On second acts and starting over.

We can and we will, come back from this. Stronger.

Dawn after dawn, we write the story of the future in the ink of present-day resilience.

We lost.

We lost and it sucks.

I don’t have all the answers here, lord knows I wish I did, I don’t even have “most” of the answers when it comes to what the fuck went wrong and what the fuck we do now.

Look, if I had all the answers to the myriad of life’s questions big and small, I definitely wouldn’t have cut bangs back in 1992 because I would have known that I’d end up looking like the love child of Dorothy Hamill and Twiki, I wouldn’t have given my insanely well curated hockey card collection to my nephews before I had kids of my own, I wouldn’t have plucked the living fuck out of my eyebrows because I didn’t then know that they don’t really come back because no one told us (why didn’t anyone tell us??) and I sure as shit would not have hooked-up with that pint-sized, Chucky looking red headed dude I drunk-met at a pool hall. Once, let alone twice. Good grief I’ll never understand that one, he was so… weird and… wee… but I digress.

At this point, we’ve all heard at least 79,521 different “answers” for why this happened and even more “plans” for what we need to change. So-called experts, pundits, politicos, party leaders and electeds have their theories, their fingers of blame, and their analysis, and while most of it is probably true in some capacity or another, there’s not been one “answer” which covers all of it succinctly. There simply isn’t “one.” Likewise, there’s not been, nor will there be, some ground shifting single epiphany of clarity in the plan for the path ahead.

Much of what we came into this election with needs to be dismantled and much of what we move forward with needs to be built from scratch.

Of course, I too have my own thoughts and opinions on these things. But I personally have a lot less interest in the hyper-focus on the autopsy report on what went wrong, than I do in the outside the box (and the beltway tbh) brainstorming for what we can do next. But I understand that you can’t get to the latter, without at least considering the former.

And so I think about all of this, all the time. I can try to stop my brain and my head and my heart from doing so, but ultimately, the thoughts find me all the same.

The truth is that every day feels like a tug of war between getting up and giving up. I’m constantly trying not to think about the reality of the next 2 years let alone the next 4, but it never lasts long. No matter how I try to distract myself and distance myself from the dark thoughts, they always come anyway.

No matter how many trolls I punch in the nose on Twitter, or how many videos I make calling them out on one bullshit thing or another, once I really lean into the reality of what’s to come, it brings me down.

I start feeling depressed. Defeated. Discouraged. Disengaged.

Done.

I’m sure a lot of us feel that way. How can we not, right? This shit is dark. Dark as fuck. It can feel like it’s going to swallow us whole. That we are stuck. Stuck accepting all the awful. Stuck in an inescapable, suffocating reality. Stuck to the point of giving in to the idea that it will never change. That it’s all over. That we should quit.

And while I’ve 100% contended with those feelings every day, I don’t yield to them. I don’t let them overtake me. I don’t let them decide my reality FOR me. I force myself up, I crack my knuckles, apply my eye black, smoke an imaginary cigarette and grab an imaginary hot guy by the back of the neck and stick my tongue down his throat (this is imaginary friends I swear and ok ok, maybe I need to date more), and then I get the fuck back in the fight.

And what I’ve realized now, as I try my damnedest NOT to imagine the largely predicable carnage of what’s to come, is that I may know fuck-all about the “data” on the ten million ways we got here, and I don’t have a goddamn clue in how to organize people to push forward (I can’t even organize my damn sock drawer), what I CAN do, what I do KNOW, what I’ve become nearly expert in over the course of the last 6 years of my life, is how to rebuild from ashes.

How to comeback, stronger. How to start over successfully. How to have a second act that makes the first one look like a dress rehearsal with the understudies.

I know, because I’m living it.

If someone had said this to me a few short years ago when I was at my lowest, I probably would have stopped listening, smiled politely and mumbled “fuck off” before tuning them out and grabbing the box of donut holes.

Sure, sure — all I had to do was change the way I “thought” about things — of course, it’s that simple, right? Take each day as it comes and try to imagine what I’d like to be different. Blah blah blah.

I know exactly what I thought back then whenever anyone would give me unsolicited advice for ways to be “happier”. Anyone who told me to try to reframe my own thinking. The “if you really set your mind to it, you can do anything” folks who pissed me the fuck off.

‘Well, for starters, I would like to wake up every day not dreading the endless sea of suck that is my existence.’ I thought.

‘And then I’d like to imagine myself supermodel skinny so a certain someone with whom I technically cohabitate would desire me again, and not tell me that I was “too fat to fuck.”… I will just imagine it and “poof”, it will be done right?’

I would get so damn mad at people who said it was possible to turn my life around. To “pick my chin up.” To start over. And I thought that unless Ed fucking McMahon was at my door with a comically large check for some sweepstakes shit I didn’t understand and didn’t remember entering, nothing was gonna change. Ever.

And it all just made the suck — suckier.

I didn’t want to believe it, because being mired in the muck of mundanity was far too easy for me to be bold enough to actually try something new.

So, the deeper I would descend into the darkness instead.

“In the midst of darkness, light persists. Mahatma Gandhi

And then after all that downward sliding, I suddenly stopped. I had reached the end of the slide. The edge underneath me was all that was left to hold onto. If I let go, I would not ever come back.

That’s when everything I loved flooded my body and my brain like a tsunami. Snapshots of time passed flashed before me. Meeting my babies for the first time. Hearing them cry out for me when they’d scraped a knee. The way nothing in all the world could ever rest my heart and mind, body and soul like having one of them soundly and blissfully asleep on my lap.

And then the images changed. Then it was hazy images of time that had not yet come. Graduations, proms, wedding days, grand babies. The future I wouldn’t be there to see. The future I couldn’t help shape.

I wasn’t there. And it took my breath away. Teetering there on that precipice, so close to letting myself slide over. But I didn’t.

I held tight and slowly, day by day, minute by minute, despite the persistent sliding backwards, I began to pull myself out. Until I could start to see the flicker of light up ahead.

I had a destination. And that’s when I really began the work.

I didn’t have enough money to buy groceries, my broken roof meant when it rained outside it also rained INSIDE, my house was being forced up for sale, and I didn’t know how I was going to dig out.

The first step was wanting to do it.

The second step was believing I could.

And the third step, was starting.

One day, one step at a time.

I had to learn how to heal my trauma. The lifetime of abuse I had used as an excuse.

I had to learn how to reshape my mindset on what “failure” was. I had to remind myself a hundred times a day that I hadn’t failed at all when I didn’t get the outcome I was seeking. I had instead, gained insight into what I should do differently, and then I tried that, and even if it never did ultimately get me the thing I thought I wanted, it almost always led to something even better.

And the harder I worked, the stronger I became, and the taller the staircase I was building beneath me became.

I learned to say “I will.”

“I will” not “I’ll try.”

I learned to be relentless. Even when, especially when, I got knocked down, looked past or stepped over.

Even more so when I was staring down a bully.

Relentless.

My journey ain’t over. Not by a mile. I’m still working and I will work for the rest of my life, because I can’t see the whole path before me, and I’m excited to keep walking forward to see what comes next.

There will be missteps, slips and slides back. But I believe in myself. I beleive I will keep moving forward. And so I do.

Relentless.

And I know that my party, this country, the American people WILL too.

We might feel like we’re sliding into the endless black right now, and we have every right to feel that. Not everyone is ready to claw their way back up yet, a lot of folks might never be.

But I truly, honestly, fundamentally believe that fighting for the future we want a role in shaping for all those we will leave behind, that focusing on all that we love, is enough to keep us from slipping over the edge.

The path ahead won’t be easy. It won’t be seamless. It won’t be without its stops and starts. But we have the advantage of having a destination we can see.

We have defeated Donald Trump before. We have and we WILL again.

We will work to uncover the path together. One day, one step at a time.

I know we want to.

Now, we have to beleive we CAN.

And then, we have to start.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. -F. Scott Fitzgerald

I love you guys. I believe in all of you.

I know we will stick together. I know we will fight. I know we will lift each other up.

I know we will have a second act. We will emerge stronger. We will get there. And it will be glorious.

🎶 …but what it takes to cross the great divide

Seems more than all the courage I can muster up inside

But we get to have some answers when we reach the other side

The prize is always worth the rocky ride 🎶

With love always, Jo ❤️