I want to cry, to scream, to be angry. I have done and have been all of those things in the hours and days following Tuesday’s election. I keep asking how we got here? Have we always been here and I missed it up to this point? America, has your hatred for the marginalized and minorities ever been this strong?

I thought I already knew what fear felt like, and now it is a collective, communal fear. Now it is a lament of the oppressed that I can feel so deeply in my soul.

I don’t know how we are supposed to heal from this. But I have to believe that we will. And we have to fight harder now than before. Maybe it would be easier to give up and mov to Canada, yet we’ve come too far to give up. I know younger generations are looking to us and how we respond to this.

If you’re like me, you don’t really want to respond and neither are you ready to. You just want to hide away for a while, cry, eat junk food, and drink lots of alcohol. And you know what. That’s ok right now because we’re grieving and no one can tell us there’s a right or wrong way to do that.

But…don’t. stay. there. We have to get up and fight to push back the overwhelming hate with something stronger than that. Hope.

Hope that things can be better than they are today and not as bad as they were on Tuesday when America showed the world they would rather hate than love everyone. Don’t give up. We are stronger than fear. We are stronger than hate. We are stronger together.