When, how and whether America will ever recover from where we stand now are questions that whisper beneath the fabric of my day-to-day life. Drop off kids, go to my school, study, pick up kids, cook dinner, remember to put the passports in a recognizable spot.
First, let me introduce myself. I am a displaced Canadian in the heart of Florida. That is part of the truth. The other part is that my parents moved from America to Toronto during the Vietnam War. I later moved to New York City after university to pursue a career in the arts, and I lived what I can only describe as a colorful life — singer, songwriter, actress, Lady Gaga impersonator.
It was the Pulse shooting, during our current president’s first campaign, and the death threats I received online for speaking out in support of gun control that convinced me to return to Canada to raise my kids. As a queer, single mom, I no longer felt safe in the changing tides of a more xenophobic America.
But when I felt the urge to change career paths and apply to medical school, I applied far and wide and got charmed into accepting a spot at a brand-new medical school in Winter Garden. So, about a year and a half ago, I drop shipped my family into West Orlando, landing in a familiar kind of chaos — eerily similar to the one my parents tried to escape decades earlier.
I often wonder if and when I’ll need to flee north again.
Living here now, I carry a low-grade vigilance that never quite turns off. I catch myself wondering what line will be crossed next — what moment turns abstract rhetoric into something personal, something aimed at me, at us, at queer people, at Jews, at anyone whose existence or speech doesn’t align with the current political mood.
How quickly rights can erode. How fast neighbors become informants when fear is normalized. I wonder whether I’ll be able to finish my medical degree before the ground shifts detrimentally toward a personalized threat against my family.
As a child, I remember the first time they showed us a film about World War II. In elementary school, we watched black-and-white footage of the gas chambers. I had nightmares for years afterward. That early exposure trained a kind of vigilance in me — an awareness of how quickly ordinary life can slide into something unrecognizable. As I got older, my curiosity deepened, from Anne Frank to “Schindler’s List,” and eventually to books like “1984,” which I find myself referencing more and more over the past year.
Let’s not kid ourselves, though — this is not a recent problem. Oppression of people is as old as the Bible—older, even. It predates nations, borders and political parties. Which raises the uncomfortable question: even if this chapter ends, how do we keep it from happening again?
That’s where I get stuck on the idea of the Great Divide. We talk about it as though it’s a chasm between left and right, blue and red, liberal and conservative. But I don’t think that’s quite true. I think the divide runs through us—through our certainty, our righteousness, our belief that cruelty only belongs to the other side.
When I think about how we mend that divide, I don’t start with policy. I start with a memory.
When I was 12 years old, at a Toronto summer music camp, I was the bully. Her name was Leila. We were writing our crushes in marker on the cabin wall. She wrote a joke about lesbians, and I teased her relentlessly for the entire two weeks, calling her “Leila the lesbian,” humiliating her repeatedly in front of others.
It was only a year later that I began to realize I liked girls myself, and five years after that that I came out.
Then, when we were both 19, something unexpected happened. We ran into each other at Pride. We hugged and exchanged numbers. I remember feeling deeply grateful — not just for her forgiveness, but for the rare opportunity to apologize and be met with grace.
We talk a lot about accountability now, and rightly so. Harm should be named. Systems should be dismantled. But somewhere along the way, we’ve created a punitive moral culture where admitting past wrongdoing is treated as evidence of permanent moral failure rather than as the first step toward growth. The result is that everyone doubles down. No one reflects. And the divide widens.
If we want to cross the Great Divide, we have to destigmatize the confession of the bully — not to excuse harm, but to interrupt its repetition. The bully in all of us cannot be healed if it is never allowed into the light.
Crossing the Great Divide does not mean agreement. It does not mean tolerance of intolerance. It does not mean forgetting history or minimizing harm. It means something harder: refusing the fantasy that we are immune to becoming what we fear.
Maybe the question isn’t when America will recover. Maybe it’s whether we are willing to do the quieter, more uncomfortable work of reckoning — with our own pasts, our own certainties, our own moments of standing on the wrong side of someone else’s vulnerability.
The divide won’t be crossed by shouting louder. It will be crossed, if at all, by those willing to say: “I was wrong once. I learned. I changed.” And by creating a world where that sentence is not a death sentence, but an opening.
Athena Reich is a queer writer and medical student living in Central Florida. She is also a health advocate whose writing and scholarship explore identity, accountability and social repair. She is a single mother of two.
