Spent

Black and white photo of a girl in winter clothes (jacket and beanie) looking away from the camera. The background is white, her hair shields her face from the view (it looks blonde), and her hands are in her pockets.
I am not going to pretend the election didn’t affect me.

I don’t know which candidate I wanted to win more until I learned Trump won.

I saw it coming, because

  1. Presidents usually run for a second term, and they usually receive it.
  2. Once a particular party is out of office, the other party enters. Or it’s one Democrat/Republican party every eight years.

Patterns: they’re not utterly pointless, and you actually use them every single day.

I live in and rely on patterns to make my life decisions and determine which action is best.

Trump’s entire campaign was that of a business marketing campaign: create a solution to a common problem, inspire the fear of missing out and resolving the problem, pretend the customer is always right, and lie when necessary to make the sale.

I saw through it, because I’m part of a blog group on Facebook. There are over 30 thousand members, but all have blogs and/or businesses, and/or working on starting one or both. The same patterns are followed.

It’s reminded me why my web series are important to me: I want to break the typical advertising patterns and avoid particular show tropes. If people are interested after that, awesome. If not, it’s not for them. Even if only ten people watch the first season, but they all have ten friends of their own, whom they also tell, that’s 110 people. If the same 110 people tell five additional friends each, that’s over half of a thousand—a little under one hundred short of the amount of people in my [high school] graduating class.

But I digress.

I feel dirty, because our new president won via a sleazy marketing ploy. I favored none of the candidates this election, but I had to choose one, because I had to vote because my vote supposedly matters. So I selected whomever I felt best equipped—extends beyond experience and wealth—and happily collected my sticker for bragging rights.

I selected the people I felt best equipped.

I selected them on my ballot.

Isn’t that what every citizen who votes does? Isn’t that how the process goes? We, the citizens of the United States of America, selected the people we felt best equipped to represent us and act on our behalf—to listen to us and care for us and keep us safe.

We, humans, voted in the 2016 Presidential Election.

Then, the Electoral College, a man-made system comprised also of humans, selected the next president.

To say God chose the next president—but dismiss every other democratic president of the USA, actions of murderers and the aftermath of natural disasters—is a travesty.

I try not to use the Bible as a weapon, so I’m not going to bring my own interpretations of scripture into this argument. I’m trying to be better at this—at not altering what the Bible says to fit into my own biases. It’s one of the ways the church has failed me as a human being: spatting out biblical verses isn’t love; it taints one’s entire perspective of religion and faith, and God in general.

So I won’t.

Trump met with evangelical leaders, who are now supporting him. There is this thing floating around that he is the King David of our time, or whatever, and I call BS.

But I’m too spent to argue.

It’s not like debating actually works, anyway. You tell someone something is illegal, but they justify why they do it anyway—then call it an opinion.

You’re allowed to debate with someone so long as you agree to their side (opinion) in the end, despite the facts.

You aim to love more, because being filled with hate and surrounded by people full of it only makes you want to be a hateful person, but are then called a “hippie”, or my new favorite: uneducated millennial.

I haven’t blogged about my autism in a while because I was already feeling spent. Now, I’m more scared than I was before. People hate us already. You wouldn’t believe how many ways allistic people come up with ways to tell autistic adults to their faces how much they want us to die. They love telling us what we “should” do.

I am spent.

So excuse me if need to take a step back from all the activism. Hyper-empathy makes me a sponge. #NoDAPL protests already had me stressing myself. Countless able-bodied people and celebrities have vowed to fight for the minorities.

This is one I need to sit out. I’m not giving up. I’m spent. If I push through further—if I use what little energy I have to wrap my head around how it’s OK for a friend to abandon me for three days from election night, to send only a petition link and disappear again—I will be back in the darkness I fear more than what this next president will do.

I feel honored to live in a time when a woman ran for president. I am in awe by Hillary’s ability to do what I couldn’t as a child: to remain quiet and collected when a man much bigger and monetarily powerful than her insulted her again and again and again; and to continue speaking, even when the same man interrupted her.

I will continue tweeting and supporting the #NoDAPL movement, because I am first a Native American, and God’s land needs protecting—and it’s all I’ve extra energy for.

(Also: Excuse me for having the audacity to decide against overexerting myself so I can help you with your [allistic] problems. I’m just a self-advocating autistic who has fought and fought and fought, who feels like Autism $peaks just won the election. BUT HEY, NO BIG DEAL.)

Love on your autistic friends, coworkers, etc. Tell them they matter—actually mean it, with all your heart. Hug the autistic in your life a little longer today, tonight, tomorrow—whenever your next chance is. Ask them about their special interests.

Send love.

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