Living the American Nightmare

Each day I wake up, check the time, check the weather, and check the news to see if a tragedy occurred while I slept. Most mornings nowadays, all I see is tragedy. They ever so kindly make sure to include a few heartwarming blurbs about a rescued dog or children raising money to pay off school lunch debt, a futile attempt to cleanse the palate.

This morning routine of mine is a recipe for disaster, by all means it should make me a hopeless, pessimistic, bitter individual. Somehow, it does the opposite. The sheer wealth of atrocities happening, and being broadcast 24/7, only fills me with empathy.

I’ve always been someone who cares a lot about a lot of things. I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life being a caregiver by profession. I determine my value by my ability and capacity to help, yet I keep finding myself in the position of needing help.

America is a funny, juvenile, little Country that seems to have spent most of its life in a dissonant identity crisis, much like myself. Home of the free, land of the brave, a place where anyone can dare to follow their dreams. Yet the more I’ve chased mine, and the more modest I make them, the more obstacles dare to drag me down.

It’s becoming painfully obvious that the only Americans who can follow their dreams are the ones with luck, and much like money, you can’t make you’re own unless you have the right circumstances.

I have been described as a resilient person for most of my life. I resent this description, it feels more like a condolence than a compliment. I don’t like to think of myself as a troubled person, but realistically and objectively speaking, I’ve had some troubles. I had a rare cancer when I was 13 years old. So rare that at the time there were only 148 other cases, and only 1% of those were malignant. Mine was too. Luck is a funny thing that statistics can’t comprehend fully.

This happened at the same time my parents were going through a brutal, rather violent, divorce due to the discovery that my Father had been cheating on my Mother (who immigrated here from Russia in 1992 to marry him) since I was 6 years old. My suffering seemed so statistically improbable, and a simple case of awful timing, that surely it was a one off. I liked to think that perhaps I had just gotten all my bad luck out of the way in the beginning, and the path ahead was paved with prosperity.

Divorce, chemo, radiation, surgeries, all left my body tired and my heart a little duller. I was intimately aware that sometimes the cure takes as much of the good away as it does the bad, a hard lesson to learn at the same time you’re trying to decide on a future, a career. Most of the important lessons I learned didn’t happen in a classroom. In fact, school taught me very few truths about the world we’re living in.

I spent the rest of my adolescence in the mental health care system, trying to find the right recipe of coping skills, therapy, and medication that would make me feel like I used to again. Much like the cancer, there were countless attempts to diagnose my pathology; depression, anxiety, insomnia, ADHD, mood disorder, PTSD, borderline personality disorder - the most offensive of the lot, as if my character is some personal failing, rather than a reaction to circumstances.

At 18 years old, I aged out and was discharged from a residential facility, I became an adult overnight. I vividly recall the intense fear I felt, not knowing how to navigate this system, this world, in a way that would provide me stability I never got from my parents, doctors, or even my own body.

I began volunteering at my local animal shelter to pass the days, cleaning cages and socializing cats. I spent over 40 hours a week there, losing track of the time. No therapist had ever explained the concept of grounding, mindfulness, or meditation in a way that felt attainable or comforting to me. As I sat in front of the cage of a scared, traumatized little cat, who was in poor health and in a strange, scary place, I finally understood it.

Sometimes the cat would be too scared to even look at me, so I looked away too. Other times, they stared me down, carefully scanning the situation for signs of a threat, so I looked away. All it took was time and patience, and with each cat I got to trust me, to relax, to open up, I felt a little piece of me heal, like doing this little bit of good was bringing back life to parts of me that chemo had killed off. I realized how valuable trust is, and being taken care of when you’re unable to care for yourself. Every time one of those cats found a home, I was reminded that other people understood this truth as well.

Throughout my career I gradually found new ways to help. I worked as a veterinary ICU technician, and I was great at it. I knew all too well what it was like to have no control, to have no strength, and to be tangled up in IV lines and procedures you aren’t equipped to understand or handle.

Though too quickly and inescapably, much like the chemo, the job started to kill more of me than it healed.

Yet, I had managed to somehow go from someone so severely sick, not trusted around sharp objects, who couldn’t afford college, to a person in a prestigious, valued position where I made good money, helped people and healed animals.

Proof the American dream is accomplishable through hard work.

On paper.

I don’t think I have ever been more miserable than I was at that job, but I couldn’t leave. Not only did I feel an obligation to use my empathy to help my patients, but a twisted sense lingered in the back of my mind that I was more equipped than others to help when it was time for them to pass on, because I was so intimately close to death myself in a way my peers (luckily) weren’t.

More practically, there was also no other job that would pay me as handsome a salary and I knew I couldn't ever afford to not have the benefit of health insurance.

I dreaded waking up, spending 10 to 18 hours of my day in fluorescent lighting, illuminating all the suffering around me, the stench of sterility and death juxtaposed and lingering in the room.

This alone was not enough to make me quit. Not until something happened to me at the hands of a coworker. I will not get into details but this development made me feel, viscerally, like I was just someone whom things happened to.

I knew the time had come and I needed to do something, so I quit.

Then the pandemic happened.

I had never not had a job before, and I was absolutely petrified of getting Covid. I spent 2020 unemployed and in poverty, in an agonizing, paralyzing fear. I wasn’t really there for most of that year.

My mind would wander endlessly into all possibilities, most of them quite unfavorable, and I would desperately try to call on all those coping strategies I collected over the years, but nothing seemed to bring my untethered thought back to my body. I just floated above myself, waiting for something to change.

In 2021 I found some new strength. I had tried to pick up gardening during quarantine, trying to echo those moments sitting in front of a traumatized pet and healing them, watching life flourish.

Instead I killed a lot of plants.

I felt so connected to them, my little projects, that I never cut away the dead parts. I thought I was honoring their effort, but really it just stole nutrients from the parts of the plant that were still growing.

I abandoned gardening and I cut away the dead parts of myself instead. I made a fresh start, I was getting back on my feet. For all the terror the past few years had brought, by 2022 I had an epiphany.

I had spent most of my life trying to make as much money as possible, because I thought, paradoxically, it would give me more time, more freedom.

Being faced with my own mortality as I was coming of age, I never thought much about things I wanted, rather experiences I longed for. Being bedridden, I didn’t find comfort in any thoughtfully given stuffed animal or get well soon bouquet. I felt reassured by the few moments of normalcy, cackling with my best friend over an inside joke or instant messaging my crush, that punctuated MRI’s, biopsies, arguments, and fear.

I am always painfully aware of how limited time is, and I want to spend it helping and holding others close.

When I think of wealth and posterity I don’t think of a fancy house, or a lavish vacation. I think of an afternoon unencumbered by demands, reading a good book with my pets by my side, a record circulating a simple song through the air, the freedom to to spend time with those I love, to have the time to love more people.

I am much more interested in spending time than spending money.

Lately, I’ve thought maybe I had found a loophole in the system. I was as close to happy, maybe even euphoric, as I had ever been without chemical assistance at the highest dosages. Sure, I was still poor, but it meant I had healthcare, a card that afforded me food, I made just enough to pay my bills and I had found my own unique, vague, version of stability and prosperity.

I spent my days exploring a new city by walking peoples dogs. I had time to cook meals, to sing and dance along to my favorite songs every evening with my old dog lapping up the spills from my kitchen floor. Every day when I got dressed I felt like I did two decades ago, pulling costumes out of my chest of dress-up clothes and flouncing around the house with a profoundly innocent glee. Suddenly, as if my nervous system had reset, I was getting all these little moments of joy everyday, and they didn’t feel fleeting at all, they felt free, like the freedom I’ve been told is guaranteed to me.

Laying on the cool tile of my bathroom after spending the day sweltering in 110 degree weather felt so good, it made up for the anxiety I had about climate change and how hot it may be in just a few more years.

Shivering in the snow to come home to a hot shower, a bowl of soup and an evening curled up on the couch with the soothing warmth of my purring cat on my lap and my dog calmly dreaming beside me, made me feel like the luckiest person in the world.

I started to dream again about the future.

I wanted to go back to helping, but in my own way, with this little gem of truth I had excavated to guide me. To start a non profit that would help people and animals, to use the experiences that once made my existence so miserable into something that might make myself and the world around me a little better.

By this time I had learned to take care of myself first, so before I made any big changes I scheduled a slew of doctors appointments out of an abundance of caution. I finally learned how to be strategic and plan ahead, and I expected at worst, I may uncover something like high blood pressure or a hormone imbalance and need to take another medication daily. I needed to get an idea of how much I would be paying towards healthcare if I took on a new career endeavor and no longer made so little that I got it for free with medicaid.

Instead I found a tumor.

It’s scheduled to be removed on March 30th. Two days after my 28th birthday. 15 years later and I feel like that same hopeless, scared, angsty, powerless teenager.

Except this time I’m a lot more alone, and reluctantly, a lot more angry.

I have completely lost the ability to buy into this scam that we accept as the status quo, that this is the best we, as a society, can do when it comes to helping one another. I am too disabled to do the mental gymnastics required to make it all make sense.

I called and spoke to a cancer support foundation and was told the grim reality of what to expect logistically if this mass in my leg turns out to be cancer:

• I can’t crowd-fund to pay my rent while I recover (with no paid time off) because that counts as income, and if I make a dollar too much I lose my healthcare.

• There are no programs here for rental assistance now that Covid is “over”.

• I could potentially find housing for cancer patients, but I would need a caregiver. My Mother is currently dying of breast cancer, and if you couldn’t guess by the tidbit of information given about my Father, he’s not really the caregiving type.

• I can’t find a new job because there simply isn’t one that would pay me enough to afford cancer treatment with deductibles, not to mention the uncertainty regarding how long I’d even be well enough to work.

Then I woke up today and I read an article about Putin (I say Putin and not Russia intentionally; these atrocities are the result of one sick man more than they are of any hive mindset) bombing a building where Ukrainian civilians were sheltering.

They had written “children” on the ground outside in a plea for mercy.

I think again that I am lucky.

I read the comments and am reminded that other people feel the deep sympathetic pain that I do for the people in Ukraine, that through all the horror there are these little glimpses of hope that shine through in peoples ability to care for people they don't know, people a world away.

What I hope people take away from this, is that we all have an obligation to help, and to strive for better conditions regardless of one’s ability to change their own circumstance, that not everyone is afforded that ability.

One of the things that got me through cancer treatment, and the existential angst it brought with it, was being on my high school debate team. I read a lot of philosophy and history and I noticed patterns, and themes. This reassured me that in a general sense, across the board, people value their community.

I often included this quote by Sarah Ahmed in my speeches, which so eloquently and succinctly describes what I hold as my deepest, core value:

“Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.”

As global and personal tragedies continue to unfold, I see the solidarity spread out in comments and anecdotes littered among the surreal experience of scrolling from a delicious recipe, to a fundraiser to stay sheltered and out of the cold, to combat footage from a war happening in real time.

Both physically and virtually, we are all intrinsically, inherently, inescapably, intertwined.

I am struggling to feel the weight of my own obstacles right now, I so boldly and desperately see that as much as all the war, climate disasters, sickness, and violence is a recipe for disaster, it’s also the recipe for change.

A kind of change history has not seen before, one where we are informed about the realities, grim or good, a world away, in different countries and cultures.

I think it would be hard to find anyone here in America, on either side of the political spectrum, that would claim that those in Ukraine should have just worked harder to avoid their suffering.

As hard as it is to watch the footage of desolate destroyed cities, I think it is important we do see it, and to not look away. To see how absurd the notion is, that life is just a series of choices and if you make the right ones you can avoid suffering.

Whether you are born at the wrong time in the wrong country, or with the wrong genetics, or without a family that is capable of caring for you, you are a product of circumstance more than choice. There are some things that we are powerless to change without resources or access to support.

As terror is broadcast to us on our phones, which have become more of an added extremity than a tool, we must not look away.

These abominations are not a scared little traumatized cat that you can placate by not making eye contact.

Rather, we are the scared strays, huddled in our manufactured, industrial cages waiting for a hand to reach out to help, to guide us, to save us.

Safety is our highest priority and how we justify spending our tax dollars on funding our militaries, investing in weapons to protect us, to guarantee safety.

How much longer can we pretend that the threat is out there across the sea, in the other, or that the tools whose creation we justify by claiming defense aren’t the same that destroy people just like us?

Learning to take care of myself was a difficult and costly lesson, but it needs to be applied to this country as a whole.

I know I am not alone, and that there are countless others born into circumstances here that don't offer them a path to the American dream, safety, stability.

Instead, we scrape, crawl, fight, try, and chase the goal until all our strength is depleted.

We fall into the trap of considering how much worse things could be, so we don't have the time to think about how much better they should be.

We will be told to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, while our valiant efforts to find a way to thrive have shot us in the foot.

We will have the boot of capitalism and rugged individualism held on our neck, and be told to kiss it for all the opportunity it provides us.