Devastated But Not Defeated

The Fight Begins Anew

Yesterday was a dark day, one of the darkest I’ve had. I pretty much shut down and couldn’t function. I spent almost the entire day indoors, and short of a few check-in texts with friends, I didn’t interact with anyone except the dog and my husband and the girls. After catching a few stray headlines before I turned my phone notifications off, I went into an information blackout. This included not watching Kamala’s concession speech. I knew it would break me, and my numbed state was a much more preferable one to be in. (Confession: I still haven’t watched Hillary’s concession speech; eight years later, it’s still too painful.)

The hardest part has been trying to help my daughters make some kind of sense of this loss. I’m still not there, and it kills me not to be able to reassure their fears and worries about the future. On a larger scale, how do you explain to the younger generation that their elders have failed them? That a majority of the country doesn’t see women as equal to men, especially considering the man in question is, among other reprehensible things, a serial sexual abuser who has been found liable for sexual assault? I grieve for our children, as they are now tasked with shouldering the burden of righting this and other unspeakable wrongs in this country that they had no part in creating, and it’s not fair. As the day dragged on, I felt my despair and sadness starting to be edged out ever so slightly by anger.

This is not the time for recriminations or finger-pointing about what might have gone wrong; the postmortems and hot-takes will be flying around soon enough. But I will say this. Racism and sexism were baked into the equation even before a black woman ascended to the top of the ticket; we knew this would be a very difficult hurdle to clear. However, one thing I firmly believe is that her loss had everything to do with misogyny, the type that exists outright in men and the type that has been internalized by women. This is an extremely bitter pill to swallow, especially in the face of the erosion of women’s rights since Roe was struck down. I wanted to believe women who might not have voted for a Democratic president before would certainly be motivated to do so on the heels of the Dobbs decision, and especially when the candidate was female. Some certainly did support her, but they were outnumbered by those who couldn’t accept that a woman could the job.

I went to bed last night at a laughably early time, even for me; my mental exhaustion had quickly given way to physical depletion. Even though I slept fitfully, I actually woke up this morning feeling refreshed. I got ready to meet friends for our weekly run along the river, grabbing my sunglasses as I ran out the door because I was sure I’d be crying the entire time. But as I drove to meet them, I had an epiphany of sorts. I am not one to take this kind of injustice lying down, and even though Hillary’s loss leveled me for months, this time I know the path forward for me is to get up and start fighting back immediately. If anything, I’m madder and more determined than I’ve ever been.

A big shout-out to the ever-awesome Liv who sent along the following this morning. It’s a piece of a longer thread written by the incomparable Rebecca Solnit: “They want you to feel powerless and surrender and let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.” The more I thought about this passage today, the more enlivened I felt. I know everyone’s timetable for processing this loss is different, and that some are far from reaching the other side of their despair as of this moment. So while I want to continue to post in this space, I’m going to take a tiny break until the pieces start to come back together and we are all ready to take up the mantle once again. But know I will still be at it. I honestly don’t see another way.

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To explain the below video reference for those who might not know:

1. Mariano Rivera is the legendary Yankees closer, the MVP of the 1999 World Series.

2. His nickname was “The Sandman,” because when he came to the mound, the message to the other team was that he was going to shut the game down for a Yankees win.

3. His walk-on song was Enter Sandman by Metallica, and right before he would leave the dugout, they’d turn all the lights off on the field and blast that song as he jogged out.

Come 2025, I am Mariano Rivera.

Lights out, motherfuckers.