Do you Actually Believe in Tomorrow?
The past few weeks I have been going through some major personal transitions, and this weekend things started to feel very real. This led to a bit of an epiphany about somewhere I think many of us are stuck right now.
As you've likely heard me mention before, my wife started her MD/MPH in the summer of 2020, which was what originally brought me to St. Louis. Med school is rough, but nothing is rougher than the looming stress of matching into a residency program at the end of school. This year, 70,000 students hoped to match into 40,000 spots. It's rough.
We've known the whole time that after you submit your ranking list, where you end up matching isn't up to you, you just get an envelope that tells you where you're going. So moving in the spring of 2025 has been looming on the horizon since July of 2020. Generally speaking, we didn't really talk about it. Especially as the time ticked down, we continued building friendships and relationships locally, spending time in our community, and allowing the move to be a bit of an "elephant in the room". Even when we started needing to think more seriously about the different program options and places we might live, things felt tremendously abstract.
Then, match day came along. She matched to a fantastic pediatrics program at Children's Hospital of Orange County in southern California (and I'm so proud of her!) and three days later I was on a plane to California to start securing housing. We pick up the U-haul 3 weeks from today.
We started looking at furniture, brainstorming decorations. We let our friends know and we shared on social media. We found a reasonably inclusive gym, and I reached out to the local PFLAG chapters to make connections.
This weekend, when I booked the moving truck while we talked about what we wanted our post-work routine to be, it truly and fully hit me. We're moving. It's real now.
It's never been fake. The residency match process was always the road we were walking down, but it didn't feel real for years.
Dreaming of the Future
So what changed that made it real? Well, we got some more specific information when we figured out where we'd matched. We started making actual plans, started acknowledging the losses and talking about the change with loved ones, and we started to regularly envision and get excited about the future. In short, we started living like it was real.
I spend time talking to a lot of people. Some who self describe as allies, others as advocates, activists, organizers, leaders, or just as parents, kids, queer humans. A lot of people right now are feeling paralyzed, hopeless, exhausted. Even those doing a tremendous amount of great work in their communities are often surprised by my level of optimism.
Since the election, my personal sense of purpose has really crystalized. I want to provide meaningful, realistic, actionable, and achievable hope to people who were feeling like they should give up, so I've spent hours trying to figure out what forces of hopelessness I'm truly up against. I've talked about fearmongering, I've talked about resilience practices.
But I think one of the things making it hardest to deeply and truly hope is our failure to actually believe that there is a better world out there.
Think about it. When someone tells you to put money in a savings account, or put energy into a project with a loooong timeline, or even to do things to improve the long-term health of your body, we put those things on the very bottom of our to do list.
I know what my reactions used to be: As if I'll get old enough to care about my body! As if I'll still have a planet to retire on! Ha! As if I'll still be out and loud and defiantly transgender 10 years from now!
And there it is. The vote of failure in our work. The subconscious or conscious decision that our work does not matter, and nothing we do makes a difference. The way we live, the choices we make, the "jokes" we make and the content we consume all make this belief feel real. We live like it is true that there is no future, so of course we feel paralyzed! Of course we feel unmotivated! The game is over, the score is settled, and we have lost.
"But Ben, I'm just being realistic!"
No, friend. That isn't realism. Let's critical think together for a second. Who has something to gain from you feeling that way? From you feeling angry and despondent and ready to give up?
Certainly the far right, who doesn't want to face any opposition or consequences for their bullshit. Certainly the social media companies who maximize their profit when you fight in the comments and doomscroll all day. Certainly the legacy media companies who maximize their profit when you are glued to the news all the time, "staying informed because you just can't believe how horrible it is".
They have built us a trap out hopelessness, conflict, bad news, high numbers of legislation to demoralize us, flooding the zone with shit, radicalized online spaces, and more, and we have moved into that trap and called it home. Called ourselves realists for being able to see all the "signs of total collapse" around us without taking the time to see who was standing behind those signs and propping them up.
Even as we go out to fight the good fight, protest, make trouble, make a difference, we sit with the hopelessness their in our bodies, living as if that is truth.
How do we move out?
In short, we must make the future we want to see real. No, this doesn't mean pretending that nothing is wrong and that everything is going to be sunshine and rainbows as soon as the next presidential election is going to roll around.
I try not to put timelines on the things I'm hoping for, or to have them be hyper-specific (i.e. when this person wins the presidency, when this bill gets passed, etc.). I mostly focus on how I want to live now to set myself up to make it to that future.
How am I taking care of my body? That means stretching, it means regular movement, it means wearing a mask in high-density areas, it means preventative medicine. For me, it also means dreaming big with strategy and goals for my business as a speaker. Bigger impact, better processes, reaching more people. Setting far-off future goals. Eventually I want to attend a white house pride celebration. I want to lead an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. It means imagining my life, actively, with plans and timelines. I'm learning how to be a better husband every day. I'm deciding what kind of father I want to be.
I hope for a future where people are kinder, more giving, I imagine the ways community could look as we build up systems of trust and mutual aid and interdependence.
I feed that hope by both dreaming about it, envisioning big group dinners and community child-rearing, and by actually working towards it. I'm learning to become a more reliable person, to think of new ways of relying on the people I love and being reliable to them in return. I'm doing community education as often as I can to encourage others to change their approaches to.
What is the world you are fighting for? How can you make a practice of believing you will actually get there? How can you take care of yourself to make sure that you personally get to live to see the world you've fought for?
How can you exit the flashy structures of hopelessness around you? How can you opt out of fearmongering? How can you look for the good news in the world around you to take it in, with balance, along with the struggles and the fears?
Hope is a verb. Joy is a choice. Neither are finish lines you cross only once, they must be fought for and lived for over and over again. That tomorrow will come is inevitable. What it will bring is not, so what are you doing to make tomorrow a little better than it was today?
We are building a better world. We are marching steadfastly towards it. And I want you there with me when we get there.
With love and hope as always,
Ben
"Hope is a verb. Joy is a choice. Neither are finish lines you cross only once, they must be fought for and lived for over and over again." Thank you <3
I love this so much, Ben. Thank you.