I haven’t slept much this past week. You haven’t either.
For those of us old enough to cast our ballot for the first female presidential nominee now eight years ago, the déjà vu is palpable; I can almost choke on the irony. How we all went into that day glassy-eyed and optimistic of a woman breaking the toughest, tallest glass ceiling in the developed world. She didn’t; we cried and fell into dystopianism and a sea of what-ifs.
Last Tuesday felt no different — except it now entirely does.
The blind naivety palpated in 2016 conceded to ugly truths by 2020. We knew what this man was capable of.
How he acted around those close to him was vile. His xenophobia ran rife through his base. Grabbing women by the pussy was, by all accounts, acceptable acts from the sitting leader of the free world.
We marched, held him accountable, and fought tooth and nail for what we knew was good and right in the world. Days of sleep were lost collectively and individually. Our faces aged, pulled by compounding looks of concern, woe, and angst. Some of us fell into mental lows we’d yet experienced; therapeutic discourse catapulted into the zeitgeist.
Amid a global health crisis and wrapped in face masks, we voted him out of the White House. It was a measured return to sanity, albeit under widely alien circumstances and the trauma that trailed those past four years.
We rested — we deserved it. We lowered our shoulders, allowed frivolity back into our lives, and welcomed human decency. We quieted the small voice in the back of our heads that 2016 wasn’t a blip or a fluke, but rather a sliding glass window into American values.
Exactly one week ago today, that pane of transparency didn’t merely glide to one side — it was shattered. By an electoral landslide, no less.
This time (cycle) around, innocence was never ours to hold. It was never ours to lose. It was never ours to win. It was only meant to fuel hope for a fool. No ambiguity, no shadow talk, no cloaks. We knew what we were up against and the consequences of a falter.
That’s why we’re — (me, you, the esteemed bipeds in mine and your lives) — numb. It’s not mourning … yet. That will happen, in time. It’s not apathy, either; that will come after the mourning. This is, however, a realization; this is the reality we feared but rejected. And that otherwise impassive stance is, frankly, our nervous system collapsing under the weight of all the overwhelm.
Sure, it’s a meme-able belief, but the sentiment stands: The human body wasn’t meant to live through this again.
The absence of hope all but snuffed out, replaced with the unavoidable validity of a hostile world.
That’s why it feels so different this time around — yearning has surrendered, no matter how begrudgingly, to reality. And that actuality is one brimming with malice and contempt.
We don’t know if things will be OK or if things will get worse (though they likely will). Denounce anyone’s claims of certainty laid out in an otherwise uncertain world.
This year, I’ve revisited the works of novelist and columnist Cheryl Strayed more than usual, longing for that pocket of contentment, of joy, of solace somewhere inside me. Truthfully, as she wrote in an entry for her “Dear Sugar” column, which helmed in the Rumpus from 2009 to 2012, “acceptance” sits within our humility, inside reflective spaces.
“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose,” she writes. “Sometimes you’ll hold on hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”
Be quiet, be still. Sometimes, we lose, like this time. Sit with that, honor that grief, and mourn the loss. Not doing so only pushes those feelings under the proverbial rug, compounding the chance of this occurring again — a happenstance event that we don’t have to accept yet in the throes of defeat.
Should this comeback arrive thrice, it’ll feel different next time, as wel.
