The Worst Election Night Ever
Our dog died and nothing else has seemed to matter as much ever since — aka where I’ve been for three months
I haven’t been getting anything done since election day. Like, nothing. I’m an extrovert, someone who derives a lot of my energy, creativity, and joy from socializing with others, and the pandemic had already squished my characteristic joie de vivre into a pebble before last November’s election night, triggering anxiety and depression that I was already treating with new medications and mostly-failed attempts to change my less healthy habits. Sleep-deprived from anxious insomnia and completely consumed with reading news and polling analysis in the weeks leading up to the election, I was, like so many others, unconsciously bathing in traumatic memories of election night 2016, when we found out Donald Trump would become President of the United States.
I had spent that entire day, over four years ago, with a sick feeling in my stomach, too. My friends mostly planned to gather at pre-supposed celebration parties in their Brooklyn apartments, or some were just going to hang out at our office in Manhattan, where my colleagues would be livestreaming results and where there would be an open bar and all of my current and former bosses. I opted out, choosing instead to go home and be alone, telling…
