I am so embarrassed of myself, constantly.
My memories of the person I’ve been fuse into a rat-king caricature version of myself—someone way too loud, way too presumptuous, with no idea how little she knew. The further back in time I go, the more certain I am that I was a jerk, and hopelessly mired in the miasma of my mental illnesses and ambition, stumbling through delicate interpersonal dynamics with the grace of an elephant. For that reason, I don’t often open my past journals.
I’ve kept a journal consistently since middle school, and I tote all of them with me everywhere I move. I have multiple cardboard boxes filled with old notebooks, my personal archive. I generally let them sit in the dark, rank with the stink of past versions of idiot me.
But since starting The Artist’s Way, I’ve felt compelled to dig through them and see what I had to say. I started with some notebooks from my senior year of college, when I was applying for my first jobs and interviewing, it seemed, every week. I laughed at my eagerness, but I was also struck by how 22-year-old Alex had some points. She was excited about the possibilities of working in digital media, but worried about the way misinformation can spread on social media. She paid attention to the diversity of teams and how that affected what they published. She wanted to understand who funded the media organizations she was interviewing for, because she knew even then that whoever controlled the money controlled the story.
I don’t remember myself that way at all, and there was something comforting about seeing this proof of who I was undeniably on paper in front of me. There can often be this impulse to discard those youthful hopes as life stomps you down over and over. This is self-protective, a callus that grows over our tenderest parts so they can’t be hurt again. Imagining a better future is a vulnerable thing. Hope requires us to bare ourselves repeatedly, knowing that pain is likely, even inevitable.
I thought a lot about this in the days leading up to the presidential inauguration. Trump’s reelection wasn’t as cataclysmic to me this time around because I’m now under no illusions of what this country is, and how cruel people can be in their self-interest and fear of vulnerability. While my mind has been calm, I’ve been shocked at how my body has reacted in anticipation of the official change. My TMJ is extremely bad right now; I can’t open my mouth wider than an inch and eating is painful. The muscles in my neck and shoulders are frozen and I’ve had a tension headache for days.
My stoicism cracked when I watched Brett Kavanaugh swear in JD Vance, though. The image of those two smarmy Yalies crystalized the most despicable truth we hold to be self-evident in this country: that it doesn’t matter what you’ve done or who you’ve sacrificed on the altar of your ambition, as long as the god you pray to is the one in power at this moment. It was a fitting coda to the horrors of the last eight years—a Supreme Court justice who sits in a stolen seat, swearing in a spineless dud who made his name selling out his own people and finagled his way to the second most powerful office in the country by reneging on his own allegedly staunchly-held values. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to throw my remote through my TV. What can possibly be done to fix what we’ve gotten ourselves into?
This morning, I wondered if I might glean any comfort from the version of me who hadn’t lived through this yet. The version of me that had more energy and anger to spare.
I dug through one of my journal boxes and found the notebook I kept in 2016 into 2017. My last entry on the morning of Nov. 8, 2016 was heartbreakingly optimistic: “Tomorrow, the world will be different. This country will be different.”
The next entry started with “I believe that moving forward, my life will be separated between everything before today and everything after. I feel empty. I got a tattoo today—my oyster knife. As the needle cut my skin, all I could see was his face.”
I didn’t cry for several days after the election, and then one day, late in the week, I lost it. I was in our weekly meeting of Washington Post social media editors, and I kept thinking about all the times I’d posted inflammatory headlines on our Facebook page, watching the concurrent pageviews light up within minutes. The record pageview days, the press releases bragging about subscriptions. “We did this,” I said to my colleagues. “I did this. I don’t give a fuck about Facebook or Chartbeat anymore.” I began making plans to change my career that day. Does it even matter?
On Inauguration Day in 2017, as Obama and Trump rode together from the White House to the Capitol, I copied out Zoe Leonard’s 1992 poem “I Want a President”: “I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harrassed and gaybashed and deported.” It was day one, and protestors burned a limo outside my office, and even in my fear, the spectacle of the violence felt right.
And now it is day one again. In so many ways, it feels worse than it did in 2017; we know how bad it got, and this time there are even fewer guardrails on the president. The tech and media apparatuses that nominally made any sense of communal resistance possible online have already rolled over in acquiescence. I don’t even know where to go online to talk about this with people, because every social media platform seems to be fucked or corrupted. When information can’t flow freely online, does it even matter what I write on this blog? Who will see it?
Over the weekend, I spent a few hours with two 19-year-old girls who had voted for the first time in November. They had been in elementary school during Trump’s first term. I asked them if they remembered it at all, and they said no, not really. One of them was a political science major, and she said proudly that she loved getting in fights with people. I recognized the steely conviction in them, the steadfast resolution that there is work to be done and that they could be the ones to do it.
After days of listening to past me offer advice and comfort, I decided to speak back. I asked myself what I would tell myself at the beginning of Trump’s first term. Here’s what I came up with:
“You’re in for a tough few years, I won’t lie. They will challenge you more than you can imagine. But there will also be moments of joy, elation, and connection. Life will continue, despite the horrors, and you will find you’ll be able to make a difference in small ways. The way you interact with your colleagues, your friends, your partner, and strangers has a greater impact than you will ever be able to see. Your work is not on a global scale, or even a national scale. But your presence will be felt, and it will matter. It has to.”
I know that keeping that small amount of hope alive will be the thing responsible for my pain in the future; it’ll be the chink in my armor that will make me vulnerable to every barbed attack this administration has to offer. But I’m willing to risk it, because the alternative is complete submission.
