Forged In Fire

How These Past Four Years Have Changed Us, and What it Means for the Future

All day yesterday, as I rode an absolute roller coaster of emotions through the inaugural day events that ended one era of American history and began another, I was haunted by an image: that of a sword being forged in fire.

Over the past four years, I’ve talked and written quite a bit about what it’s taken to survive the era of Trump while fighting back against everything he stood for and everything he wrought. Earlier this week, as I reflected on the passage of this window of time, a follower commented that surviving it when so many did not, and bearing witness to so much trauma and so much loss, has changed us all—made us serious, hard, tough, and aware in ways that we could not have anticipated— and that we will carry that with us for the rest of our lives.

We have been forged in fire now, in ways we have yet to fully realize.

The finest swords are created through a process, repeated over and over again, of heating the core metal to incredibly high temperatures, pummeling it into shape, and repeating the process over and over again to refine it. Japanese sword makers in particular heat the core metal with which they work to up to 1500 degrees, folding the molten metal over and over and over again-- up to sixteen times-- to create a sharper and sharper edge and a stronger and stronger internal structure, before finally plunging the finished product into cold water to harden the blade, and then polishing and refining it to a high sheen.

Metalsmiths will tell you that the best swords are those that are strong enough to hold a sharp edge, but flexible enough to bend under stress without breaking. Creating swords with those qualities, however, is a painstaking process that requires heat high enough to fundamentally alter the metal in use at the elemental level. Once complete, it is never the same material again, unable to be returned to its original state.

And so it is with us. The past four plus years has felt often like being continuously thrown into fire, heated to unbearably high temperatures until every aspect of who we were before was burnt away, pummeled and folded into something different with brute force, and then returned to the fire again and again and again. Over and over again, we were forced into fire, asked to tolerate the intolerable, beaten down and marked and altered and harmed and pushed back into the fire again, seemingly to no end.

We will never return to who we were, as people and as a nation, before this moment in our history began.

The process that has brought us to today has changed the elemental nature of who we are.

Yesterday, though, it felt as though we were finally, at long last, being given over to the cooling bath of hope. Through the inaugural balm of of art, music, poetry, joy, that celebration of survival and that acknowledgement of unremediated grief and loss, so much emotion washed over and over these forever altered versions of each of us. It formed a final, forgiving respite from the relentless heat and beating that we took daily over the past four years.

Now, on the other side, we get to look at what we’ve become.

I, for one, am not who I was when I started.

I know now that I can survive profoundly hard things that I could never have previously imagined, and I can teach my children do the same.

I know that my capacity to organize, mobilize and fight back for my own future and the survival of all those I love and care about is far broader than I previously knew.

I have a much deeper understanding of injustice— of white supremacy, of systemic oppression, and all the ways in which they continue to perpetrate harm—than I did at the start, and a concomitant commitment to ending their operation forever, to rooting out their evils wherever they are found and replacing them with justice, equity and freedom, no matter how long it takes.

I have been folded in fire over and over again— through terror and trauma and actual fires that caused us to evacuate our home, through rage at child separation and neo-nazi uprisings and criminal neglect of marginalized communities in the face of COVID, through so much death and transformative loss, both personal to my immediate circles and family, and on a mass scale.

I am not who I am when I started. Neither are you.

And the layers of these experiences have made me stronger— far more serious, far more deeply committed to change, to justice and to fighting back.

I am more powerful now than I was when I started. So are you.

This is good— perhaps a polished, sheened silver lining to what we have lived through.

We are going to need the strength of our sharpest edges as we push forward to make a better nation and world, as well as the flexibility to bend but not break under stress. We are going to need everything we have learned and everything we have become, and then some.

I do not expect the systems that gave rise to Trump to quit easily, but I also understand that with intentionality, and with layers of strength in collective and with the sharpest, most precise skill, we can cut through the oldest and most long-standing systems of oppression with profound speed, end them now, and replace them with something better.

We have profound opportunities before us. We were made for these times and for what is coming next.

We must honor what we have become in surviving these past four years.

And we must understand that if we want to make sure we never live through anything like them again, we must take these honed works of mettle that we’ve become, and wield our newfound strength and the sharpest of honed truths in precise and ferocious ways to force the change we know we need, as fast as possible.

Here’s to being forged in fire. Here’s to recognizing that we are stronger than we knew and capable of great things, sharper at the edges and more flexible under stress. Here’s to our survival.

Here’s to taking all that strength and applying it to every challenge ahead of us, at once and with cutting, singular precision, to create a future where all of us are safe, all of us are equal, all of us have power, and all of us are free.