Captain's Log, Day 24: What Happens Tomorrow?

 Date: November 2, 2020

Time of post: 8:05 PM

Quarantine Day: 222

Last Song I Listened To: “Change” by Taylor Swift

Last Person I Communicated With: GroupMe groupchat

Last Thing I Ate: chips and queso

Last Thing I Read: oh, definitely some fanfic; it’s been a great coping mechanism

Current Mood: ANXIOUS AF

One Thing I’ve Accomplished Today: sent some emails I guess

One Thing I Want To Accomplish Today: dishes and cleaning, but that’s not happening today

One Reason I’m Stressed Today: Wow, I wonder…not like tomorrow if a defining moment of American history or anything…

One Reason I’m Happy Today: the Young Adult Studies Association’s conference is this week, and I’m presenting at it; Little Mix’s new album drops on Saturday!

 

Dear Apocalypsers,

It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? And a lot has happened—some things that I could talk about and some things that I can’t, but, in all ways, October was a long month.

And now it’s November.

Yikes.

November 3, 2020 was always going to be an important date. We’ve known that since 2016, but given every other indescribably shitty thing that’s happened this year—which, if you ask me, can all be tied back to T*ump at least in part if not in entirety—tomorrow is even more important that we could have imagined (if that’s possible).

Last week, Noelle asked in group chat if we wanted to Zoom on Election Night. And, for some reason, that really solidified for me what tomorrow could be. I don’t want to be hyperbolic or seem like I’m trivializing this moment, but it got me thinking, “Who would you want to be with if you knew the world was ending?” Dr. Tatonetti asked us that same thing on our first day of Apocalypse back in January—back when the concept of an apocalypse was more fiction than reality for most of us. Back then, we chose family members, friends, famous survivalists and athletes. We had reasons, both practical and sentimental, that were sometimes sensible and sometimes funny.

That feels like a lifetime ago.

Because, now, the fact of the matter is that we’re standing on a precipice, and we don’t know what America looks like after tomorrow. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe Biden wins and we can have genuine hope and optimism for the first time in years. (This is the only option I want to entertain.) Or maybe the unthinkable happens, and we have four more years of things getting worse—more racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia and Islamophobia and violence and fear mongering and hundreds of thousands of more deaths from COVID-19 alone.

So who do I want to be with when I get that news?

Who do I want to be with when I breathe a sigh of relief or curl up into a ball and cry?

The friends I’ve made in grad school—these friends who are practically family now—are definitely a good option.

I remember the 2016 election. I was editor of my undergrad newspaper, The Chanticleer, at the time. It was actually my first semester as editor. We were still working on 2007 Mac desktops that crashed if you opened more than 2 tabs, so I designed the front page in advance: with Hillary Clinton winning.

I honestly didn’t think T*ump would win, but as my roommates and I sat up that Tuesday night, I vividly remember Jennie looking at me, her face white, and saying, “Katie, she can’t win. There aren’t enough points left.” And I said what I always do when I don’t want to believe something: “No.”

But she was right. And I’ll always remember that moment, because everything changed.

I’ve come a long way in the last 4 years. This is the kindest I’ll be to the year 2020, but it’s forced me to confront a lot of my innate biases. It’s forced me to be louder about social justice in public; I like to think I’ve been a pretty good ally on personal level for a while, but I realized that these are issues that need to be screamed about on every platform that I have. Because, yes, I’m a woman, and I have—and will continue to—face discrimination because of that, but I’m a white person entering academia. I have the opportunity ahead of me to support writers and creators and academics of color, to buy their work and write about it and cite their articles and tweet about them—and I can start doing that now. I should. And I can do the same with the LGBTQIA community. Some of the most talented and thoughtful and brilliant people I’ve ever met have fallen into one or both of these communities, and it’s a disgrace that they’re statistically less likely to be recognized than cisgender, heterosexual white people.

I can’t even imagine how hard the last 4 years have been for them and how I may have contributed to those hardships in small, unconscious ways.

But I’ve been trying really hard the last several months to change my behavior and to be more aware, to speak up when I have a political opinion, to be more careful and thoughtful about my purchases and where my money is going. And I’m ready to see that change on a national level.

I don’t have much to say, for once. Just that I’m scared but I’m stubbornly optimistic; I’m a sick to my stomach but I’m gritting my teeth; and I have so much love and respect for the people on the front lines of this fight, from nurses and doctors to Democratic campaign managers in battleground (or historically red) states.

And to everyone T*ump and his people have hurt this year and the previous 3, I’m sorry. You deserve better. And I’ll keep saying that as long as I have the breath to do so.

So I’ll leave you with this goosebump-inducing political ad that dropped earlier this week featuring, for the first time ever, one of Taylor Swift’s songs.

 

And, now more than ever, may the odds be ever in our favor,

Katie