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(Sorry I started drinking the soju so my bad if this rambles and doesn't make sense)
It helps me to pause and ground myself in the present.
When I woke up this morning, it felt like I was on the wrong end of a diverging timeline. There was some other version of reality where things made more sense and I had a clearer picture of where I needed to go. And it was nice to think about that for a while, but then it just made me sad to look around and see where I actually was and what had actually happened. And though I can keep thinking about what might come to pass and get anxious and feel even worse, truth is I ultimately I don't know. I have no way of knowing what's gonna happen, just like I have no way of knowing how the Kamalaverse I imagined would've actually worked either. I can keep thinking and getting anxious about every worst case scenario, and fall further into despair by comparing that to every best-case scenario I imagined, but it's not helping me at all.
Then I thought a lot more about what I should have done differently to have prevented this. Were there any lessons I could learn. And the honest answer is that there wasn't anything more I could have done. Unlike 2016, where I protest voted third party, this time I did what I thought was best, with no regrets. And even though I failed to convince a few people to vote, it wouldn't have made a difference even if I did. We're like raindrops falling into a river. A person can't change a nation, but people can, and enough raindrops working together can erode the riverbank little by little until the river changes its flow. It takes time, but it always happens.
(I'm halfway through my daily ration of grog so I'll ramble along with you)
I've been doing the right thing since 2000. I vote in every primary and general election. I donate to candidates. I did text banking for Bernie. I'm doing what everyone says you should do. Hell, in 2000 I swapped my swing-state Nader vote with someone in a solidly blue state because I knew how much it mattered.
But every election makes me feel like some kind of alien creature. People act more and more irrationally, arguing about more and more inane things. And nearly every time things get worse. I'm trying to be a good little raindrop but the rest of them are going in the opposite direction as hard as they can.
When do I get to stop doing something that feels like beating my head against a wall? It's been two and a half decades of this and every single time I feel like we get further away from what I'm working toward because everyone else is acting crazy. And every time I feel less and less like I'm even a member of the human species. They're all so alien to me.
Shit I typed out a whole thing and my app failed to post it so sorry this is all I got.
Just wanna say I'm sorry and I'm here for you. I don't know what else I can say right now, maybe I'll think of something better tomorrow, but just wanna say that I think you're a beautiful person and hope you continue to be a shining light in a world that's getting darker and darker. Hopefully this is just the darkness before a brighter dawn.
Fucking copied it to clipboard this time so this one better post dammit.
I appreciate the sentiment, friend.
I think it's important to keep your mental health. I try not to dwell on the bad and just know that I did my part along with millions of other people. Even in the reddest state, there are A LOT of rational people.
BTW, I live in a red state so I usually feel like my vote legitimately doesn't matter. But we got the Chief Justice that we wanted (she wrote the minority opinion that an abortion ballot measure should stay on).
It's not mental health per se. I've been in a pretty good mood today, surprisingly. It's more that every election I feel like what I do has less and less impact, because everybody else isn't pulling in the same direction.
And, yeah, the state senator and representative I wanted won, so that's nice. But these tiny victories feel so useless against the weight of a nation determined to destroy itself and the world.
Plus even the rational people don't make sense to me in other perplexing ways. If I just reinserted myself into the ad-filled, algorithm-driven existence they all seem to inhabit I'd feel less like I beamed down from outer space. I'd be able to talk about TV shows and Facebook and other normal people stuff. But I've been there and I didn't like it.