Hey, Don't Let 'Em Gaslight You. You're Right to Grieve What's Happening in America.

Friend, I may not know you, but I’m pretty sure I know some things about you:

I know you feel something breaking inside lately, an invisible fracture that only you’re fully aware of, one that seems to grow deeper by the hour.

I know you walk away from conversations with people you once relied on for wisdom and compassion, doubting your own sanity because you no longer recognize those qualities in them.

I know you feel internally estranged from the friends, coworkers, family members, and neighbors you used to find affinity with, the people who once felt like home.

I know you stare at the perpetual parade of horrible scrolling past you, from the second you wake up prematurely in the early morning until the stretched-out nighttime moments you try unsuccessfully to fall asleep, and how you question the grip you have on reality.

I know the crushing disbelief you feel when you look around and see so many people who don’t seem the slightest bit bothered, who are carrying on as if this is all normal; people who appear fully oblivious to the Category 5 shitstorm that you’ve been screaming about for a decade, now.

I hear the nagging question that careens inside your head, the one you ask yourself a few hundred times a day: “Is it me, or has a huge portion of this country lost its mind?”

It isn’t you.

You’re quite fine, and this is, of course, both good and terrible news because of what it says about you and about the place you find yourself.

The fact that you see how wrong this all is means your faculties are intact, your mind is fully right, and your heart is working properly. It’s all confirmation that you still have a soul doing what souls are supposed to do: keep you deeply human in profoundly inhumane times.

This is why you need to hold tightly to that humanity because it is rarer and more valuable than it has ever been.
It’s why you need to kindle this holy unrest in the center of your belly, because it can push back the numbing flood of apathy threatening to swallow up the beautiful fury of good people.
It’s why you can’t allow your right but troubled mind to make peace with such abject madness.

If enough time passes, an otherwise healthy person can start to get used to feeling sick. They can slowly begin to convince themselves that almost any horrifying, toxic, painful, twisted reality is acceptable, even ordinary.
Little by little, they can gradually allow their hearts to acclimate to the nightmare, to come to see it as normal.
Either that, or they come to believe the damage to be beyond repair, and they collapse inward, a hopeless, lightless shell of who they once were.

I need you to hear this, friend:
You’re okay.
You’re not overreacting,
you’re not stupid,
and you’re not crazy.
You’re also in good company.

Right now, there is a massive army of similarly walking wounded sharing this place with you; fellow exhausted but still pissed-off warriors who realize that the bad people are counting on them to become so disheartened that they give up—and who refuse to give them the f*ckin’ satisfaction.

You and I, we’re seeing clearly, friend, which is always the more painful path; staring down the terrors and refusing to look away from what so many willfully choose not to see.

We know that this movement assailing our nation is an assault on decency, a rebellion against goodness, a mutiny against sanity, and that’s why we need to keep resisting it.

We need to shout down the legion of professional liars working so fiercely to convince us that it’s we who have gone mad.

We need to refuse to be gaslit by people who try to diminish our worries, mock our outrage, or dismiss our despair, even if we have once called them friends.

We need to press on undaunted and unafraid, knowing that the jittery chaos-makers realize their time is short, and they are rightly terrified of us because our goodness makes us dangerous.

So, breathe, gather yourself, and carry on.

Work to find your people, those who are as heartbroken and furious as you are. Find ways to care for human beings in peril, to organize against the legislative and physical assaults, to be focused and effective in your response, and to be strengthened by loving community.

You’re not crazy, but these days surely are.

You’re not upside down right now, friend; a good portion of this place is.

People of faith, morality, and conscience together, from every corner of this nation, will right it.

Grieve, and move.