It's The Hope That Kills

In 2016, I voted for Hillary. If you read the rest of my content, that’ll be no surprise. 😉 She wasn’t my ideal candidate for a variety of reasons (mostly involving war), but she was what we had and it looked for sure like we were going to finally break that last glass ceiling. I sat there, clutching my laptop, watching CNN with excitement, and slowly but surely lost all my breath, lost all my hope, lost… everything.

I mean, look… I’ve been following and involved in politics since I was 14. I saw injustices in the world, and I believed in our ability to right those injustices. Also, as a biological female, I was told and saw from go that I would be treated poorly by the world around me. I was six when I first learned how cruel and disturbing men can be… and the trouble is, you don’t know which ones are cruel and which ones are kind until it’s far too late. That first injustice shaped me into someone who could not stand it when, to paraphrase Tim Walz, people couldn’t just mind their own fucking business.

As a young child, it confused me as to why skin color, religion, sex, gender, or any portion of someone else's identity and private life mattered so much to people. Why do we have to spend so much time talking and worrying and jockeying position over things that do not matter in the long run? It’s not logical. It makes no sense. It is a complete and utter waste of everyone’s time. Yet here we are, still fighting and begging for everyone to have basic human rights. That, in a nutshell, has been my lifelong set of values. That made me a democrat for many years until 2008, when I left the party and declared myself a free agent with no party.

I still vote democrat, though, because there’s really no other choice. Every part of my identity they hate. I am a biological female nonbinary transgender person. Even before I had words for all that crap, I was different and no part of the republican party represented me. So I sat there, on election night in 2016, clutching my laptop and a box of tissues, ready to watch the ceiling shatter… and then it didn’t.

Instead, something inside me shattered. To say life’s been difficult since then would be an understatement. Not all of it is directly related to MAGAts, but it certainly helped set the tone. It felt inevitable that Roe would fall. It felt inevitable that really hard won LGBTQ rights would fall. And they have. Issues I’ve worked on my whole life were being rolled back to an era before I was born. What the actual fuck?

Then Biden stepped aside and a smiling, laughing, hopeful Kamala took his place and I’ve been holding my breath since. Last night, I watched the opening of the DNC still holding my breath. They are doing many many MANY of the things I’ve wanted. Come out fighting, not holding back, telling the whole and unvarnished truth about where we are right now not just as a country, but as a planet.

But, uh, to quote Ted Lasso… it’s the hope that kills.

2016 shattered me. It’s 2024, and I’m barely put back together. What the fuck is going to happen if Kamala doesn’t win?

Jesus Christ, someone get me a paper bag to breathe into… this is gonna be a loooooooong few months.

But you just gotta keep doing it, keep moving forward, keep putting one foot in front of another. Keep trying. Keep working.

What the fuck is wrong with people? It doesn’t make your life any better to make someone else’s life worse. I shouldn’t have had to spend my entire life trying to drill that simple and basic concept into people’s skulls. It’s basic low level being a good human being shit.

I… just wanna fast forward to November. Or maybe to the next insurrection. 🤣

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