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I spent the evening of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election in Lisbon, Portugal.
I had cast my absentee ballot ahead of time, and I had big plans with the other American tech folks attending to watch Hillary Clinton become the first female President from a pub in the middle of town. The evening started off fun, but quickly the mood turned sour, and slowly, and then all at once, people began to peter out and retreat back to their respective hotels or Airbnbs.
Transfixed in a strange state of morbid fascination, I couldn't look away from the TV. I spent the hours from 10 p.m. until 4 a.m. in the tiny lobby of my hotel, eyes glued to the screen, yelling in the general direction of anyone who entered into my periphery. Eventually another American joined me. Together, as the expats abroad, we yelled, we laughed, we cried. We drank beers and whiskey together from the hotel bar until the bartender shut down for the night. Then we took the liberty of hopping over the bar to refill our own pint glasses.
We talked about everything and nothing, me and this stranger. Our panicked anxieties of the world that would be, our absolute bewilderment of the country's descent into chaos. The loneliness of being all alone, on the other side of the world, while the world as you know it is falling apart. That neither of us had any power or control left to exert.
We waited up together, until it was all over. And even before the sun began to rise in Lisbon, we went out onto the streets and yelled together, to everyone and no one: "FUCK!!!!!"
Then we parted ways and went to bed.
In the morning, I remember feeling a profound kind of isolation. I scrolled on my phone through pictures of people in New York City, coming together in some sort of collective mourning, sharing Post-It's all over subway station walls, and I wished that I could have been there, too. To gather. To commune. To grieve.
Eventually I decided to drag myself back to the tech conference, and I wandered around as if in a dream. I feebly greeted other Americans I recognized, but they seemed as shell-shocked by the news as I had been. Nothing seemed to matter. I left in the middle of the afternoon to go and get tapas.
While I waited outside, I noticed a group of other conference attendees waiting with me. I asked them if I could join them, explaining that I was feeling particularly put out from the election results.
"You think you've got a dictator problem?" piped up one person. "I'm from Russia. Just look at what we're dealing with the parliamentary elections two months ago. Putin's dominance is everywhere. You'll get through it."
"I mean..." I interjected. "I guess I just thought I knew Americans a little bit better than that. I thought..."
"...you thought your opinion represented the majority? Ha!" chimed in a woman from the UK, still reeling from the Brexit referendum that has passed just a few months earlier. "When Brexit passed, I was just like you. I don't know if I even want to live in my own country anymore."
"I just don't talk to anyone outside of Berlin," volunteered someone else, from Germany. "All of this hostility against Chancellor Merkel's open border policy to migrants and refugees is disgusting. We have to control what we control."
My myopic American ignorance hit me like a brick truck. Of course, the United States was hardly the first country to be impacted by the growing populist movements around the world. Brexit in the UK, terrorism in France, and anti-immigration sentiment in Europe all contributed to factors that impacted many others.
How lucky, in the end, to be immediately introduced to the global perspective of this bizarre election, to have access to an international collective who would remind me that this was not a single aberation, but in fact a patten indicative of a much more complicated, nuanced, and global reaction.
"Thank you all so much for sharing these stories with me. I just worry that it's getting really scary out there," I confessed.
"Yes, it is..." acknowledged another new friend, from France. Nobody needed to say out loud what we all knew he was still thinking, of the 86 deaths in the Bastille Day parade in Nice just earlier that summer.
"But we get through it. It's just a phase. It'll pass."
I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of their level-headed, world-weary perspective. But, of course, they were right. We took a selfie to commemorate the collective, global group therapy session. In the end, I did feel a lot better.
A lot of things have changed in eight years.
We've been through a lot together, collectively, and individually. We all know a little bit more about what it's like to go through a really tough global change from the loneliness of your own living room. We know the range of emotional turmoil that has been bubbling up in our country and our world, for many years.
But we also know a little bit more about the weight of our own impact. We know what lies within our control, and what fall outside of it. I can choose to model the power of the democratic process for my own daughters. But I can't choose how the rest of the country feels.
I know it sounds strange, but I’m not anxious about what’s coming—tomorrow, next week, this month, or even this year. Whenever that moment arrives, the one that half the country will cheer and half will lament, I will stay the same course. So yes, on Tuesday I will vote, and I will keep my fingers crossed yet again for the opportunity to see our country elect its first female President.
But no matter what happens on Tuesday night, I'll still wake up on Wednesday morning and publish a blog post. On Thursday I'll still facilitate our first kickoff planning meeting for the Manhattan 75, the block association I revitalized this summer for my New York City block. And on Friday, like every Friday, I'll order in pizza dinner for me, the kids, and some friends.
And also. Because I now know that community is the antidote to loneliness, I’m not taking any chances on spending this election night alone. That’s why I’ll be seeing Suffs, the musical about how women earned the right to vote, with 20 friends and neighbors. It's a humble reminder that progress is possible (not guaranteed).
Collect this post as an NFT.
