I confess that I’m a little lost these days.

I’ve become a restless, reluctant nomad moving through familiar places with a nagging internal dissonance.

I am a lifelong American who is profoundly disoriented trying to navigate this nation now.

I was born here and have spent most of my life here, and yet for a while now, I’ve begun to feel more and more like a stranger in my homeland.

There are dozens, sometimes hundreds of moments in a given day when I look around, and I simply don’t recognize this place anymore. It all seems terrifyingly foreign.

Waking up every morning and walking out into this version of my country is that bittersweet experience of expectantly visiting the town you grew up in as a child, feeling the rapid deflation as you note the changed landscape and strain to see the familiar places you used to know well and feel at home in.Yes, it’s still a version of the familiar, with quick glimpses here and there to momentarily ground and reconnect you, but so much seems missing and so much feels different that you begin to grieve the alterations that have taken place because of how much appears gone for good. You realize you miss the idea of home rather than the reality of it.

I’ve found myself frantically searching for old familiar landmarks to try and ground myself again: family, neighborhood, community, church, nation—but these have all been renovated to the point of being almost completely obscured by the garish facades in their place; newly fashionable malevolence, bitterness, and cruelty.

See, that’s the thing: it isn’t that the physical landscape has changed. There are so many people I do not recognize anymore; people whose lives I used to call home, people I once found easy affinity with, people who now make me feel newly orphaned.

I’m unsettled and distanced in their presence; estranged from them because of what I’ve discovered about their hearts, what I’ve heard out of their mouths, what I am realizing about our new (or perhaps newly revealed) moral incompatibility.

They are the America that I am most disheartened to bear witness to. They are the greatest source of my lostness. They are why I wander here.

Maybe this was never the place I thought it was. That image is likely just the selective memory or the idealized version of it all as filtered through a younger, more naive, less aware, more optimistic version of myself. Still, the sense of loss is the same, the grief as crushing.

Part of me wants to leave altogether, to go and make a new home somewhere else that might feel more aligned with this iteration of who I am, but that would feel like surrender; it would be admitting a defeat that I am still not yet ready to consent to. I still have dreams of what this place can be: not a mythical land born of ignorant nostalgia but a tangible incarnation of the best of its stated aspirations.

Right now, the best thing I know to do is to keep my eyes open for the other restless, reluctant nomads; to look for those who, too, feel lost here but who are still stumbling through increasingly unfamiliar surroundings, trying to manifest quiet goodness in the middle of the loud, sickening march toward national greatness.I’ll keep seeking out those compassionate, generous, open-hearted sojourners who also no longer feel at home here, and together we will shepherd humanity through these days, and we will be rebuilders.

We will make an America where compassion is our greatest calling.

We’ll make an America where diversity is celebrated.

We’ll make an America where religion isn’t wielded like a weapon.

We’ll make an America where no one goes without.

We’ll make an America that is big enough for everyone who wishes to call it home.

We’ll make an America where no one has to go elsewhere to find refuge or respect.

Fashioning the nation we could be out of the nation we are seems impossible, but I still feel it’s worth trying, because I know I am not alone in my disorientation.

I am surrounded by similarly heartbroken human beings, who are also here in this thick, heavy darkness, passionately stumbling toward the light of what we might still be.

And because of them, though I am an American who is lost in America, I am not yet ready to lose America.Where do you feel that sense of lostness I talk about? What helps you feel connected? What keeps you going? Let me know in the comments.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe

For Americans Who Feel Lost in America