Thread by @SethAbramson

I’m starting to think 1/6 is more emotional for me than I realized. At the time, it prompted me to make a number of big life decisions—the most public of which was starting PROOF and dedicating myself to chronicling the insurrection when I thought I’d stop my writing on politics.

That day was a turning point for so many of us. We had felt such joy at the election of a man who promised to bring some dignity and integrity back to our government, and it felt like before we could even settle in it was *scratched* out of our hands by Trump—an actual monster.

It was easy to respond to January 6—as it came in mid-pandemic—with a sudden fear that nothing will ever get better. That sort of hopelessness in the face of a monster is just what Trump wanted. It’s what he *still* wants. He wants submission—he wants the nation to submit to him.

The GOP has spent so much time gaslighting us about what happened a year ago that some of us—no matter how confident in our memories and what we saw—feel continually retraumatized by the fact that we can’t fully express how scary 1/6 was and how much it threatened our way of life

What happened that day is the literal definition of domestic terrorism. I mean the actual dictionary definition. And the reason I consider it the worst such attack in American history—since the Civil War—is not because of loss of life, but because we almost lost our *country*.

On 9/11 we didn’t face the end of America. During Vietnam we didn’t face the end of America. During Watergate we didn’t face the end of America. But if the “Green Bay Sweep” Trump plotted had been executed successfully, you wouldn’t be living in a democracy now. Think about that.

So for something that traumatic to have happened to all of us and then be on Twitter and be daily laughed at and mocked for considering it a trauma...that’s something. Did you know that on the far right they talk about “the coup” all the time? They’re referring to the *election*.

I guess, as someone who’s now written ~200 articles on January 6 and faces threats and abuse almost daily for doing so, my earnest advice to all of us is to admit that January 6th really *hurt*. I'm not trying to be melodramatic—I think we need to all admit that it *really hurt*.

But I think we have to go farther and say the hurt hasn’t stopped—and that many of us fear the hurt won’t stop, and that many of us agree with the prosecutors on TV who say Trump was part of a seditious conspiracy and the historians who say our democracy is in its last two years.

I think we all have a sense that our democracy is actually at the point at which it has to be “saved.” But we don’t know how to do it, or who’s going to do it, or whether it can be done.

Meanwhile, 600,000 of us are getting infected with a dangerous virus daily.

We are hurting.

I appreciated what President Biden had to say today, even as I’m not sure that his anger and resolve is what really meets the moment. I wish there was a politically acceptable, sufficiently leaderlike way for someone important to acknowledge that we are living with an open wound.

Because of course, finally, you don’t *live* with an open wound—you die from it. To say you have an open wound that isn’t closing and is bleeding is to admit that you are bleeding out and ask for help. But we don’t actually know anymore if anyone can help us. That’s pretty scary.

I tried to spend the last year on occasion doing some things just for myself, and on occasion doing things I thought might help others (separate from PROOF). I put a lot into that effort, and much of it didn’t work out. Everything still felt the same. I bet I’m not alone in this.

I think most reading this don’t realize that I used to be a poet. I published many books of poetry, and even won some national awards. And then I did some funding-oriented rankings of graduate creative writing programs to help out struggling young poets and everything fell apart.

Suddenly poetry wasn’t in my life anymore because it wasn’t healthy to have poets or the poetry community in my life. I think that today is the first time I’ve realized—in maybe a decade—how much I miss being a poet and expressing myself in art. Not sure what to do with that now.

What I am trying to say is that in the same way we can hurt as people and not fully understand it ourselves, and not fully have it understood by others, we can be hurt as a country and not know how to come to grips with it or explain it to ourselves or others.

That is 1/6 to me.