I will fear things that have always existed and have, post-election, surfaced so much more overtly: men pursuing women to slap their asses or attempt a crotch grab in public and high-five their bros neighbors intimidating nonwhite residents with deportation or vigilante action white men threatening to harm nonwhite infants, or ripping the hijab from a woman’s head and demanding she express gratitude for being made American. While bedridden, I fielded emails from current and former students, some deciding to quit wearing a hijab for their own safety, some seeking advice about toning down a flamboyant presentation, or about marrying a boyfriend or girlfriend in a hurry because s/he is undocumented. For the next four years, I won’t be able to. I am brown, queer, disabled, female. This is not female hysteria, and I do not need you to tell me that life goes on, the sun will rise, I just need to breathe and calm down. Reductively applying it to your act of voting for a candidate you know will not win in a bipartisan system, because you can afford to live with the consequences of either Clinton or Trump, without consideration of the many, many people who can’t.įor those of you who claim me, or my sister for that matter, as your minority friends: you know I check off all the boxes. The last time I called something a call to conscience I was recounting to my media ethics class how a journalist chose to knowingly face assassination for publishing truths that a repressive government did not want to hear. What a flagrantly masturbatory act, in what has always been a bipartisan system, to choose this election as your call to conscience, especially when much of the rest of your rhetoric suggests you couldn’t handle the multi-party parliamentary systems, coalitions, and power blocking of western Europe. What a fucking privilege it must be to know you can comfortably survive under either bad choice. I can’t work up the courage to properly reply to the surprising number of acquaintances on Facebook or Twitter who voted Trump or third-party and now are defending themselves on the basis of personality or conscience, calling themselves genuinely nice, saying I’m not racist, I have minority friends, I support LGBTQ rights, claiming If I didn’t vote third party I wouldn’t have voted at all, I knew it would be a matter of living under one bad choice or another. I can’t work up the courage to step outside. It felt as real as anything else, meaning it didn’t feel real at all.įibromyalgia means any bout of illness destroys me, physically and mentally, but for once I am grateful for this cough scraping the flesh from my throat, lungs, diaphragm, energy reserves, because it legitimated canceling my classes, it allowed me to stay in bed for days, to let my apartment go to shit, to utterly lose momentum on my dissertation, to wear the same pajamas day and night, through sweaty night terrors and takeout stains, and call all this something other than depression.
Three days ago, I watched the election results in the throes of a terrible cold that refused to let go, without surprise, with a rising mixture of feelings akin to what I felt during the climax of Sri Lanka’s civil war. I vomited once, and later that night, coughed up bloody phlegm. This weekend, I turn 33, what some call the Jesus Year, the year we are meant for greatness.
My anticipated full-recovery date was November 13, my thirty-first birthday. Today, I stand inside my apartment, in front of a closed door, as I have done each morning since Donald Trump became president-elect. The last time I had this much difficulty breathing, I was fresh from an appendectomy that excised the organ but couldn’t repair months’-long internal damage.
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