There’s a certain spot where I turn the corner coming out of my neighborhood, heading to my running path, and I get a shot of Tennessee hills in the distance. Every time I see it, I am struck by how beautiful it is. “I’m glad I live here,” I think. I still feel that every time I see it, even with everything that’s happened.

There is a lady who comes into the fitness center that I manage. She always says something about how she hates ‘all of this.’ At first she asked if I hated ‘all of this’ too and I wasn’t quite sure what she was talking about. Does she hate the fact that we had to come back to work when the pandemic was still far from over? Does she hate the restrictions we have to obey to be out and about because of the pandemic? Does she hate the turmoil in the country? Or does she legit hate it all? I honestly still don’t know, we were interrupted when she asked me.

I don’t ‘hate it all’ though.

Do I wish that we didn’t have a pandemic, yes, of course. Dean and I had just moved into a new house. We were finally getting our financial shit together after the fire. I had the upper limit of personal training clients that I could handle at my management job and I had just scored a four class schedule at the coolest gym in Nashville, in addition to three regular classes at residences very close to our new house and a personal training job at Vanderbilt. I was ready to be working my ass off and loving it.

I had cool friends! I had way diverse friends! I had made friends who were older than me and younger than me. I made a friend with a dog who lived a five minute walk from my new house and we were gonna have game nights! I made a friend who lives in East Nash who took me to sweet restaurants and burlesque shows and knew the best take out places! I made a friend who was one of the best hairstylists in Nashville who was also one of the best drag queens ever who invited us to drag shows and was going to cut my hair in exchange for yoga! I made a friend who took us to protests and sweet dive Asian food joints and had deep thoughts who would start watching movies with me but we would end up pausing it and not finishing it because we had so much to say. I made a friend in law school who cares about the environment like me. I had a friend in the theatre here. I had all these friends and more and we were just getting revved up.

Obviously everything is different now. I still don’t hate it.

In April, I wrote two condolence cards on the same day. One to my sister and one to a friend who both had cats in their teens that had died. I remember that I was crying when I wrote them because I lost track of time and I had a FaceTime date scheduled with a friend who called while I was writing and I had to explain why I was crying. I remember saying, “It has to be absolutely horrible to lose your pet during quarantine because they’re such an even bigger part of your joy. I’m so glad that Jake is healthy.” If you’ve been reading for any length of time, you know how that ended.

I still don’t hate everything.

Yes, I hate that Jake is not with me. I miss him every day. But the fact that I was home and not doing my crazy-ass, amazing work schedule that I had worked so hard to create meant that I got to spend more time with him daily. The fact that I wasn’t having to constantly choose to forgo outings with my new fabulous friends and spending quality time with my dying best friend is a blessing.

There are necessary protests happening during a global pandemic. How twisted. And I couldn’t go to the first round because I was on medications that weakened my immune system. Being already an asthmatic, it would have been stupid of me to go. That’s okay, there will be more, because this isn’t a flash in the pan movement. And each action causes an equal and opposite reaction. These actions are definitely the direct result of how the environment and civil rights have been aggressively eroded over the past few years. And the protests are causing disgraceful reactions in response. I have been more infuriated by politics in the past few weeks than ever before in my life.

But I don’t hate everything.

My aunt has been having a difficult time at work. She flipped open this notebook on a hard day to write something, and was surprised by a note my grandma had left there sometime before she died.

Because this needed to happen. These things needed to come to light. I considered myself a pretty progressive person, but I have definitely learned a ton in the last several weeks. And I’m not going to stop. And I’m not an anomaly. I don’t know that this powerful wave could have happened under different circumstances.

My future is a complete uncertainty. Professionally, socially, domestically (no, Dean and I are good, but in terms of pets; Dean’s ready, I’m not) and politically. But, honestly, I think I’m used to it by now. The only thing you can count on is that you can’t count on anything.

I could find ways to hate everything.

But I don’t hate everything.

I think we’re gonna make it work.

Don't you just hate all of this?