Articles

Years ago, at the request of a mutual friend and the consent of all parties involved, I found myself arguing the importance of accepting a person’s stated identity. I needed this mother to accept her son as her daughter. In a quarrel I probably should have been smart enough to avoid, I dug deep into my arsenal of logical and emotional persuasion methods.

I spent my first twelve years on Earth confident my life would end in a sudden flash of light. I was a child of the (late) seventies, and perhaps by then those who had lived through the missile crises of the previous decades had begun to doubt that cataclysmic inevitability.

This morning I read a friend’s social media post declaring that she is working tirelessly to become somebody she’s proud to be. It’s a familiar tale. Too many of us believe that we are not, at this moment, enough.

Maybe it took a global pandemic rendering us isolated and powerless to gain awareness of our loneliness. Why is lonely such a terrifying word? Those kids up to no good: loners. Mass shooters: loners. Those who bother us or are otherwise unworthy of our attention or affection: loners.