There is an alarm sounding in my heart, and it tells me we are out of time. The soil in my garden is bone dry again, there isn’t a drop of rain on the horizon, it’s nine degrees over the daily average and this heat wave isn’t due to break for a week. If my roses don’t survive the season, it will hardly be the worst havoc climate change has wrecked, but these backyard signs of stress are what make the abstraction real for me. They signal, every single day, the peril we are in. 

When scientists first sounded the alarm about global warming, back in the 1980s, in the decade of my birth, you had to have faith in their methods, had to trust their calculations and their objectivity, had to exercise your imagination to envision the future they predicted.

But now the evidence is all around us, readily available to our senses, routinely making headlines. Proof they were right all those years ago. Which should persuade us they are likely to be right again. And again. That we would do well to heed their warnings this time. 

And yet. All around me I see people—good-hearted, liberal-minded people who would assure you they believe that climate change is real, that it needs to be addressed—still going about their daily lives as if it weren’t, as if it didn’t. And I understand why. I am one of them. I board the plane to see the pop star perform in a stadium on the other side of the country. I buy the avocados shipped thousands of miles from Mexico. I type these words on a computer whose environmental impact I do not even research. 

Isn’t this insanity? Why don’t we stop? Why don’t we make a change? Why don’t we say, no more?

Much could be said—and much has been written—about the psychology behind our resistance. A whole vocabulary exists to describe it. Loss aversion. System justification. Diffusion of responsibility. Present bias. Despair fatigue. But what I want to point out, what seems relevant here, is a deeper cause, more fundamental: we have built our society on a dangerous myth: on the idea that the Earth and its attendant resources were created for us, that we may use them how we like, that they will never be depleted. 

Never mind that many of us don’t subscribe to the myth; we still live within a web of systems spun from its false claim. Systems that survive now by maintaining their status quo, discouraging free thought, rewarding conformity, conditioning us, from the earliest age, to believe they are inevitable and infallible. That if something seems wrong, the error lies in us. That the way to feel better is to accept their authority. “Keep calm and cary on.” 

For a time, maybe this works. And for a time, in my way, I did try. But there is an alarm sounding in my heart, and I can’t ignore it any more. I can’t pretend I haven’t read the climate reports. Can’t pretend I don’t know this is the last chance we’ll get to save our species from extinction; that, in fact, it might already be too late for that. 

So, I acknowledge the truth. But what comes next? How can I live my life in such a way that it honors this reality? 

I’m a writer, so somehow I must write about it. 

A whole genre of fiction now exists, which imagines the kinds of post-apocalyptic futures toward which we might be headed. Deserts subsuming continents. Heat waves killing millions. Costal cities engulfed by the ocean; skyscrapers turned to islands. Cautionary tales for an age of climate crisis. And they serve as a potent warning. But, like the scientists’ antiseptic talk of degrees of global temperature rise, meters of sea level rise and parts per million of greenhouse gases, these narratives leave me, still, uncertain how I ought to live now, in this liminal time before the worst has come to pass but after we’ve been given fair warning of its approach. 

That’s what this novel, The End of the World, is about. Writing it is my way of grappling with the question. 

It’s a book I’ve been waiting seven years to write. Since then, since the idea came to me, I’ve known every thread of the plot, kept its outline affixed to my bulletin board, done my research, tinkered with a chapter here and there. But the time never felt quite right, to turn my full attention to it. Now it does. Now it feels not only right, but necessary. In fact, it feels like the only thing I can do. And yet. I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it. To sit down every morning and face the famous blank page. 

Why? 

I undertake this project from a place of weakness, not of strength. From inside of my own little crisis. The midlife one, I suppose. Approaching forty, another truth I have to acknowledge is that my life has not gone the way I’d hoped, at least not in certain significant ways. I have not found the love I’ve always longed for, a partner with whom to share this existence, whose presence would counterbalance all woe. And I have not found a place in the world for my writing, haven’t been able to forge a career from my calling. Though I’ve been writing seriously for eighteen years, writing nearly every day for nearly two decades, you wouldn’t know it. I submit, I apply, and I am rejected. It’s been five years since I had a story published. I can count my credits on my two hands. And so I have come to feel very alone, rather invisible, as if the work I do and the love I give have no power, make no difference. What’s wrong with me?, I often wonder. What don’t I understand?

In such a state, I cannot bring myself to write another book the same way I wrote my first. Striving in secret to realize a vision, polishing every sentence until it shines. Trying to build something perfect, something unassailable. For years and years. Devout. Preaching the party line that it’s the work that matters, not what happens after. 

I don’t believe it. I write to communicate. Write in the hope that my words will stir something in the hearts and minds of those who read them. As long as nobody does, I remain unfulfilled. And my work remains unfinished, no matter how many drafts it has seen. 

I have tired to find an audience in the usual way. I apprenticed myself, went to graduate school, read my predecessors and my peers. I attended workshops and an artists’ residency. I spent twelve years writing a collection of twelve stories, revised and revised and revised. Then I sent them to every magazine I admire. I queried agents, submitted the book to small presses. I did, in other words, what I was supposed to. 

I gave my work everything I had to give, and I gave it with all my heart. To no avail.

Now it seems to me like madness, to keep knocking at that same door, so firmly shut for so long. And why, after all, do I want to enter that room? Because that’s where the party is! Where the writers I admire have gone before me, to gather and consider the who-what-when-where-why of existence. To find camaraderie. To be awarded validation. But I’ve been peering through the sidelights at the revelers all these years, and I have to admit I’ve noticed some signs that the party might not be all I imagined. I’ve been reminded that the publishing industry is an industry, after all. Essentially capitalist. Designed to turn a profit. Unconcerned with the wellbeing of the individuals who comprise it. With no particular loyalty to the truth, except where the truth can serve its stakeholders. 

Is that room really such a prized destination? I know it’s not. And yet. I can’t pretend I don’t still, even as I type these words, wish the door would swing in and admit me, saving me from having to go my own way. 

Needless to say, it doesn’t. So I’ve decided to throw my own party. Out here, in the open, where there’s no barrier to entry. And where there isn’t any pretense. Where the only rules are the ones I make for myself. No more striving for perfection. No more asking for permission. This is my plan: to write the book quickly, a chapter a month, leaving no time to second guess my intuition. I’ll publish the chapters as I finish them, as a means of accountability, but also, I hope, an invitation to community. No one else will edit these pages. And, aside from correcting any typos, I won’t alter them once I’ve posted them. 

That’s my intention, the work to which I pledge myself here. This book is the tightrope of purpose I string across the chasm of my despair—a thin line, my lifeline, the golden thread leading me on. I don’t know how well I will walk it, if I will look graceful or foolish as I try to keep my balance, try to fulfill the promise of the idea granted me by inspiration all those years ago. I don’t know if I’ll make it across, or if I’ll fall right off at the first breath of air. If, in other words, I will fail. 

But even if I do, if it doesn’t end well, doesn’t come together like I’ve planned, I hope there will at least be some value in the attempt. That it can serve as an example, however imperfect, of what it looks like to heed your heart’s alarm, to walk away from the old systems that do not serve you, to honor the truth before comfort, to try, even when trying feels futile. To dance out over the abyss. To dream an impossible dream.