Holding Onto the Future

What really robbed us wasn’t the pandemic.

I just finished reading a poignant article by Rachel Hislop entitled “Testing My Fertility at the End of My World”. It’s a personal essay with some melancholic teeth, and is the first in a series I’m certain to continue reading.

Hislop explores how women have lost so much over the last few years, and how the imagined life so many women around the world held onto (especially those in developed countries) is fading before their eyes. “I thought I had time,” she writes. “Who doesn’t?”

Cycles and seasons have felt especially present in my life of late. The personal needs and wants we experience as human beings are frequently subsumed by the tectonic crises of our age. How can one think about kids, and a home, and love, when we are inundated by the horrors of war, climate change, unethical AI, and a global inclination toward oligarchic totalitarianism?

“There is no clear way to have this conversation,” writes Hislop, “No elegant script for talking about the unsavory feelings that come up when you have to accept your life is going to look different than you thought it would.” She describes the sense of an inner timeline gone to seed, an envisioned plan for the future that suddenly isn’t going at all the way you thought it would be.