The First Step Forward

"microdosing hope" after the election

Photo by "My Life Through A Lens" on Unsplash

I’m waiting to start a webinar healing circle for post-election grief. Snuggled in my plush robe, my feet beneath the snowy forest blanket I crocheted last winter, I am mostly calm. That’s more than I can say for my state of mind for most of the past week. I haven’t had the heart to watch Harris’s concession speech yet, although I’ve been told it’s good. I will, eventually. This week I have been surviving.

My idea of bliss is to freeze myself inside the happiest moments I have experienced for as long as I can stay there. Safe, happy, for once not afraid of anything. I wonder what that would feel like. Hell is living trapped inside my worst memories, all happening simultaneously, an unending loop of pain. I do know what that feels like. A cascade of triggering events since last week have kept me on the trauma hamster wheel. I’m exhausted and I’m no closer to getting out. This webinar is hope for me.

“Remember the wisdom of the Midwife,” says host Valerie Kaur of Revolutionary Love. “Breathe! Breathe, and then push.” We breathe together. Hundreds of us from across this newly fractured land—over eight hundred in all, mostly women—breathing into our parts, together. Breathing into our grief, our fear, our rage, our need to be loved. Breathing with our ancestors behind us, the ones who came before and have survived great hardship. “Burn,” my ancestor whispers to me, placing a pleasantly warm flame into my hands. “Burn bright, girl.”

“What if this is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if the story of our country is one great labor?” Valarie said, “I believe it is both.”

There is a kind of death here to grieve. I no longer believe I will live to see a country united in mutual respect, or even a nation capable of viewing women as equally human in the eyes of society and the law. This deeply grieves me. There is conflict coming our way, a world of hurt to wade through in the next four years, the specifics of which I am trying not to imagine. But there is also hope. Dr. Brené Brown posted on social media this week that she has been “microdosing hope.” I loved that phrase. I don’t have the capacity for big hope right now, all of that seems to have died along with Harris’s chance at office this cycle, but I can manage little pieces of hope. Glimmers.

“God, apparently I wasn’t cried out yet,” I typed in the webinar chat. I almost didn’t send that comment, but I was glad I did because it changed the feel of the comment stream from that point on. Before then we were all posting as individuals, but the responses of “Me too!” and “I’m bawling over here” reminded us that we were really all feeling the same things. Suddenly, I wasn’t alone any longer. None of us were. We were hurting, but we were hurting together. The piece of me that has been feeling hunted and cornered let her guard down for a minute. Over eight hundred people, and they all had my back while I cried, they held space for the rage climbing out of my belly at last. I felt safe and seen for the first time since the election.