For months I have been playing the game of “What if?” Not “What if I left the burner on, forgot to pay that bill, screwed up the tip?” Not even “What if that’s not a mole, or what if the brakes fail?” But what if he wins?
On Nov 8, He won.
No amount of pre-emptive fretting, phone banking, marching, petitioning, or magical thinking on any one person’s part would have prevented this. Even if I’d stayed up later on election night, or posted one more Facebook status, the outcome would have been the same. It’s not magic; it’s math. Electoral math to boot — antiquated, convoluted but the math that is the law.
I know my anxiety is unhealthy but I
can’t stop feeling like I have been in a plane crash. All I can do is stumble around in the wreckage looking for survivors. I know they’re out there, bruised and bleeding worse than me. One survivor is in his neighborhood bar, being told to go back to his own country although he was born here. Another survivor is smacked with an ethnic slur as he’s helping a man cross the street near Trump Tower, near where he works. One survivor fled Somalia at age 7, and 23 years later is afraid she will be forced to return there because she’s trying to cobble together money for her legal paperwork. The worst that happens to me is that a former student called me a leftist and questioned my Faith on G+. But even though I have no personal threat I know that none of us are going to be OK until all of us are — but won’t someone please tell my body that?
So this is where I’m at, screaming at my heart, lungs, brain, stomach, and skin to calm down. Eating sweets and hiding under the covers until the bad man goes away doesn’t help. What helps me (a little, but better than anything else) is breathing.
It’s so easy to forget to breathe. Not in the autonomic sense — we’d all just be passing out in heaps on the street and behind the wheel if that weren’t the case — but in a deliberate way. Standing up, inhaling deeply through my nose, holding it in, releasing it. It’s such a simple thing, and it’s free of charge, and I have my lungs with me all day, but I forget to do it.
I have to remind myself to stop reading my Twitter feed. I have to remind myself to stand up, breathe, reclaim my body from my mind as best I can. It works — some of the time, but way better than nothing.
There’s so, SO much work ahead and so many people whose need for safety is greater than mine. So much has changed, that it can feel overwhelming. STOP. Breathe. Focus. I can’t do it all, no one can — and that’s OK — but I have to start with something.
I will take a breath. I will pick my battle. I will not consider this election results as normal. It signaled that fear is now the main motivator in my country. The wings of freedom and equality have come off the plane
The plane has crashed. We survivors need to stick together.
The Shadowlander 