The television blares brightly, a dizzying mix of red and blue, a rave of political signifiers. Too many ties and power suits decorate the screen, offering up projections that heighten anxiety rather than subdue it. Elections are moral anxiety-packed puzzles, both celebratory and perhaps damning at other times. I sit with my legs crossed, anxiously playing with the frayed ends of my stretched-out but thoroughly loved CU sweatshirt, the aroma of warm cardboard and pizza a scent I try to fixate on. My friend sits next to me and we both mirror each other in our perpetual ebb and flow of worry-tapping our phones, obsessively escaping into humor when the present moment is anything but comedy, exempt from gravitas. The snow outside blasts, twirling, slamming, and blowing. It’s a tundra tempest, a siren of snow, a warning of winter, a damnation of ice and crystal submerging us within our greatest fears of the current moment. I have been practicing how to stop myself from obsessing about the future, but right now, it’s all I can do to keep myself from predicting the paths not of the present, but of moments further down to come.
I shut the television off, the results already looking bleak confirmed by the early morning AP results. It’s a stark wake-up call, my eyes and mind caffeinated at 5:30 AM. I feel transported in my fear, back to being a child scared of the monster under my bed. I knew then that the monster was a figment of unsubstantiated but creatively curated fear. Yet now, the monster was no figment, nor a hyperbole meditation could fix. The monster that was under the bed was not born out of the meaningless atrocities of the imagination but rather was born out of the grave obscenity of hateful humanity— more terrifying than anything born out of the limits of the limitless. I spent the morning after the election in a contradictory state, both numb and amidst the most painful of sadnesses. It was the state of sadness that made me feel the most vulnerable and aware of the gravity of my tears while I cried. My post-election state was an experience shaped by and inundated by hyperreality. Never had the seeming mundanity of emotions, the taken-for-granted physical acts triggered by emotions, felt painful in the way that the newest of open wounds feels.
Yet, so much of my sadness stemmed from the letdown of the hope and belief I pushed myself to foster, regarding the humanity of the U.S. Believing in the population who chose the wrongs over the right, was a task harder than climbing the tallest of peaks, but one that, nonetheless, I still pushed myself to do. If nothing more came out of election season, at least I could have held a space of belief in all, kindness, and hope, immune from being blemished by conspiracy and cruelty, shielding myself from the inevitable unsubstantiated but lethal attacks of the MAGA alt-right. I wanted to believe that we all held a moral compass and a sense of right and wrong, that perhaps was faulty and needed repair, rather than fostering a belief that nothing guided the decisions we made and the words that we spoke. Yet, the morning after, I felt nothing but despair, that trying to hold a heavy kind of hope had exhausted me for no substantial gain. It was hard to hold onto the concept of the intangible making an imprint for the greater good. All I had wanted was a tangible mark, tangible proof that proved the cynic in me was a dramatic fool. Still, all I got was more evidence to support the cynical half of my heart’s despair and disdain for humanity. I felt shut out, despondent, unable to hold a light for that belief. We cannot see past the ends of our own noses. We choose to believe and follow what is enviable, a trend that will allow us to blend and be desired. Fact and fiction blur the lines, and we create realities that float above the ground of reason. The hardest fact for me to sit with is how we often choose to follow stupidity and harmful distractions, choosing macabre rhetoric, rather than blindly being led to it.
The pain I felt in my heart was even more heavy for the millions of individuals around me who were now on the brink of being under even more attack. I cried for the women, like myself, who were now at risk of losing the right to make our own bodily choices. I cried for the LGBTQIA+ individuals who were abused, harassed, subjected to being called pedophiles and child molesters, and so-called woke or dangerous non-conformers, all for simply holding the hand of their soulmate. I cried for the immigrants who simply wanted to buy a white picket fence home for their little girl and to watch her laugh in the sunshine, graduating with honors from high school, only to be called rapists, murderers, and the poison of this very nation. I cried for the many black mothers who lost their children to the hateful unjustified pull of a policeman’s gun’s trigger. In summation, I cried for the unjustified— I cried for the unsubstantiated hate that so many bought into and so many ended up choosing and hailing. In my heart, and visibly, I wept because I felt that I was living in a moral opposite day, in which my love, that purity of heart, was hateful, and real hate was embraced as if it were love. Still, even more vulnerable, I cried for myself. I sat numb, in a realization that I was going to be starting a life so seemingly far-fetched but oh so real, in which it would be necessary to consider the most severe of precautions and consequences for the most mundane and basic of human rights. I sat, more scared to think about even having sex, for fear of pregnancy. I never have seen motherhood as a role or a route that I have desired. Being a mother is a role that I felt no desire to assume. Yet the fear brought about by these politicians’ characterization of women as mothers, dispelled the possibility of choosing to embrace the very roles and routes I wanted to assume. I felt scared to simply talk to a young man my age, for fear he embraced incel-hood and voted to protect the apparent attack on his masculinity, fearing he embraced Trump. I was in a perpetual state of detailed consideration, in acknowledgement that soon I would assume a life where my identity put reprehensible responsibility on my every move. I felt betrayed by the American people. We had also voted in a rapist, and here I am, a victim of sexual assault, feeling betrayed. Although it was impossible to know the millions of individuals in this country and for them to know me and my story, I felt my victimhood made me a villain, silently and stealthily. I cried because we had voted for someone who was a moral double for my perpetrator, soon to be sitting at the highest office in the country, while I was still trembling whenever I kissed a guy. My heart hurt. I was going to have to live four years with someone guiding, leading, and representing the country with the morality of my perpetrator and I was more angry than anything else. The country had chosen to believe someone who had done the unbelievable, rather than trust in the excruciating trauma that lay engrained in the bodies of women like myself. Instead, we carelessly elevated the violating source of our aeonian lacerations. Amidst the technological glow of a damning statistic and the image of a marmalade monster, there was a flicker, replacing those images with the puissantly triggering black hair and pretentious wire-rimmed glasses of my perpetrator. Now, I truly knew the potential darkness and damnation that hid behind the action of choice. My heart was a mixture of tears and thunderbolts of anger shooting up to the sky. Could I be in this much pain and perhaps harness it enough to do good? I was in too much grief to consider effectiveness.
Thus, with open arms, I embraced grief and opened myself up to not being ok. Although the results of this election are hard to stomach, a result that means a grim, hard, tumultuous, perhaps disastrous future, these results have permitted me to find sustenance and community in not being ok. We are inundated with messages that show us that not being ok is a pity-worthy mess, a wreck, a rock-bottom worthy of intervention and concern. Yet, what happens if we approach not being ok as a source of power? A source that feeds off the tumultuousness of grim agendas and forces and is a reflection, a tool, of our refusal to be complicit in their games? Perhaps to not be okay is to not be okay with all that is wrong and unjust. That isn’t messiness, that’s compassion. When we are not ok within these systems, we are what queer theorist Tina Takemoto calls “succeeding at failure.” We are failing, only in the eyes of the dominant systems. Yet we are succeeding to fail in the eyes of the oppressive of these dominant systems that uphold and perpetuate the problematic. I am proud to say that I am not okay, for being not okay means that I hold enough space to push on and continue to act with empathy, strength, kindness, and awareness. Not being ok means I am rooted strongly in my convictions and will not stray at any costs or threats. Not being ok means that I engage in and enjoy refusal, using it as a tool when all else seems to be disappearing, and when hope seemingly infringes on annihilation. To exist someone who is not ok is to be supremely alive, embodying more strength through an angry manifestation of mess. We are failing to be acceptably neat in the eyes of the institutions and systems that we despise, and that we are, as of now, scared of. It is impossible now not to feel scared and empowered, eerily tranquil and angry, grief-stricken and catatonic, inspired and anxious, existing in states that simultaneously contradict and balance each other. Yet, to permit ourselves to feel the black and the white, to ignore the subtle gray locale of our emotional and energetic sphere, is giving each of us tools to make ourselves larger than life for the fight of our lives. Although I feel a gravity in my heart that hurts, and a hope that has died down, I refuse to believe that there is no hope for this country. I refuse to believe that we are weak enough to be conquered and to let the convictions of centuries and the laws we’ve abided by, be all for naught. I will not let the winners ultimately win, because I will instead choose to believe that there is potential that is festering in this country. I will choose to believe that hate can be overcome because our country is in a state of misguided morality, led by the madness of modernity. I believe in the power of free will, that deep down people will not rest within the unjust, because with that belief comes the unparalleled potential of personal agency. Still, it is crucial to also remember that we are okay because we are all not okay together. Whether it is an overt expression of pain and anxiety, or a fleeting glance across a room, we all see that others around us feel pain so similarly intense that it rivals culpability. Yet, there is a sense of comfort when we are all amidst our own mess, and when we merge that messiness together, to connect and resist.The people have spoken and, despite the pain and the anger festered in the freshest of wounded recesses of our hearts, we must accept the outcome of the democratic process. Yet, that doesn’t mean we have to be complicit. We can keep standing up after the people have spoken, and we will never shut up after the polls have shut down.