Everything is bad. It’s what I say now, to “the news,” to every numbly delivered outrage. I say it when someone knows about my former job and catches my eye. I don’t know what they are waiting for me to do. Everything is bad. It’s a cop-out, but it, seems to be, keeping me together. The window to write this, I know, has passed. The subject has been exhausted, what happened has happened and we are here. We are dead inside. That’s another cop-out. Most of this, now, is saccharine and petty and uninteresting. I am tired. Cop-out. I am not fighting, anymore. I am sorry.

The day after, I walked through a North Carolina airport in a determined daze—crying and deliberately looking any stranger who would let me, right in the eyes. I was manic and furious and the task felt aggressive. It felt like my right. More people than you would think met my sobbing gaze. Each time, I would look away first.

Months before, I started working for Hillary Clinton, the first major-party-viable-woman-presidential-candidate, and I, with my colleagues, spent seven-day work weeks in a dorm-like office working to get her there. We were going to. It was our job, but it was also our entire life. It wasn’t pleasant, nor was it miserable. We put our blinders on and we showed up 10am sharp to our morning meeting and we didn’t, really, leave. Many of us were sent out into the field for the last week, one last push, knocking on doors and making phone calls and blue and red signs—manically and deliberately, like actors in the last act of the season. We were ready and I was in North Carolina, wishing it would finally fucking end and I could sleep and live, checking Twitter in bathrooms, and then there it was the day I had lived for: the day after. But instead the worst thing possible happened and I was willing strangers into fights.

For awhile after, I kept reading books about grief. I read When Breath Becomes Air, The Year of Magical Thinking, Dying: A Memoir, I even read What Happened. I don’t know, it seemed like the thing to do. I was hoping I would find some answer—a human recognition of pain or a coping method—but other than the descriptions of the first panicked and angry delirium, I didn’t understand any of it. I did not know. My grief was not a personal death, it did not end. It certainly wasn’t just mine.

The night of, I knew right away. The day itself gave no indication, if anything, I felt vindicated and invigorated—the palpable energy and hope and excitement of a monumental day. It had gotten dark and we were speeding back to Raleigh, the sides of the car making a blurry photograph of the Southern countryside. NPR was saying early Florida wasn’t looking good. I knew. I stopped talking.

In Raleigh everyone in the hotel lobby was drunk. Business casual outfits swirling and the TVs screaming, his horrific smiling headshot taunting from the screens. His smile looks like men I have known. Sweaty strangers kept telling me it would turn, any second, but I knew.

I grieve like an animal going to die. I leave everyone and I hide. I don’t desire touch, or comfort, or presence. I spent the long night in a childhood bedroom of a supporter’s home throwing up from panic. Nights before I had heard my host, a middle-aged woman, saying along with Hillary on the TV, her stump speech woman card line, “Deal. Me. In.” I am thankful I was alone that night, to go through it by myself, away from everyone. That night I did not have to put on a brave face and since then, thankfully, I have not.

I remember, somewhat, who checked in on me. I remember explicitly who didn’t. I kept thinking about Hillary Clinton sobbing in a shower. I kept sobbing in the shower.

During the campaign I was dismayed by my peers and allies—everyone acting like they were too... good to care, much less do even a bit of uncomfortable (and accessible) work. To them, he was a joke and she was embarrassing. I could tell you who I blame. I’m still too angry to know if I am being fair, but I no longer believe in fairness, about the arc of the future bending toward justice. Is that a cop-out, too? I stacked my grief against theirs, yours. My effort, against yours. My effort against my colleagues. I did my best and it doesn’t matter. I was never naive, or disillusioned, enough to believe her reign would save us, but neither was I naive, or disillusioned, enough to believe her loss wouldn’t cataclysmically break us. I do not have a profound lesson from what happened, it just… did. Nor do I believe in silver linings. I don’t believe we will recover. I said this, in a beautiful and naive thing I wrote right before the election, “Yet, the past month broke me in his, a very American, culmination. The thing is, it is not coincidence a man like him is her competition. It's absurd we expected otherwise, and it makes me even more tired, more heartbroken, to be confronted by this reality.”

A very American culmination.

It was never just a campaign or a job, by the nature of a her and well, everything, about him. Even now, he’s still a joke, a “nightmare.” The election is not as neat a metaphor about gender as some make it seem, but it is inescapable and I certainly cannot escape it. I used to say, to normal people, you, that I didn’t want to hear about your election night. I didn’t want to hear about how you hadn’t done anything more than vote, for the first time in 4 years, about your bad attitude, and your shocked sobbing in a bar. About your disdain for her that has so often looked like disdain for women like me.

I still don’t, but I don’t think our grief, mine, means anything anymore. Maybe it did back then. Now we all have this collective mess we are and are not responsible for, and we’re all running around like fucking idiots and I keep saying everything is bad by which I mean “everything is lost.” Cop-out. People are still doing the work and yet even more people are hurting more than I ever did, likely ever will. What I actually mean then is, the grief has grown up. It has become something else entirely.

The only grief book I understood was C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed. The parts, at least, where he seems to have almost lost his faith. Throughout the book he referred to his dead wife, Joy, as “H”—a bit too on the nose. I was comforted by his Job-like nihilism, his deep resentment, and his grief induced laziness and apathy. Like any book of faith, it inevitably disappointed with its gospel. Contracts based on hope and salvation seem less plausible than ever and I haven’t had a god like Lewis’ in a long time. Like all of us, I liked the book the most when it told me what I already almost knew.

I considered What Happened one of the grief books that did not help me and maybe that’s a lie. She wrote this and I think about it often. A woman both maligned and full of mistakes, who experienced for the world to see, an extremely familiar—“womanly,” if you will—indignity, “I can carry around my bitterness forever, or I can open my heart once more to love and kindness. That’s the path I choose.” Once more! Can you believe it.

If you like these letters, would you mind passing them along to a friend, or tweeting about them? xo.