Before I say what I want to say, first, let’s celebrate. BLUE WAVE CHEERS!!!! Thank you all for voting with your hearts! High fives and Hallelujahs! WOOT!

I still have parts that are worried about what happens next, anxious about the next insurrection when it’s time for the peaceful transfer of power, scared of big MAGA manosphere men with guns who could initiate a Democide and take out their neighbors. When Jeff went to vote yesterday, some goon wearing a K-9 Team sweatshirt in an unmarked white SUV with tinted windows and a German shepherd tried to block Jeff’s Tesla from parking at the post office and was behaving in a way that Jeff interpreted as intimidating. Jeff is a 6″‘4” white bald guy who looks like a European hit man, so he still got out of his car, pushed past the guy, hid his ballot in his jacket, and dropped his vote into the post office mailbox. But he wondered what a small Latina woman might have done.

That’s still a huge part of this country, that MAGA-style intimidation. They’re armed. We’re not. So I worry about that. But I’m cautiously optimistic the way I was in 2020 when Biden toppled Trump, the way I felt when I imagined Kamala winning in 2024. I dared to let myself listen to my Kamala Harris For President playlist, something I haven’t been able to do since 2024, because it brings up unbearable levels of grief for me.

As Liz Plank wrote about in Millenial Optimism Is So Back, this sweeping political win for women, minorities, and Democrats is creating just enough breath, just enough space, to make me realize how really fucking furious I’ve been for ten fucking years. I am boiling inside, between the Trump nightmare, the narcissistic spiritual leaders fucking their students while preaching and teaching how to spiritually bypass accountability, the manosphere, rape culture, the tolerance and lack of accountability of Epstein’s child abuse and sex trafficking by the most powerful men in the world, and by the men in my personal and professional life who continue to aggress against me because I’m a woman who stands up for her parts and doesn’t take shit from men who don’t want to talk about patriarchy.

I know I’m not alone. You might be feeling the same. So let’s just take a beat and honor what we’ve endured. Deep breath. Allow feelings to bubble up without bypassing any of them. Maybe we can de-armor just a little bit, at least for one day.

I was in Bali teaching an IFS writing retreat when Trump won in 2016. Like all of you, I was in shock, and when the shock wore off, I was outraged and marched in the Women’s March in Oakland with my then 10 year old daughter, whose safety I feared for in a country going to hell. I felt betrayed by my country, like I could no longer truthfully identify as an American without embarassment. When I’d come to Bali earlier that month and taxi drivers asked me where I was from, I’d say “California,” and they’d say “Ah, yeah, naked sexy Hollywood.” After the election, I’d say “California,” and they’d say “Donald Trump.” It was humiliating.

Then everything got as bad as we expected it might. Worse. Our worst nightmares got exceeded, and half of our country seemed to be celebrating. I found myself distrusting total strangers I was sitting next to at movie theaters because I didn’t know whether they were cackling with righteous glee when Roe v. Wade got overturned, whether they were celebrating ICE goons and watching the atrocities like they were spectators at some medieval blood sport as immigrants were rounded up and disappeared into detention centers.

I couldn’t look at the American flag without feeling sick. I couldn’t listen to my fellow neighbor justify why they voted for Donald Trump without wondering how deep the depravity and defense of it could go. And I couldn’t quite get my nervous system to stand down, because every time I thought we’d reached rock bottom, the bottom dropped further.

Plus…pandemic. And all the people who couldn’t be bothered to wear a mask, social distance, or get a vaccine because they were so self-absorbed and focused on bodily autonomy that they couldn’t be convinced that public health guidelines and herd immunity are acts of communal generosity, love, and protection of the most vulnerable among us. On the scale of altruism at one end of the spectrum and self-centeredness at the other, we found out where we and where other people really lived, in their bodies, in their hearts.

And in spiritual communities, way too many people landed on the selfish side. All those seemingly progressive spiritual types and wellness industry influencers who brandished appropriate virtue signaling during #BlackLivesMatters and #MeToo swung to “Trump is a lightworker” and MAHA RFK, Jr madness. I still haven’t quite figured out how that happened, in spite of listening to every single Conspirituality podcast episode about the spirituality-right wing slide. What I took away from witnessing that the most was how religions and New Age spirituality contribute to the “We’re better than them” dialectic that eats away at the notion that all humans are created equal. What a disappointment so many people I once considered esteemed colleagues (y’all know which ones I’m talking about) turned out to be.

I feel like I’ve been in a narcissistic relationship with the President of my country for ten brutal years. For ten years, I’ve been writing about relational trauma, preparing to write the book I just published RELATIONSICK (which you can buy here) while living through a collective relational trauma with President Narcissist and all the flying monkeys who licked his boots, while a huge percentage of my country thought this was a good thing.

How is a woman to reckon with the normalization of the gaslighting, the cruelty, the unthinkable, the constant threat of what shock and awe collective trauma might happen next? I lost respect for every academic institution that licked Trump’s boots, every CEO of every corporate giant who rolled over, every newspaper and media company that sold out. That erosion of trust in our institutions, in our neighbors, in our democracy, sometimes even in our own ability to make sense of reality is so destabilizing that it’s been intolerable and impossible to stomach. It’s been exhausting to live in a country where you have to keep asking yourself whether the people around you see what you see, whether they care about what you care about, and whether they would protect the vulnerable, protect you as a woman who speaks her mind, if things got dangerous, as they still could.

And maybe that’s part of why this election feels like such a big exhale, not because the problems in this narcissistic, power hungry, racist, sexist, bully of a country are solved, but because for at least one day, I feel less alone. I feel like attending every single No Kings rally, signs in hand, songs on my lips, and hope in my heart, meant something. I see that millions of people have been watching, witnessing, and refusing to accept that this is who we are, that the people who have been trying to make cruelty normal haven’t won the hearts of as many Americans as they wanted us to believe.

I know this isn’t over. I know another insurrection or wave of violence could erupt from the MAGA loyals, the manosphere, the KKK-inclined. But before we armor ourselves for what comes next, maybe we can just let ourselves feel the depth of the rage, and underneath it, more vulnerably, the depth of the pain, the grief, the horror, the overwhelming trauma of what we’ve been through in the past ten years.

Let’s not rush to platitudes or spiritually bypass what we’ve been through. Let’s not try to make meaning out of it too soon or cull some spiritual lesson from it. We don’t have to turn our fury into some fucking growth opportunity. Maybe we can just be fucking furious.

I want to go to the beach at 5am and just scream into the darkness, wail into the waves, and let my shaking body flop on the wet sand like a beached tuna. I want to mourn with my sisters and howl with my BIPOC brothers and scream with my queer daughter and her queer friends and rage with those who can’t afford groceries or gas or a roof over their heads because asshole billionares who think they can get away with crimes against humanity have profited off the poor and middle class.

I was supposed to go to a grief ritual with Francis Weller at Commonweal this weekend, but because of his sexual misconduct with women (which I wrote about here), he’s been replaced with Orland Bishop. I was looking forward to that ritual space, because there’s so much to grieve, and I’m fucking furious that even Francis, who I really respected, has let us down with his entitled taking of what was not ethically his to take. I hope a Black man can hold the space for all of our feelings better than the white man could. When I asked Resmaa Menakem, who participated in Three Black Men with Orland Bishop, whether it was worth my time to go see Orland and give up something fun I was planning to do instead, Resmaa said, with unqualified certainty, “Orland all day everyday. Do the fun later. He’s one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met.”

So I’m going to let myself have just a little bit of joy today. But I’m also going to allow myself space for my anger and my grief with the Black man, since this victory doesn’t mean we’ve abolished white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalistic greed, American narcissism, Christian nationalism, xenophobia, homophobia, ableism, anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic hate, and institutionalized cruelty. Not yet. Not anywhere close.

But I will lean into gratitude. Gratitude for the American people who showed up in droves to say “This is not who we are or what we want.” Gratitude for the grass roots organizers and everyone who came to the protests and all the politicians who did what they had to to topple the regime. We can celebrate that, at least for today, the people who have been trying to convince us that decency is weakness, that compassion is a liability, that human beings are not equal in their value, and that democracy is theirs to dismantle have been handed a very loud reminder that the rest of us are still here.

Blue wave. Deep breath. And maybe, just maybe, a little hope.