Journalism has always been a wild profession. The hours can be nutty. The pressures are severe. The competition is stiff, and the money is often nonexistent, as the closure of dozens of newsrooms over the last few years attests. Basically, it’s not for the faint of heart. But I’m not sure anything in modern history has challenged journalism and its limits quite like the 2016 election and the presidency of Donald Trump.

The already rapid-fire news cycle went from 24 hours to some supercharged new controversy, wild statement or possible constitutional crisis about every 24 seconds ― punctuated by COVID-19 and its lockdowns; nationwide protests over police brutality; the war in Ukraine; and the devastating and deadly fiasco that was the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Needless to say, most journalists were tired by the time Joe Biden was sworn in, and a lot of us, including me, have never really recovered. There was no time: to process, to think, to reflect on what we’d collectively gone through. And now it’s 2024, and we have to do this all over again, with our unprocessed grief from the pandemic, the compressed news cycle and the grim reality of how unhinged and toxic our national discourse has become.

To some, it may seem hyperbolic, but to those of us who are both blessed and cursed with information, 2016 and the pandemic offered sobering realizations that no one is actually in charge.

Oh sure, we have a president, a Congress and a judiciary. We have laws, and institutions that enforce them, if sometimes unevenly. But no one is really “in charge.” There’s no single person or entity who can actually stop us from sliding into anarchy. There is no hand at the wheel. America is essentially held together by things like “norms” and social contracts that are only as strong as our belief in them. Trump, an iconoclast, a smasher of norms, has pushed us all to the limits of understanding and reality, as the things we were told as children were “wrong” are apparently fine if they’re done in the name of your team. Lying? No problem. Violence? Encouraged. Cheating? “Everyone does it.” Serving your country or paying taxes? For suckers. Caring about your fellow human beings? Damn them all and let God figure it out. The ends justify the means no matter how ugly and unfortunate, causing the death of what one once thought America was, and the birth of a new, even uglier reality than one could have imagined.

I have post-traumatic stress disorder. My first experience with it came from a long-gone, almost-forgotten romantic relationship that turned sour in my 20s. I would be perfectly fine and happy until that person would reach out to me, triggering a response that was one part screaming and another part paralytic. I didn’t want a return, ever, to the status quo. I wanted my new life without this person. I wanted them to disappear. Their insistence on thinking they had any right to have access to my life led to hospitalizations and my almost quitting journalism by the time I was 30.

My second experience with PTSD came from being a working journalist during the 2016 election; its deadly aftermath of Charlottesville violence and empowered white supremacists; the pandemic; the slow bleed-out of American journalistic institutions; the “racial reckoning” of 2020; and the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6. But unlike with my toxic relationship, I didn’t seek help, because I didn’t see the problem for what it was. I allowed myself to lose interest in things I’d always loved, and found myself shutting out the information I’d consumed since I was about 11 or so, when I started reading the newspaper every day.

I could read the news, but I couldn’t........

© HuffPost