On the Hard Work of Healing in the Aftermath of Trump

By Annie Mark-Westfall — LETTERS FROM BERLIN

It is a new year, and my American optimism has me programmed to have high hopes for the next 365 days. That sentence reads easier after Joe Biden’s inauguration. We have finally emerged from the darkness of the Trump administration, stepping gloriously into the light that Amanda Gorman so eloquently reminded us how to see, and to be. Biden’s first act of his presidency-both inherently through his vice president and Cabinet picks, and explicitly, in words — was to denounce white supremacy; something Donald Trump so disturbingly refused to do.

I first drafted this piece right after insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol building at the behest of the President, smearing shit and ransacking Congressional offices. Optimism is harder to summon when the living effigy of white privilege is standing on the Senate dais bedecked in an animal skin, face painted like a county fair farce. And when you read that a judge actually granted this self-proclaimed “shaman” of the Q Conspiracy an organic food diet in jail.

Last autumn, as the second wave of Covid began to surge, a friend emerged after a long period of silence. “I fell into a hole,” she explained. Not a physical hole. A mental hole: existential. A cheesy romantic comedy provoked an evaluation of her own…