I find myself once more staring at this great expanse of white space choking on the words. I want so much to hide behind the the grandiosity of a greater good, when the reality is I just want the air I breathe. The fight exhausts me, and I yearn to set it down.
That's not an option, though. Political fights are one thing. There's the campaign, and then the election, then everyone sleeps for a little bit. Even interpersonal fights - you can ignore the individual for a little bit, let the flames die down on their own, before reaching out to rekindle the relationship. But when the fight is for basics like life and dignity, there is no setting it down. There is no chance to catch your breath.
Midway through the campaign, I made the decision to stop talking to my father. My father is a bigot. He believes he is always right, and that I am always stupid. He feels he has special standing in the world having dealt with mortality in his 60s in the form of a triple bypass. I feel I do, too, considering I have held my mortality in my hand every day since I was 23. And while I would fight with my last breath for him to be able to say and do as he pleases, and indeed have reached out to his enemies to try and get them to back off, my father shares no such compulsion towards mutual defense. In a sense, to win any of my battles, great or small, I must defeat my father.
He decided at one point it would be appropriate to accuse the Democratic ground game of unethical and improper behavior in polling and voter registration. Then he didn't understand why I would find this offensive. He couldn't fathom why I would take that so personally, it's not like I had anything to do with it personally, he was referring to the mystery "them" that does bad things, the phantom menace "they". It didn't matter to him that I was partially responsible for organizing a legislative district, and it sure as shit didn't matter to him that I had met and worked alongside literally every organizer in the county. No no, it wasn't about me, specifically, so I shouldn't be offended, and I should afford him "some kind of consideration" because he's my father and he's old.
Fuck that.
Initially, it was beyond liberating to cut the man off. No longer did I have someone haunting my every last victory who was actively cheering my demise. The specter of his self-righteousness, of his insistence on playing the sinned against martyr, was wholesale jettisoned from my life. I felt like I could speak freely without having to give a damn if my father back in Maine got wind of this that or the other. He could sit and rant at the Facebook all he wanted. I didn't have to hear it anymore. Now, though, the door of this new closet is clearly gone, and I am still afraid to come out of it.
I should have the bravery to do it. I should have the courage of my convictions to stand tall on my own narrative and tell it rather than flee from forming it. The truth is I hate the story of me. It is not that I am ashamed or regret it. The making of me has been what it has been, and I cannot exist as I do now without it. There are people all around me now who have encouraged me, who have lifted me up, who have lead me to believe in my own inherent good just as much as I believe in the inherent good in all of them. That man cannot be divorced from his making. If I am to be effective, let alone understood, I must come to grips with and be able to talk down that making. I have to draw this deep ragged breath as best I can and begin the process of enumerating the moving parts, describing their orbits, explaining the warp and woof of the plane they transit.
Here goes.
