I sat down to write a Thanksgiving piece for 2025 and immediately knew it was going to be a disaster. There’s no polite way to dress up a holiday that survives on national amnesia, and every sentence I tried to summon curled up and died before it made it two inches out of my brain. I kept trying to land on an opening that felt sincere, something that didn’t feel like I was slapping decorative frosting on a historical grave marker, but nothing worked. The cursor blinked at me like it was getting impatient, like even the machine knew I was stalling because every version of this holiday dissolves into hypocrisy the second you actually look at it.
I tried starting with the mythology, thinking maybe I could ease into the critique by warming the reader up with familiar terrain. But the moment the word “Thanksgiving” hit the page, the truth barrel-rolled out behind it: colonial violence, Indigenous erasure, the whole mess of land stolen and futures destroyed under banners of purity, destiny, and entitlement. Once that door opened, there was no way to pretend I was writing a holiday essay. I was performing an autopsy on the country’s favorite lie, and every cut revealed something still bleeding. Nothing about that fits on a cheerful seasonal plate.
So I pivoted. I tried focusing on gratitude, because gratitude is the holiday’s emotional hostage-taker. But that felt obscene too. Gratitude in 2025 requires ignoring detention centers humming under the radar like a secondary power grid. It requires ignoring the Indigenous communities still fighting for land and rights promised to them in treaties older than the concept of American exceptionalism. It requires ignoring the families going to bed tonight hoping no one gets dragged away before morning. You can’t build a Thanksgiving meditation on top of that. You can barely build a sentence.
I tried anchoring the whole thing in something personal—my own exhaustion, my own attempts to make sense of a holiday that asks us to be warm and reflective while the country is cold and cracking—but even that fell apart. Every metaphor I reached for felt like set dressing for a stage I didn’t believe in. I erased draft after draft, not because the ideas were empty, but because they were too large and too sharp to fit inside something as tidy as a Thanksgiving column. Trying to force them in felt dishonest, like trimming a truth until it’s small enough to swallow without choking.
So this is what’s left: the article about the article I couldn’t write. The outline of an attempt, the collapse that followed, and the realization that maybe the failure itself is the point. Maybe the silence between the drafts was more honest than anything I could have written. Maybe Thanksgiving in 2025 isn’t something that can be packaged or polished. Maybe it’s something that resists being captured at all, because the only way to do it justice would be to tear the whole holiday down to the studs and start over, and nobody wants that kind of honesty with their seasonal comfort food.
Tomorrow I might find the words. Next year I might find the tone. Or maybe I never will. For now, the only truth I can offer is this: I tried to write a Thanksgiving article, and it refused to exist.
This post has been syndicated from Closer to the Edge, where it was published under this address.