I keep flashing back to 2016, what it was like to live through the last few months of Trump's campaign. From the moment he descended that golden escalator, I knew he could win. He manipulated fear and pain and resentment like no one else.

Everything Trump touched came to resemble him. Even mocking him, we ended up speaking in his flattened language.

So I worried more than my friends, who counted on his defeat.

Even so, I keep thinking about how much easier everything was that ugly fall—not just the obvious: no pandemic, my passport wasn’t a useless packet of paper. I'm talking about something else.

I was in my late 20s, living in a big liberal city. I lived comfortably within the circles I inhabited. I could say everything 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 most private life, relationships, friendships. I’ve also been thinking a lot lately about the 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 that followed the 2016 election. Two examples stand out.

On the morning after the election, one of my colleagues called out sick. If anyone should be upset enough to call out sick when there’s work to do, it shouldn’t be Z, I thought. 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. Of course Z could care as much as anyone about the future and seeing it dashed. Rich or not, white or not, male or not, Z has to live on this planet, too. He gets to care as much as anyone.

When #MeToo broke the next fall, my then-boyfriend posed many of the questions that that have since been caricatured so many times: “How is it that people are supposed to behave so as not to mess up?” He wanted bright lines. I couldn’t define any.

Every time I tried, something in me protested. I thought, 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 who stalked me after I turned him down. The 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 knew what it was like to move from one impossible situation to the next. I didn’t want anyone to live that way.I wanted men to understand the world women lived in.But I wanted us all to live in a better one.

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 couldn’t accept that whether something was true or not depended on who said it.

That the possibilities of understanding and solidarity across difference were so narrow. The idea that fictions can better serve a greater ‘truth’ that’s poorly served by inconvenient facts. That if everyone thinks the right thoughts, problems will melt away.

The idea that because some people are dishonest in one direction it's permissible to be dishonest—here and there, a little, always in service of that greater truth, naturally—in the other direction.

But seesaws and tug-of-rope and counterweights are lousy analogies here. What's a better analogy? Burning books? Devouring libraries? You consume that section, I'll gobble up this one.

I bailed out. But two of my closest friends kept going. And over the last three or four 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. When we met, we were just out of college. 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 and her cadences 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 and 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 three 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? Is that really so?" 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 have dreams Charlotte Beradt would write about—dreams where everyone is accompanied everywhere by a little scroll of paper and a feather quill that scribbles down every single thought that crossed their minds, available for consultation by anyone else at any time.

I value more than ever the privacy of my mind and will guard against any intrusion. 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, refuses the possibility of understanding.

Where my friends are headed, I can't go and don't want to. But I miss that feeling of invincibility I had, going into the unknown four years ago. Trump terrified me. He still does.

But I thought those of us on the liberal-left would band together. I thought that the principles that had drawn us together in the first place would withstand four years of storms. For all my dark imaginings, I had no idea what was coming. I don't know how we get out of it.

[I reworked something I'd posted before, so if this sounds rather familiar, it is!]