I keep reliving 2016, like the conversations I had four years ago this week with perfect strangers in Paris and Amsterdam about Trump and the US. One question people kept asking was, “Could Americans really go along with that?”

I already suspected the answer was yes.

But I also keep thinking about how everything felt then—not just no pandemic or the fact that my passport wasn’t a useless packet. I'm talking about something deeper: I spoke freely. I've always been a bit of a misfit, but I lived comfortably enough w/in the circles I inhabited.

I was in my late 20s, living in a big city, working at a nonprofit.

What strikes me now is I could say just about anything that came into my mind. Even the very same questions that get me in trouble now were still sayable. Being a person with questions didn’t count against me.

I thought I could imagine life under Trump, but I couldn’t imagine the changes that were coming to my private life and intimate relationships. I’ve also been thinking lately about the few steps I took toward the new groupthink during that time and what made me turn back.

I first saw warning signs in my own thinking in the year after the 2016 election. Two illustrations.

On the morning after the election, one of my colleagues called out sick. I thought, if anyone's going to call out sick when there’s work to do, it shouldn’t be Z.

He’s got a trust fund. He’s white. He’s a man. His body wasn’t on that ballot. But then I realized what I was doing to him—what I hated when it was done to me. Rich or not, white or not, male or not, Z could care as much as anyone about the future and seeing it dashed.

When #MeToo broke the next fall, my then-boyfriend posed many of the questions that that have been caricatured so many times: “What, people shouldn’t flirt anymore? We met at work!” He wanted bright lines. I couldn’t define any.

Every time I tried to define a rule, something in me protested: Ever since you were 13 years old, you’ve never been able to put a foot right. No matter what you do, no matter your intentions, you can’t escape offending and paying for it: slut, prude, tease, bitch.

Every day brought a new story & too many of those stories picked old scabs: the boss who locked me in his office; the man I met at a concert who moved across the country to date him and stalked me for weeks when I said no; men who wouldn’t take no for an answer, so I negotiated.

To hear men like my ex complain about uncertainty and fear of being punished for unwitting transgressions, I thought: See how you like it for a change.

That satisfied some injured part of me, but it wasn’t the right answer.I wanted men to understand the world women lived in.But I wanted us all to live in a better one.I knew what it was like to move from one impossible situation to the next. I didn’t want anyone to live that way.

When it came down to it, I couldn’t live as though things were as simple as many narratives that took shape in that time seemed to become. I bailed out. But my two closest friends kept going. And over the last few years, I’ve watched them change before my eyes.

One, my writing partner of several years, changed down to the very structure of her sentences. For the longest time, we’d sought fresh expression for every idea. Neither of us ever knew what we thought before we sat down to write. Writing was thinking.

When we were stumped, we wrote colorful first drafts to clear our minds. I could have recognized her words anywhere. But her vocabulary contracted & stiffened. Eventually, she wrote only in prefabricated sentences. She stopped asking questions and started lecturing me when I did.

She still writes, though we don’t write together anymore, but her voice went out of what she wrote. She writes the way people write when they don’t think.

My other friend transitioned. Our shared past underwent a brutal revision. What we’d shared in fact we no longer spoke about. My friend’s newly imagined “trans childhood” recast everything. Yet in fact we had been young women together.

We both railed against the way some of our professors and peers took our ideas as little more than bids for sexual attention, efforts to please. We wanted to be taken seriously, as more than our bodies.

And we knew how lucky we were, to have the problems we had. We were passionately concerned about women & girls around the world.

Though we still talk every day, the perimeter of our conversations shrunk. When we first met, as teenagers, our conversations were a revelation to me. So that was what it was like to think out loud with someone else. Now I watch what I say.

I observe my own rules for the sake of my own conscience. I will never lie. I will answer any direct question. But I don’t want to be asked.

Over the last few years, my friend’s non-trans friends have fallen away. Really, they’ve been pruned. I don’t want to leave my friend with no connection to the world we used to live in together, even if my friend never wants to come back.

I try to point out cracks. Several times a week I say some version of, "When did you start labeling everything?" I am always asking, "What do you mean by that?" But sometimes I feel like I'm talking to myself. I never used to feel that way.

Sometimes I think this is just the time we're living in. It's put color in all those history books I read.What I could never quite understand about the past—how history broke into the most private spaces of people’s lives—now I get it.For the first time in my life, I'm living it.

I thought we would always speak freely. But the times we're living in have come between us. I still see myself as part of the left, but I'm a liberal first. I don't want to censor myself or anyone else. I will never not have questions.

I will never support something I don't understand, much less something that refuses to be understood.

(Just as an example, and among much else, what's in the "+" of LGBTQ+? What does it mean to support a "+"?)

Where my friends are headed, I can't go & don't want to. But I miss that feeling of invincibility I had, going into the unknown four years ago. Trump terrified me.But I thought those of us on the left would band together. For all my dark imaginings, I had no idea what was coming.