It's Not the End of America, We're Just Going Through a Divorce

We're grieving what we had, but soon we'll realize the relationship wasn't healthy anyway

Hello Friends,

I've had a bit of an epiphany that I wanted to share with you all.

I remember the day my mom called us into the living room so that my parents could announce they were getting divorced. The odd thing is that just from the way my mom was standing, I knew what she was going to say.

“It's over,” I thought to myself. “Our family is over.”

For those of you who have gone through a divorce, you know that it's a hard thing to deal with. You feel like you've been gut shot. You feel an intense jumble of emotions.

You feel sad.

You feel foolish.

You feel angry.

You indulge in self-recrimination. You say, “Why didn't I see this coming?” or “What could I have done to prevent this?”

But most of all, you grieve. You grieve because a chapter of your life is over and you're not going back. This grief is not something that you can process in an hour or a day or a week. It can take months before you start feeling like yourself again. It can take years before you discover joy again.

The old saying is that time heals all wounds. It's impossible to recognize how profound those words truly are until you've experienced a gut wrenching loss.

The amazing thing is that, bit by bit, you find that you emerge into a situation that's much better than the one you left behind.

In the case of my family, the divorce helped me realize that my dad was abusive. I'd blinded myself to that before. I'd blinded myself out of a commitment to our family. This doesn't mean I was foolish, or stupid, or committed to a path of self-destruction. I had merely done my best to survive within the parameters of my given reality.

After the divorce, my reality changed. In fact, during that family meeting, I felt an enormous weight lift off my shoulders. There was some subconscious awareness that my life was about to get better that my conscious mind needed a few months to accept.

When you have the rug pulled out from beneath your feet, it takes a while to find your footing again. This happens many times in our lives. Every time a major chapter of your life ends, you find yourself scrambling for a sense of identity.

I felt it when I graduated from high school. I found myself wondering what I was going to do now that I was in the possession of the freedom I'd always longed for.

I felt it when I graduated from college. Anxiety hit me as I was moving out of my apartment, uncertain of what the future would hold.

I even felt it when we got a puppy. I had a hard moment of awakening when I realized our family life had been irrevocably changed. I love our puppy, but I still needed to experience a moment of grief for the dynamic that had been lost.

My dad was the individual who initiated the family divorce, but he didn't think it through. Apparently he felt that my relationship with him would be the same even if he removed my mom from the scene. That would be like taking the color blue out of The Starry Night with the assumption that the picture would still look the same.

It doesn't.

Once I'd absorbed the reality that our family would be forever changed, I discovered there was a domino effect. I'd always thought of my family as forever. Once my dad left, I didn't think of it that way anymore.

Once I realized my dad could be out of the picture, I realized I had come into power. I came to understand that I endured much of his behavior because I'd resigned myself to thinking I could never get away from him.

Then he went away.

He expected me to go and visit and that made me laugh. Why should I do that? Did he think I'd go running to his house so I could endure his abuses again? From the moment he said he was going to leave, I knew he wouldn't lift a finger to come and visit me.

It was freedom.

And the dominoes kept falling.

I began to realize I didn't need to endure his attitude in others. I began to realize I could demand to be respected. I began to realize I could set my own boundaries. A whole floodgate of realization stemmed from my new reality.

As the months went by my grief ebbed away. It was replaced with empowerment.

I've only just realized that I've been going through this same process in the wake of the 2024 election. The result of that election forced me to confront many ideas that I had trained myself to disregard.

I've suffered the same kind of self-recrimination that I experienced after my parent's divorce. I thought, “Was I foolish for believing she could get elected?” or “Was I delusional for assuming the people in my community would make a different choice?”

But with every passing day, I'm having more and more realizations. I look around my country and I see an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty. Many people have suggested that the result of the 2024 election represents the end of the United States, but that's simply not true.

We've forgotten our history.

This country has endured a Civil War. This country has been through many eras of reconstruction. The Civil Rights Era was one. The response to 9/11 was another. There are many events in the course of human history that shock humanity into giving up its illusions and accepting a more enduring truth.

The United States of America has just experienced another gut check moment. For the last few months, we've been reeling. The America that we knew is gone. It's gone forever. It's not coming back.

Just like the end of my family, there are many things that I will miss. But now, as the months have gone by, I'm able to see many things about the old America that simply weren't good enough. Now, like a newly liberated person, I feel empowered to demand that certain boundaries are respected. These boundaries will apply to our national approach to things like health care, education, women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and basic respect for immigrants.

I think my dad's greatest mistake in his life was thinking he could force his will upon the family without having to endure any consequences for his behavior. What I have seen time and time again is that consequences are inevitable.

We all wear blinders that enable us to survive when we're forced to endure abusive situations. We disregard blatant contradictions because we feel we lack the power to do anything about them. But now, those blinders have been stripped away. We have proof that the warnings we issued were valid, and we're going to be less inclined to submit to lies.

We're going through a period of awakening. We still have many months or maybe even years of struggle ahead. But we've also been empowered to challenge the essential deceits that have been woven into the fabric of our ideology.

The dishonest actors cannot escape accountability forever. Rising to power was the worst thing they could have done because it forces them to reveal themselves. I expect that a new collective consciousness will descend upon our nation. We're all about to be liberated from the outdated ideology of cruelty that's existed since the inception of this nation.

We see it now. You can't put the genie back in the bottle.

The old America is dead. The cruel America that could elect a man without integrity. I predict that will be the last one. I am hopeful that we will take advantage of our enlightened perspective and use it to forge a nation that's finally worthy of our children.

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