This one’s vulnerable for me.

(Some might also wonder while reading: I thought this was about finding a little light?!)

But light comes in all shades, and sometimes it’s the toughest conversations, the hardest personal introspection, that most helps us push back against the shadows that too often use our fear as fodder.

My trans son has always been fairly unflappable. I don’t know where he developed his stillness and relative calm, but he can usually find his way through, even though I know he carries some anguish from being constantly under the microscope when he was younger—the questions, the policing in the bathroom, the sometimes overt cruelty.

To wit: He usually says “I love you mama” every day before he heads out the door for school. One morning, the heat was running and he must not have heard my response. He walked back to my open door to tell me something else and I answered, I know I did, but when he got home from school that day he asked if I’d heard him.

“Yes, I answered you!”

“Oh, I didn’t hear you,” he told me.

I then asked if he thought about checking if I was dead.

“Why would I check if you were dead?!” he gasped, shocked that would even come to mind for me. “You sleep pretty soundly sometimes.”

Me? I would have been sitting at school spiraling into the abyss until by the time the last bell rang I’d have myself convinced my mom was laying dead in our condo, scolding myself for not checking. Or, I would have ditched school early to rush home to make sure she was still alive.

Let’s just say I’m glad my son is not me.

In a recent conversation in the kitchen, I was asking him about this recent Pew research. I was surprised by a few of the results, the biggest one being that a full 69 percent of teens answered they believed gender was determined by sex assigned at birth.

“I thought your generation was going to save the world,” I said plainly.

Perhaps I generalized, knowing my son, but I honestly believed his generation was more progressive, cared far less about the right-leaning traditions that too often and too tightly scripted everything from bodily autonomy to gender roles to the binary.

The stat that surprised me didn’t surprise Ben, though. As was clear from some of the election data that came out days and weeks afterward, his generation, particularly young men, seems to trend more conservative than I think many believe.

His eyes filled—though didn’t spill over—as he told me how he talked to his friends about what for him are unmistakable signs of danger for many vulnerable people, including himself, but most believed he was overreacting.

“Except for P and V,” he said. “Everybody else, if they ever get it, it’s going to be too late.”

“It’s hard sometimes getting young people to feel urgency,” I told him. “They feel invincible in ways, have a hard time understanding that not everything just works out or that time is not infinite.”

It’s hard, I added, to get people to care about things that don’t affect them directly. America is not particularly accomplished at valuing community. “We all need one another to survive,” I said. “There’s just no way around that fact, even when most don’t like to admit it.”

When I’m honest, if I didn’t have a trans kid, I wonder if I’d be as engaged. I’d like to think so, but parenting Ben has forced a reconciliation, as has living in a very diverse neighborhood on the north side of Chicago.

My curiosity helped me be the parent my trans son needed—I did the work of learning and taking myself off autopilot so I could more clearly see how we’d all been duped into believing so many things about so many things, most of which aren’t true or, at the least, much more nuanced and complex.

And that journey also pushed me to lean in more generally. To reexamine most everything, take myself down to the studs and rebuild.

Once you feel what matters in your bones, once you understand the world—all of it—is a continuous act of creation that you have the power to influence, staying neutral or deciding not to act, whatever that means for you, becomes virtually impossible.

“Sometimes,” I told Ben, “it’s hard to make people care.”

I ask myself often when I’m trying to move people to act: How can I get you to care about my trans son?

So, my invitation to you today is this: Sit for a minute and think about what you care about and where you actively engage with the world. Really think about the root of that care. What is the motivation—love? experience? trauma? justice?

Then, think about how you might let that deep, supportive care take hold in other areas.

The world needs you. I need you. My son needs you.

The Light Links

Cultivating empathy

The new comfort movie canon

Lincoln’s Dilemma (on Apple TV)

Book Rec: The Half has Never Been Told