okay maybe one more
(Source)
This letter has two parts: the fun part and the personal part. This is the fun part.
I saved the best for last because you have to click through and watch it. It’s worth it — I promise.
This is the personal part.
Four years ago to the day I woke up in my childhood bedroom in Brooklyn to go vote at seven in the morning. I was registered at my parents’ apartment because I moved too often to maintain a mailing address anywhere else, and so I had gone home the night before in order to be close enough to my polling place that I could vote before work. My father had left a note taped to the door that said “TRUMP VICTORY PARTY — YAAAAA!” He’s a (white) Green Card holder and thus not eligible to vote in the U.S.; his stated political opinions are thus whatever he thinks will upset me the most. He usually guesses correctly.
By the time I saw that sign, I had been covering Donald Trump’s campaign since May that year. In fact, I received my offer for a full-time job in a political newsroom just one day before Trump clinched the Republican nomination. Later that summer, my mother told me that she didn’t see the point getting stressed about the election, because there was no way of knowing what would happen even if Trump did win. “The reason I’m so stressed is because I know exactly what will happen,” I told her. I compared it to having your face an inch away from the flame of a blowtorch for months on end. Sure, maybe you don’t know precisely how it’ll feel, but you don’t exactly have to guess.
I was not supposed to cover the winning candidate on Election Night. Since my newsroom was located in Manhattan, it sent reporters to both parties’ events, just to be safe. My senior coworker went to the Javits Center to cover Hillary Clinton’s event. I was dispatched to the Midtown Hilton. I wasn’t even a reporter at the time, just a social media editor with a talent for covering active shootings and press conferences by rape survivors. I was also my newsroom’s most visibly queer, least white, and physically smallest employee. Nevertheless I found a dress that seemed appropriate for an event that would be photographed from every angle and a pair of boots with good ankle support and waited to find out if we would be approved for press access.
The days leading up to an election are hectic in a political newsroom. Every significant House and Senate race gets two prewrites, one for each possible outcome; every swing state gets two prewrites, one for each possible outcome. The polls — Jesus Christ, the polls! Like Pepe fucking Silvia, are the polls. And of course there’s the flurry of last-minute campaign stops and rallies. I was assigned to cover a rally at midnight on election eve, and then my coworker, who was supposed to be covering the other rally, fell asleep and I had to take over his coverage as well. By the time the clock ticked over to the 8th, I hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in two weeks.
But my press pass had been approved and so I packed a bag with water and my laptop and two chargers and the various accoutrements of womanhood on the go (Band-aids, tissues, lip balm, blotting paper, safety pins, and so on and so forth) and went to work, where I finished my last prewrite three minutes before I had to leave to make it to the Hilton before the evening rush.
“Now we have you at this event just so that we’re covering all our bases,” our managing editor told me (more or less; I’m paraphrasing). “We don’t expect Trump to win. If the night starts to look like it’s going to go differently, we’ll pull you out and swap you guys—” by which he meant switch me out for my senior coworker. All right, I thought; I don’t like it, but at least there’s a plan — and who would turn down the opportunity to be there on the ground on election night? Reporters fight to the death with broken chair legs for a chance like that. At least if it all goes wrong I won’t be on my own.
The Secret Service checkpoint was where I realized that this had all been self-deluding bullshit. I was on my own from the moment that I passed through the metal detector — of course I was. Of course it would be impossible to scramble another reporter across town on such short notice if something did go wrong. Of course I should have known: fuck.
At least it doesn’t look like he’ll win, I thought to myself.
Yesterday morning I saw that Biden was projected to win and I started crying in the abortive way that I used to when I didn’t understand how to have feelings, which is to say that I hiccuped once or twice and laughed semi-hysterically and then dry-sobbed for a minute and then stopped. It’s not that I like Biden as a candidate or that I expect to like him as a president; I’ve made no secret of the fact that I find his platform milquetoast and his history repugnant. I also haven’t forgotten that he’s a rapist. Likewise I haven’t forgotten about Harris’ record of sending trans women to men’s prisons, where they are all but inevitably raped and assaulted and killed. I have been horrified by the number of people — many of whom I know personally! — who have been quick to gloss over these facts for the sake of an easy political narrative that positions this as a straightforward win and some kind of great triumph for the left. I am not glad that Biden and Harris won.
But there is something I have never been able to explain — to therapists and friends and family members — in four years of trying. I joke that I have election PTSD, but don’t we all? And people nod and say, yes, it’s so horrible to understand how many people don’t see you as human. Or they say, yes, I can’t believe we do this every four years; yes, I can’t believe we continue to legitimize this settler governance on stolen land; yes, I can’t believe this system continues to disenfranchise the many to serve the few. All of which are also true, but are not what I mean: what I mean is that I, through bad luck and miscalculation, was at the precise place in the world where a future shattered like so much sugar glass. Trauma is when you watch a timeline die, when all its possibilities wither away in front of you in a matter of seconds. When all the lights in the world blink out and you are left in darkness. I happened to be present at the epicenter of a future-killing event and I have not been the same since.
If you were watching the news on November 8th, 2016, maybe you remember — there was that lull after the first rush of early returns, right when it wasn’t clear how the night was going to go, when states were only coming in every half hour or so. (How quaint now to think that was a long time.) And then they blinked red, red, red, and everyone thought, is this really happening? That queasy drop of the stomach, that last bastion of denial. I know this because that was what happened in reverse at the Trump event in the Midtown Hilton, in a dim room with press risers backed up against three walls and an empty stage with a red hat in a glass case. There was the hush of held breath, of tentative hope, of disbelief that the night could be turning in their favor. I stole a half-finished beer from a Breitbart columnist and made friends with the MSNBC camera crew, who talked about how their colleagues were investing in body armor and how pro dommes in D.C. would be booked for months to come. We sat and watched and waited. And then somebody in my newsroom Slack said, “It isn’t definite yet — Clinton might still have a path to victory!” And I knew it was all fucking over. Blowtorch, meet skin.
I can go back to that moment any time I want. I just close my eyes and there it is: the crowd, startling to babble with delight; stilettos and wide ties; $13 for a bottle of Bud at the cash bar; my laptop battery flickering. The deep pile carpet. The glare of broadcast lights. The drunk man who broke into the press pen and demanded that I tell him where to find Trump TV. The realization that because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, not only had I found myself at ground zero of the end of the world, but I would have to cover it. Flame reaches bone and yet one must carry on.
For weeks afterwards I couldn’t make eye contact with anybody — strangers on the street or the subway, neighbors, anyone — gripped by the paranoid delusion that I’d be able to see who they voted for, how they felt. That I would look into their eyes and see triumph, which would unseam me, or anger, for which I would feel responsible, or sadness, which I could not bear. I never tell people about this because it makes me sound so much crazier than usual, which I was. For weeks afterwards, whenever we went out for work drinks, everyone had just one story to tell: where were you when it happened? What were you doing when the world ended?
Speaking about the trauma of Tonya Harding’s early life, Rev. Jesse Jackson once said: “Her insides must look like broken glass. But she keeps smiling, and keeps skating.”
I think of this quote often.
Just past midnight I realized that it was the 8th. Four years to the very day. Smashed up inside like a pulverized car window, a highball glass thrown into a fireplace, whatever is left of a future irreparably broken like the mirror crack’d from side to side. I watched this begin and I have lived to watch it end — the symptoms, to be clear, not the underlying causes; we have not ended racism or rebuked fascism or struck some great blow for feminism or any of that, but — I did not think it would end, or that I would be alive to see it. Hundreds of thousands of people are not.
Even as I write this a small part of me is thinking about how journalists are not supposed to acknowledge the way we are affected by the events we cover. Women are supposed to cover misogynist violence without letting it get to them. Jewish reporters are assigned stories about Nazi desecrations. Trans reporters inevitably get the hate crime beat. Under the guise of giving bylines to the people most qualified to write them, newsrooms actively reproduce the trauma inherent to such stories. As a reporter your professionalism is supposed to shield you; you are supposed to watch the survivor of child rape explain to a bundle of microphones exactly what happened to her, and when, with perfect impassiveness. This letter is, perhaps, unprofessional of me to write. But I have always struggled with this view of reporting. A few nights ago, before Pennsylvania turned, I realized as I lay in bed that I think of what happened in 2016 as my failure — to adequately cover Trump’s unfitness, to do so in a way that conveyed the dangers of his governance, to give a voice to those already hurt by him and those he planned to hurt, and has. I know this is not necessarily true. White people just fucking love racism and Islamophobia and genocidal cruelty, and this is a nation built to exalt whiteness, which Trump also promised to do. Those, for many, were his selling points. Nevertheless I have carried this story inside of myself like shrapnel for four years.
Four years ago tomorrow, we all dragged ourselves back into the newsroom on three or four hours of sleep. My coworker who had spent the night at the Javits Center came over and gave me a hug, her hair still wet. We all looked godawful. “I don’t know how you did it,” she said. “I would have just lost it.” I didn’t know how she had done it either, witnessing all that grief, that collective loss. I couldn’t have. “I went and cried in a corner for a while,” she said, and shrugged. Back to work.
Trauma is when you begin to react but do not finish — when you are caught in the moment of response like a bug in amber. Four years I have spent frozen. I didn’t cry then and I keep trying to now, but the mechanism is rusty; it is slow to start. I keep trying anyway.