Thoughts on the election and this time period?

The first thing I have to say is that the suspense was crazy. Everything to do with the election is so crazy and dramatic. I talked about it with Kay in my podcast episode for the week, and we were just saying how stressful it is to have to wait for the results of an extremely important election. I won’t lie, I went to bed at 8:32 pm on election day. I woke up the next day and was horrified at the amount of red states, but then I saw that Biden was leading in electoral votes. I was still stressed about the results, but I wasn’t panicking as much. Then Biden got to 264 electoral votes, 6 away from a win, and Nevada had the votes we needed. I know you’ve seen something about how annoying it is for Nevada to take their sweet old time counting the votes. They had to be scared of the results themselves. Anyways, the next thing I know is a lot of other swing states change from leaning red to leaning blue. Trump had to win every single undecided state to win, so by this time, I was pretty confident that Biden was going to win, and he did. I was recording the podcast this morning, and at the end, we both got notifications that said that Joe Biden is America’s 46th president. He won by 70 electoral votes and he has the biggest popular vote in history.

I was surprised by that fact actually, to me it seemed like it was a razor thin race, too razor thin considering who he was running against. But, no matter how marginal it was, more people have voted for a candidate than ever before in the USA. I also love that Kamala Harris is our first woman, woman of color, and Black woman vice president of the United States.

I don’t know about anyone else, but this year has seemed almost like a book to me. Small things go wrong at first and then increasingly bigger and more pressing things happen, and then the characters remember that there’s an election. The election was intense because of the other things that have happened in the world, and this election was a lot about race, which means that the intensity was crazy. I think the author just wrote the book’s happy ending, though. We don’t know what will happen in the future, and we still have a global pandemic, but a change in leadership represents a big change for the country. It feels like we got rewarded with a beacon of hope and peace as we process this awful year we’ve had.

I also think that friendships have gotten closer in this time period. I feel like people have either lost touch with people or found it. I talk to my best friend everyday and that’s probably partly because we need someone to vent to or just talk to and pretend the world isn’t the worst (not the worst, we’ve had slavery and wars and other terrible things). This might sound weird, but I’m doing better than I usually am. I like school (that part hasn’t changed), I have good friends, and I’m reaching a lot of goals. I’ve gotten close to my dance class too, we’re allowed to share our thoughts and feelings, and I think that has brought us together as a community. This year is terrible but I think it’s brought people together in a way too. When people go through traumatic events, it forges a bond between them.

If you want some suggestions on how to deal with anxiety, I suggest picking up a lot of hobbies, going all out with school or work, not going on social media (just turn on news notifications), talking to friends and family, and playing thinking games. Try to occupy your mind. I recently started playing a word game. You choose a letter and then you and another person go back and forth saying words that start with that letter. You might have to stage an intervention, because it gets quite addicting.

This is probably the most personal a blog post has gotten. I like it. Anyways, I hope you’re well and happy, dear reader.