Sometimes the body knows first.

It is about midnight in New Orleans, where I live. My four year-old-son is asleep in my bed; my husband has gone to sleep in the spare bedroom. From my perch in front of the television, I look in the direction of each room, knowing I should join one of them. The responsibilities of the next day are clawing at the corners of my wine-dulled mind, but I can’t imagine sleeping without knowing if this nightmare is really coming true. I resolve, however, to try.

As I get up to start turning out lights, I begin to shake. I breathe in, I breathe out, and try to collect myself. Did it get really cold in here? I check the thermostat — still seventy-four degrees. Sometimes a swift change in temperature seems to trigger my anxiety. Sometimes a tiny skip of the heart that other days I wouldn’t notice, unleashes the fear beast. I have learned mental tricks to put it back in its cage, but this terror isn’t going anywhere. My jaw clamps down tight and I feel like the muscles in my arms and chest are contracting and conspiring to pull me into a fetal ball. I fall on the couch, shivering. I can’t get in bed with my son like this or I’ll wake him up, and my poor shift-working husband needs to sleep, too.

I lay there, helpless, as the electoral votes add up.

The shivering becomes so violent that I start to question whether this is anxiety, or some sort of medical emergency. Waves of nausea start passing over me. I moan. I have felt this way on one of three types of occasions in my life: when I have been poisoned, when I have grieved a death, and when I gave birth. Conscious breathing is doing nothing. Acknowledging the feelings in my body, knowing that they are just feelings, knowing that they will pass, and that I will be on the other side soon — none of that is working.

I am dying. I need a tranquilizer. I do not have a tranquilizer. They have them at the hospital. I need to go to the hospital. That will be expensive, will terrify my kid, and absolutely ruin tomorrow. Maybe I will run a bath. I might have to crawl to the bath. Do I have food poisoning? That pork chop my husband made was a little pink. But, no, he and the kid are fine. That chicken Caesar salad I had for lunch at the hospital was clearly on its way out. The hospital, the flu shot. Is this because of the flu shot? They wouldn’t just give out shots that could do this. I am clearly dying.

Trump is going to win.

I can’t take it on my own anymore. I wake up my husband. I sob. I shake in his arms. I tell him through clenched, chattering teeth that I don’t know what’s happening to me. I moan. I ask him to put me in a hot bath. Time passes strangely. The veil between worlds is very thin. He puts me in warm clothes and his big socks and I take his spot in the guest bed, while he climbs in bed with our son. I fall asleep, but am roused every hour until sunrise by violent heaving that brings me just enough to consciousness to think, “Oh my God, Trump is president,” and then hurl forth whatever bile remains in my stomach.

It may have been a bad reaction to a vaccination, or possibly severe food poisoning, but whatever it was, I know it was exacerbated by extreme emotional distress. I have been diagnosed with an anxiety “disorder,” but I would like to argue that perhaps it is not a disorder at all, but that anxiety is quite “in order” in a world gone so mad. Anxiety starts as a feeling in the body. The story goes that it is the fight or flight response run amok. We are programmed to run from natural predators who no longer exist, yet we have this vestigial response that goes haywire sometimes. But I, like so many other women I know, particularly the ones who have been victims of sexual violence, have a visceral response of revulsion and fear when they see an image of Trump. We know a predator when we see one, and his being elected is doing actual violence to us.

In my fever dreams that night, I was the earth and also grieving for the earth — the way we can, only in dreams, glimpse being both a thing and also outside of the thing. Yes, there is healthcare, and the Supreme Court, and all these manmade things to be distressed about, but in my deepest depths I know that we are well past the point of being able to keep catastrophic climate change and all its nightmarish consequences from unfolding without some sort of Herculean Hail Mary by all the countries of the world. And, when we picked Trump as our leader, we picked hurtling ourselves toward our own destruction. We picked the continued subjugation of women and people of color, and the unspeakable atrocities we perpetrate on the animal world. We picked war and greed. We picked plundering the last of the earth’s resources, turning into commodities the last of her gifts: the seeds, the water, perhaps even the breathable air.

A few days out, I mostly see attempts to normalize the results of this election. People are trying to put it into some sort of workable context, so they can carry on with their lives. But creating a false equivalency between this and past elections is denying that the public is being told lies by fraudulent news outlets, and therefore cannot make the informed decisions that democracy demands. It denies that the man we elected is a dangerous criminal, misogynist, and bigot, and his election incites violence and produces trauma. We must do everything we can to stop this transfer of power, because our very lives depend on it. People will tell us to be rational. They will tell us that we must accept it for the sake of our democracy, but I argue that electing a fascist was the real blow to democracy. I lay it back at their feet. Still, days later, when the work of the day is done and I get a quiet moment, I begin to shiver and feel ill at the thought of it all. My body knows that what has happened is much worse than what my mind can yet conceive.