Election Day, 2016
Last night I went to sleep at midnight, already knowing what I’d wake up to. But then I did some 2am doomscrolling to confirm that yes, that thing I hadn’t thought was possible actually…was. Again.
I was laying there in the dark, staring at my phone, when the whole world went even darker, and even silenter. My fan cut out; the clocks went blank; the streetlights blinked off.
Today, the power is out in Malibu and much of the surrounding area. There’s a fire by my kids’ school, and they’ve been evacuated. I’m at a Starbucks because I had to shoot a post-election segment this morning and you need WiFi to do such things, and I still have to make a living.
It does feel like the sky is falling. I can’t cry, though. I cried enough in 2016 to last for years, and what I feel now is exhausted.
I know what I’m supposed to say. Buckle down; now’s not the time to stop fighting; we have a greater responsibility than ever to try to fix our broken system…but I’m so tired. Everyone is. And that’s the greatest danger we face here, I think – the fact that in situations like this one, it is so, so much easier to look the other way. Resistance takes time, and energy, and money. It’s not the simple path forward. And we’ve been doing it for so long. The Lincoln Project; the millions of dollars in donor money; the nationwide protests…of course we need to keep organizing, but a willingness to keep working in the face of overwhelming obstacles and tremendous setbacks is not an especially common quality.
Related: That Time Donald Trump Wrote His Name On My Friend’s Face
Related: An Abridged History of My Body
We’re in the process of a not-so-slow slide towards full autocracy. Anybody who tells you they know what’s going to happen over the course of the next four years is likely either wrong or on TV (hi! aware I’m probably wrong about everything!), but it’s safe to say that the people holding on the guardrails – the free-for-now press, the organizers, the diminished House and Senate – have their work cut out for them.
I’m sorry if you’re hurting. I’m hurting, too. But we can do hard things; we’ve proven that to ourselves. I just wish we didn’t have to do them so often, or with stakes that were quite so high. Lean into your families, lean into your communities, support others whenever and wherever and however you can. For now, that’s what we can do.
Later, there will be more. But for now, we hold each other up.
