I was holding my baby daughter, wrapped in the quiet hysteria of early COVID.

Masks littered the streets. Fear clouded the grocery aisles. Stay-at-home orders echoed through every corner of our lives.

A friend quit surfing—“The virus has learned to surf,” he said.
A neighbor insisted we all get tested, even though we kept our distance: “The virus moves through walls,” she warned.

Strikingly blue skies.

Empty highways.

I remember tears welling in my eyes as I watched Governor Gavin Newsom, confident and measured, lay out California’s response to the exponential surge in cases.

I hadn’t paid him much attention before, but in that moment, I felt a wave of relief. Someone seemed to know what to do. A strong and thoughtful plan was unfolding. We were going to be okay.

Then came the French Laundry—the first of many fractures in the window of truth.

While we were told to avoid all public places, spending hours lined up outside grocery stores, masked in stinking P94s, wiping down each item before it crossed our threshold, Newsom was caught indoors, unmasked, shoulder to shoulder with cronies, smiling. Living his life while the rest of us bore the burden of his proclamations.

It was just one betrayal. But it cracked something already splintering in me—and in many.

Hairline fractures in my trust in institutions erupted into a fissure. On one side: my current reality. On the other, a future self.

Until then, I had invested deeply—personally, professionally, spiritually—in communities and institutions.
A nonprofit where I’d grown on all levels turned, first on one person, then another, then me, when I began to voice my questions about the community’s dogma.
Revelations of abuse rocked the yoga community in which I had practiced and taught for 15 years. Accusations flew. People fled. The sacred unravelled.

To cope, I dissected the pattern.

Yes, these spaces were cultish. Power moved opaquely, often dangerously. But more than that, they had filled an essential hunger in me: to belong.

When my daughter was born, I realized I had to feed that hunger myself. In a path through the wilderness that I cut myself.

We moved to a rural place.
I learned to shoot pistols, rifle, and bow, well.
I began harvesting wild foods.
I ran alone, longer and farther than I’d ever imagined, spending more time off-trail than on.
Blessed with a two-acre forested property in dire need of restoration, I started learning the plants and trees, began building again, and learned and re-learned how to fix many things.

Most importantly, I began learning how to be a father.

I didn’t look back at the communities I once clung to, even when I wonder what it would be like to return.

The world, meanwhile, kept turning. Most of the people I once walked beside carried on as they always had. The confusion I’d felt—the unraveling of trust—seemed, to others, like a momentary storm. Or no storm at all.

Then Trump was re-elected.
Half of my friends were thrilled. The other half believed democracy itself was unraveling.

What struck me most, though, has been watching some of my most progressive friends start preparing for the worst.

One friend’s post hit me hard:

“The time to prepare is now.
Plant bigger gardens. Stock up. Build emergency kits.
And sign up for a gun safety course—for hunting, etc.”

My first thoughts?
Wow. The Left are becoming Preppers.
And: It might be a little too late—and a little too little. One course won’t prepare you for hunting, especially if you’ve spent years fearing guns and fighting against gun rights. This person knows nothing about that world.

But then came a more meaningful insight.

When our trust in the system shatters, our vulnerability surfaces. We become exposed.
We defend. We protect. We fight. We prepare with a vague anticipation of really bad times ahead. All of these reactions have been before the terrible outcomes we anticipate have happened.

So what is it, really?

I am understanding that these reactions, in myself and others, are lies we tell ourselves to avoid feeling the angst of our vulnerability. And to avoid feeling that vulnerability, we turn on each other, because the system, and the grief simmering beneath our anger, feels too big, too distant, too immovable to fight any other way.

In a course on Trauma, the professor, Donald Kalsched, used William Blake’s painting to illustrate the internal battle we all face. A child caught between opposing angels—dark and light.

Kalsched suggested the painting reflects our inner war: the parts of ourselves we accept and the parts we disown. Our personality. Our shadow. And all of it tethered to our physical, mental, and emotional mortality; the innocent child.

This battle never ends, and shouldn't.
Unable to reconcile it fully, and not understand the righteousness of the struggle itself, we project it outward, onto others, and onto society.

In his later work, Kalsched spoke of the need for a “democratization” of the psyche. True healing, he proposed, comes when we embrace not just our light and shadow, but also our essential fragility. That trinity forms the foundation of any real, inclusive, diverse, and resilient system, internal and external.

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Trump represents hope for millions—and dread for millions more. The same is true for Biden and Harris, only in reverse.

Depending on which “side” we trust, we feel either empowered or disenfranchised. One election cycle is enough to swing our collective sense of the future from hopeful to apocalyptic, and back again.

What this reveals is the deep fragility of our trust in systems, and how easily that trust can rupture, splintering friendships, families, and communities under the illusion that salvation or ruin lies on one side alone.

Despite the stories we tell of a glorious past, or the faith we place in leaders who promise to mend what’s broken, the truth remains that systems exist to preserve themselves. And the people in charge—however well-intentioned—are inevitably shaped by self-interest.

Even Jesus, the most subversive and transformative figure in Western history, recognized this:

“Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there.
He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves.
‘It is written,’ he said to them, ‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it a den of robbers.’” —Matthew 21:12–13

And now, some of the most powerful institutions in the world—churches, governments, and corporations—operate under the guise of preserving that very message of revolution. Yet many, if not all, profit from our misplaced trust, our collective hope, and even our outrage.

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Because it’s easier to blame than accept responsibility, we often excuse ourselves from the ways we are implicated in the mess. Idealization offers the comfortable illusion of a righteous side and shields us, if only briefly, from the fragile discomfort of not knowing.

But in doing so, we miss something essential.

We miss the unglamorous, unending, and often disorienting power of learning to love our vulnerability, our innocent child, and the fragile, imperfect world we are creating together, whether we take responsibility for it, or not.