I am an older sister, a teenager, and a rising high-school senior. At present, the thought of looking toward college and the future is dreary. It feels impossible to continue planning my life when I will be entering adulthood in a country that claims to be a democracy, but fails to value the rule of law or the will of the people. I can picture myself on the college campuses that are described in Joan Didion’s book of essays, The White Album. Protests and violence abound, a sense of resistance and unrest palpable in the air. Young people disempowered and disenfranchised. Yet instead of the 1960s, it is today. I feel the past creeping up on us. This Fourth of July, with little interest in celebration, I wore black.
The future offered to my generation continues to become more and more of a wreck. In just the past few weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to further minimize gun control and ruled against efforts to curb climate change by limiting the power of the Environmental Protection Agency. With the Dobbs decision, they struck down almost fifty years of abortion rights and privacy protections.
The future offered to my generation continues to become more and more of a wreck.
It seems that we are trapped, our right to bodily autonomy under aggressive and increasingly violent assault. If the federal government continues on its current track, we will be left a mess of a country. My generation will be forced to fight to pick up the pieces, just as childbirth is now being forced upon those who are not ready, capable, or interested in having children. As I write, these truths sting my eyes.
It was an almost beautiful day. There was a certain dull, beige quality to the air, though I couldn’t grasp why. Even while sitting in the university information session at a college tour, unaware and unsuspecting, I felt extreme unease. Still, I went on the tour, filled with hopefulness and dreams of the future.
Then I got in the car, checked my texts, and everything shattered.
In disbelief, I rushed to Twitter. If it had happened, the news would be trending at the top of the search page. To my horror, there it was: “The Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade in a 5-3-1 decision.” No longer did the future—or the present—seem like a place I wanted to be.
Nora Ephron once urged us in a commencement speech at Wellesley College to take each act of violence against women personally. And I did. I felt the Court’s decision like a punch to the gut. It was personal to me, and to every woman—even the women who celebrate the overturn; whether or not they choose to acknowledge it, their rights have been diminished, too. Rage first appeared in my eyes, spilling over and rolling down my face. I sat in silence for a moment. My mom was speaking on the phone with my sister about the usual things, and she did not yet know. For a minute or so, I held the news to myself, the scorch of hopelessness burning against my chest.
She hung up the phone. I opened my mouth to tell her, searching for any part of me that could manage to form the words. It was like a secret I couldn’t bear to share. Finally, a tiny voice emerged. She began to sob. I stared ahead, quiet, feeling the tears streaking down my sunscreen-coated face. How can something entirely unsurprising be nevertheless so unbelievable?
Upon that consideration, the tears really began to flow. It felt like a good moment to play some angry music. The first song I could think of was “F**k You” by Lily Allen. But as I listened to that rage anthem, the lyrics weren’t quite resonating. My fury, though very much present, was at the surface. Beneath was immense heartbreak. What I needed was the saddest song I could think of.
Hence: “That Funny Feeling,” covered by sad indie music icon Phoebe Bridgers. It captures the feeling of every liberty being stolen combined with the cruel paralyzation of helplessness. Every line in that song cracks you open. As Bridgers sang, “The quiet comprehending of the ending of it all,” I shuddered. The song’s author, YouTube sensation turned professional comedian and songwriter Bo Burnham, combed through life and managed to pick out extreme pain from the most mundane. He points to everything broken and breaking, and at that moment, the crumbling world he describes happened to be exactly where I was.
I felt like an inconsolable baby. So, I regressed. Queued next on my playlist were the crying songs of my youth, though really of my teenhood too: “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac and “Rainbow Connection” by Kermit the Frog. I could feel myself caught in that landslide. Above, a rainbow, the bliss of that morning before the news, taunted me, far out of reach.
The Instagram infographic rampage was not helping. I only reposted one thing, one line, posted by the singer Gracie Abrams: “the Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will be responsible for the death of so many women in this country.”
People were going to die. Knowing this, it was unclear to me what I was supposed to do with myself.
The only thing I could think of left to help was to read.
In a rare occurrence, my mother did not know either. So, we got the spiciest Indian food that upstate New York had to offer. That way, there would be an explanation for our public tears. We went to a candy store and bought my sister a rice crispy treat with Paul Rudd’s face on it. We went to a toy store and bought a birthday present for my baby cousin. I watched little kids waddle around, free. I often envy little girls, uninhibited by insecurity or social awareness. I can no longer remember what it felt like to be one.
Those places, sweet and playful, brought momentary comfort, which promptly disappeared each time I blinked and saw that dreadful headline pasted on the darkness of my eyelids. My friends were already at the protests. Signs materialized within hours—the ruling proved a powerful motivator. I was jealous that I couldn’t be with them, and that I, still out of town, couldn’t access a communal outlet to express my distress.
The only thing I could think of left to help was to read.
When I got home, I started with a little Joan Didion. The Year of Magical Thinking, to mourn. As she mourned John and Quintana, and I mourned the world as I knew it, we grieved together (though, please note, she would define grief and mourning as separate entities).
Then some bell hooks. She has all the words and all the love. I needed the love. When I read her work, I feel as though I am being spoken to in a soft but forceful voice. I heard that kind, powerful voice in Feminism is for Everybody when she speaks for the children of mothers who did not want them: “Many of us were the unplanned children of talented, creative women whose lives had been changed by unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, we witnessed their bitterness, their rage, their disappointment with their lot in life. And we were clear that there could be no genuine sexual liberation for women and men without better, safer contraceptives—without the right to a safe, legal abortion.” I feared for the talented, creative women in my life, and in this country, who would now be forced to suffer and perish. I wondered how I could send that paragraph to the Justices of SCOTUS. Of course, there would be no point: They wouldn’t read it, nor care.
Next was Audre Lorde, who always makes me feel. I don’t often love poetry (I recognize that was not her only medium of creation), but her prose transcends that label and becomes a new narrative art. In her bio-mythography I’ve Been Standing on This Street Corner a Hell of a Long Time, she paints a terrible picture of dimly lit emergency rooms and “bloody gurneys lining the hallways.” She shares that “Jean’s friend Francie had died on the way to the hospital just last year after trying to do it with the handle of a #1 paintbrush.”
I could at least ground myself in what I knew in those words, in how writing is power.
That line horrified me. Women of that time had to turn to brutalizing methods of abortion just to escape what the law attempted to chain them to, and died in the process. Now, people of the present will again be forced to use extreme, dangerous methods of terminating a pregnancy, and some will inevitably face otherwise preventable deaths.
Then a little Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, though I retain that their practices of feminism have certain faults, especially when it comes to inclusion. Regardless, they know the fight, they know the truth, and I wanted some truth.
These readings left me a bit more centered. I could at least ground myself in what I knew in those words, in how writing is power, and that so long as I could hold pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, I might not be entirely helpless after all.
A couple of days later, while writing this essay, I saw a rainbow. I felt a new landslide coming, but this time I would surf the running earth, afloat and fighting.
This essay is me throwing my first punch.