What WORDS Are FOR

We have been LIVING in “UNPRECEDENTED TIMES" for 25 years. KAITLYN GREENIDGE reflects on what it means to write through a NEW REALITY.

- KAITLYN GREENIDGE

I remember waking up on the morning of November 8 in the year 2000 and heading to work. I had dropped out of college after my freshman year, moved to Juneau, Alaska, and taken a job at a day-care center. I heard my coworkers whispering to each other during nap time. "Can you believe it?" one said to the other. "I can't believe it." "I know," I said excitedly. "It's crazy, but it's gonna be Gore, right?" The women looked at each other, looked at me, and didn't answer. They walked away to check diapers, and no one spoke about politics around me for the rest of the time I was there.

In hindsight, I probably should have known. The day care played nothing but VeggieTales, and when I would look for books to read to the kids for story time, there were only kids' versions of Bible myths. I had moved to Alaska because I wanted to experience something different. I had arrived on the last ferry of the season with a little less than $800, with no idea where to stay and knowing only one person. I think I was almost daring myself to fail. My life before this had been defined by the knife-edge anxiety of poverty. I had been my high school's valedictorian but wasn't allowed to officially graduate because my mother had to decide between paying a $100 school fee or our electric bill. In the end, the rich woman who funded the family therapy clinic my mom worked for paid the bill. At least in this version of reality, if I failed and no safety net caught me, it would be on my own terms.

Alaska was the first time I had lived around anyone other than Massachusetts liberals. That experience in high school, plus the thousand other ways that even liberals make you feel worthless if you are poor, had made me give the whole blue state the side-eye. So I went as far as I could from it without a passport. Alaska was, though I did not know it then, my first glimpse of the future, of how we would all be forced to live now.