A Collective Grief

I don't know how to feel and so I wrote this.

I am on the toilet, feeling ill, when the notification comes through at 5:46 a.m. that Donald Trump has been elected for a second term as president.

The last time this happened, I was 20 years old, in my third year of university, having cast my mail-in ballot in my home state of Colorado for who I thought would be the first woman president. I remember filling it out in a café by my college campus and feeling a little thrill of excitement — she wasn’t my ideal candidate, but it felt like I was participating in an important historic moment.

I remember the particular, new way in which young women seemed to be brimming with hope: on election day, many of my peers wore bright-colored pantsuits, eager to see someone more like themselves reflected back to them as powerful. At midnight, when it became clear what was happening, they wept onto their lapels, their creased trousers. The next morning, the campus was silent, the pantsuits crumpled on the dorm room floors. Our professors cried. They didn’t know what to say to us.  

Eight years later, it’s been difficult to muster that same hope. Despite going to the polls last week at my local YMCA in Brooklyn and getting to once again fill out the bubble for a woman president — one who I genuinely believe would do a good job in the role — I haven’t been able to shake the sinking pit in my stomach. A defense mechanism, you might say: to force yourself to look away from the impending car crash. It’s easier, I admit, not to hope. You can look at your phone, hunched over in the early morning light, walls of the already-tiny bathroom closing in on you, and say, I knew this could happen. Perhaps it will hurt less than last time, which came as such a shock. Still, there is shock. Still: the grief, the rage.

I feel a sense of guilt for my numbness, for my lack of hope, for my seeming inability this time around to buy into the message of joy. But it feels like an impossible project, when the entire system seems more each day like a big farce, cards stacked against the every-day person, entire parties nestled into the pockets of billionaires. The ongoing allowance of blatant genocide. The constant degradation of the Earth. Each day for the past six months, I’ve received ten to twenty dramatic texts from the Democratic Party, quite literally begging me on their knees and choking back sobs for my donation. Upset, I’ve deleted them, not knowing quite what else to do. The whole thing feels so irreparably broken: My $5 can’t stop the hateful propaganda, or the fact that my vote in an already blue state counts for little, or the steady march toward fascism that has gone somehow unchecked or unbalanced by the country’s institutions of power.

This morning, after 5:46 a.m., I allow myself finally to doomscroll. What does this mean? I already know. My partner sleeps seemingly peacefully beside me, and I am struck by a feeling of deep loneliness. He suggested somewhat jokingly last night that we go to New Zealand, where he is from. I experience all at once the overwhelming sensation that this does not feel like an option for me: I love this country — despite, despite, despite. I want better for it. I want safety for those here who are most vulnerable, most disenfranchised. That’s not me. To leave feels like a certain abandonment of the project — the one where we’re supposed to be reaching back behind us, lending hands, uplifting. To leave means that the bullies win.

I have never felt more American than those times when I have left the United States. By happenstance — aligning with required time spent abroad as a French major — I moved to France the day Donald Trump was inaugurated in January of 2017. The French, though they were in the process of their own election featuring racist, right-wing leader Marine le Pen, were fascinated by what had happened here and often asked me about Trump the moment I opened my mouth. I was referred to by the family I lived with mainly as l’Américaine. Right, I remembered, suddenly not swimming in the water of my place of origin. This is a main thing about me.

Our reputation precedes us: the rest of the world, very fairly, loves to hate us. We: the stupid, the lumbering, the naïve. We, who have chosen this path for ourselves — electing, eyes wide open, a fascist dictator through a democratic process. It is hard to believe — and yet, and yet. We have been boiled down, by popular vote, to the worst of our own impulses, the most hateful, the most closed off and fearful. The most violent among us are the most powerful now — the rest of us face the consequences.

It is also when I am away from the country that I realize that I do love it. Despite my many criticisms, my frustrations, my sense of hopelessness: this place is my home. Two years ago, in New Zealand, I listened as a man ranted about how ridiculous the U.S. was — a greedy collection of idiots, in summary. I felt defensive, in the way you do when you hear someone talking shit about your family, even if you yourself have spoken the same points. Hey, that’s my family, I thought. You can’t say that. I was suddenly overcome with the impulse to share something wonderful about the country, to say something of its magic. The list of pros and cons here is a long one, perhaps often off-balance, but — its softness has to count for something, too, right?

In this, I realize that to love something is to hope for it. To see it at its worst and to believe in it at its best. This theme is currently rippling out through every facet of my life to what feels like an almost comical degree — the recent new moon in Scorpio is taking its role of death and rebirth a little bit too seriously, in my honest opinion. How does one decide — in work, in love, in politics — whether to continually commit to the thing that breaks your heart because you believe in what it could be, or whether to cut loose, bail overboard, and save yourself before the ship potentially sinks?

For this particular moment, I have no answer, other than to say now that almost every American person I know is a kind, tender-hearted, generous, thoughtful, intentional being who yearns toward a better, more equitable, more just world. And of course, there is the dark underbelly of everything. The bitter reality of this morning, and all the days to come after it. The gentle among us have our rage and our teeth as well. Our broken hearts, all jagged edges. In one palm, our hope as loving, in the other, our pragmatic hopelessness — and still, we hold on. Weeping openly in the streets. Shaking our heads in front of the college classes. We’re here, part of the beating heart of this place, as much as anyone else is. And we’re not going anywhere.