Today is Wednesday, November 6th, 2024. It feels like the end of the world.
A lot of us are scared - for ourselves, for others, for the world. A lot of us are sad. A lot of us are in shock. A lot of us are kicking ourselves for our optimism or feeling horribly validated in our pessimism. All of us are angry.
Last night, I stayed up until five in the morning with my best friend, binge-watching Doctor Who and pretending that neither of us was checking the news, until we couldn't keep our eyes open. Today, life went on. I went to work, graduated PT, and ran errands. It was a normal Wednesday. And it's already a blur.
Four more years feels like an incredibly long time. The dread that the damage will last far longer than that underlies almost every conversation I have. It's a recurring nightmare, a déjà vu, a curse.
And.
We are not done.
I got a tattoo last month. Mushrooms, ferns, and a forget-me-not, encircling the words: "You cannot kill me in a way that matters." I wanted to be unkillable, even before this felt real. I want it more now.
Did you know that decay is an extant form of life? When one thing dies, other, smaller things feed off it, and it becomes the fuel for other lives. A bear dies, and the bugs and scavengers take its body apart for food and shelter and keep on living.
Maybe democracy is dead. Certainly, the idealized image we had of it is dead. But we are not. Our communities will continue to survive because of the work each of us puts towards them.
Voting is not and has never been the whole of political action. We can protest. We can put pressure on our representatives. We can educate others. So take the time you need to mourn this vote, and then turn to what we can do next.
Now, we build our communities. We make safe spaces for our own groups, of course, but we also make those spaces safe at the intersections of identities. We build Jew-friendly queer spaces, fat-friendly disability spaces, antiracist trans spaces. We create a network that connects us all and provides support. We are stronger than they are, when we come together.
We take care of ourselves. We can't pour from an empty bucket. We keep ourselves healthy and strong so we can make our communities healthy and strong. We offer grace to ourselves. And we take care of each other and offer grace to each other.
We create. We write. We study. We rebuild. We keep trying to make this world better than it was when we found it.
This is not the end.
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