We're all right here
On white despair and wanting more of our lives back.
There's a lemon seed stuck to my friend's wrist.
She's been squeezing lemons over a sieve too small for the job, and now she's holding her phone above the bowl, reading us a terrible news story. The seed moves when she turns her hand. I keep watching it, which feels like a shitty thing to do while someone tells you about the intricate, despicable ways our world is falling apart.
The kitchen window is painted shut. Someone wedged a wooden spoon beneath the extractor fan's broken switch to keep it running. It makes a noise like loose change in a dryer. We were gonna eat outside, but mosquitoes got there first, so we're making room at a table that has become, through no one's particular decision, a municipal archive of unopened mail.
“I just don't know how anyone is supposed to live normally.”
One of my other friends says they haven't been sleeping. They say it's gonna get worse. And someone else starts up, “And did you see,” and we all make that small consenting noise that means yes, keep going, we have just enough room for one more awful thing.
I want to say stop. I want to take my friend's hand and put it under the tap. I want to finish dinner. I want, somehow, for this not to make me a terrible person.
You see, I've been getting impatient with the people I love.
I keep hearing despair so complete it could have been shipped from an Amazon warehouse. Everything has already been tried. Everything has failed. The people in power have won, and the rest of us can only keep one another informed of how thoroughly our asses have been handed to us.
Except... we're still here. There are, it turns out, countless things we haven't really tried.
But it's too small. It's too much. It's probably compromised. Or cancelable. They used AI in a flyer or They misgendered me once. Or maybe it just won't stop the larger thing. But there's an endless nesting doll of larger things.
And, look, I get how a finite body gets scared by infinite demand. I happen to have one of those bodies. But sometimes I leave these conversations feeling like I've been asked to do a peculiar kind of labor: witness how much someone cares, agree that nothing can be done, and help them bear the knowledge until we meet again to repeat it.
I miss my friends while I'm sitting with them.
A phone lights up next to the salt. Every head at the table turns toward it. Mine too.
I'm starting to think of this all as something like white despair.
I'm white. I'm also a trans woman. And I have enough security, enough money, enough room in my life to make choices that aren't available to everyone. I want to use that room. I want to live in it.
When we say things have never been this bad, who are we remembering?
When we ask how we're supposed to live under a government that doesn't care whether we survive, who do we imagine has been living here?
Some of us are losing an expectation we never questioned: that our safety would mostly maintain itself. That the government might be embarrassing, venal, even cruel, but the cruelty would remain somewhere beyond the quotidian elegance of our lives. We would object to it, of course, but we wouldn't have to learn how to resist it.
Now, that expectation is breaking, and we call the sound the end of the world, as if there has never before been apocalypse.
But see, for most people, that arrangement was never on offer.
It takes some real nerve to discover a struggle, glance at the odds, and announce to all the people already in it that they have no future.
White guilt had a question it could never quite finish asking: Am I a good person?
White despair seems to have found an answer. Look how much I'm suffering. Look how carefully I've understood. Surely you can see that I care.
I know that voice. It's mine. I've been the one at the table who couldn't put the phone down, who needed everyone to stay in the room with whatever I'd just read. I've used my friends' attention as a place to metabolize something I hadn't metabolized yet, and called it caring. The distress was real. I just kept treating the depth of the feeling like it told me what the feeling accomplished.
Someone else's suffering enters my life, and the conversation becomes about what it has done to me. How unbearable I find it. How helpless it makes me. Eventually, someone has to comfort me, and the people whose suffering began the whole thing disappear behind the much nearer task of making me feel less alone.
Empathy can bring us toward each other. But it can also leave us staring at ourselves, horrified by how much we feel.
And see, there's this peculiar safety in despair. It masquerades as sophistication, but isn't it just a refusal to ever be caught looking naive? If you already know nothing will work, you don't have to risk being disappointed by an effort that falls short. You don't have to offer someone something small enough that they might actually accept it, and then learn it wasn't enough. You don't have to give up a Saturday bagging groceries at a mutual aid pantry, only to wake up Sunday to a world just as broken as it was on Friday.
You get to remain comprehensively, tragically right.
And don't get me wrong, I find that tempting.
Despair is immaculate. Hope is clumsy and embarrassing.
Here's mine: I want you to be okay.
The extractor fan's still rattling along on its wooden spoon. Nobody remembers who wedged it there, and nobody's fixed it properly since. It just keeps running, dinner after dinner.
I tend to remember the movements that came before us as lightning strikes. I forget how much of history was just people working out the plumbing.
I don't need my friends to become the sole defenders of democracy. The hero fantasy is just despair running in reverse: the vanity of believing that if you can't personally fix the republic, nothing counts.
Because there are organizations doing work none of us could do alone, led by people who know things I need to learn. They know how to share weight across more bodies than just their own. A tenant union, an abortion fund, a neighborhood clinic, a mutual aid network led by the people facing the harm—each of them already has relationships in motion. We don't have to invent a crusade. We can just ask what needs doing, and offer something we can actually stand to keep giving.
Following leadership, especially leadership that doesn't look like us, asks something of white people that feeling terrible never quite requires. Someone else gets to decide what needs doing. Your help might be welcome without your interpretation becoming the center of the room.
There will still be disagreements. Joining doesn't surrender your judgment. It just gives that judgment actual work to encounter beyond echoes of yourself.
The Montgomery bus boycott lasted more than a year, and a lot of what kept it going was a carpool: over three hundred cars, forty-three dispatch stations, forty-two pickup spots, so people could get to work without riding a segregated bus.
I keep thinking about that carpool. About the practical intelligence of people who understood that refusing an unjust world meant making sure someone else had a ride to work.
About how much resistance has always interwoven with business as usual.
And hear me, plainly: I want that work to keep going. Its importance can't be overstated.
But also, I want to notice when someone right beside me needs something I can give, without first asking whether their need is big enough to qualify.
When I came out, someone in the queer community I really didn't know all that much scooped me up. I stayed with them and their partner for a few months while I found work and got back on my feet. I took my first dose of estrogen on their couch. They couldn't make the whole world safe for me, but they gave me somewhere to sleep while I figured it out.
I want to be able to offer something that real. And I want to remember that I might need it again. Mostly, I just want to be someone my friends can call when they're hurting. When they need something but are too scared to ask anyone else.
Because we're all just... right here. We can know each other's lives well enough to notice when something changes. We can be a ride, somewhere to stay, company through a hard evening. We don't have to be in a cause to be useful to our communities.
We don't have to be useful to love. To enjoy each other.
And the thing is, I am desperate for us to enjoy our lives.
I feel the urge to put a whole paragraph of qualifications after that sentence. To prove that I know who doesn't have the luxury. To list enough atrocities that you'll believe I've earned the right to mention pleasure.
But refusing available happiness doesn't redistribute my privilege. Nobody gets back an evening I punish myself for enjoying.
The good life I want has other people in it. It has time to make something badly and then get better. It has friends who stay past when they meant to leave, two people who only met that afternoon starting a blood feud over Betrayal at House on the Hill on my coffee table, a song someone needs us all to just shut up and listen to. I want to be interested in what you're growing in your garden. Even the cucumbers. Even after we've all begged you to please stop giving us. So. Many. God. Damn. Cucumbers. I want to hear the director's cut version of how your date went wrong.
All these things deserve more than the exhausted leftovers of my attention. Of yours.
For me, getting to want a life at all has been a slow, hard-won project. I'm not gonna surrender that wanting every time the news finds a new way to scare me.
I didn't know it was possible to be trans until I was nineteen. Before that, I knew something was wrong, but I had no language for what I was. I was incomprehensible to myself. Try imagining a future when you can't even name the person who has to get there.
Being trans didn't make me magically invulnerable to despair, but it did teach me to distrust the apparent permanence of any world that insists there's no place for me or you. The world told me my body could only mean one thing, that the laws of nature and society were fixed, and that trying to change them was laughable. But it turns out that reality is far more pliable, and far more fragile, than the people running it would like us to believe. Other people bent it long before I got here. I walk down the street on ground they took.
Now, I'm out. I have my hormones, a good job, a home I love in Indy. My cat, Hobbes, is asleep on my lap. No, literally, right this second. I have friends five minutes down the road, and I have love in my life. I start listing what I once couldn't imagine ever having, and I realize I'm describing practically everything I get now.
So yeah, I get angry when despair tells me it knows how this ends. I fought so hard to get to this present. The future couldn't picture me either.
But here I am.
I just... I want to know when I'm seeing you next. I want our friendships to have a future tense. I want us to be able to ask each other for things before we're desperate.
I'm talking about resilience, or endurance, or care, or whatever word hasn't yet been hollowed out by an HR department asking us to become better at being injured. The kind I want involves somewhere to come back to. People who will feed you when you're worn out, and who can expect you to take a turn when you're able.
There has to be space to fall apart. I want to hold my friends when they're scared. I want them to hold me. Depression or anxiety or whatever beautiful crazy we need to have today isn't our supreme moral failure just because the world needs work done.
But I'd like us to stop requiring hopelessness of one another as a price of admission. I'd like a conversation where someone can suggest a way forward without first demonstrating that they, too, know it's probably pointless.
I love you. I want more of our lives to remain possible than this conversation allows.
Back in the kitchen, the lemon seed has dried onto my friend's skin.
“You've got a thing,” I say, pointing.
She turns her wrist and laughs, a small blush of air. Rubs at it with her thumb. It takes two tries.
Someone asks if the rice is burning. It isn't, quite. A layer has stuck to the bottom, and now there's a brief, passionate disagreement about the word socarrat. We carry the bowls to the table. We stack the unopened envelopes on the floor, where they can continue their work of being urgent.
Nobody has said anything reassuring enough to fix the evening. Nobody really has to. We'll be back here, same time next week.
My friend holds out her bowl. I scrape the good rice loose.
“Here,” I say. “There's more.”