Finally, Hope
Zohran Mamdani ushers in the light, and my depression lifts.
At this particular moment in time, perhaps hope is a subversive act.
I hate being a sucker, so I tend to talk myself out of feeling hopeful. But after election night, I can’t help it. I can feel the change both in my personal life and in politics.
If I were to accurately describe my physical condition right now, it would be the antithesis of self-care.
I was in Virginia for a week. I didn’t sleep more than a few hours a night, can’t remember last sitting down to a balanced meal, and I’m once again in the company of death.
I’m glad—and fortunate—to spend time with one of my lifelong friends as he’s dying. But the first day I got there, the change to his condition was difficult to process.
He’s lived a life devoted to a mastery and delight of the English language. Now he’s struggling to finish a sentence.
I watched his face and could tell he could see the end of his thought. He had the words in his mind.
But he was so weak, he couldn’t vocalize the whole thing. He went back to the beginning, again and again, repeating the same two words, determined to get it right. His head lifted an inch off the pillow with the effort.
Death eventually humbles us all. But to watch this man struggle with language took the wind out of me.
This is familiar territory.
My mom died last year, and I was with her while she died. I suspect the depression I’ve experienced these past two months might be a delayed reaction to her death. To be in death’s environs again is not comfortable.
My friend is leaving, and I’m still firmly attached. Life without him is unimaginable. To witness the process, to simply sit with it—the three of us in the room together, because death is there with us—is more difficult than I’d anticipated.
It’s not like I haven’t done this before.
Life bewilders me. The brevity of it. The point of it. I’ve had one eyebrow raised at the whole business for a long time. I know there are people who don’t suffer from all this doubt, who are able to enjoy life without questioning why, why, why, but I don’t think I’ll ever be one of them.
Everything I write is clunky and awkward. I suddenly realize I’m having the same problem my friend has. I go back to the beginning of the sentence, again and again:
I don’t want to lose him, I don’t want to lose him…
I can’t finish the thought.
I finished writing a book. I finished a book proposal, which was more difficult to write than the book. I picked an agent to whom I wanted to give first refusal, and sent the proposal. I waited.
And then I got depressed. I haven’t touched my book in two months.
The amount of fear that’s developed in this time is so large. It’s filled my body, then seeped through my skin and surrounded me. I swim in a water balloon of fear.
There are the smaller fears: the book is terrible, I won’t get an agent, I won’t get published.
There is the big fear: I will stop trying to get the book published. I’ll give up getting another agent. I will shoot myself in the foot after writing a book about not shooting myself in the foot.
And every time I write an essay, I think it’s the last one.
I realize this kind of fear is self-indulgent. So on top of being a crap writer and a quitter, I am a bore.
I don’t know why that’s so funny, but I just laughed out loud.
Then there’s this weight of living through the Trump era, smothered in despair.
To review the past couple of months: depression, death, fear, despair.
It changed when I least expected it.
I said goodbye to my friend and took a train back to New York Monday morning. The train was delayed in Washington due to the heat, so I was on it all day. What was initially chilly air turned warmer and warmer; Amtrak’s air conditioning seemed to give up the ghost.
By the time I got to Moynihan Station I was hot and exhausted. I stopped in the restroom before heading over to Grand Central to meet Secret Service. I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, whoa. You need some color in your face. You look like a wrung-out dish towel.
I put on some lipstick, a feeble act of hope. Then I decided I looked like a dishtowel with lipstick on it.
I had to wake up at 3:30 the next morning to get to the polls at 5:00, and had a terrible foreboding we’d be working without air conditioning.
I was right.
The first thing to know about being an election inspector is that it involves sitting on a metal folding chair for sixteen hours. There are also dozens of processes involving tiny bits of plastic that securely lock and unlock all the different components of voting apparatus.
I have become an expert at the zip tie.
Every time I record a tiny lock with even tinier numbers on a piece of official paper, I hope that the people who complain about election security will one day become Election Inspectors.
But it’s mainly sitting, and telling the person next to you that you’re going to take a walk for the 20th time.
Tuesday was different. Tuesday was about surviving the heat. There needs to be a bigger word than draining to describe it. Each hour that passed, more of my life source evaporated.
But I worked with a new young man at my table who turned out to be a very interesting fellow.
We talked a lot. Then I met his girlfriend and talked to her.
They were both highly intelligent, but there was something else about him that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
I think it was decency. When his girlfriend and I were talking, he was in the chair between us.
He didn’t look at his phone, he didn’t interrupt us. He didn’t offer his opinion or correct anything we said.
He listened.
If that doesn’t give a woman hope, I don’t know what will.
Working an election is a lot like writing an essay.
There is a point on every election day when the idea of pulling seven more hours is utterly impossible. My back hurts too much, I am too grumpy, I just do not see how it’s possible to get through the day.
There is a point in writing an essay when I realize nothing I’ve written works, and have maybe a paragraph or two that’s usable out of two thousand words.
They are exactly the same place: hopeless.
Hopelessness is a physical place, and it looks a lot like those road barriers in New Jersey, when you go past your exit and can’t make a left turn for seven more miles.
Working an election in the northeast when the temperature is 100 degrees on a June day puts one smack up in the face of climate change. There is no denying the weather is now vastly different than it used to be. I’ve lived long enough to be able to tell you so.
Calculations begin, and they don’t have happy outcomes.
If I live another 30 years, will it be too hot to go outside? How will the human race survive itself?
I looked at my New York Times app and saw Trump speaking to reporters.
He looked like Shrek in a Suit, bloated, cranky, and mean. Iran’s nuclear capacity wasn’t quite as obliterated as he’d thought.
He actually used the word “fuck” because I suppose he was out of them.
Why, I thought for the umpteenth time, have we had to endure this man?
What is the point?
I can’t tell you when it happened.
But I noticed how I was feeling, and I was no longer depressed. It was just a moment, but it was enough.
Something inside me changed. It was as if a mechanic replaced a bad part. I felt myself running again.
I felt normal.
And I knew I was going to spend the rest of this month pitching agents. I wasn’t going to abandon the book.
All I had to do now was get through the hottest day of the year while sitting on a folding chair.
I was kind of hungry, because the hard-boiled eggs I brought exploded out of their shells and into the plastic bag. I had to throw them out.
I was lucky; another woman had a bottle of juice explode in her bag. It sprayed the young man at my table.
That’s how hot it was in the gym. Food and beverages exploded.
It is finally 8:40 pm, which means in twenty minutes, we shut down the polls. Very soon, I will be in my blissfully air-conditioned home. I survived.
At this exact moment I get a text from Secret Service informing me the power just went down at our house.
I feel like a roll of melted Lifesavers stuck between a car seat. Secret Service picks me up, and I can barely speak.
We get home. My iPhone flashlight led the way to the bathroom, where I strip off every bit of soaking wet clothing clinging to my body. I turn on the bath.
The bath helps. The iPhone glows next to it.
Secret Service is already asleep, because he never worries about existential dread.
I lie down next to him and get up two minutes later. Two humans in one room make way too much body heat.
I go into my dressing room and start reading the news. In a half hour, everything changes.
Everything.
At around 11:00 pm, I hear a sound.
It’s the air conditioner turning on. I telepathically tell all Con Ed workers they are worth their weight in gold.
I can’t sleep yet, so I keep reading. And I discover in my beloved New York City, Zohran Mamdani beat Andrew Cuomo in the primary.
The end of the Trump Era begins as suddenly as my depression lifts.
What if nature corrects itself?
If ever nature needed a correction, if ever evolution went awry, the Decade of Donald has got to be it. It must end for the sake of our species.
Point of order:
Donald Trump was born during a total lunar eclipse. Mother Nature couldn’t have warned us more; someone with the motherlode of bad karma was headed our way.
The GOP really could have used Nancy Reagan’s astrologist in 2016.
And now, light.
Zohran Mamdani. Because as sure as Trump was born into darkness, Mamdani was born into light.
I don’t know a lot about Mamdani, but what I do know delights me: he is an unapologetic progressive. He isn’t ashamed to be a Democratic Socialist.
This nation needs progress and progressives, and the DNC needs to stop apologizing for us like we’re the crazy cousins because we want to make America more habitable for everyone.
Enough already—if you want to be the party of change, embrace change.
What I didn’t realize about Mamdani initially is that his mother is Mira Nair, award-winning director of one of the most beautiful films of my lifetime, Monsoon Wedding.
I defy anyone to watch the movie and not be moved by the love his mother has for people. It is filled with gorgeous color, music, and humanity. It is a celebration of the beauty in and between humans.
And his father—his father!—is Mahmood Mamdani.
Dr. Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University. He marched for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Alabama the year I was born. He was voted number nine in the top 20 public intellectuals in the world in 2008.
People may not be their parents. But don’t tell me Zohran Mamdani didn’t grow up in one of the brightest households in the United States. New York City is now going to be the beneficiary of his mind, and with any luck, our nation will as well.
He is everything Trump is not, except they’re both from Queens.
Trump is from the Queens of landlords with civil rights violations who developed property and accumulated wealth from government subsidies. He is third in a line of ruthless people devoid of the most basic scruples, and is blatantly racist.
Mamdani is from the Queens which is the heart and soul of New York City, where people from every culture live as neighbors. He was born into love, beauty, art, and intellect.
Like the young man sitting next to me working the election, Mamdani has human decency.
We’re in a decency deficit. We need him.
Because in the end, that’s what depresses me about our nation under Trump: our gross indecency.
Suffering is not eternal. I still don’t understand the point of it. But we are moving out of the era of the total eclipse, and into the era of the human spirit.
Nature is correcting itself.
I hope.
Absolutely loved this.
Just a fabulous piece! You have outdone yourself!