am I welcome at your table? When your leader makes threats towards people who “don’t belong,” ask yourself, does your son “belong?” Is your son among those being threatened? My community consists of people of many races, religions, appearances, orientations, and backgrounds. What about us? Do we belong in the world you are trying to make? If we don’t, what happens to us instead? If the people in your movement got to take out the rage they feel on those they feel it twoards, would my neighbors survive? Would my lovers survive? Would the people with whom I have slowly, carefully, built community, a sense of belonging and support, survive? I am part of the out-group. If we assume that this movement (the one, again, you’ve chosen to be a part of) goes the way that such movements usually go… I am a prime target, and many of my dear ones are even more so.
What’s more, if the movement does commit heinous acts of repression and violence here in the US, you won’t ever admit that it has. You are too well-inoculated against facts that don’t fit your “patriotic” narrative. You will hear rumors of rough handling of Mexicans, or Muslims, or Queers, or reporters, or whoever. And you’ll grumble, “Fake News!” and get on with your day, satisfied that you are defending peace and justice in America.
Hell, you already have. Kids in cages, Dad. Kids being torn away from their mothers and put behind chain link fences in big warehouses. People suffocating in the heat, fenced in under overpasses in the desert. It started two years ago, and there is no indication that it has stopped. How much worse has it gotten? We don’t know for sure — we do know that ICE won’t let reporters, or Congresspeople, into their facilities to find out. So we don’t know.
“We don’t know.”
That’s another piece of what scares me — you’re committed more than anything to not knowing. Anything that comes your way that might cause you to question your place in this movement, you have been taught to respond “fake news!” and laugh and laugh, secure in your confidence. “Own the libs.”
It doesn't matter what we show you. You can look at pictures of concentration camps run by ICE and the Military (example: https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/us-border-patrol-migrant-camp-from-above-idUSRTS2HV7C ) and you won't even see them. When they start shooting Central Americans who attempt to cross the border, in cold blood, you'll find a way to justify it.
Probably a reckoning will never come for you. It won’t have to. The right-wing media outlets that help hold up your world will never completely go away, even if fascism is baldly shown to be the evil that is is, and is permanently defeated in America. Your wealth and stability will never be seriously threatened, so you’ll get to remain calm. You’ll go to your grave crying “fake news.” You will never find out the harm you did.
I, on the other hand, live in the world that your collective action is creating for the out-group. A world you have decided to be blind to. I have to live with the fear, and it takes its toll.
I had a mental and physical breakdown last August from which I am still recovering. Rising fascism was not the only stressor that caused this to happen. But it was one of them, perhaps the most important. The splitting of reality is, for me, very hard to bear — I’ve always been interested in the truth, and your movement has as one of its main tenets, “there is no truth.” Like Pontius Pilate. “Alternative facts” are now the only facts. The fractiousness and slipperiness of this new world, not entirely created by, but gleefully embraced and advanced, by the movement you are a part of, is fucking with my head.
As it is fucking with your head too.
How are your politics harming me? By creating an environment where truth and knowledge are intentionally obfuscated rather than revealed, and where I live in fear for the rights and the survival of me and my community.
V. The Rug Pulled Out From Under Me
The fact that my parents have been drawn into MAGA-land has been a huge stress also. What does a person do when they’re at their most afraid? Ask for their mom. Literally or figuratively. But now that my mom, and my dad, are participants in the beast, the monster that has a pretty good chance of consuming me, they are not safe people anymore. I am afraid of them and what they are going to do with their political power. Not individually, that’s not how this works. As part of a collective action.
This has also been a confusion regarding morals and values. Whether or not I have really embraced Christianity over the last decade or so, it has always been the starting place for me. It has always felt like the safe home I left behind, that I can return to when I need to.
But now?
Now 80% of Christians in this country have shown their hypocrisy on such a level that I am filled with only disgust when I contemplate them (again, including my parents). I cannot trust these people anymore, cannot trust their judgment. Their decision-making has been compromised. They could be turned against me, and against people like me, at any moment. So there is no safe home to return to.
The values that my parents taught me — honesty, integrity, hard work, consideration of others’ needs, respect for women, frugality — is being openly violated by this movement’s leaders, and my parents follow not despite this fact, but because of it. Not despite the fact that they are Christians, but because of it. Which begs the question, why did they instill these values in me if they did not believe in them?
And so, I am presently reinventing myself. Pretty much from the ground up. Seeing my parents abandon our values has caused me to set some of those values them aside for now.
They spent the last few years telling me that I was betraying my upbringing. And I believed them, though there were some things that I just knew I needed to be doing. I tried to find a compromise between the path I felt called to, and a groundedness in those values and their expectations.
But now?
Now they have shown me that what they are willing to accept includes what I can only describe as evil. Now that I know that, I don’t care what’s acceptable to them or not. I regret that I put so much time and energy into trying to find a balance, because the thing I was trying to balance with did not exist. That is what they have proven to me by going down the road to fascism.
Personally, that may be for the best. In a way, I am becoming more of an adult now that I realize that I can’t implicitly trust my parents, or the guidance that they gave me in the past. When that happens, everything is called into question. Now that I’ve been through a clean break, and am no longer interested in what might be acceptable to them, I am forging my own path. It certainly is painful, and to say that it almost killed me is not an exaggeration. But in that sense, maybe I should thank you, Conservative friend, family, or co-worker, for so openly displaying the hate in your heart, and confirming to me that, what I thought we both held dear, we never really did. It was just me.
So, how are your politics harming me? (Or helping me?) By throwing away the spiritual and ethical foundations of my life and forcing me to start over.
VI. In vain attempt to conclude
You asked, “How are my politics harming you?”
And this is just my partial answer. I’m sure that other young Americans of good will would answer the question very differently. They might bring up racist oppression, rape culture, or the intergenerational wealth gap. They might instead choose to focus on destruction of specific habitats, the cementing of kleptocracy and corruption in the heart of the American government, the threatening of US democracy, or separation of powers, or global leadership. They might bring up the way the conservatives choose to demand more and more of those who have the least, and ask less and less of those who have the most, and the suffering that is creating and exacerbating. They might also bring up the continual looting of the middle and lower classes by the wealthy, and how policy — especially as enacted by conservatives — enables that to continue. They’d probably point out the robbing of women’s reproductive rights, the oppression of LGBT people, or the synergistic relationship between mass murder, gun sales, and the Republican party. I’d have to agree with them on all counts.
Consistencies you’d probably find:
- A general bitterness and a sense that we’ve been robbed — of opportunity, of agency, of the chance to build a better social world (which, by the way, we know how to do, and have been trying to do).
- An emphasis on collective action rather than individual action. In the case of Dad, for instance, the only individual beef I have with you is that you don’t accept that I’m a queer, and that makes our relationship strained. It’s the collective where we have a real problem — all the sabotage of long-term peace and prosperity that you participate in as part of a collective — through voting, through the narratives and propaganda you participate in, through your previous (and current?) political donations and organizing, etc.
So are you really responsible? It’s so distributed that I don’t know whether we can really say that you are, as an individual. I’m not sure about that. I know that the future is hard, and that my generation is already doing the work to make it better, and that you continue to stymie our efforts. I know that I’m angry and afraid, and that you are one of the people in my life who is knowingly, actively contributing to the sources of that fear and anger. It’s enough that I’ve tried to tell you that I’m afraid, and that you’ve ignored me. It’s enough that you don’t have my back.
If it’s true that you — Dad, Uncle Kevin, Pastor Darryll, the Conservative-identifying boomers in general — aren’t doing this knowingly, then that cuts both ways — on the one hand, this isn’t how you see the world. In the way you’ve chosen to see the world, you haven’t betrayed me at all. Can a person be blamed for stepping on the anthill he doesn’t see?
But on the other hand, we’ve told you. Over and over again. The information has been out there for all of us. We’ve been protesting in the streets, for God’s sake. You’ve all had access to this information, and you’ve gone well out of your way to train yourself to ignore it. So in that sense, ignorance doesn’t make you less responsible, but more responsible. You’re ignorant not because you had no way of knowing — you’re ignorant because you’ve made a decision not to learn.
You asked why I’m angry with you, what I think you’re doing to hurt me. This was the shortest answer I could give you. It’s not complete by any means, but I hope it will give you a good bit to think about. And I hope that you will let yourself think about it, and give yourself a chance to see this whole thing from my perspective. I will continue to keep this door open, even if you refuse to peek through it for the rest of your life.
Writing this has been frustrating and difficult, and I feel that I’ve done a mediocre job at best. I’m not used to sitting down into an angry space — I am always looking to find the positive, so it’s against my nature to double down on rage. In the several sessions it has taken me to lay this out, I’ve felt like I needed a bath afterwards. But hopefully I got something out of it writing it, and maybe you will get something out of reading it.
May we find some way to work together in common interest.
In love, frustration, and abiding despair,
-Brad
