I always reiterate that our stories unite us and make us feel less alone. But the truth is the day after the 2016 election, I had never felt so viscerally connected to every other being on this planet. I can’t really explain it, except that I felt we were all in imminent danger, none more so than our children and the environment, and as if the pain I was feeling was not just mine, but the weight of what all of us were facing, together. One year later, I asked for some stories about the day after.
Kathy Crutcher, Shout Mouse Press:
The morning after the election, the team from Shout Mouse Press and I went to Ballou High School in SE DC. These students are teenagers, all of color, living in high-poverty communities shaped by the often traumatic effects of systemic racism. They know about demoralization. They know–too much–about being let down by people they thought would do the right thing. Their reactions that morning ranged from grief to numbness to whatever defense mechanism they had learned how to employ: humor, anger, disengagement, distraction. They knew far better than I how to face this affront, the depths of which I have the privilege of not having experienced. I was humbled by their example.
That morning in class, after their teacher opened space for them to share feelings and vent, the vast majority of them got back to the business they knew well: of denying the haters. Of keeping their eyes on the prize. Of blocking the pain and doing what they needed to do. In class that day they were applying to colleges, and revising their statements about why they were determined to take that next step. Here is one example. This is what DaeDae wrote, less than 12 hours after a man who campaigned on bigotry and hate was elected to lead her country:
“I want to be the voice that speaks for many people and be heard. I feel that everyone should be heard, because when they’re not, they may do something they will regret. I want to help people with their emotions through my experience or through my words… We are the next generation, and we’re going to change the world.”
I am grateful for the educators, like Shajena Erazo Cartagena at Ballou, who are supporting our children, especially those most vulnerable, through stressful and scary times.
And I am even more grateful for the students, like DaeDae, like so many young people out there, who are leading the way, right past indifference and disbelief and despair, vision narrowed and shoulders back, to the world that they deserve.
I’m ready to follow that lead.
B
I dragged my pregnant ass to work. Walked straight into my boss’s office. She’s one of the baddassest women I know. I started nervous laughing and said, “What are we going to do?” She looked me straight in the eyes. She was crying. She said, “This is bad. This is really, really bad.”
Michael
We were planning on going to Disney and of course there was never a good time to go. It was a couple of weeks before the election where we were kind of like… if this election goes the wrong way, I don’t want to deal with reality at all… let’s get the hell out of here!! So we went. We landed late in the day on election day, ignored everything, went to the pool and got the kids to bed. Turned on CNN at like 11pm and watched until that asshole sauntered out to the podium to claim his victory. We went to bed and then ignored the real world for the next 5 days. Listening to “it’s a Small World” over and over was much less painful than watching Trump fans crow about their victory. Still makes me nauseous. My wife is still angry with the world about Trump getting elected (her family is Muslim).
Donna
I went into work feeling very vulnerable and sad, not quite sure what to expect. There was an eerie quietness among my teammates. Very similar to what the mood was after a tragedy such as 9-11 or Sandy Hook. No one really acknowledged what happened I’m guessing we were still shell shocked. The only time I ever really acknowledged that day at work was when I went to the restroom and saw a woman sobbing. I knew the impact it had on her and what is could mean down the road . I went and gave her a hug and said I’m sorry – again very much like mourning. There were teammates pleased with the outcome but again they were equally as shocked and weren’t quite sure what to say if anything so they thankfully did not.
TDG
I’m not known for showing my feelings outwardly in person. I don’t often cry in public or raise my voice in anger. I wouldn’t jump up and down if I won a free, 450 sq. ft. tiny house or collapse to the floor if I found out my car was stolen. On the inside, though, there’s a constant, endless, flurry of processing my thoughts, feelings, and emotions.
Traumatic events usually take the longest to process. They send me into the darkest, quietest places in my mind where I attempt to make sense of the universe’s plan when it doesn’t align with the vision I had.
Once I feel confident that I’ve processed something, I need to express it visually, through photos or written word. Some are quick and easy to share through social media. Some take a little more time and aren’t shared until I can compose them into a digestible blog post. Some things aren’t shared until months or even years later.
I typically post on social media at least once, if not multiple times, a day and I rarely post a photo without a caption. I went back through my digital life to see what I did on November 9thand didn’t find anything until two days later. I was processing.
My November 11th post was a caption-less picture of a pile of safety pins. After the election, the safety pin represented a way to show support to the countless groups across the world who feared the implications of his election.
The truth is that I haven’t felt safe since that day and every day I have to process how to navigate that. I haven’t posted much about politics since the election. I’m still processing. Maybe one day I’ll be able to share what’s taking place in my head. Maybe one day it’ll feel safe enough to do so.
John
I took the morning to walk to a coffee shop near my house to get my work done. The sky was gray, of course. I “worked” at the shop for a little while, but I mostly watched people coming and going and tried to smile—encouragingly and understandingly—at anyone whose eye I caught. Eventually, looking for some way to connect, I made a few signs on notebook paper and set them up like tents around my computer. I don’t have them anymore, but they said things like, “I’m angry too; now what?” and “Day 1: Facebook the shit out of this. Day 2: Fight back.” Stuff like that. I asked the baristas if we could push all the tables to the sides of the shop and just have a huge and cathartic dance party, but they shook their heads. The rest of the day is an exhausted blur—but I know I’ll never forget that disoriented, devastated morning at Albina Press.
G
Took a deep breath , smiled, prayed for my country and its leaders, and was excited that America would be great again.
AMP
My fridge was stocked with champagne. I had exuberantly purchased 8 bottles of bubbly. How smug. Because it was Scotch I was drinking at 1 am, 2 am, and 3am.
Champagne is for celebrating. Scotch is for funerals.
The next morning I was forced out of bed by my alarm clock. As the creative director at an agency, I needed to straighten up, get to work, and face my team. I looked in the mirror and thought, “Just touch on the topic this morning and move on with the day. Get in and out.”
Hopping on the train, the el was SILENT. I had never witnessed a quieter commute. And I wasn’t alone with the water works. Many women on the train were visibly crying and everyone was distressed. The whole city of Chicago was overcome with an undeniable pallor. Was the city itself grieving?
Just the day before I had bound out of bed like a kid on Christmas morning, feeling excitement, anticipation, and overwhelming joy. I picked out my election outfit the night before (no, it was not a pant suit—but it was new) and as I stood in line at the polling place, I thought about how my life felt different, and how my life would never feel the same again. I felt an overwhelming desire to achieve more, push harder, be better. Anything was possible.
As I walked through the doors of the agency and saw my team, and fell into a TOTAL heap of a mess. So much for staying strong. Put a gun to my head—I could not have stopped crying that morning. We all clamored around an iMac to watch Her concession speech live. The writer on my team handed me his hanky. When Hillary said, “And to all the little girls watching….” I was literally hyperventilating crying. At work. Oh my god I was draped in despair. Grief, I realized, cannot be controlled or minimized. I really was grief stricken.
Noon came and we went to lunch as a team. It was bloody marys all around and some bites of food. We’d talk for a little bit, then just huddle in silence, not exactly aware of each other’s presence. It felt very much like a post-funeral brunch. Something had died, unexpectedly, and we were hit with the force of it. Two women behind us laughed at something. I thought, “What the FUCK is funny.” We made our way back to work, and upon entering I locked eyes with our CEO. And just like a death, and upon seeing each other for the first time, we wept again.
Later that evening, my friend, Lauren, came over for dinner. She had been at my house the night before, for what will go down as the worst party I’ve ever thrown. At one point, 4 of us locked ourselves in my bathroom and cried in silence. She hadn’t eaten all day. I drank Scotch for dinner. We thought, “Let’s watch something light tonight—try and get away from all of the news…and our inner thoughts.” We chose (the animated) Beauty and the Beast. Horrifyingly, and quickly, we remembered that the whole plot was about how the woman was initially confronted with a chauvinist, deplorable man, lands herself in a dungeon and when released, implored not to visit the West Wing.
Six months later, I gave the champagne away. The scotch was gone that Friday night.
C
It was a rainy, dreary, soul-torn day. I ended up reading James Baldwin, as I had done a lot that fall. This is the quote that I turned to and subsequently posted on FB: “The will of the people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an ignorance not merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly cultivated: the better to be used by a carnivorous economy which democratically slaughters and victimizes whites and Blacks alike.” The next day, of course, Leonard Cohen died. and this photo summed all of 2016 up:
Sarah
I woke up kind of not sure if it was a dream, and then I read everything like a maniac. I got a text from my supervisor at 5:45 am saying she had been up all night puking and shaking and might not come in…then I got a text from her saying she was coming in. At work we were kind of dazed. I work in a medical center and the bulk of the nursing staff is Hispanic (Mexican first or second generation immigrants): there was so much feeling of dread and fear. We work at a federally funded sight for medical care for historically under-served communities (in this case rural communities and also agricultural workers)- one gentleman came to see his doctor- white, middle aged, poor hygiene, not great health- he was wearing a “make America great” hat and loudly told the medical assistant (Mexican) that trump was “getting rid of your trash ass”. He seemed pretty jubilant. I couldn’t eat anything that day and spent the day between patients texting my mom and my brother and my friends, looking up local activist organizations, just doing anything I could to give myself a sense that there was hopefulness and action I could take. I also started thinking a lot about why this happened, what we needed to learn from this event, and thought a lot about white male fragility (per my journal from that night).
Alissa
I went to bed that night thinking I would get up in the morning and welcome in the first female president…
With all the anticipation, coupled with the fact that I’m usually a light sleeper, I woke up at 3am and checked my phone.
I had multiple cryptic texts that alluded I needed to check what was going on.
I remember putting on 2 laptops from 3am to 7:40 am when I need to leave for the train (a combo of fox news and cnn, msnbc, bbc).
I cried on my walk to the train. When I got on the train, I sat with my French, Iranian friends. They couldn’t believe it.
There was one more American who had recently started at my company. When the train arrived at work, he asked what was wrong with me and I just glared at him. He said “things have happened before, I’m sure the stock market will be okay.” From that day forward, we all assumed he was a trump supporter and don’t hang out with him anymore.
I started drinking every night when I got home. A trait that is so unlike me. I couldn’t handle it. I became obsessed with it. I was cornered every spare second by colleagues who wanted to know how I felt. It was such a surreal, sad, hopeless feeling.
I marched in the Frankfurt Women’s March following the election. But I felt hopeless. I felt so far away and so useless.
It has been both necessary and unfortunate to have had a barrier from US politics. On one hand, I have become obsessed. Drinking or checking politics at all hours. On the other, there are days where I have such enriching conversations from international friends about their countries or what they think of Trump, and I know I am getting a perspective so few in the US have gotten.
Karen
I was hungover. The celebration wine of election night had turned into desolation wine as things took that dark turn. I worked from my remote office, and got very upset about a literary reading passage that referenced the forcible deportations of refugees by the Ugandan government around 2007. I railed against it as a selection for our reading test, thinking of all the kids who were so scared that they or their family members would be forcibly removed from the United States, from the only home they’d ever known. I messaged my friend Jayne—who had already booked a train ticket from New York and was planning to come with her friend to attend Hillary Clinton’s historic inauguration—and told her not to come. I am leaving town that day, I said. (Later, I began to hear rumblings of a march that weekend…the Women’s March…and we all shifted to Plan B.) I went out to dinner with my friend at an Italian restaurant down the street. (I can’t just sit home watching cable TV, she said.) It was such a gloomy night; the city was in mourning. It was hard to believe that just yesterday I had skipped (well, maybe not literally, but I was skipping in my heart) on a perfect day with the bluest sky to cast my vote for Hillary Clinton.
Andrea
I thought: I will smile and laugh with them, even when I’m feeling the fear and anxiety taking over my entire body like it does now. I will read to them about courageous women, both historical and fictional. I will encourage them in whatever they try and to try again when they fail. I will be tough on them, and I will reward them when they earn it. I will urge them to be creative in their play, work, and conflict resolution. I will model and praise inclusive behaviors and words. I will teach them to stand up for themselves and others when injustice presents itself. I will cry when I need to because of the minds and hearts of some of those that surround us, and when they ask me why I’m crying, my one and only answer will be “because I love you so much” (truth). I will drink wine. I will stay informed and watch the news again someday when I am strong enough to do so, but never in front of them. I will excuse us from conversations, parties, and homes as necessary when hateful words or people are discussed, and, if I’m feeling extra strong, I may even be able to do it politely. Above all, I will work every day to teach them to live The Golden Rule as my parents taught me.
I’m not saying that this will be anything much different than what I would have done before this week. I am just much more hyper-aware of it, and it is now so much more of a necessity to pledge to them rather than something I take for granted as normal.
Ultimately, my honor and pleasure is being their Momma – and now, for the next bit at least, I have an insanely important duty on top of that: their Insulator in Chief.
Lauren
I am a school social worker. On Monday November 7 I planned out my week, and I planned to spend all day Wednesday, November 9 at the DAEP (Disciplinary Alternative Education Program) with my students who were currently placed there. That day, I spent 8 hours helping kids (students from my schools and the surrounding county schools) process what happened in our country the night before. I was asked over and over (by elementary and middle school students) “how did this happen?” and “what does this mean for me/my mom/my dad/my friend/the world?” The conversations I had with parents that day were tense and fearful.
That day I woke up feeling like I was hit by a train, crushed, and I ended my day sad and totally pissed. My students were scared. Their parents were sad, angry and scared. I always tell my students that when someone does something to hurt, scare, or provoke you, it’s okay to feel sad, scared and angry. I also help them find ways to acknowledge those feelings and cope with them. To learn ways to calm down, be kind to themselves and others.
We continue to talk about positive coping skills and think about ways to channel negative feelings into positive actions. I have a student working on a school wide project to promote kindness in one of the middle schools. She says that it’s hard for people to feel and see kindness in the world today and she wants to bring it to her peers. Kids are so awesome and resilient. It’s things like this that help keep me feeling energized and fighting for my students and their families (and everyone else).
Candice
I was in Virginia, just outside DC. I had spent November 8th in the Capitol with my sister, who had just moved down to the area, and my husband, brother in law, my sister’s two sons and my two daughters. We wandered around DC and I talked to Amelia about what an amazing day it was because we were electing our first woman president.
I woke up exhausted from being up so late watching the news. I honestly didn’t know what to do with myself. Was still on vacation visiting my sister but she and her husband were working. Thomas (my husband) and I had originally planned on taking the metro back into DC for the day but I couldn’t bear the idea of that given the result of the election. So the morning of Nov 9 we basically took care of our kids and bummed around my sister’s house letting them play. I think my husband could tell I was seriously depressed. I was staring at the news in disbelief all morning and he came in and said it was a terrible idea to be watching so much of it at that point. So, finally around noon we mobilized and we took the girls to a local park and he played with them for an hour to give me an hour to run. This helped me a bit. Then we went to the grocery store and back to my sister’s house and made dinner for everyone (had an interesting talk with my nephews about the result of the election- they were 8 and 11) and I went to bed roughly around the same time as my daughters.
I think my whole day was centered around staving off the depression that was setting in. Seriously.
Maureen
After watching the results to 11:00, went to bed thinking it could not be true, got up at 3:00am checked the news to confirm. Got up at 5:00am to go to work. Can’t remember much but my fellow coworker who supported Democrats and I were in shock. Could not say much because we have a lot of trump supporters on our floor. The women who work on ACA (Affordable Care Act) in our company figured they were out a job and were very emotional and a year later it is coming true.
N
I teach in a high school, and while the day of the election had been full of energy – lots of folks in pantsuits or blazers, lots of buzz, a mock election – the next day, it was awful. Lots of crying, shell-shocked students, particularly female students. A group of female faculty members and I (we are close friends) gathered in a classroom to watch Hillary’s concession speech – we had students in there with us, weeping – I was literally holding eighteen year old women for much of the morning. For many of them, it was the first election they’d been able to vote in – just devastating.
Many friends reached out to me as the results had come in – they thought of my family first in terms of who Trump’s election would most impact – so I ended up scheduling lunch with a friend who worked near my school. It felt surreal, but also good, to sit and talk with a friend and process. After school, I visited the Rothko chapel, which has always felt like sacred space to me. It was good to sit in silence. As I left, I signed the guest book and saw that several others had thought to come to the chapel that day as well, as a kind of mourning or grieving ritual.
Bridget
The day after D-Day, I woke up still hoping and praying that the outcome would be different. I had had an Election Night party the night before, and was forced to clean up all the autumnal joy the next day. I cried and cried. I called my best friend and we cried together on the phone. We just kept saying I don’t know what is going to happen? We tried to make each other laugh, but it was hard. That night, I brought all of the leftovers from my party to the Improv Class I was teaching—beer, wine, cookies. We all took time at the start of class to hug and have some much needed therapy. I was dreading going to find comedy in the darkness, but my students cheered me up, and gave me hope as we tried to “Yes, And” through the stomach high shit storm.
Kayla
I went to work at 5am and listened to the Hamilton soundtrack while baking bread. Then I cried a bit during “One last time” and continued to make bread.
**********
The day after felt like a new world, like a vortex had opened up and released monsters from the Underworld, like that scene in Ghostbusters.
No, that’s not right. The day after, it rained. The sky dripped gray. There was a stillness in that moment when something falls and everyone watches it shatter. I was nine months pregnant.
I woke up crying. I’m not sure I ever went to sleep. My head throbbed. My eyes burned. I tried to hold it together but as soon as I saw my daughter’s sweet, bright face, the tears came pouring out. She looked at me curiously. Then, “Mama, you need a tissue.” Decisive. Because she knows when your nose is wet, a tissue is what is needed. She went and got a tissue for me.
Normally my husband takes her to school, but I needed to be close to her that day. We both brought her in, me holding her hand the whole time, and as soon as we released her into the classroom, I stepped back into the hall and started sobbing. Down the hall, hoping we wouldn’t see anyone, out the door, into the car, sobbing the whole way. We walked the dog and talked. The tears came intermittently, I stopped trying to control them.
At home, I had to work but it was inconceivable to me that anyone was working. Something had died. How could people just go on checking emails, managing projects, leaving voicemails, as if the world wasn’t coming to an end?
I cried. I looked up volunteer opportunities. I ignored text messages. I stayed off social media. I refused to read the news. I blamed everybody and I was angry. My friend called and I answered, already crying. We told each other we loved one another. We made each other laugh, briefly. I cried. I texted my friend who teaches public school in DC. She said her staff had an emergency meeting, everyone cried, they discussed how to comfort kids who feared deportation and for their families. I told her to let me know if she needed anything, though of course there was nothing I could do. I felt helpless. I cried.
I was nine months pregnant.
I waited to wake up from the nightmare. I refused to watch Hillary’s speech. I texted with friends all day. We asked each other over and over, Are you okay? None of us were.
My husband said he felt so sad for the women in his life, for what this meant to us.
I said I couldn’t bring a life into this world.
We picked up my daughter and walked around the duck pond. She was her usual brave, happy, talkative self. I looked at her and thought how badly we’d failed her. I looked at her and knew we’d be okay. I cried for her and her generation.
My parents didn’t call. I was insulted. I thought they didn’t care. I cried and cried. Later that night my mom called. She had been putting it off. We cried together. She tried to comfort me, but her mom wisdom wasn’t working. Even she didn’t believe what she was saying. She told me to focus on the baby, that everything would be okay. I didn’t believe her.
I don’t ever want to forget what that felt like, that day, the collective grief, the realization of how dumb I was, we all were, how naive, how very, very asleep. I wish it hadn’t happened. But we can’t go back. The tears stopped eventually but we are all a little more broken, a little more cracked. There are silver linings. There are ugly truths that can no longer hide. We wanted someone to save us but we have to save each other.
“There is a crack in everything/ that’s how the light gets in.”