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I always find myself thinking about how people in our position handled this drastic narrowing of our scope of opportunities. I was very influenced by Rod Dreher's Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies, as well as Aaron Renn's The Negative World, which, rather than addressing the racial and gender aspects of this, deal with the anti-Christian nature of the current cultural moment; all of these books, in different ways, basically advise you to focus hyper-locally, to keep your internal locus of control alive, and build what you can in the little domain that you are actually able to influence. So I've done that. I've just been elected to a two-year term on my church's leadership board; I managed to get published in a little local history anthology by a small press; I settled down, bought a house in the Midwest and am trying to start a family.
Still - it's painful that we'll never know what we could have done if we were born into a different reality. I had dreams of being a popular novelist. I probably don't have the ability, but because of the cultural headwinds, I also gave up on that before I tried to reach my maximum potential. You might have been a great professor, or maybe you would not have; but people like us, with even greater ability than us, also got pushed into paths where their potentialities are never realized. I am reminded of Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk, a mid-century novel about a girl who dreams of becoming an actress, and ends up shattered by the experience of continual failure. (And of course by encounters with an infamous cad.) Her outcome: a quiet, happy suburban life, but one in which her initial dreams are forgotten. She makes her peace with that, and I've mostly made my peace with what I couldn't do, and of course I can console myself by saying, "Well, that was just my attempt to be special, and I probably wasn't special anyway in the end." There are failures and mediocrities in every generation, but I would've at least liked to try on a more level playing field. Part of this is just growing up, but obviously part of it is that we were frankly cheated out of a fair shot; and it's only so much compensation to say, "Well, I made a great network engineer."
I thought about this phrase a lot, and in the end, this is yet another poisonous secular idea seeped in the water you drink. In Christianity there is no such a thing like being born as some other person - as other gender, in other time or other place. You were created as a unique soul by God and it is what it is. It reminds me of the conversation penned by Tolkien where Frodo laments:
If you don't like Tolien, then look at the Book of Job. In a strange sense Christians are more grounded in here and now, and secularists are more entangled in strange mysticism. Be it Rawlsian idea of how everybody is an immortal soul flying around the Earth waiting to be materialized, presupposing the moral structure from this mystical tought experiment. Or transhumanists raving about uploading their soul and making themselves immortal, or of course transgender activists who literally claim that their souls were materialized in wrong body. All of that is nonsense.
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Indeed, you get it my friend. I also just took on a leadership position at my local parish, and am volunteering in a broader capacity with my larger church body.
I think that the best we can do is simply bide our time, spread awareness, and grow our social capital, our virtue, while supporting our side of the culture war here and there. Store up treasures in heaven, where moths can't destroy and thieves can't steal.
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