My internal struggles of celebrating a country that doesn’t celebrate me
When I was a kid, the Fourth of July was my absolute nightmare. I dreaded it with every fiber of my being and each year my anxiety around it got worse because I was terrified of loud noises. I couldn’t even be around balloons let alone relax outside while erratic and deafening explosions were happening in the air, it was awful. And because I was a weird kid I couldn’t go into the house because then I would be alone and the only thing worse than sky detonations was being alone, so I picked the lesser of two evils and for years I would spend my Independence Day cowering in the hills of West Virginia while my family enjoyed themselves to their heart’s content.
Eventually, my sentiments did begin to shift as I learned more about why we celebrated the holiday. In the fourth grade we spent the entire year on the Revolutionary War and the subsequent years of America’s birth (sans slavery, of course). With this abridged version, I started to fall in love with the story of a Nation that Should Not Have Been. After learning about how much “we” fought for our independence, how much the odds were stacked against “us”, the Fourth of July started to become a beautiful commemoration of our collective history. I started to love watching the fireworks specials…
