Being a young American right now
Is a strange, terrifying thing.
It's waking up after too little sleep, filled with nightmares that you can't afford therapy for.
It's spending the first half hour of your day repressing the urge to just sob while you talk yourself out of calling in sick. You need the money, whether to pay rent or to save up and move out of an abusive household.
It's hugging your loved ones as you leave for work, praying you'll all make it home tonight, and not be killed by a cop or fascist or r*pist or impatient driver or repressed white boy at school.
It's wanting to stay politically aware, but dreading reading the news. Your country's leaders are actively stripping you and your friends' legal protections, while starting another war for you and your friends to pay for and die in. They're also jailing people at the borders and letting them die of the flu, and would be ok doing the same to you.
It's sometimes spending the commute fantasizing over escape plans with your partner, imagining homesteading in the wilds to flee the looming draft. Or promising each other that prison is an acceptable alternative to being killed or being forced to kill brown kids because some wealthy old fart says that's how freedom works.
It's spending a third of your day or more pretending that you're OK, that this job isn't smothering your dreams and goals, sometimes resorting to pretending you're a happy robot so that customers or clients don't hurt you with their unmanaged and misdirected anger.
It's a combination of realizing these people are just stressed and scared too - lashing out in fear and frustration- and sometimes losing your cool and you're the one that lashes out.
It's beating yourself up over it later, in the dark hours, replaying scenarios in your head and wondering why you couldn't just take the kind path. You feel you could have been stronger, maybe, if you'd had more sleep or hadn't skipped lunch.
It's sometimes choosing happiness, taking 10 minutes to sip at a coffee made by a wage slave, like you, while someone else rants online or on the radio about this coffee is why you can't afford a house or the wedding you've been putting off for years.
It's coming home and doing a headcount of your loved ones, celebrating a 100% vital count by making a cheap but filling dinner, doing the dishes, and falling into bed.
It's do it all over again the next day, and the next, and the one after that, because you have no energy to hope for better and just enough energy to hope it doesn't get too much worse.