Member-only story
The Art of Being Lost
What my wrongful murder conviction showed me about how to get through 2020
This year— with its seemingly never-ending pandemic and economic recession and with the president and his enablers threatening our democracy — isn’t just disorienting and sickening. It’s also deeply familiar.
It’s been five years since I was definitively acquitted for a murder I didn’t commit, and I’m still unsure what my best path forward is. I don’t know if I can ever restore my reputation or achieve anything that will impact my life as much as this external trauma has.
I feel perpetually lost.
This year, the rest of the country has joined me. All at once, so many of us are having to figure out how to make the best of a shitty situation that none of us foresaw. We are an entire nation adrift. We are lost en masse.
Even if we emerge from the Trump presidency intact as a nation, the challenges ahead are rushing at us: rampant vitriol on social media, growing wealth inequality, mass population displacements due to climate change, the looming automation crisis that will eradicate tens of millions of jobs within the next few decades.
We can’t wish for a world where everything makes sense. That world is gone. The best we can do is learn to be productively lost…
