election results
One of my greatest talents is emotions. I'm the queen of emotions. I'm notably excellent at identifying them, putting labels on them, expressing them to other people in controlled and productive ways. I'm great at unpacking emotional bird's nests, like when anger is concealed grief or anxiety concealed anger. I'm even reasonably good at connecting emotions to causes.
All of this is to say that it's been unnerving as fuck to have had minimal identifiable emotions since Tuesday night.
I'm not surprised: just like in 2016 and 2020, I thought he would win; just like in 2016, he did. I'm not really disappointed: this is exactly who I thought we were. I'm scared, but I'm scared most of the time[1] of a wide vareity of quotidien crap, like emails and needles and being outside, so that's hardly an unfamiliar state for me. I'm not even sad, and I'm also sad...not most of the time, but certainly a lot.[2]
Really, I've been unusually emotionally fine and I hate that.
There's a bit of guilt in that—I apparently have some sort of moral judgement working that says that an ethical American citizen should feel sad right now. I'm not sure I love that at the level of logic, but it clearly exists at the level of impulse.
There's also some fear, not only of the next four years but also of my emotions. I'm worried that the grief I'm not feeling right now will come out with rather more vehemence at an unknown point in the future. I'm always the sort to eat the frog, so to speak—I want the unpleasantness done now, and given the choice would have spent this long weekend losing my shit so I could pull it all back together by next week.
I'm not totally unaffected. My temper is a little quicker than usual, but not to any uncontrollable degree, and I remain keenly aware that my burning rage at some idiot on the internet is not, in fact, about that particular idiot, which keeps me from reacting in ways that hurt others or embarrass me. I felt a small release of tension when my priest addressed our congregation's fears about the election results.
But instead of feeling overwhelming grief, or rage, or anything else that feels like it meets the moment, I'm mostly just kind of...sitting here. Waiting.