Climbing out of rabbit holes
I avoided doomscrolling this week but still got sucked into a sad past
This entire week has been a barrage of bad news in the national media. My reaction to each Supreme Court ruling has rapidly devolved from “I’m going to stay off of Twitter, go for a long hike, and then figure out how I can help” after Dobbs to “Maybe I should stock up the bunker for the coming civil war but with any luck, I’ll just die from my already severe sensitivities to air pollution before the shit really hits the fan” with the latest EPA ruling.
It’s just … I don’t know how to function right now. Writing helps me keep my head above the water, so I decided to engage a random prompt. I have three identical albums full of photos from 1998-2001. My prompt was to grab one of these albums, open it up to a random page, land on the second photo on the right, and write about whatever the photo ended up being — ideally in a way that would lead to positivity and hope, but I wasn’t holding myself to that. Sometimes it’s more helpful to embrace the truth rather than spread disingenuous optimism over a pile of garbage.
I landed on the above photo — it’s a print from May 2000. In it, an old friend, Ben, is scrambling under an arch in Arches National Park. My heart sank the moment I recognized the person in the photo and realized the timeline. My life was a hot mess in May 2000. I had just graduated from the University of Utah with a bachelor’s degree in mass communications, but I had no real plans for the future. I had a vague idea that I wanted to go to law school but hadn’t started the application process yet. My degree focused on journalism, but I was pretty sure I’d burned all of my bridges in that career when I abruptly quit working for my student newspaper in a blaze of burnout (that’s its own story for another time.) I was dating two men, neither of whom I even liked let alone loved. All the while, I was pining over an ex-boyfriend who left me to join the Peace Corps a year earlier, and whose apartment I was still living in with my best friend from high school. These are just the broad issues that were further compounded by a slew of micro-complications. Suffice to say my personal life was a big old mess.
What’s humorous to me now is that, at the time, I was riding the political high of my life. I was volunteering most non-working weekday afternoons and weekends to environmental organizations such as the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Tree Utah, and Terra Firma (our university club.) I spent many a Monday night in front of the Utah State Capitol marching with signs bearing slogans such as “More World. Less Bank.” I was all-in for Ralph Nader’s campaign in the 2000 presidential election and thought the Green Party really had a shot, but if not, Al Gore would do just fine, he’d still try to stop climate change, and that idiot Bush Jr. didn’t stand a chance. Oh, to be a naive 20-year-old. I miss it so much.
And yet, I was not a happy 20-year-old. The Arches photo was taken during a camping trip to celebrate my college graduation with one of my boyfriends, Mark, and our mutual friends, Ben and Reanna. Mark and I had a terrible passive-aggressive relationship where we spent most of our time together arguing about our problems, so I usually tried to invite other friends to any activity we planned. I dug up my old journal to spark a memory about this trip, and immediately landed on an entry from April 27, 2000, about one of my many fights with Mark. It read:
“Today Mark and I went out to dinner to discuss our problems. I didn’t have the heart to tell him about Eric. We drove out to Sandy to eat at Wingers. While we were there, all of these fire trucks, cop cars, helicopters, and a life flight started surrounding the Maverick across the street. Our waitress turned on the TVs above us and we found out there had been a shoot-out at Chevy’s just up the street. A guy shot five people and killed two. One of them drove herself down to the Maverick with two gun wounds in her face and the gunman followed her there. It was chaos, and we were just sitting there watching it from the booth at Wingers.”
After that paragraph, I indulged in a cringe-worthy metaphor that conflated a fight Mark and I had at the restaurant with that terrible mass shooting. Even worse, I currently have no memory of the shooting. I still retain a memory of bickering with Mark in a Wingers but not of the real-life horrors playing out just across the street. So I was both unhappy and self-involved as a 20-year-old. No big surprises there. But what sort of meaning can I derive from this?
I flipped the journal again, knowing the Arches trip happened sometime in the middle of May. The next page I landed on was a journal entry dated May 24, 2000:
“A week ago, my dad’s friend Steve killed himself alone in his home. Today I went with my family to the funeral. My dad gave the eulogy. He talked about the fun stuff he and Steve did together — the good ol’ crazy times. He had the whole audience laughing through their tears. He talked about the ski boat he and Steve pooled their money together for. Steve named it “The Love of Life.” I don’t think Dad told this story to point out the irony. I think he told it to show how Steve was truly a man who loved what he did.
Nobody knows what to say at a Mormon suicide funeral. Steve’s mission president talked for five minutes about Steve’s service in the Church and 15 minutes about why the audience should follow the example of Christ. Nothing wrong with that. But it must be hard for those who loved Steve, who knew about all of the good things he did with his life. The Church teaches that what he did to himself will land him in Hell — and they’ll never see him again. I have a hard time believing that. I don’t know how God could punish everyone who fucked up their lives when we all do on some level.”
Eyes now glazed with tears, I glanced over to the next journal entry dated May 25, 2000:
“I thought more today about Steve, about how hard my dad is taking all of this. I can see him hurting. Death claimed my dad’s best friend — who, at least in that moment, wanted to die. Resent consumed my relationship with Mark — though I’m starting to believe he wants to be resented. Everyone he’s ever been with left him in a fiery explosion. He’s never had a happy, mutual relationship. People pursue what they believe to be the truth. Carry the torches that will burn us down.”
Disgust prompted me to close the journal without reading about the graduation trip at Arches. As I rose to the surface from this angst-filled rabbit hole, I was struck by an errant thought about my dad and Steve reuniting. A thin smile emerged from the anger, all of the volatile emotions surrounding the evangelical doctrine that is driving U.S. politics — that the people struggling with depression and hardship are Hell-bound while comfortable, rich, white people wield claims to God’s favor to justify their campaign of oppression and destruction.
But … where do we find hope? Arches National Park? The only truth I know is this: The world is beautiful and the universe is infinite, and all of this will far outlast all of the machinations of humanity. Despite my relatively rosy view of culture and politics before the Bush v. Gore debacle and 9/11, even a cursory glance of this myopic old journal shows that mass shootings and depression were prevalent in my world in the year 2000. This angst is nothing new. And my young life was a mess, but I put it together, and then it fell apart, and then I put it back together, and this is just the way of life. My sister asserts her optimism that bad things follow good follow bad, and this is the way of history. Good will continue, but it can never last, because nothing holds on forever.
We have no choice but to hold onto the good where we can find it.
Your article is for you to look upon with pride. Perhaps because it aligns with most of my philosophy. Rich.
The top photo is fabulous. I love rocks and snow, and this is an incredible rock face.