Dear America,

What did I learn this year, you ask? That's a loaded question. Well, I had an awful year, just like you. You remember when the president of the Philippines started talking smack about President Obama, or when diplomatic relations with China got feisty after our president-elect called Taiwan, and Taiwan was PRETTY DAMN SURE that China was their ex, but China was still not ready to let go of the relationship just yet, so they got mad at us for acknowledging that Taiwan exists as a strong, independent country who don't need no China? I messed up too, America. I ignored friends and got tangled up in conflicts I probably shouldn't have jumped into.

We had to deal with a lot of really terrible stuff. David Bowie, Prince, Harper Lee, Alan Rickman, Alan Young, John Glenn, Florence Henderson, and that's only some of the many whom left us. Brexit confounded EVERYONE, we remembered names like Philando Castile, and mourned the lives of everyone shot and killed at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. However you feel about politics, let's be honest, both the Warriors and Sec. Clinton could have and should have conceivably won. It seemed like people went unpunished - Ryan Lochte suffered little consequences for lying, Brock Turner got out nearly scot free after raping a girl, police officers that had contributed to the pandemic of police brutality were acquitted in the Freddie Gray case, and a certain someone with multiple accusations of sexual assault, cyberbullying, refusing to pay workers, using Foundation money for his own personal gain, paying off the Florida attorney general, not paying taxes, lying, swindling people of their money, groping women and watching them in changing rooms, and racial housing discrimination, without naming all of the things he said and simply lied about, well, became the next leader of the free world.

But how did we get here? Last year, I lightweight freaked out about what you were doing to yourself. You were splitting yourself up, dividing yourself into bubbles of disconnectivity, and I worried that you'd only further isolate yourself. And you did that this year. You burrowed yourself in so deep that you were even willing to believe in news that was blatantly false because it fit the narrative of the world you wanted to believe in because you had tied your political worldview so tightly to your identity that it blinded you from the real world, a broken and beautiful world continuing to fracture at the seams. It's like what Wanda, Lisa Kudrow's character on my favorite TV show this year, Bojack Horseman, says: "When you look at the world through rose colored glasses, all of the red flags just look like flags."

You know why I think we turned to easy narratives and straight-up lies? We're still not ready to accept the hard truth - that there are no easy answers. We don't want to believe that President Barack Obama was not the post-racial savior some of us had thought or hoped for, as much as he tried. We don't want to believe that ideological gridlock keeps us from tackling complex solutions to complex problems, and that the government or our leaders or even our own communities and families can't save us from ourselves. We don't want to believe that some of us have it better than others and the American Dream is not equally attainable for everyone, thanks to differences in race, in class, in religion, in ability, in age, in gender, in sexual orientation, and in health. We want to be saved and we don't like how things are right now, so we turned to the charlatan who said how we supposedly felt because he turned our complex problems into "us vs. the world" solutions. THAT we can understand. We needed someone to tell us that yes, we're still the good guys, and we're going to come out on top again, and that we matter. It's like what Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy says in the movie (you should really see), Jackie: "People like to believe in fairytales...I believe that the characters we read about on the page end up being more real than the men who stand beside us."

We fell victim to the myths that our other supposed enemies, the guys out at Wall Street, supposedly believe and invest in every day - that life is a zero-sum game, and that someone else winning means that we are losing. I deeply struggled with that. Does my happiness mean that other people are unhappy? Do we have limits to how much attention and time we have to give, and does that show our priorities of who we value, and does that show us how much we ourselves are valued? I fought for attention instead of backing away from it, and I got bitter and angry and disappointed and cynical at times. I heard your stories, America. I read of how you cry at night because it seems like the opioid addiction will never end and that the jobs at the factory will never return and you're unsure how to provide food for your family. I heard when you told me about how costs went up and earnings went down and now you're not sure how many workers you can afford. I listen to you cry at night at the fact that you are treated less than or not even American because of the color of your skin and how much money you have and what you look like, and that some of you die from these injustices. I turn up with you as we try to dance away our problems, feeling some kind of beat, any kind of beat, instead of the one in our fractured, broken hearts. There are some things I hear from you that I cannot even begin to imagine, and there are some that hit me right in the soul and pierce my being. I know what it's like to feel forgotten, to feel like you have no worth and that nobody cares, and to feel like you are unimportant and unloved. Our president-elect started his campaign vowing to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. Little did we know that we ourselves would build our own walls within ourselves and make ourselves pay for it.

Everything became so personal. Everything became a battleground. Captain America and Iron Man battled it out, and everyone had to take a side (I'm always #TeamCap). Kim Kardashian stuck up for her husband after Taylor Swift lied, and everyone had to say something about that (sipped that tea for days). We held protests and counter-protests. And while some really mattered, like black lives standing up for themselves and Native American tribes protecting their land from an oil pipeline being built on tribal burial grounds, did we really have to fight about Starbucks again? Or get butthurt that a white dude wasn't the star of the new Star Wars movie or get upset that the government isn't as liberal or conservative as we might have wanted it to be? But when we build our identities around ideologies, every potential challenge to our worldview becomes a threat to our very core, not just to simple ideas or a plane of thought.

So instead, we took it out on others. People have conflicting opinions on the role of violence in protest, but there's no doubt that many small businesses had more than their lives to clean up after rioters had their way. Hate speech and hate crimes seemed to keep happening, reminding my people and others like us that there are people in this country who do not want us here, America. Although you say to "give me your tired, your poor," we wearily hope to just make it through the day, some of us just praying to stay alive or have enough to eat. I am poor in spirit, America - your expectations, your ideas of what I am supposed to be, sets up a standard which I cannot meet and yet am hopelessly working to achieve. We threw out respect and social norms out the door and gave up empathy for others dealing with grief and anger as we ourselves felt those emotions. Instead, we lashed out on social media and made fun of the other side to make ourselves feel some tingling of moral superiority, something to make us feel at least a little better about who we are and who we had become. We fought over who had it worse and turned suffering into a pissing contest, discounting other people's experiences to try and uplift our own.

You know what else we did? We took it out on ourselves. For some reason, we thought that if we all could just become self-aware, we'd be okay. We'd let our TV shows be meta, our movies in on the joke, our music play on the sentimentality and nostalgia that old motifs and genres give us...and we'd even bask in our own shortcomings and pitfalls, and maybe that would somehow make things a little bit better. I missed a deadline, missed a coffee date, stopped being there for friends, hurt people, and told myself, "I'm the worst," and hoped that the fact that I knew that, in fact, I was the worst, was enough. We turned to memes as a default form of communication (which are totally legit and amazing and everyone should love memes), and my university channeled our social anxiety and our struggles with mental health and sheer desire for a perfection we would never achieve into the largest Facebook memes group in the country (UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens makes up 90% of my news feed, to keep it 100). But self-deprecation never actually led to solutions, just more acknowledging and laughing at the problem.

I think that's how we got here, America. I didn't know how to deal with how out of whack I was, just as you didn't. And so we both responded violently - we lied to ourselves and then took out our anger on each other and ourselves. We chose to believe fake narratives and lies about ourselves because they were easier to understand, especially when compared to the actual, hard, complex truth. Another thing we have in common: I don't think you want people to be aware of your past and the legacy of marginalizing minority groups and how it affects your present, just like how I am terrified that people getting to know more of me won't like what they find and get up and leave. But you know what I learned this year?

I had just gone through a breakup, and all I could do was stare, to look at the white wall in front of me. I was leaning against the hallway, next to Emily, and I was confused. I could feel anger cascading inside me, ready to fall down like water and out my tongue. She turned to me, eyes shooting into mine, and with intention and sincerity declared, "You deserve better. Say it."

I couldn't say it. Until I could. And now it is my battle cry. It is my battle cry against the fantasies we thought we were fighting against and the fantasies we distract ourselves with from the complex realities that we actually face. And now it is yours.

We deserve better.

Say it.

Conclusion next week - redemption, and why I'm still optimistic for what this country (and me and you) can achieve in 2017.

And if you're interested, here's my retrospective from 2015! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!