Well,???? ????? it happened.
The thing that millions of people of color, undocumented workers, Muslims, queer people, allies and apparently just 43 percent of white women were terrified of just came true: Donald Trump is America's next president.
It's impossible for many of to us to imagine what to do on a day like today. Parents are struggling to tell their children, teachers are scrambling to break the truth to their classes and others are wondering if they'll even have a home in their country anymore. And while there have been fierce calls to organize on Facebook, to protest more, to fight smarter and harder and better, to do it differently this time, to reach out to that racist cousin and speak calmly with that sexist uncle, no one should be forced to advocate.
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Maybe it's ok to just sit back today, and maybe for many days after, just holding on and grieving.
SEE ALSO: Hillary Clinton's devastating loss spells heartbreak for women everywhereFor millions of Americans, Trump's win feels not like a political victory or "the revenge of the white working class," but a death, plain and simple. And to be clear, that death is not hyperbole, but impending, promised and soon-to-be literal.
Think of the thousands of refugees seeking asylum who will likely be sent home to war torn countries, or will never make it to this relatively safe one, if Trump gets his way. Imagine what will happen to queer and trans kids forced to undergo conversion therapy, the dangerous practice that Mike Pence spent his career defending. Or the millions of black Americans who will be stopped and frisked under a Trump administration, then conceivably asked to serve in a war their commander-in-chief doesn't fully understand.
As a queer person and a woman, there are parts of the country where I just don't feel safe traveling to anymore. And no, not because I feel like I'm smarter or better than them, or I'm some New York snob who only eats kale chips, or some hyper-PC college student who can't listen to people who disagree with me. The American voting population tells me everything I need to know about how much they value my life, and the lives of people who look like me.
So it feels strange to turn on Facebook and Twitter and our mainstream media sources and hear that, hey, we have to get up today and work harder, fight better, work for the greater good. Of course, that sentiment comes from a good place: compassionate humans, trying to pave a positive way forward, create meaning out of chaos.
However, imagine telling that to someone whose just experienced a death; that it's their job to push past their tears and register some young voters or sign a change.org petition. Yes, the two deaths are different -- one is literal, the other (temporarily at least) metaphorical.
But for millions of us, the feeling is the same.
And it's not like Clinton voters didn't try, either. After all, she won the popular vote.
She had a strong get out the vote effort. Thousands of Americans knocked on doors, made phone calls, showed up at rallies and delivered desperate pleas to their Trump-voting friends. And thousands still advocated in other ways: as community organizers, as social workers and as friends. They wrote impassioned pleas. They walked in protest marches. They worked, and they worked intelligently, and with courage.
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable You don't need to ask these people to look forward and dream bigger -- they already were.
When I was a social worker, counseling people experiencing grief, there was only one principle we were all taught to live by: don't give advice. Let people in grief scream, cry, dance, withdraw, throw food at the walls, rip paper out of their notebooks, cut off family members, find new ones. Let them eat a full roast chicken at your desk. Let them spend $200 dollars on a deodorant from GOOP. Don't ask them to find the silver lining.
We were taught to let the clients do whatever they wanted to do, as long as it didn't cause harm to themselves or others.
I remember one client who had just experienced a loss, sitting at my desk, going through cat GIF after cat GIF, goat video after goat video, saying nothing, just clicking the day away.
The secret to ending grief, we were taught, was not trying to end it in the first place.
The situations are obviously different, and we shouldn't minimize people's personal losses. But for so many of us today, the pain feels profoundly similar. Healing won't come in the form of the traditional organizing on Wednesday. Resistance will look like this: reaching out to our favorite friends, watching our dumbest movies, dragging our bodies to our dumb jobs, eating our worst foods or just sitting in silence next to the people we love.
We should all push for a better future. And we will. Just maybe not today.