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Common wisdom has it that people grow more conservative as they age, that the proverbial “Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac” comes for us all. I’m the opposite, having moved further and further left with every year, growing more progressive as I, a straight cisgender white woman from a middle-class background, learn all the ways the world is rigged in my favor, even as I myself have been severely let down by the status quo.
The more I learn, the more mortified I am by the myths I once accepted as irrefutable facts.
For so long, I believed there was one correct path for my life, that having lots of academic and then professional ambition was the key to success, in whichever way I’d choose to measure success, money, or happiness. I believed that my job would love me back, that meritocracy existed, and that hard work was the key to fulfilling my every material and emotional desire.
I believed I’d own a home one day (I guess I’m still hoping), and that regularly contributing to a 401(k) would be all that was required to retire comfortably.
I thought that having Type 1 diabetes couldn’t define me, that I should strive to be “normal,” never mind the fact that I had to worry about my blood sugar all of the time. I certainly always thought that insulin would be available and affordable to anyone who needed it.
I thought there was a proscribed way to behave if you wanted to have successful romantic and personal relationships, and I believed that women’s magazines could show me how. I thought that being skinny was a tremendously worthy goal, that beauty required pain.
I had little vocabulary to talk about sexual politics, so I thought that carrying a rape whistle and avoiding strange men skulking on the street late at night would keep me safe from harm.
I believed that abortion would always be legal in the United States.
I thought you should call the police if ever anyone was in danger.
I thought that labor organizing was impractical.
I thought that acid rain was the biggest threat to the environment, and that as long as we worked to close the hole in the ozone layer, our planet would be just fine.
I was wrong—about everything. I see now how unquestioningly I bought into the promises of democratic institutions that I later came to realize were at best deeply flawed, at worst irreparably broken. I didn’t consider how enormously privileged it was to believe that such systems could work in the first place. The American Dream of my parents, and of boomers more broadly, has become less and less attainable for the next generation, and especially for the people who were never intended to dream such dreams in the first place: Black and Brown people, poor people, differently abled people, genderqueer people. And ultimately, these systems didn’t even work out so well for me.
So here I am coming out as a late bloomer, a fortysomething former “good Democrat” who got angry and became radicalized and is stronger for it. Who finally has more faith in mutual aid than in government assistance. Who will never again donate to a national political campaign when there are people right outside my door I can help directly. Who is still actively choosing every day to break away from the self-centeredness of rugged individualism in favor of community and solidarity.
I want to share with you all the ways that I was wrong. Maybe you were wrong, too. Maybe we, together, can grieve what we thought the world was and hope for something better.
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