Well, this freaking sucks.

It is no secret that I voted for Hillary Clinton this past Election Day. I was proud to vote for her, enthused to vote for the first female president of the United States who promoted ideas of tolerance and inclusion and being stronger together. I genuinely, truly believed she would win. This was the nastiest, most vile campaign in recent memory, maybe in this country’s history; it was long, violent, heartbreaking and embarrassing, and everyone just wanted it to be over. I thought it would end with a resounding victory for love and decency, that this incredibly dark chapter in the history of this country would be worth it because it ended on a note of optimism and hope.

I was dead wrong.

Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, I watched with mounting dread, apprehension and depression as Trump won more and more states. So many states went to...Him. The guy who spent years claiming our first black president wasn’t born here, who started his campaign on day one by saying Mexicans were rapists and killers, who bragged about grabbing women by the p*ssy. I couldn’t believe it.

My boss and I were texting, both of us liberal election junkies, and we were both melting down. The pundits of MSNBC seemed to act in increasing incredulity as the night wore on, and the people of CNN were as confused and bewildered as the people of CNN have ever been (which is saying something, because it’s CNN).

At about 11:30pm, I switched over to Stephen Colbert’s live election night special on Showtime, needing some levity, needing someone to tell me that it was going to be alright, no matter what happened (I should point out I have been an ardent, passionate, and obsessive Colbert fan since the summer of 2008, before my freshman year of high school, as the guy just gets everything that I’m about, is someone for whom I couldn’t have more love, and has a way of making me laugh even in my darkest of times).

The show started lightly and comically but gradually grew darker and darker throughout the hour as Trump’s victory became apparent, with Colbert saying at one point he “[didn’t] know how to be funny right now” and unironically asking someone “What the f*ck is happening?” Then the special ended with a largely improvised, now-viral monologue centered on Colbert trying to make sense of everything, in which he touched upon humanism, his deceased mother, the state of decency and Kit Kats, that left me in tears.

Disheartened, crushed, and broken, I went to bed, unable to sleep and checking my phone incessantly until Pennsylvania was called. When that happened, I knew it was over. I cried some more and forced myself to sleep (spoiler alert: It wasn’t a good sleep).

The mourning morning after, I came downstairs to see my mom crying. I had to look my sister – my amazing, intelligent, hilarious, clever, as-beautiful-on-the-outside-as-she-is-on-the-inside sister who was adopted from Guatemala and has been a US citizen for nearly a decade – in the face after we elected the guy who started his campaign by saying she’s a rapist and killer. I’ve spent the past few days hugging so many of my loved ones.

I saw a friend from across a sidewalk and we just walked into a hug. I sat down next to another friend, we sighed heavily at one another, and we shared a hug. I saw my boss, who couldn’t bring himself to come into work Wednesday after having to console both himself and his even-more distraught wife (another dear friend of mine), Thursday, and we just looked at each other, shared a huge, and said, “It’s going to be okay.”

An openly gay friend of mine who was the biggest and most passionate Hillary supporter I know (he has so many shirts and buttons and even canvased on the weekends) walked into a room when I happened to be standing near the doorway, and, without even thinking or asking or hesitating, I gave him a hug (we’ve hugged three times since then, because we’ve needed it).

And, most importantly, I hugged my amazing, brown sister so tightly and so many times. I don’t know if it all was more for me or for everyone else, but the love needed to be felt. I shared so much on social media and cried more over this any political event, with Hillary’s concession speech being especially difficult (her line about how, despite this, little girls still have value, combined with the fact that we live in a world where that has to said, will always devastate me, as I cannot hear Hillary say it or see it replayed or even read the remarks without tearing up).

How did this happen? I thought love was supposed to trump hate.

Instead, love lost. Love didn’t trump hate. Hate trumped love.

And, to me, this is the most devastating thing of it all.

This election, we had two candidates with two vastly different ideologies at their core: On one side, we had Donald Trump, an entitled, narcissistic xenophobe who preyed upon white disenfranchisement, base fears and intolerance while promoting the most indescribably abhorrent ideas, all of which was in a blatant power-grab in a thinly-veiled effort to prove he is better than everyone else, and this is a thing he feels he has to do because daddy didn’t hug him enough and he’s insecure about the size of his penis hands; on the other side, we had Hillary Clinton, a flawed but decent candidate who promoted progressive policies designed to help the most people while understanding that progress happens incrementally and with the help of others and did all of this while promoting positive messages of inclusivity, tolerance, togetherness, and, yes, love.

That, that right there, is the thing that gets me: We had the first female nominee of a major US political party who was running on a platform of decency, tolerance and love, and she was going to defeat the man who is the exact antithetical of everything that she stands for. We were going to have our first female president, and she was going to win because she loved everybody, and she was going to defeat the wretched hatemonger.

I thought that’s the country we were at the end of the day, a country who loved other people, who actually encourage the presence of your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. “South Park” did this bit last year in lampooning to the angry white vote Trump was courting by decrying immigrants and their lament that they lost their country; a belligerent teacher from the town’s elementary school became so frustrated with a flood of immigrants into his town that he fell into a presidential campaign based on the slogan of “f*ckin’ ‘em all to death.” In the episode, the character, Mr. Garrison, sings a song called “Where My Country Gone?”

When I first saw it, I remember thinking it brilliantly and beautifully parodied the idea of the angry white person, because America isn’t any one person’s or group’s country, but it’s all of our country (we’re supposed to be a damn melting pot, okay).

In the days since Trump’s victory, though, I find myself wondering: In hindsight, is this song about me? The America I thought I knew, the America I loved, isn’t here right now. I knew it was fissured and divided and beyond messed up, but I thought, I genuinely believed, that love would trump hate, like it’s supposed to. Now, though... Now, I don’t know. My view of this country, of the world, of humankind as a whole, has been shaken to its core.

I understand that not all Trump supporters were as vile and repugnant as he is. I get that not all of the over 60 million people who voted for him are what he is. I know that, but that’s not the point: The point is that we said his values are okay. We said “okay” to the racism, misogyny, classism, nativism, bigotry, xenophobia, bullying, rape culture, all of it. Purely by voting for him, we rewarded his behavior, and we enabled others to commit further atrocities in his name. If the President of the United States did it, so can anyone else.

Beyond that, I want him to be a good president; heck, I want him to be the best darn president we’ve ever had. I do not wish him ill, and I do not want him to fail; having said that, I am ineffably afraid he’s going to, and the only people who pay the price are the people of this country.

My heart is broken and is breaking. I, obviously, have this tremendous pain and am grieving, not just for myself but for all of my loved ones who will be negatively affected by the policies we’re likely going to see in the next four years. Because I’m a straight, white, cisgender man, and the worst thing that will happen to me is I lose my insurance when the Affordable Care Act is repealed, but I’m still, always, going to be a straight, white, cisgender man.

I’m the identity people want, the identity that threw a hissy-fit at the thought of not having all the power in society so then elected American Hitler. No matter what, I’m generally going to be okay despite probably strife, but I’m largely alone in that. Women, African-Americans, LGBTQ, Hispanics, Muslims, the disabled, their lives are going to get even harder than mine; for the people of those communities and so many others, I am so, so sorry. I’m sorry this is the country we live in now, but I love you all so, so deeply.

And that idea, loving all people, brings me to my final point of this messy, overlong nonsense (I swear I’ll write, like, one sentence for next week, but consider me this famous character from “Mean Girls” with a lot of feelings): We need to love each other. We have to be kind to one another. Now more than ever, it is all we have. We have to remember that every negative emotion we’re feeling was felt eight years ago when Barack Obama became the first black president and four years ago when he became the first-second black president.

We can tell ourselves we’re on the right side of history all we want, the just side, but that doesn’t change the fact they told themselves the same thing and their emotions felt as real to them then as ours feel to us now. Having said that, we have to get angry, and we have to take that anger and turn it into action, a fight for what we believe in. Because we aren’t just fighting for our individual selves, but we’re fighting for everyone we love who is different, who deserves fair and equal treatment purely because they’re humans and they’re alive.

The next four years are going to be the hardest intranational conflict the US has faced since maybe the Reconstruction Era, the period after the Civil War when the US tried to rebuild and also figure out what to do with all these newly emancipated black people, but we cannot forget to love one another. It’s all we have.

A show whose existence I am appreciative of more and more every day, “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” featured a bit with producers going to voting locations and spoke to both Hillary and Trump supporters and bring everyone together. The whole segment is worth watching, but toward the end, something truly remarkable happens: A Trump supporter, so distraught at how nasty and atrocious things have gotten loses his cool, starts tearing up, and hugs a Hillary supporter.

About 40,000 words ago I mentioned my love for Stephen Colbert. I’ve been a fan of his since his days on Comedy Central on “The Colbert Report.” He played a character on the show, someone he often described as a “well-intentioned, poorly informed high-status idiot . . . [and] a self-important right-wing commentator." When he took over hosting “The Late Show” after David Letterman’s retirement a little over a year ago, he dropped the persona, and the real Stephen Colbert became apparent for all to see all the time and not just in out-of-character interviews.

Colbert has, through his tenure on “The Late Show” more clearly and drastically evinced his message of humanism, and his love for other people because they’re people; thinking we’re all in this together because we’re together is Colbert’s core philosophy, and he tries to espouse that every night. One of the ways he does that is with his bandleader, Jon Batiste. Jon’s band? Stay Human. The name of the show’s opening music, written by Batiste? “Humanism.” It takes that idea of humanism, of loving other people, and puts it into music. The song has given me tremendous comfort since Tuesday night, and maybe it’ll help you, too.

Look, I don’t care what you do. Listen to “Humanism.” Watch something I linked to in here. Go have a cry. Hug someone you love. Hug a complete stranger. Just, whatever you do, now more than ever, I beg you: Please, please love each other, and please by kind to one another.