The Conversation

It could’ve been us.

Twice.

Last year, an F3 tornado almost hit our house. The funnel cloud passed right over us. Imagine our surprise recently as another tornado warning went off at our new home. While we were hiding in a closet, severe winds were ripping apart houses across town. People lost everything, and they’re just now talking about it. The destruction here has gone unnoticed in the larger vortex of chaos and loss.

Every now and then, my family has the conversation.

We talk about the future.

We talk about the futures we could’ve lived, and what kind of future we have to prepare for now. We talk about the futures other people, sometimes even us, are still haunted by, ghost futures. It’s not a pleasant talk.

Our daughter probably won’t go to college.

She’ll need a different skill set.

Neither I nor my spouse nor any of our friends will get to retire. We’ll count ourselves lucky if we even make it to our 60s, provided disaster and disease don’t take us out first. Anyone with a halfway-decent house has no idea if it will withstand the next hurricane, the next flood, or the next tornado. We await the slow, inevitable collapse of the insurance industry and the power grid. I used to daydream about having a home library. Now I daydream about having a cave.

Yesterday, I was outside and overheard my neighbors having a nasty fight. It put a bit of a damper on any hopes I had about building a resilient community. In reality, there’s few people we can actually trust at all.

That’s part of the conversation, too.

Strangely, this isn’t new to me.

I spent the first half of my life managing my mom’s paranoid schizophrenia, wiping up her bodily fluids and helping raise my brother while my dad worked all the time to keep us housed. My mom tried to kill us more than once. It was almost impossible to get the police to come out, and it was almost impossible to get her into a mental health facility. Even when we did, insurance rejected coverage. On top of all that, she somehow managed to lose my dad’s entire life savings, including my college fund. It took me most of my 20s and early 30s to rebuild from that. It looks like I got everything back in order just in time for the end of the world.

My mom’s mental health provides a decent allegory for the problems our societies are ignoring. From the day I was born, she wasn’t quite right. She lost her temper and threw things at me. She screamed. She talked to herself for hours at a time. Everyone ignored it. They thought it would just go away. Instead, things got worse. They got more unpredictable. The worse it got, the less help we saw. One time, my grandparents and uncles visited to try to help us get through one of her episodes. They left the next day, saying they couldn’t handle it.

There’s one reason I was able to find a good job, get married, or have any friends at all. I learned not to talk about it.

You see, people don’t want to hear about your crazy mom, not even when she dies. They want to talk about their own moms and how much they love them or miss them or whatever. Your trauma brings them down.

It’s the same thing with…

Everything.

The silence I practiced as a teenager became the silence I practiced as an adult. Now on top of not talking about my trauma, I also don’t talk about the climate crisis, the pandemic, or anything else.

At least I’m used to it.

I’ve had practice.

Except lately, my spouse and I are finally having those important conversations. We’re having them because they can’t wait. Although he deserves credit for listening, every single time, I had to find the energy and the resolve to be the one to bring it up, to ruin the mood, and to darken the future.

My spouse knows a lot about science. He understands the situation. He knows what’s going on in Gaza, too. He struggles to bring all of that knowledge into the realm of personal action. For him, the danger has always existed far away. He grew up in a loving, supportive family that didn’t talk about politics at the dinner table, and all of them except him voted for Trump.

(Twice.)

Finally, we had the conversation with our parents. It wasn’t the first time we brought up unpleasant topics, but it was the first time we told him we wouldn’t be able to see them again if they didn’t listen.

They’re still digesting it.

My brother and sister-in-law have always considered themselves above politics, yet culturally liberal. During Helene, they got trapped in Asheville. They were completely unprepared. They got lucky. If it weren’t for a kind landlord, they wouldn’t have had food, shelter, or even a pot to piss in.

They’re starting to get it.

Even though my spouse has finally clued in, I have to be careful. I can’t tell him every single thing that’s on my mind. I can’t tell him every single thing I know, just like I haven’t told him about the “vacation” when my mom took off all her clothes and climbed into bed with my brother and started touching him. As you might know, there’s just some things you keep to yourself.

I haven’t told my spouse about the videos of Palestinian children with their heads blown open, parents weeping over their corpses. How do you know what’s enough to tell someone, and what’s too much?

Have you ever actually seen a dead kid before, in real life? In my 20s, I covered the crime beat. I saw a few.

It hardens you.

Some of us have regenerated a few times now. An old version of us bursts away and a new one glows into being, a little meaner than the last. It’s that new mean that helps us get through the cruel new world.

It’s happening now.

Every day, millions of people around the world desperately want to have the conversation with their friends and family. It’s eating them alive to keep their knowledge of the future to themselves. They think we’re downers. They have no idea how much we’re already picking and choosing what to tell them. Every day, we train ourselves to enjoy the moment, as if it’s the last.

One day, there will be a last moment. There will be a last good night’s sleep. There will be a last smile. There will be a last day of childhood innocence. We know all of this, and we snake our way through it.

That’s the real mental health crisis.

It’s not social media. It’s not phones. It’s not loneliness. It’s not that we don’t have anyone to watch TV with. It’s a soul-crushing sense of isolation. They’re facing all of this alone, with nobody to help.

There were plenty of solutions for my mom, but nobody wanted to help. They just wanted to dump all the responsibility on us and walk away. Now I’m watching the same thing happen practically every day, on a global scale. Except this time, nobody escapes the consequences.

We have plenty of solutions for our problems, but nobody wants to give up the slightest convenience or comfort.

We can’t deal with any of this if we don’t talk about it.

Every single day, we’re watching our friends and family and wondering how we can possibly ease them into the conversation.

That’s the crisis.