It’s Never Going to be about Lemonade

When I was 23, I left my first husband after being married for just about 10 months. Of course, we should never have gotten married in the first place, which was, I have always said, painfully obvious in hindsight.

But really, it was obvious beforehand. It was obvious when he brought home size 6 clothes for me, when he knew I was an 8 (but I could be a 6 if I tried). It was obvious when I found out, after a car accident, that he didn’t have a valid driver’s license (just some tickets he hadn’t taken care of. No big deal.) It was obvious when he took a hammer to my engagement ring after a fight (full disclosure, I’d started it by criticizing his treatment of his mother, which was, he said, none of my business, and had wrenched it from my finger and thrown it at him mid-fight.) Not the best signs. But I stayed. I took that deal. And I married him.

If I could go back, I don’t even know what I would say to that girl. Shake her, maybe. Because she was so willfully blind, or so willfully focused, or maybe just incredibly stupid. I thought it would get better. I thought we just needed to get settled. Or maybe we needed a change of scenery. We were just passionate, not dysfunctional.

I’ve heard it said that everything happens for a reason, but sometimes the reason is that we’re foolish (naïve, irrational, bone-headed, desperate, reactive) and make bad choices. And there it is, sometimes bad things happen because we make bad choices. Sometimes the bad choices are painfully obvious, to us, to those around us. And yet we make them anyway. We accept a deal that’s a stacked deck because of a myriad of background issues, our own personal foundational cracks and insecurities, previous heartbreak and heartburn. We don’t live in a vacuum, and we don’t make decisions in one.

When I was 23, after 10 months of marriage, my brother had a health scare on the East Coast while I was thousands of miles away in Colorado. I got the news in an email from my mother the next morning. I was late getting into the shower. I was late getting out of the shower. My lack of basic consideration meant that my ex was now also running late. Might even be late for work, because of me. I don’t remember if he was. I do remember that he said things no one should say to anyone, let alone their wife. Mean things, especially to someone who was never a natural size 6, but had tried, and who was still wrapped in a towel, and inescapably vulnerable to the icy acidity of the cutting inventory of my bodily and marital flaws.

And so I left him that day.

Realizing a bad decision, or even coming out of a bad decision, doesn’t negate it. We’re a sum of our parts. It simply means that I made bad choices, but am now making the choice to make new choices. There’s almost necessarily some collateral damage along the way. Some of it is repairable. Some is not. Some people will forgive you and welcome you back. Some will not. It’s not up to you and you have to make peace with that, even when it hurts.

New choices take some distance, some soul searching, some willingness to see that we weren’t irreproachable ourselves. I was culpable in my own disgrace. I could give you a dozen easy reasons why it wasn’t my fault. But in the end, I made that deal with all its concessions. But also my choice to rebuild, refocus, rebrand, remake.

Whether a person believes that the nation’s electoral college win for Trump – which is a win for the presidency, I don’t dispute – is a black hole of bad decisions doesn’t matter much at this point. We can unfriend and hashtag and yell into the void for as long as we want. As a nation, we made that choice. We decided, apparently, that we’re just passionate, not dysfunctional. As a nation, we agreed to certain concessions.

And so, we jumped into a relationship that is bound to be volatile at best. Bernie Sanders supporters may blame the DNC. Hillary Clinton may blame Jim Comey. The blue states may blame the Rust Belt, or the 40% of Americans who don’t vote. Millennials who are too entitled. Baby boomers who are too rigid. I’m not convinced that even Donald Trump is super happy with the result. It turns out he applied for a really big job, and he got it.

In the end, though, retrospective armchair quarterbacking is only significant if we do a little soul searching on top of it. I’m still angry. And I’m still despondent. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter how incredulous I am if I don’t question my own culpability.

Enough Americans feel they’ve we’ve been hurt tangibly as a country because of [personally-specific reason here], that we’re willing to go in a completely new direction, as long as it’s unrecognizable from our past. Sometimes our choices don’t say nearly as much about who we are, or our foundational beliefs, as they do about what we have just immediately walked through. Sometimes we whiplash from painful into toxic before we can walk out. I’ve been there. In the end, it’s as Shakespeare said, “What’s past is prologue.” We can’t change it, but we can react to it. There’s a whole play after the prologue; we’ve all got parts.

No matter what we’ve done, “inexorably, unalterably done,” we control our next choice. We choose when to stay, we choose when to walk. And it’s infinitely more complicated than that, of course, and far from fair. Regardless, our choices can’t be expunged. And sometimes the consequences are incredibly high, either to ourselves, or others, or if you’re the President-elect of the United States, then potentially for the world.

While I might despair that the new administration’s first Cabinet choices include white males known more for their racism than their open-mindedness, I can celebrate that social justice and civil liberties groups have seen a huge groundswell of support, record breaking donations.

For all the good people who voted against Trump, we feel pummeled, irate, afraid, inspired to activism, but with the election in our rearview mirror, our outrage is only as good as our follow-through, and only as useful as our pragmatism.

For all the good people who voted for Trump, the country needs your voice now more than ever. To speak for those who are afraid. To speak up against a Chief Counsel with alt-right views. To protest loudly when a new Chief of Staff will not rule out a Muslim registry on the Sunday talk show circuit. To admit that to be white and straight in America is not the same as being gay, or brown, or otherwise marginalized. To admit that some people are marginalized, and to commit to using our privilege to protect their rights.

For those who voted against the president-elect, for those who voted for him, but reject the rhetoric that came with the campaign, there are myriad of choices that can be made now that will reassure a nervous nation and a worried world.

And for everyone who voted neither blue nor red, it’s time we all make choices so that every voter feels like they have a voice in this process and are motivated to use it. We each need to hold ourselves accountable. We need to agree that we hold some truths to be self-evident. That verbiage should sound comforting and familiar and seems like a good place to begin.

We’re in this horrible chasm right now and chasms create echo chambers and have such little light. We start thinking the shadows are real, and we forget we have the ability, and the responsibility, to walk out into the light, confront life in all its three-dimensional forms. When Trump objectifies, patronizes women (et al., et al., et al.), I think back to the young woman who was never a comfortable size 6, but who – for a little while – tried to be. And who faded away, insubstantial but still a size 8. For a little while, she believed the shadows were real.

The reasons that we make choices that compromise our best selves isn’t because we’re bad people, or incredibly dumb, or hateful or uneducated. We make choices because of our own backstory, because for each of us, in this moment, there are certain things we fear more than others. The 22-year-old fears of the girl who stayed were different than those of the 23-year-old who left. The 23-year-old made the choice to make new choices, and years later, I’ve been shaped by her renewed resolve. I’m grateful to her.

As a country, we’ve made choices, but we aren’t beholden to any past choices going forward. Sometimes it’s embarrassing to nullify a relationship so soon after minting it. But it’s even worse to let ourselves be subservient to it.

Knowing the right steps to stop demonizing each other while also staying true to our personal beliefs is hard. The chasm feels deep and painful. I will never be okay with the rhetoric of racism. I will never be okay with casual misogyny. But I am open to the idea that we are better than both of those things, no matter who we voted for. Now we become braver and stronger than our anger and despondency and fears. We live up to our potential instead of down to our fear. With one big choice behind us, we can now choose to stay or go. We can choose to make sure that no one in our country feels afraid because of who they are, how they worship or who they love.

When I was 37, I voted for the losing candidate in a demoralizing, poisonous presidential campaign that took a piece of my optimism and idealism with it. It feels a little like a bad relationship foisted upon the country and throws lurky shadows of poor choices and ghosts I’ve left behind.

But as I’ve learned, the best time for good choices is after a bad one.