By Aniya Carrington
4:53 AM
My internal alarm glitched in the early morning on November sixth.
I opened my eyes to my dim ceiling, and the easy nothingness that comes from four in the morning. The second that my brain fully woke to feel my body laying in the sheets, I knew. I didn’t need to check. It was there: the soft lapping of dread at the shores of my body; the sorrowful intuition that you get from being Black in America.
Kamala Harris was not the president of the United States.
There were a million signs telling me that it would end up this way, but everything in me needed to believe otherwise. I was running on the charge that hope gave me, and with it gone, I was depleted.
In the moment, I turned over, not ready to face it. I wanted to be soothed by some otherworldly presence: my dreams, the pillow against my cheek, my late grandfather’s naive excitement from years ago at showing his granddaughter a vice president that looked similar enough to her in a position of power. When I voiced my concern about some of her beliefs, he looked at me, puzzled. In this rare moment of peaceful cross-generational communication about politics, I had forgotten one very important thing: due to everything thrown at us, mostly it’s expected that Black people will stand by other Black people, no matter what.
The attempt was made coming into this election, and unfortunately, it fell through.
The temptation inside of me to run from this new reality was strong. Humans relish in the path of least resistance. Squeezing our eyes shut and denying, or prolonging the denial, is how we believe we survive.
7:44 AM
I finally begin to process what my bones knew to be true. This election has been lost.
I open my phone and see people with faces like mine crying, mourning, frightened. In the dark of their eyes, mirrored are my thoughts. What about my students, my best-friends, my unborn child? What about the environment, our education, our rights? How can they all just be lost as quickly as that?
I see unidentifiable profiles jeering; pointing and laughing, inhumane down to the marrow. Your body, my choice, is a celebration, intent in the way it fills my cells with horror. There is blame being thrown around, clashing with the exit polls; over fifty percent of white women voted red, fifty percent of latino men voted red, all those third party votes lost. Everyone is talking about someone else. Everyone is throwing up a spotlight, creating a room full of flashing strobes that leave the people inside blinded.
In my room, tears are shed. The thickness of fear is hard to resist. It’s like an illness; a slow poison. I stop and start between sobs to get dressed and attend class. The professor promises a politics-free zone – whatever that means – an easy day – if such a thing exists – and yet, halfway through, I desperately need to leave, overwhelmed by the constriction that sitting still and breathing and doing nothing is.
There must be something to do, I think, placing one foot in front of the other, as I hurry away from the room of playing pretend. There has to be something else.
There isn’t. Grief resists all logical progression of time. You can ache for things that have not happened, for undead things, for the tangible and abstract alike. My thoughts are to my future, the future of the people I hold dear, my sisters, my mother, myself. I’m grieving the people I haven’t met, that I won’t meet, that I feel like I know because I understand they’re feeling this too. In a sickening twist, we have become kin under this distress.
12:21 PM
I join, then leave a seven minute call where my academic advisor tells me there is nothing she can do to help me.
I need things that she cannot give me – reassurance, peace, to travel back in time, for her to fix this – and she knows it. But her power bank is low too. I’m going to keep my camera off if that’s okay, she says. Still recovering from a rough batch of COVID. I don’t bother wondering how true it is. I’ll keep my camera off too, I respond, as if I’m graciously doing her a favor, pretending that it isn’t just for me.
Either way, it’s a mutual allowance of momentary vulnerability. I am still hiding, and it brings flimsy comfort to know that others are too. She can’t help me in the big ways, or the small ones. It’s impossible to see my transcript due to technical issues, and so the meeting is rendered useless quite quickly.
Sorry, she sighs, but there’s nothing I can do right now.
Her verbal admission of helplessness feels more honest than required. It takes energy to read into it, but as we left the call, I feel like our voices’ low tones hug one another goodbye.
There’s not much to do now.
Emails come: counseling is being offered, there are people who want to let you talk, there are people who want to talk to you. You are not alone loses its meaning with how often it’s said. A writing professor says that class is optional; Come if you need somewhere to be. If you can’t, there will be no penalties for you taking this time. It’s completely understandable.
The space is just as helpful as it is harmful. It makes me very aware of my racketing heart. Too emotional to be looked at square in the face. Too numb to round a corner steadily. Usually, writing balances me. Shows me the healthy medium to the stretching spectrum of my thoughts. It tells me where I should focus my energy. I approach it with the dedication that a teaphile brings to a sachet of herbs and collection of porcelain; I believe it to be healing down to my very core.
This is the first time in my life that I feel nothing when I think about the act of writing. It’s scarier than the grief. To sit with it is to hold hands with a nightmare.
6:32 PM
I am angry.
Raging and inconsolable. Things are being taken away from me and all I can do is sit and watch them be ripped out of my hands? This is all that I am reduced to? Weeping listlessness? A drone of despair? No. Something hot floods me then, thick and slow-moving. I eat with a vicious sort of hunger; the kind that is more about the violence of biting than any savoring of taste. I blindly work through an assignment, feeling hate at how useless it feels. All this talk about nothing, I seethe, All of this nothing.
I storm to work, where I tutor students in need, with a thunderstorm nipping my heels. I’m projecting hate into the space around me. If someone wants something from me, they’ll need to be brave and quick about it. There is a lot that I’m missing in the moment, but writing is one of the things that makes me into a kinder, wide-eyed individual. The lack of it, plus the new festering hole in my heart where it usually resides, is blackening with rot, turning me into something new and terrible.
I believe there is no solution to this growing snowball – I will tumble down this hill until I am crushed into nothing, flattened by my own nervous system – and then a student shows up.
She’s exhausted, clearly. Another mirror, I look at the exhausted blink of her eyes, the slow way she pulls out a notebook. The ache of today is a coat on her. She’s younger than me, and maybe it’s because I have sisters, because I’m thinking about their future well-being in between every breath I take today, but something about her breaks the fever of my anger.
There’s a test tomorrow, she explains, in such a way that I can hear her silent: if there even is a tomorrow, and I realize suddenly, starkly, that I want there to be a tomorrow. I want to soothe her. I want to fix something, even if it’s small.
I smile, and I pull out drill sheets. Let’s see what we can do.
As we work, we talk. We’re not dancing around the hanging thing over our heads, but turning our sides to it, letting it float in our peripheral. We acknowledge the reasons for our despair, yet continue to focus on the task ahead, and slowly, definition by definition, word by word, a rope is threaded. Our Black hands are holding onto one another’s, passing along this knowledge, stubbornly creating hope for success. Short-term, only until tomorrow, but still, success nonetheless. A future, despite.
Does this make sense? I ask, regarding the material, but also the world around us, and she laughs in a free way. No, she admits, eyes crinkling. Okay, non-judgmental, then we’ll work through it together.
We walk away from the table lighter, full of something necessary. Like we ate a meal, or hugged. As if there was a simple human wish there that we were able to fulfill for each other.
I’m terrified, she says in the warm night air. We’re lingering, understanding that to leave this moment is to return to the turbulence of everything. I nod. Me too. This is hard. Turning to the thing in the periphery. Giving it notice, but no power. I’ll come to the next session, she says. Will you be here?
And I say, yes, realizing the answer’s truth for the first time, something tight unfurling in my chest.
10:02 PM
I open a word document, and it doesn’t feel like pain lancing through me. I’ve been reading recently, and it lends itself to my vocabulary, my ordering of words. I find art in this creation. I find joy.
The first couple of things aren’t good. It’s just emotion coming through my fingers, I don’t have words for what I am saying yet. I want something that will comfort the girl that came to my tutoring session, the academic advisor unable to show her face, my sisters. I want something to comfort me. Something that will hold me when I crumble. Something that gives me direction.
Recently, I watched a webinar with Dr. Thema Bryant, a clinical psychologist that specializes in trauma research. It was called Cultivating Joy as a Sacred Practice of Resistance. She says that joy is a reserve that you can pull from in times of heaviness. Selecting forces of joy, of strength, of resilience, surrounding yourself with them, and letting them fuel you are all ways of pushing back against the world’s insistence that you are better off miserable.
They want you dead, so surviving, and even better than that, doing so joyously, is how you fight.
Currently, my joy is creating. Whether that’s writing or making pencil drawings on notebook paper. It doesn’t matter. It feeds me, and in a world that’s intending to starve me, it’s deeply necessary. Find your joy, and center your life around it. Make it your medicine.
In any case, I believe that we need to create. We need to create with intention; for someone, for joy, for peace. We need to create intently; sit down and do it, make space to do it, carve out time for it. We need to make creating a routine; practice ritualistically building something with your mind and familiarize yourself with the restorative gift it brings.
If creation involving thought isn’t for you, then create a space. Give yourself a room to go to, fill it with things that bring you peace, settle there and recharge before you come back out. Involve people: look at who is in your life, who you wish was there more often, who gives you something that can’t be received from anything else, and cherish them. Invite them in further. Let yourself have community. Be enriched by them. And while you’re doing so, honor the places that accept you. Breathe life into the spaces that revive us. Our libraries, our classrooms, our affinity spaces. These need to be churches to us. They should be places where people go in order to inhale safety. Places where people can let their hard-locked muscles loosen; let their bones unlatch to rest, fill themselves back up with hope.
That interaction at that singular tutoring session – the sustained belief in one small good – gave me what I needed the entire day. It was vital, just as hope always is. It has always existed, even in the worst of times, and it will always exist if we make space for it.
