About 10 years ago, I was a staunch Republican. This will likely surprise nearly everyone who knows me today. Today, I’m the poster child of liberalism: a college-degreed, free-spirited feminist who has lived all over the country and world.
The root of my political views can be traced back to my family. My mom was a hardcore Republican and remains so to this day, her views hardening over the years into the radical, white-knuckled MAGA-ism that defines the party now.
Growing up, I don’t remember politics ever being discussed directly or pushed on me in any way. Yet, the sound of Rush Limbaugh’s voice on talk radio was the sound of my childhood. Even now, I can hear it in my mind, conjuring images of driving around town in my mom’s derelict mini-van. I also attended a Catholic school for 12 years, so the concept of weaponizing traditional values was already quite familiar to me. Republicanism was in the air and the soil, and I [unfortunately] had no choice about where I was planted.
In high school, I did a lot of driving to escape a tumultuous home life. My boyfriend at the time lived an hour away, so I was always driving to and from his place and always had a lot of free time to think and listen to music in the car. I was an absolute fanatic for bands like Brand New, Blink-182, and Taking Back Sunday, but I also had a really active mind and liked to always be thinking, questioning, and chewing on ideas. Remember, these were pre-podcast and audiobook days, when you were limited to the radio or the CDs you had in your car. Talk radio was the perfect solution when I got tired of listening to music, and the only talk radio station I knew of was the one I had been raised listening to.
I listened to it all, from Rush Limbaugh to Sean Hannity and Mark Levin. I found something deeply comforting about being able to turn on the radio at any hour and hear their voices. Conservative talk radio gave me my first taste of politics, and I fell in love with it. Although I did feel conviction at the time for their political ideas, I see now that my passion was more for the nature of politics itself and how interesting and mentally stimulating I found it—the theories and ideas I could mull over, the arguments for and against, the ways history intersected with reality.
Inevitably, their ideas started to swirl and percolate and form my first opinions on national politics and economics. I started to identify as a Republican, wrote some scathing research papers on illegal immigration, and even joined the College Republicans.
What appealed to me about the GOP at the time (and I emphasize 'at the time' because the Republican Party of 2006-2015 was vastly different from today's MAGA-dominated version) were core principles like individualism, self-reliance, and the belief in hard work and its rewards. I was not a radical. The Tea Party movement, in particular, was sparked by the 2008 financial crisis and pushed back against what was viewed as reckless government spending. Looking back, that is so far from a radical idea that it’s almost laughable.
If asked, I probably would have said my political ideas were locked in stone. But, to my credit, I continued being true to myself, which meant I continued to be open-minded and curious. Eventually, my small-minded political views gave way, crushed under the weight of some truly pivotal and eye-opening experiences in my 20s:
I read an essay that made me see my white privilege for the first time
In my freshman year of college, around 2010, I took a women and gender studies class and was introduced to a slew of topics that, needless to say, had never been discussed at my catholic all-girls high school. One essay completely upended what I thought I knew about racism.
The essay is called White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy Macintosh, and it was a list of invisible privileges granted to white people; things that most people white people are so accustomed to that they stop being able to see these things or recognize them as privileges. (I didn’t know it at the time, but this is actually quite a famous essay—I’ve heard several references to this particular essay over the years about how it similarly awakened other white people to the existence of white privilege and systemic racism). Examples of the invisible white privilege knapsack include:
I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
I can turn on the television or open the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
If a traffic cop pulls me over, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.
And the one that blew my mind the most:
I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color that more or less match my skin.
This list utterly rocked me. It was the first peek behind the curtain of racism that my political party at the time was saying didn’t exist. But here it was, right in front of me, its evidence on every street corner, at every pharmacy, and even in my own psyche. Crack.
I moved to a big city
I went to college in a small city in Ohio, graduated, and then continued living there for a couple of years post-graduation. I was 21, I had a house, a job, and a boyfriend who wanted to marry me. But Chicago kept calling. So, I gave up the proverbial white picket fence in favor of the Windy City in 2015.
As I’ve written about before, one of the first people I met was a guy from Ireland, and through him, I fell in with a crowd of binge-drinking Celtic men (a far preferable fate to being shackled married in an Ohioan cornfield—high five, Kate!).
Jokes aside, they were some of the first people I met who weren’t American, and they opened my eyes to how much bigger the world was than I had previously thought. What’s more, many of them were not there legally, and, in stark contrast to the aforementioned papers I wrote on illegal immigration, I was not particularly bothered by this fact. I loved Chicago, and so did they; of course they wanted to stay by whatever means necessary. How different they were from the illegal immigrants Rush Limbaugh had taught me to fear, the border-crossing criminals with no objective outside of raping, pillaging, and causing general mayhem.
Another awakening experience in Chicago was meeting a pretty high-profile civil rights lawyer. I was an ICU nurse at the time, working nights in a downtown hospital, and for several nights in a row, I took care of an old man who was dying. His son was a lawyer and would come to visit after work. Unfortunately, his dad was more or less comatose at this point, so his son would sit at his Dad’s bedside and make an effort to talk to me and get to know me. It sounds strange to say, but this actually was a remarkable fact because people tended to look through me as a nurse; I was not human to them, I was “the help”, an object to be ordered around and commanded.
Eze told me stories about the deep well of corruption among the Chicago police, and in particular, about a specific family he was representing whose son had recently been shot to death by the police. The police alleged the young Black man was armed and dangerous; however, Eze's team uncovered security footage from a nearby restaurant that contradicted this claim, showing the man cooperating with his hands raised, unarmed, before being shot over 10 times.
Eze spoke with a grim factualness, like a man who didn’t want to believe a reality that had become too plain to ignore. He seemed rattled, like he was sharing in order to spread his burden thin, as if not sharing would be an even greater injustice to a man who had just been murdered.
I couldn’t forget it. But I wasn’t sure yet if I could believe it. I held off from making up my mind, instead, watching the news and waiting to see if this story would ever break.
And it did. It actually did. Six months after our encounter, the news broke that security footage had been found that showed the police shooting and killing that exact unarmed Black man. Eze hadn’t been lying. Crack.
I dated a woman
Since I was a teenager, I knew I was attracted to both men and women. This was just a fact, something that didn’t require a title, proclamation, or close analysis. So, in 2016, when I met and started dating Jen, I felt so normal and comfortable that it almost blinded me to the reality that others might not be as nonchalant or accepting as I was.
When you hear about people coming out, you hear about them being terrified of the reaction of their loved ones. This was not my experience, at least not at first. I wasn’t scared to share the news with my mom, I never had cause to think she would be anything but happy for me.
I told her casually over the phone, and she was quiet, stoic, not excited but not blatantly dismissive either. I didn’t give it much thought, thinking she would get used to it with time. But then I found out from my brother that she was secretly horrified and shocked, and that she was contemplating canceling her trip to come see me in Chicago.
It was such a weird, outsized reaction for something so small. But it kicked off a shame spiral that I couldn’t extricate myself from. Suddenly, I was afraid to tell anyone. If my own mother wasn’t okay with me dating a woman, how could I expect anyone else to be okay with it? I felt safe in the liberal bubble of Chicago, but I was acutely aware of how unsafe and unwelcome we (I) felt outside of the city boundaries.
I never figured out what to do with the shame. It slowly ate away at me and the relationship, which was further degrading due to drugs and alcohol and the fact that I had not even remotely begun to unpack my suitcase of generational bullshit. Jen deserved so much more than my irrational and involuntary shame. I started to see how conservatism and religion had both played a part in promoting and upholding the homophobia that I had never believed in but felt nonetheless. Crack.
I had to have emergency surgery with no health insurance
Republicans vehemently oppose universal healthcare. Prior to the Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) being passed in 2010, I had been hearing a lot about the supposed catastrophic consequences of passing this bill and how doing so would decimate our healthcare system and basically cause the economy to collapse. I was worried. But then the bill passed, and a whole lot of nothing happened aside from some people getting health insurance who sorely needed it. Hm.
In 2019, although I pretty firmly identified as a Democrat, my mind was not completely made up about universal healthcare. The system worked well enough for me, and I didn’t yet have cause to complain. It [selfishly] took me almost losing my life out of fear of the hospital costs to change my mind.
For several years I had been working as a travel nurse, moving around from city to city every few months to live and work. I hated the gig but loved the flexibility—3 months on, unlimited time off. The only caveat was that I didn’t have health insurance when I wasn’t actively working. Generally, I was out of the country, so there was no point in paying for cripplingly expensive insurance in a country I wasn’t living in, but there just so happened to be a month in July when I was in Seattle, unemployed and uninsured.
You can probably guess what happened.
One day, I started having horrible abdominal pain. I had had kidney stones before, and I recognized the symptoms, but I thought if I could wait it out, it would pass on its own, and I could avoid an uninsured expensive ER visit. The pain did get better, but then it got much, much worse. I spent hours hunched over on all fours, crying, panting, wondering how the hell I would get through this while telling myself over and over that I could not go to the hospital.
So I went to bed instead, spending a horrible night tossing and turning, clutching and moaning, never finding relief. When I woke up, I was shaking like a leaf. I checked my temperature, and when I saw I had a fever, I knew then that I had no choice and that it was now life or death. I knew there was only one reason a person would develop a fever after a kidney stone, and it’s when the stone blocks your urinary tract, causing urine to back up in your kidney, thereby causing a life-threatening bloodstream infection.
That is indeed what happened, and I had to have emergency surgery. I cried as they prepped me for the OR, wondering how the fuck I would pay for this. An ER visit was one thing, but a surgery was another, putting me squarely on the line for hundreds of thousands of dollars. After the surgery, I spent the next few days teetering on the edge of the ICU, fighting off the sepsis that was causing my blood pressure to plummet.
Once I was back recovering at home, I received some good news—because I was unemployed and hadn’t made a cent that month, I would be able to retroactively get on Medicaid, and they would pay for everything. If I had earned even a dime that month, I would’ve had to foot the entire bill—roughly $130k.
No one—young, old, employed, unemployed—should have to risk their life not going to the hospital out of fear of the cost. Everyone should have affordable healthcare, full stop. Crack.
What’s interesting (and maybe not surprising) is that none of these things would have happened if I had not 1. gone to college and 2. moved to a big city that then permitted me to live the big, unconventional life I went on to live. If I had stayed in my hometown, if I had gotten married after college like everyone else seemed to be doing, I would have been placed squarely on the comfortable, moving sidewalk that would not have challenged me or led to any uncomfortable (albeit eye-opening) experiences.
Today, my political views are a reflection of the life I’ve lived, marked by risk and discomfort and overlying it all: curiosity. In discomfort I found growth, in risk I found perspective, and in curiosity I found reasons to change my mind. In the end, I've found that it's not about adhering to a particular political party forever, ad nauseum. Instead, it's about continually evolving, learning, and being open to understanding the complex, nuanced world around us.
Fascinating story!