When I was around eight years old, my family took a day trip from San Diego to Tijuana, Mexico, to experience the thrill of haggling with poor Mexican shop owners over the price of firecrackers, bull whips, and ponchos — necessities, all, for American boys in the 1980s. The most vivid memory I have of that trip, though, is of a boy around my age selling Chiclets to the American tourists. This was my first encounter with poverty and I did not like it one bit. I immediately wanted to give him all of my money. I remember looking to my dad, asking if we could help, and being told no, and something about how giving him money would actually make things worse, because it would only encourage his parents to keep sending this little mendicant out to the market rather than to school where he needed to be.
I didn't have words for what I felt standing there, but I know now what the question was: What the hell?
I spent years trying to work my dad's answer into some larger whole, and from my vantage point today, I see that moment as the first of many like it. Grandpa casually expressing his conviction that women's suffrage was a mistake. What the hell? My parents telling me of their impending separation. What the hell? Our church essentially abandoning us over my parents' marital problems. What the hell? My dad scoffing at a news report because it relied on radiocarbon dating. What the hell?
A desire to understand is one of the central themes of my life. I don't mean this the way a botanist or a biochemist wants to understand the physical world. I mean I have always wanted to understand the people who make up my small corner of it — individual people, yes, but also the groups they form: family, friends, church. I was given a frame of reference for making sense of all of it, and since my life was happy, and perhaps because of my temperament, I assumed the frame was sound.
But the truth is, it never quite held up. The Chiclets boy never fit. Grandpa's take on women's suffrage never fit. The church that abandoned us never fit. And for most of my life, when something didn't fit, I drew the only conclusion available to a kid who trusted the people who handed him the frame: the problem must be me. Why couldn't I make it work? Why couldn't I just live inside the frame I'd been given, the way everyone around me seemed to?
I was never able to articulate this though. I had to live my way through it. In the early 2010s I embarked on a third years-long attempt at being a good Christian. I read everything I could in the Christian spiritual formation vein, Dallas Willard, Richard Foster and the rest. I earned a master's degree in the subject in 2018. That's how invested I was in finally getting myself to fit.
In 2014 I started traveling internationally for work, and for the first time in my life I was regularly outside the frame looking in. I was in London and Northern Ireland during the Brexit referendum. I talked with Uber drivers who had fled Syria and Iran, ate in a Bangalore food court with colleagues whose futures hung on a visa program my country was debating ending, and felt something I'd never felt abroad before: embarrassment at how America was showing up in the world. The frame I'd been given had categories for all these people. But I wasn't meeting categories. I was meeting people, and they kept not fitting, the same way a boy selling Chiclets hadn't fit thirty years earlier. It is hard to see the frame while you're living inside it. And while I was out there getting my first real look at mine, the people who had built it began, publicly and all at once, to tear it apart.
When Donald Trump was elected, and when my parents, brothers, and I stopped being able to talk politics, and when Colin Kaepernick was exiled, and when George Floyd was murdered and I was told all lives matter, and when people yelled at me for wearing a mask, and when my cousin stopped speaking to me, and when our church imploded and I saw that this church, the one I'd believed was so different, was no different at all, something changed for me. For the first time, the question changed. It wasn't what's wrong with me? anymore.
It was what the hell? — aimed, finally, outward. My framework for understanding the world wasn't something I was failing to live up to. It was in pieces. It had collapsed all around me, and it took me forty years to look up from asking what was wrong with me.