November 7, 2020
The first Saturday of November comes with an unexpected heatwave after rainy days and Daylight Savings have signaled that fall is here. I go to my morning yoga class, then walk home soaking up the sun. I talk to my parents who are in the middle of a brisk walk in Berlin’s outskirts. We don’t yet have the results of the elections. I haven’t been watching the news. Friends tell me throughout the week how the counting goes.
“I think we’re going to win” announces my Australian roommate on Thursday. She’s been trying to move back home, but can’t because of the local quarantine rules.
“So it’s like halftime during a sports game?” I respond skeptically. “We’re hopeful, but have absolutely no idea how the game will end?”
I’m not trying to be cynical. I’m trying to protect myself. I vividly remember myself 4 years ago, going to bed early on Election Day feeling certain that I’ll wake up to the announcement of the first female presidency. Then my world started to spin. It took me 2 years to calm down, to not predict the world ending or the Third World War breaking out any moment.
Feeling hopeless about the world around me, I started to pay more attention to my immediate surroundings. I shifted my focus to what I could control. I accepted my failure at building the home and family in Colorado I’d planned to build and left my partner and home of a decade. I moved back to Brooklyn 19 months ago to find a home within myself and build the life I truly want to live. I’m not going to give that up. I voted for who I thought the best option was out of the two. I controlled what I could. Now I’m waiting calmly.
I start practicing stand-up when I hear clapping and honking and cheering on the street. It sounds like the New York Marathon, but that cannot be: we’re still the middle of the pandemic. I finally watch both CNN and Fox News for a minute. They both confirm the upcoming Biden/Harris presidency.
I’ve gotten better at being aware of my emotions. I feel a sense of joy, hope, release and distance. I meet one of my best friends for a bike ride. We end up spending the rest of the day together soaking up the sun, singing along with people throwing parties on every other other corner, biking through drum circles and crowds cheering. It is one of the best days of my life. I am exactly where I want to be, surrounded by people who’ve helped me become a better version of myself, talking about and doing work I enjoy. It is joyful to see friends relieved, bars and restaurants full again, people celebrating after 8 months of isolation.
My friend from Poland texts me. I slowly start to realize the impact and weight of what seems like a neighborhood celebration. “Apart from everything, it’s a hope for Poland too. Trump was an ally and friend of our dictatorial government. Biden will not take this shit. And Kamala is just amazing. I have faith in this world and its future, our future, again, thanks to what happened in the US.”
It’s sometimes hard to realize the effects of local actions on the greater world. I’ve been here for 12 years, I don’t exactly know what people see from the outside. The hardest part of the last 4 years has been defending the system of democracy. When I lost faith many times, my parents tried to remind me that I should not worry as much about who the president is for 4 years, but about the system that allows or prevents that president to win again in 4 years. We’re not comparing Trump to Putin or Orban. We are comparing the political systems of the US, Russia or Hungary currently in place. Despite all the pain and damage Donald Trump has done, he did not change the constitution. He did not dismantle the free press. He did not murder journalists or his political enemies.
Our problems are not going away when he moves out of the White House. Over 70 million of our fellow citizens have voted for him. Partially, because he was one of only two options. How can the system offer better options to choose from?
I’m grateful to be here and included in the celebrations, but I’m really here for the work. I’m here because I want to be surrounded by people who care about the same problems that I do. Freedom of choice, equal rights and representation, economic progress in the information age. The #Metoo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and taking an honest look at our history.
We just started to allow ourselves to feel the discomfort in the tension between two facts: the largest free democracy of the world was built by colonization, white supremacy, toxic masculinity and patriarchy. We cannot change the past. It influences us, but doesn’t determine our future. Growth is painful. We can just let ourselves feel the discomfort in order to know where we’re coming from, identify what we’ve learned and agree on what mistakes we don’t want to repeat.
Trump has woken us up to the fact that the amount of work we all individually and collectively have to do in this country is tremendous. Our individual choices lead to collective change. It is work we each have to do, in every environment we step into, to constantly raise the bar for the collective. It is work that never ends. We survived 4 years against the wind and hopefully we’ll take advantage of 4 years of backwind.
It’s already dark, but barely past 5PM when I get to combine my lunch and dinner, waiting for a burrito at a street taco truck. I soak in the smell through my mask, feeling grateful for being here, for the people who’ve helped me to get here, for living in the city that has felt most like home in the past 30 years, spending my time with people who know and understand me best. I have not had alcohol for a few months, but today I want to celebrate with the world and have one beer. I go to bed before 11AM.
I wake up the next day at 6:30AM to write, practice and teach yoga, listen to a few coaching podcasts. I will close the day with an open mic. A lot of my jokes are about me comparing my looks and accent to Melania Trump’s. A name that will soon be forgotten. I’ll gladly adjust my material.
