The Long Cold Shadow
Aging and raging in a changing world
content warning for passing suicidal ideation
It didn’t really snow this winter.
I wanted one good snow. One good snow to stay inside, brew some hot chai, and maybe catch up on four years’ worth of book reading. One good snow day to take it easy, and then go back to work the next day or so. It didn’t happen.
It was 70 degrees in February. I live in Virginia, and although I live in the South, it’s not like I live in Florida or anything. It’s snowed here before. I wanted a hint of cold. But any hint of that familiar winter coldness is evaporating before it ever hits the green ground.
It’s too late to undo the damage humans have caused to, well, everything. Last December marked a decade since my dad left our house, beginning my parents’ separation and eventual divorce. A decade since I learned about how the iceberg theory applies to romantic relationships outside my own. I am almost 32 years old with a functioning uterus and living through the destructive fury of the recent Supreme Court rulings on bodily autonomy, confirming what I predicted on the night of the 2016 election. Years later, I struggle to complete a phrase. A mere word on a blinding white screen. The damage can’t be undone.
Global charts document the damning rise in sea levels decade by decade. The ocean will swallow Miami whole, the climate scientists warn. Satellite maps show the damage mega-hurricanes have done to island shorelines. You can measure the earth’s trauma with countless instruments, swirling its contents into tiny glass vials. You can compile research to prove the world is changing. Whether people will believe you is an entirely different matter. How can you chart the erosion of a person’s being? A society sinking under the pressurized weight of absolute everything-nothing. No independent report exists for what ultimately happens to us.
Can I “individual responsibility” my way into a better future? I dispose of leftover cooking grease down the kitchen sink drain, like an absolute asshole. I am not a scientist. My words cannot be studied under a microscope. I’m an adult writing about a broken marriage.
After my dad left, my college therapist explained that I was experiencing an adjustment disorder. A mild depression, she said. A mild depression, as if she were describing a tropical storm forming thousands of miles in the ocean away from me. The disconnect was real.
I ended a relationship in my early twenties and stayed single for a long time. Six years, to be exact. I recycled my body in weak flirtationships, one-sided attractions, and a bad hookup. I ate little and drank a lot. In my old 2002 stick shift Volkswagen Beetle, I simultaneously ruined and avoided the environment I was living in. I’ll be real here: I wanted to die. For a long time. When a prospective employer once asked me where I saw myself five years from now in their education tech startup company, I had no answer for her. I had no answer because I wanted to die. Yet, here I am: 31, partnered, and a wisp of a future in front of me.
As a child in the 1990s, it was stressed to me in both school and popular culture to do our part to stop climate change. That we had the power to change things not just as a grown-up, but as children. Individual responsibility was the key, as if the world’s atmosphere came down upon a six year old. When the book "50 Simple Things Kids Can Do To Save The Earth" was published in 1990, it listed simple, kid-friendly lessons: Turn off the lights to conserve energy. Reduce, reuse, recycle plastics. Turn off the sink faucet when you’re brushing your teeth. There were schoolwide contests for who could design the best recycling poster. Collect bottle caps and tin cans so your classroom can win a pizza party. All the DARE classes on the dangers of smoking and illegal drugs. Teach your children well, or whatever.
I learned what is wrong and what is right. Pick up trash on the roadside median. Learn about the water cycle. Plant trees. The Industrial Revolution quickened the pace of destruction. Greenwashing is only a coat of paint for companies producing the same toxic garbage. My father has never outright admitted to cheating on my mother. At one point, he told my sibling that they separated due to a “communication issue”. Cheating is wrong. Littering is wrong. Destroying the planet is wrong. I think. The gaslighting is real, and Captain Planet didn’t prepare me for this shit.
One of my favorite tv shows as a kid was Captain Planet and the Planeteers. Captain Planet was a man with blue skin and a green mullet who led 5 teens from all corners of the globe to protect the Earth from pollution, violence, crime, etc. This show, classified as edutainment (a portmanteau of education and entertainment) featured some well-known and celebrity voices starring as either villains or main characters; Jurassic Park’s Jeff Goldblum voiced a villain named Verminous Skumm and Whoopi Goldberg of Ghost and Star Trek: The Next Generation fame lent her voice as the mother goddess Gaia. Just think of an actor from the 1990s and they probably had a cameo voice role in Captain Planet.
I don’t know if the show has aged well or not. Maybe. Probably not. All the episodes mush together in my head because they follow the same plotline. As Big Media scrapes off the vestiges of 90s culture for Millennial and Gen Z consumption, I highly doubt Captain Planet’s friendly tokenization of specific ethnic groups has held up. Most edutainment shows exist in that enjoyably liminal space of cringe and nostalgia. The only real lesson is that no blue-skinned man will save us from the handful of cartoonish billionaires and CEOs bent on destroying the planet for quick profits. Unfortunately, Elon Musk is real (sidenote: if I had to compare him to a cartoon villain, he’s closer to Xanatos from the iconic 90s cartoon Gargoyles, but I digress).
My father mails me holiday cards from his new address with his new wife. He knows I like cats, so he sends me cards with funny cat jokes or pictures. Sometimes, he includes a gift card. A check. He makes more than my mother ever has or will. I regretfully asked my father for money when I couldn't make rent. My credit card balance is a few thousand dollars. I have $25 in savings. At 31, I finally have my first salary job after years of academia and retail underpaying me. My Boomer parents lost their stable jobs in the years following the 2008 recession, but only my dad seems to be doing fine. Let’s be real, both my parents are relatively unscathed from current economical upsets. My generation and the ones after? Haha, oh man. We’re fucked. So very fucked.
I dread the 2024 election. The next decade. The next twenty years. The rest of my life. People on my dad’s side live well into their late 80s and 90s. I’m privileged to think this way. I know something is wrong with the planet. I see my mother and her siblings take care of my 87 year old grandfather. My father is the primary contact and provider for my 85 year old grandmother in an assisted living community. Despite my father’s failures as a parent and former husband, my grandmother seems to be happy. When I eat lunch with her at the nice Chinese restaurant, she asks if I’m “serious” with my boyfriend. She has asked me multiple times if I am getting married.
I don’t doubt that my father’s ongoing motivations are for me to take care of him in some capacity when he ages. His constant efforts to have lunch with me and my sibling. Sending money. When each winter gets colder and the following days fluctuate in temperature, how will I manage his aging? Or my mother, who supported me most in all my creative endeavors, someday living alone in the house she initially bought with my father? I know my choice, but it’s no longer mine to make.
My boyfriend’s parents are in their early 70s. We’ve had serious discussions concerning the reality of the ifs and hows we’re going to manage caring for our parents. His parents, still married, live in Michigan--my parents, divorced, reside in Virginia and North Carolina. It gets cold in Michigan. Too cold for my Southern blood. I’ve thought of moving to North Carolina for better job prospects and to be closer to my grandmother, but that was before I landed my current job in my hometown; I’ve never lived anywhere else.
There’s something to be said about the special brand of millennial anxiety. The future that was promised to us if we went to college, worked hard, if we did Y thing or X task, that we would finally enjoy the fruits of our overworked labor. The burden of responsibility was ingrained in us from our (mostly) Boomer parents and their (mostly) Silent Generation parents before them. Yet we were called lazy and entitled, while forces outside us demanded more and more of us to satisfy their expectations.
And now, like the before and after photos of a Swedish glacier, many of us are faced with an unfamiliar future, set in motion long before we were born. No amount of shopping only at secondhand clothing stores, growing your own food, or switching to reusable food bags will undo the ecological damage done by our oldest family members and their cohort. Sustainability, like the word Anthropocene, doesn’t mean anything to me anymore when my rent keeps going up. So I keep on going to work despite my four existential crises a day. I turn off the lights when I leave the room. My boyfriend and I will try to save money for a house that we will likely never buy outright unless the housing market crashes (again).
I cannot outrun the shadows of change. At least let me live for a while longer.