Seeing America Between the Lines, by Ronald K Henderson

Less than a year into the second reign of the mad American king—a monarch with all the subtlety one might expect from America’s first—it’s easy to forget that his first term was no cake walk. Supposed terrorists in every rescued migrant, children separated from parents on the border, over-told numbers of personnel scandals and the constant turnovers that resulted, the utter weaponization of foreign relations, the camera-captured continuation of systemic racism culminating in George Floyd and the rise of BLM, and, of course, the pandemic…we were in a constant collective state of emergency.

It was a time of destruction, mostly of our idea of normal. But it also was a time of repair, or at least, for many, the recognition of its need. The ubiquity of psychotherapy that took shape during this time is not surprising: a lot of us decided to have a look under the hoods to see if we might be part of the problem.

In 2018, hot on the heels of therapeutic discoveries of my own, I started with a steering wheel and ended with a qwerty keyboard. I saw neither coming: the road trips nor the discoveries they would lead me to.

Some of those discoveries, I found, I could not live with.