To Divide or To Continue

Like you, I am overwhelmed by thoughts and emotions after the election. This is my attempt to catch some of the overflow.

On election night, in the back of Yu & Me Books in Manhattan Chinatown, a friend gives me feedback on a personal essay about love. It is evident that I write like a romantic.

I try to explain that I hadn’t always been a romantic, that I used to be, and then I wasn’t, and now I am again. I say a slew of words that mean nothing. It bothered me, later, that I didn’t say what I meant.

The rest of the conversation is hot water and my thoughts are unfurling tea leaves. We talk about Rothman’s dividers and continuers, which are two types of people. The dividers experience time and self episodically. The continuers view themselves and their time as an ongoing narrative. Dividers see their past selves as different people. Continuers, well, continue to be themselves.

What am I? Gen-Z has a tendency to divide. We like to start and stop. We measure ourselves in “eras.”

“I’m in my love era,” I repeat to myself. “I’m ending my cynic era.”

I promise myself no phones or group chats on Tuesday because checking the votes won’t change the outcome. But after talking about writing and love, thoughts swirl around my head, all black and caffeinated. On my walk home, I text my friends as I usually do when I feel like I am overflowing. But people at home are watching the election results come in and crying in the living room. One friend answers me:

This is a fair response. That’s how I found out.

It is a strange feeling for Trump to win the election while I am on a visit to New York. At first it feels like a vacation gone awry and maybe everything could be righted by going home. Then I realize the despair would only follow me onto the Amtrak. Could I find solace in friends? Not when everyone is grieving too.

The general loneliness I felt everyday was compounded a million times that night. The ugly truth is that my fear morphed into jealousy. I envied people who could turn to someone who represented comfort for them in times like this. I’m trying to be better about that, about turning the world’s problems into my personal sorrows.

Without a place or person of comfort, I turn to time. I want to return to before, to the backroom in Yu & Me Books, with those three arm chairs, the yellow glow of the lamp and the stacks of free books, except I know what I mean to say this time.

That’s what I’d say. 

All the while, outside of Yu & Me Books, America tips away from hope. Is the room swaying too? There is no before and after, actually. America has been tipping long before the election and though we are divided, we are people next to people, careening continuously until we find ourselves completely upside down.

I write out of fear, out of loneliness, out of the lack of love. I worry that my need to write interferes with my ability to talk. I worry that my feelings interfere with my ability to think. I worry that I should mark time and identity with progress, rather than hope. 

Perhaps love makes me the idiot, but it gets me to tomorrow.