The World In Here Is Real

This time, I don't have the energy to worry about what will happen.

I’ve been waiting for a medical diagnosis. It’s probably nothing. I’m peeing blood.

Statistically, I’m almost certainly fine.

But these weeks of waiting have made me think, as these things do.

I am, on this day in 2024, completely in love with my life. I love my children and my husband. I love the rooms in the house I’ve painted and repainted and repainted again. I love my job(ssss). I love my dog and my plants and my garden and my chickens and my watercolors and my insane shelves of books. I am trying hard to love even my droopy old self. Sometimes, when I’m thinking straight, I feel like the luckiest person in the world.

Most of you don’t know me very well, so those words likely strike you as arrogant or trite.

If you did know me well, the way my family does, you’d know that gratitude isn’t so easy for me. For as long as I can remember, I have had to work hard for joy. (It’s something to do with my brain. Some of the stuff that’s supposed to be there isn’t.) I have never written about this on the internet or anywhere else.

Maybe one day I will be brave enough to tell you more about that. But for now, you’ll have to trust me that me loving my life is very far from trite. I had to go through a lot to get to this place.

Most of the time, I don’t think anything about the medical issues. But after I had a CTscan a couple weeks ago, I had one day that I felt really afraid. I told my husband I sometimes think bad things will or should happen to me because I got everything I wanted out of life. I wanted two things: to be a mom and to be a writer. That’s it.

I looked at my husband, my eyes hot with tears. “It’s okay if I die because... Who gets everything they wanted?” I said. I looked around at the photos of my kids on the wall. “Seriously. Who gets all this?”

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Donald Trump was elected president again. Online yesterday, I read the smug triumphs and I read the very real desperation. I read the extremism on both sides. I read claims that a Trump victory was both heaven and a nightmare. I shouldn’t have, but I read it all.

Joan Didion wrote, “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

Tomorrow or next week, I could lose everything I love. You could, too.

I’m not saying the world isn’t burning, that democracy isn’t threatened, that poverty isn’t rampant, that children aren’t abused, that women aren’t raped, that bombs aren’t going off right this minute. I’m not saying that.

But I am saying this: They are not going off in my house. If you are reading this, they are not going off in yours.

I know we have to figure out a way, together, to save the world. I’m not kidding. I believe people who “got everything they wanted” don’t get to sit on their asses scrolling their phones and wasting their lives.

But I also know we have to hold that work in tension with loving the lives we already have. I know that my daughters have science projects and questions about the electoral college and one of them spent over an hour curling her hair this morning only to cry because it didn’t turn out the right amount of curly. I know I need to talk to my son about standing still in line and writing more neatly, and I need to teach him about the Revolutionary War but also the infinite nuances of how to be an honorable man.

The world out there is real.

The world in here is equally real.

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One time, many years ago, my husband and I wanted to buy a historic house downtown. We’d only ever lived in small, modest houses—nothing I ever felt guilty about. This house was different because I loved it. The walls were plaster and the wooden stair railings were carved in 1897. But was I allowed to have a house I loved? How much was too much to spend? What did it mean about me to buy that house?

I fretted about it for weeks. I kept talking to this one friend about it. Once we went to dinner and we were standing on the sidewalk afterward. She said to me, quite suddenly, “Lindsey, God doesn’t care if you buy the house. God cares if you waste all your time fretting about whether it’s okay to buy the house.”

Some friends are good friends. I have never forgotten her frustration with me. She was right: all my hand-wringing had come to nothing. I could buy the house or not. But the real transgression was using my fretting as an excuse to put off reality and to make me feel better about myself.

Half of America cannot tolerate the other half, and that makes me deeply sad. I want to be better and I want us all to be better.

Also: all our hand-wringing comes to nothing. Nothing.

Nothing.

I won’t tell you what do. You can fret if you want to, truly. Sometimes we just need to fret.

But I’m peeing blood, and four magical, hilarious, sometimes maddening children are asleep in my house. In the other room, a man I chose 20 years ago still chooses me. Probably I am healthy now, but I won’t be forever. Probably we will all live long lives, but we won’t live forever.

2016’s election wrecked me. I had to rethink everything I’d already rethunk. I’m sure the days of angst will come again, but today I don’t have much energy left for worrying about what’s going to happen. I can be better, and I can change some of what is wrong, and I will try.

There will come a day, though, when I will stop trying to save the world. If I get bad medical news in a week or ten years, that day will likely be the day. I will water my plants, and I will walk my dog, and I will love the people I love. And I will try very hard not to fret too much because we have so little time.