I am caught between having no words to capture how I feel about this moment in our country’s history and also having a constant cacophony of words running through my head. So I am writing this blog to try and make sense of something that bewilders me. My ruminating thoughts are trying to find meaning for Donald Trump being elected as president again. It’s like my brain is a phone searching for service, draining the battery as it endlessly tries to find a connection. Like the spinning circle of death (as we call it) when my computer is trying to figure out what to do but might just crash.

Let’s start with grief. I started crying on Tuesday, November 5 around 9pm. I woke up and cried for hours, then throughout the day on Wednesday and Thursday. It’s not that I was surprised that Trump won, it’s that he won the popular vote, not some fluke of electoral college math. And that Republicans won Congress, so now have control of all three branches of government, and who knows what will happen. It feels like an early chapter of so many of the World War II historical fiction novels I’ve read, the part where the masses don’t yet see what’s coming, yet we as the reader 80 years later can’t understand how they don’t see it.

I often share with clients a picture of a “tangled ball of grief,” which shows that grief is more than sadness. My grief about this election brings on feelings of sadness, for sure, but also fear, anger, despair, disgust, hopelessness, confusion, heartbreak, shame and loss. Loss of what I thought America was, and disillusionment because I don’t think it ever really was what I thought it was. America was not actually built on idealism and freedom. It perhaps has always been a “smash and grab” job—people who wanted to avoid taxes and own land and make their lives better at the expense of others. I’m thinking our government has always been run by rich, white, powerful men and I delusionally thought it was a fair race. It was possibly always a rigged game. Barak Obama was a beautiful, hopeful exception, not a real change in the system. Maybe Trump is just business as usual, only more brazen and less sneaky about it.

America has always been an us-and-them mentality. Maybe humans are just generally like that. But who is us and who is them? Last year, I grieved with cousins I love for my aunts who died. We were very much an us. And many of them voted for Trump, so does that turn them into a them? It is incomprehensible to me that so many people support him. It’s an easy answer to say that those people are stupid and racist and selfish and brainwashed. And that is part of the problem. We all want easy answers, yet there are none. If I want to understand the appeal of Trump, why do I not ask his supporters (my cousins and my friends) why they like him? If they are living in a misinformation bubble, then I am too, right?

I find in therapy that people come because they want their lives to be different but they don’t actually want to change. This is the irony, the paradox of therapy. We are always working with resistance because people would really prefer that the world would change, that their partner and boss and friends would change. People don’t really want to look at themselves and take responsibility for making change happen, because that is hard and messy and takes determination and patience and fortitude and an ability to tolerate discomfort. That feels like our country right now. We want easy answers to complicated questions and here comes someone who says it is easy, that he has the answers, and the appeal of that doesn’t surprise me, even if it is untrue.

Going back to my heartbreak and sadness, I’ve thought a lot about my parents this week, and the political work they’ve been doing for 60 years. My mom was at the March on Washington and heard Martin Luther King, Jr. speak. She was Delhi’s Democrat of the Year a few years ago. My dad moved to Florida and immediately became an active member of the democratic party there, as he had been in other places he lived. He met Jimmy Carter. They took me to demonstrations in a pack on their backs when I was a baby. I sat in rooms with people stuffing letters for candidates my whole childhood. And then this. It breaks my heart that all their work is for nothing. The world is no better than when they started trying to change it. It may even end up being worse before they’re gone.

That got me thinking of Sisyphus. Rolling that stone up the hill just to have it roll back down, over and over, for all eternity. Maybe all we can ever do is keep greed and corruption and evil at bay. Maybe there is never a triumph over those things. We fight the good fight over and over, and maybe make some progress here and there and then lose it all and start over again. Which reminds me of my personal anthem, Martina McBride’s Anyway. “One storm can come and blow it all away…build it anyway.” I do it anyway.

So onto switchbacks…

My husband and I spent the weekend in Yosemite National Park. I turned my phone off for three days (other than taking pictures). We absorbed nature and shut out the world as a salve for the pain in our hearts. In doing so, we hiked every day, including to the top of Vernal Falls—up the mist trail and down an alternate route that was filled with switchbacks. Let me tell you, switchbacks going down are nothing like switchbacks going up, which I’ve done plenty of times. Switchbacks going up SUCK! You want to just go straight up, but you can’t. You have to go back and forth, up and up and up. You see the top but it feels endless to get there. The turns initially feel motivating (yay, I’m closer!) but after a while they become discouraging and frustrating because they just go on and on (another effing switchback!).

Do you see where I’m going here? We want a shortcut. We want the top of the mountain and then we’re done, but it doesn’t work like that. As Miley Cyrus sings, “it’s all about the climb.”

I want change to be quick and easy. Most of all I want it to be permanent, that once you change something, it sticks. But that isn’t how change works. Change is slow and incremental. It is mostly erosion.

Of course, sometimes change is sudden, which brings me to wildfires. The fire sweeps through the forest and consumes trees and brush and everything else in its path. The landscape is changed in an instant. Yet this also circles back to complexity because for a long time, people believed fires were bad. They did everything they could to prevent all wildfires, but that is an attempt to make a complex issue simple. Fires aren’t bad (just like immigration and guns and abortions and homelessness aren’t bad). Forests need fires every now and then to make room for new growth. Mariposa Grove was devastated by the Washburn fire in 2022, and the damage is obvious. Yet the biggest, oldest Sequoia’s were saved. And new growth has begun.

I don’t think I’m done mourning, but I’m getting there. I won’t give up on making the world better, even if it is Sisyphean. Even if it is slow and complicated and full of switchbacks and breaks my heart. Last week I was hopeless, and it felt particularly horrible because hope is one of my core values. Hope is who I am, how I choose to move through the world, and I am not going to have that taken from me.

I’ll end with another verse from Anyway (listen to this song!):

“You can chase a dream
That seems so out of reach
And you know it might not never come your way
Dream it anyway”

I will do it anyway. I hope you will too.