The days that must happen to you

As Walt Whitman's deeply imperialist, deeply gay "Song of the Open Road" nears its climax, he offers a stanza that has forever lodged itself in my brain for moments when the world seems too painful to bear.

He writes:

Listen! I will be honest with you,
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes,
These are the days that must happen to you:
You shall not heap up what is call’d riches,
You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,
You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d, you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart,
You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you,
What beckonings of love you receive you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting,
You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands toward you.

"These are the days that must happen to you" is my favorite way to describe the peril of living in interesting times. Yet Whitman, who published the poem as part of Leaves of Grass in 1855, wasn't writing about anything he found especially troubling. Instead, he was writing with great, unbridled enthusiasm for the United States' westward expansion. For Whitman, all was good and jolly out on the open road where (the poem's subtext suggests) you could totally sleep with your hot "Camerado." Here is a freedom heretofore unbelievable! Aren't you lucky to be alive to partake of it? Of course, that freedom wasn't for just anyone. The westward expansion displaced and killed untold numbers of Indigenous people. And as Whitman published Leaves of Grass, the United States was careening headlong toward a Civil War animated by a number of states insisting that they needed to enslave human beings.

Leaves of Grass exists within an incredibly American artistic point-of-view. It is written by someone who cannot partake of American freedom in the way he would have preferred (Whitman almost certainly had several clandestine romantic and sexual relationships with other men), but it is written in a mode that suggests that surely America at its core is its best self, not its worst one. Much of Whitman lives amid this quintessentially American optimism, even when he was writing about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

And yet buried within that optimism is an inherent melancholy, an understanding that good times are always followed by bad. Perhaps I am reading the historical record onto Whitman, knowing that his career would end up being defined by the war that erupted just a few years after Leaves's publication. Or maybe this melancholy reflects Whitman's understanding of the gap between that which is desired and that which is real. Every new greeting out on the open road is accompanied by a necessary parting sometime later. The days that "must happen to you" include immense happiness, sure; they also include all of the worst things you will have to endure.

Yet there's no sense of divine providence behind the use of the word "must." We are not really going to learn anything from what happens to us, other than that time moves forward, and every beginning carries within it its own ending. The days that must happen to us are simply an accident. We are alive now. These events are in motion. Thus, we must endure them. There is no other option.

I've been thinking about the election of 2004 a lot. George W. Bush defeated John Kerry, and as a burgeoning progressive who read Daily Kos religiously, it crushed me.

I lived in Milwaukee that year, making it the one time I lived in a swing state during a presidential election. It was a strange, electrifying experience to be so aware of the election in a way I never had been growing up in South Dakota. When I went to vote early that year, the line was so very long. It felt like Something Big Was Happening.

The night before Election Day, I remember watching Kerry's final rally on TV. It was a loud, jubilant affair, and once it was over, one of the news anchors said they had only seen enthusiasm that big the night before an election for one prior presidential candidate: Barry Goldwater. Oh no, I thought. I was a naïve kid who didn't know anything, and I saw this statement as a bad omen. It was. Kerry carried Wisconsin (narrowly), but he lost the election overall.

A raucous final rally before Election Day has presaged a big win the next day for plenty of candidates, regardless of party. Obama's last rally in 2008 was pure pandemonium; so was Trump's in 2016. This year, if you were going to guess who would win based on final campaign rallies, the difference could not have been more clear. Kamala Harris's last rally in 2024 was incredibly energetic and electrifying, where Trump's final speeches were sad, tired affairs, dragging on long past when they were "supposed" to end because the man just couldn't stop talking. Yet in watching Harris's final rally, I did feel the nagging sense that this was another Kerry situation, something where the enthusiasm for the candidate tracked a world that wasn't quite yet ready to be born. (So you don't think I think I'm psychic, I had a similar fear about Obama's late stage jubilation in 2008, and look how that turned out.)

What was intriguing about this, however, was the way that Harris wasn't, in any way, promising a direction the country was moving in, in the way Kerry and Goldwater did. Kerry and Goldwater's losses nevertheless pointed to the wins their respective parties would enjoy in the very next presidential election cycle. Yes, Harris's extremely tricky candidacy – which involved almost perfectly threading seven or eight needles at once while falling from a plane she had been kicked out of – often had the feeling of an outsider, underdog campaign. Yet she was, nevertheless, the sitting vice president for an unpopular president, whose unpopularity ultimately led her to the same fate as incumbent parties all over the world in the wake of post-pandemic inflation: resounding defeat.

Yet if you watched her final rallies, you did get the sense of a world struggling to be born. It was not necessarily a new world, was the thing. It was the one we lived in already, the one that might evaporate right out from under us if she didn't win. The joy was real and powerful. It was also always tinged with terror. We so badly wanted this world to survive, even as we could sense a doctor waiting to call time of death.

This is very self-centered, but the first thing I thought of when it became clear Donald Trump was going to return to the presidency was my career. In recent years, I have finally begun to build a life where I can pay most of my bills by writing fiction and then a few more by writing this newsletter. It's granted me a creative freedom that is nevertheless tempered by its inherent instability.

The book I'm about to publish and the new novel I'm mostly done with are about trans protagonists. The novel coming out in March will (hopefully) (probably) still come out in March. But will I be able to sell future titles? Will the market for stories about trans people completely dry up? It was already a small trickle, so it's not hard to imagine it completely going away. (Speaking of which, if you wanted to preorder my novel right now, I'd sure appreciate it. It's really good! It's also available on NetGalley if you feel like reading it and spreading THE GOOD WORD.)

I love writing, and I feel confident enough in my ability to pivot that if I have to retreat into anonymity and publish hard-boiled crime fiction under the pseudonym Frank Fisticuffs, I'll figure it out. But even if my career goes exactly the way I want in the next few years, it will always have this cloud overhanging it. When my first novel was published and my first script for television aired, I was actively wondering if I would have to leave the country.

Then I checked my self-centeredness. So much more is at stake in a second Trump term than my career. Whether locally, nationally, or globally, there are endless numbers of people who will have their lives torn apart by his administration. Even if I'm just talking about myself, I'm sure that various aspects of my life as a trans woman will at the very least become more difficult – and that's if I'm not letting myself indulge in complete and utter paranoia.

Then I thought more about this and realized mourning a life I might not get to live is a rational response to the moment. Assuming there are free and fair elections in 2028 and we somehow end up back in the world those last minute Harris rallies were hoping to keep alive (or an even better one), I will still have aged into my late 40s. The work I do in the next four years – no matter how successful – will always carry with it the stress of this very moment.

Already I feel within myself a curtailing of possibility. For instance, I have plenty of ideas without trans protagonists, most of which I would love to write. But, I find myself thinking, which of these are most likely to sell if things get really repressive? Any professional writer asking themselves "will this sell?" is part of the process, but adding "if things get really repressive" adds a whole new wrinkle that induces paranoia by its very nature.

We understand authoritarianism as a system that destroys lives. This is true in a very literal sense. Every authoritarian regime in history has imprisoned and killed innocent people simply for existing or getting in the way. But it's also true in a more subtle, insidious way. Once you spend all your time thinking about what will be least likely to get the spotlight turned onto you, you stop thinking wholly for yourself. You are in a prison that seems like your real life. You might come to confuse the two for each other.

My deepest, most fervent hope – one I think has more than a fair shot of being the case – is that we as a country bumble our way through this mess and come out the other side somehow salvageable. But even in that scenario, there are whole lives all of us won't get to live, simply because we are guarding against the very worst or living in a defensive crouch. It is okay to mourn those lives, even if you don't precisely understand the nature of what you have lost. Those other lives will stalk you like a shadow cast by something you cannot see.

Whatever happens in the next few years, there are trips you will not take. There are jobs you will not pursue. There are babies you might be forced to have, and children you won't be able to raise as diligently as you might want to. There are bad marriages you might stay in and good relationships that will never have a chance to flourish. There are changes you will not make and regrets you will grow bitter in harboring. There are sunny days you will not be able to enjoy and music that won't hit the same way and everyday outings that will be tinged with a sharp sense that something is wrong. No matter how likely you are to be untouched by the worst of the worst, you will still put up walls around yourself. You will be right to do so if you want to survive. If things get really bleak, you will hope, still, but in quiet, in the dark. If things aren't quite that bad, you will still carry your hope silently, lest speaking it cause it to evaporate. You will be marked by this, no matter how long it lasts, and you will never wholly trust whatever world awaits us on the other side. That is a promise and a curse.

But you are alive right now, and these are the days that must happen to you.

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