How A Campaign Staffer Deals with Election Grief

Checks phone obsessively. It’s hard to shake the feeling that if you don’t stare at your screen every second of the day in the highest possible stakes environment that you will be responsible for losing the election. If only we had checked our phones more, we might have won, she laughs.

Sends job descriptions into the world like little message in a bottle life rafts. If they get a new job, they can tell others the good news of all of our hard work so people will remember it.

If no one remembers all the hard work, did it even happen? Jeez god, please remember it because a sleep deficit this serious needs to have been for something.

Start unfriending armchair quarterbacks that you know for a fact never picked up a phone or knocked on a door or sent a text or did literally anything to try to stop a literal Facist from becoming our president.

That’s not fair. Our electoral system is full of white supremacy, our Party needs help, our leaders don’t represent us. Honor folks’ feelings in this moment, this happened to all of us.

Why am I trying to qualify that I understand our electoral system? Why do I care what anyone else thinks in this moment?

Stop working.

Start thinking dark thoughts about your friends who don’t identify as Democrats, don’t even like the Democrat Party but want to talk a lot about how shitty it is. Find your own club. If you had spent even one second inside the Democratic Party at any level you would know more tenacious, solutions oriented people are needed. On second thought…well, ignore that. That thought won’t yield anything productive but it does make me feel good. On third thought, we take all comers. Let’s figure out this messiness together.

Find yourself trying not to make eye contact with people in a room lest they ask you how you are. If only people would stop asking me how I was doing. I feel like someone died, I feel ashamed we didn’t win, I have serious anxiety about my finances, and I desperately wish people would stop asking me to name that all the time.

Check in on your life, the one you let go to hell in a hand basket while you worked 100+ hours a week. Wince at your bank account. Cry at your credit card debt. Wonder if your husband will magically become a billionaire so you can figure out what the hell you want to do in peace — and maybe go see some Broadway shows. Consider posting a GoFundMe for a vacation, which is all you really want right now. Nix the GoFundMe. Post the GoFundMe for your teammate who has $15,000 in medical expenses and whose family is under the threat of deportation. Wonder why Jill Stein raised millions but Nestor still hasn’t met his goal yet. Wonder if you should put your energy into that instead.

Grow increasingly frustrated with people who say things like “don’t mourn, organize.” President Obama is one of those people. You should probably listen to President Obama. Would he write me a permission slip for an extended period of mourning?

Is it armchair quarterbacking when you were part of the team?

Letting your phone die and not charging it is a really good way to stop checking it obsessively.