Right now, we are barreling through a summer marked by great and calamitous shifts in how we understand ourselves as Americans. Most days it feels like we are living in the upside down, or a watery underworld where we can’t exist without assistance, watching the horrors of authoritarianism floating grotesquely by while the GOP cult and its fever dreamers delight in the netting of democratic norms.

Whether this season of cruelty becomes the springboard for a necessary backlash against it, we can only hope.

Please understand when I say “hope”, I am not invoking the energy of platitudes and bypassing that the positive thinkers and reality creators of the New Age hide behind. I mean the kind of hope that is also an action. One that is rooted so deeply in the goodness of people (however deeply buried in some) and in the potential of our humanity, that it is willing to build muscles of resistance. To invest in the basic decency within us that we all can access if we want (and which we intuitively know is our birthright). To unpack our fears. And to declare, finally, that we are in this human project for the long run. We are not giving up on us.

This kind of hope leads us, like our intuition does, to participate in the highest good for the greatest number.

This kind of hope that knows we have two choices in life. We can recoil in fear or we can offer ourselves to be of service.

This kind of hope means we will sometimes be marching, sometimes be involved in mutual aid, and sometimes we will need to pull off to the side of the road to weep.

This kind of hope endures because it is not just mine, or yours, but ours.

There has also been another kind of turbulence in my world this summer, that of an anniversary reaction. This summer marks the 10th anniversary of the loss of my husband and the father of the Junior Gormans. My personal life is entirely different than it was 10 years ago when my husband was dying, yet the echoes of that time are still alive in a way. Suspended in the kind of timelessness that grief embodies.

The best way I can explain what having an anniversary reaction is like is to describe it as a periodic emotional disregulation that comes with a side of mental exhaustion. It comes and goes without any warning or predictability. I trigger into rawness even more easily by stories of suffering and struggle, which there is no shortage of right now. Injustice, tragedy, and cruelty inflames me even more than it usually does. My first reaction to minor things is often irritability and impatience. Being around noises, loud people, or crowds is difficult. Executive functioning is taxing, everything takes at least a little more effort.

Another feature of the anniversary reaction for me is that quite often I feel other people’s grief, specifically that of my kids and my husband’s family’s, but really anybody’s story of loss can leave me feeling like an open wound. As an intuitive empath, it’s simply impossible for me to avoid carrying some of the pain and loss of the other people who are so central to who he was.

So, some days my plans change on a dime. I’ve had to be extra patient with my expectations of myself. This experience is certainly not anything near what we experienced in the last months of my husband’s life, or in the aftermath. It’s different, less sharp, less demanding. But it’s always there, too. Like receiving emotional and spiritual postcards from that time, at all hours, randomly.

But alongside this grief that is calling the shots, I am also receiving lots of intuitive messages of hope, often in the middle of the night, and I am beginning to feel a strength and the tremendous release of healing power from the infinite into this timeline. It really feels like the ultimate Both Things Can Be True experience.

Ten years ago, my children were 11 and 13, and my entire focus was on helping my husband have the most peaceful death he could have, and to protect my children from the catastrophic loss of their father.

The following year would bring the rise of what we now know is the American brand of fascism, with the candidacy of Donald Trump. It would also bring me a breast cancer diagnosis, just as we were emerging from the deepest throws of our sorrow.

If anyone should have given up on any nuance of this life we live, to declare this world and its people unredeemable, you would have understood if it had been me. But I did not, and the person I became out of this time of layered tragedy is a woman I am proud of and whom I respect. I was supported and surrounded by so much love and I will always be grateful for that. I would not wish the fear that I was orphaning my children onto anyone. Once I understood intuitively (before the doctors confirmed it btw) that breast cancer was not going to kill me, and that I was going to be around for a good long while, I lost any remaining tolerance for drama or stinginess. I laugh a lot and cry easily, and I cherish every moment of life even though it is fucking hard to be here sometimes.

And let me tell you something else. You should meet the Junior Gormans. They are living, breathing examples of how to survive the blast of a catastrophic loss and emerge into the best people you will ever have the privilege of knowing.

There is nothing in my life today that exists without the lessons I learned about life’s preciousness in that time ten years ago. The relationship I have with my partner Bill, our good health, the home we share, the joy all five of our grown children bring us, the privilege that we feel it is to have had another chance at being a family. It is all born out of the things life took from us.

Real hope has a very steep price tag, one almost no one would agree to pay in advance. Real hope has a cost. But when I hear the call to “take care of each other” through this dark time, I understand intimately what it means. Not only must we, but we absolutely can bring light back to our world. We can and we will.