🧵 Thursday Thread: "The conditions for democracy and for art are one and the same. What we call liberty in politics results in freedom in the arts." ~Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1939

I don't remember my first time voting, but I do vividly recall my first memory of voting. How about you? Maybe swapping memories will calm our nerves ...

"Whenever I meet someone who vacillates on whether or not to vote because there isn't a perfect candidate, I tell them the voting booth is the one place on earth where the least powerful and the most powerful are equal. Who would pass that up?"

—Gloria Steinem

In yesterday’s exploration of windows as a narrative engine, one WITDer wrote a surprisingly moving passage from the centuries’ long perspective of the 25 windows in the crown of the Statue of Liberty. The passage wove moments of his personal ancestral history with broad historical markers of triumph and disaster as viewed through those iconic windows.

That sweeping view felt all the more poignant, now, on the eve of an election where enlightenment and liberty are themselves at stake, and over which so many of our stress levels are soaring to surreal levels.

As I am sure is clear, I strongly support Kamala Harris. I support equality and dignity and the right of all people to be safe from hatred and attack based on race or ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, immigration status, sex, or otherwise.

I support women.

I support democracy.

And I support and highly encourage voting.

In fact, it’s hard to think about anything else right now.

So, I figured, maybe let’s swap memories of our first time voting.

Here’s mine.

In November of 1988, I had just starting my second year of college. I would drop out six months later to get married and have a baby. But in 1988, I was living all by myself for the first time ever in a tiny one-bedroom apartment with shiny maple floors and loud, comforting radiators.

The apartment, although in a bad area, was on the third floor of a pretty brownstone building that overlooked a large city park. I loved it there. In that little box up high, I felt safe and free in the world in a way I never had before then. I felt millions of miles from my childhood.

But, of course, I wasn’t. I was twenty years old, just two years out of foster care, and I hadn’t even begun, really, the work of recovering the part of myself that was actually safe and free—not just in the world, but in myself.

So, while I vividly remember canvassing door to door for Walter Mondale in 1984, I have almost no memory of the 1988 election. I imagine I voted. I’m sure I would have. But I don’t remember. This is likely due to how trauma impairs episodic memory long after the traumatic events are over. Just one more way in which trauma steals.

Anyway, I don’t remember the 1988 election, but I do remember 1992. My daughter was two years old, my son was three months old, and our foster daughter, Erin, was sixteen. We were all living in a big, drafty Victorian perched on a bluff overlooking a small lake in a tiny town with one polling location at the city hall down the street.

Sometime that night, after my daughter was in bed and my son was asleep in his bundler on my chest, I stood in the kitchen with my then-husband, my back against the portable dishwasher—which was hooked up to the sink and warmly running—and picked up the phone to hear my sister shouting gleefully from Manhattan: “They’re out of there! They’re out of there!”

I ran to my foster daughter’s bedroom door to tell her, but the room was empty. She had climbed out the window. When she came back the next day, she no longer had braces on her teeth. She had removed them herself with a pliers.

A very memorable evening all around.

How about you?

(And this should go without saying: be respectful, kind, and decent. Anything other will be swiftly deleted.)

Love,

Jeannine

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