Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ stages of grief carry great renown throughout the world. I’m all too familiar with them on both an academic and personal level. What the layman doesn’t really tell you about them, what it does take a formally taught person to confirm, is that the stages of grief are rarely in order. I know that as a younger kid, something upsetting would happen and I’d consequently grieve, and I remember explicitly thinking that the “stages” must be a load of bull because I might’ve started with anger, gone straight to acceptance, double-backed to denial then depression, before finally hitting bargaining, getting angry a second time, and ending with acceptance all over again. But that’s exactly how the stages work. And not only is that how they work, but grief isn’t always this quick cycle that takes up all of 5 poorly depicted pictures on a single page in a textbook. Grief can take anywhere from seconds to years. We all grieve in different ways.
It’s ironic to me now, me who has spent several years explaining this to friends and family, that when I most recently got upset, I distinctly went through the stages in order.
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There’s so much I’ve wanted to say about the election. So much I initially denied for several hours before giving up, going to bed, and being so in shock I thought it’ll be better in the morning. So much I got angry about in response to not just real life reactions but the social media comments on it all. So much I bargained for a few days there under the pretense of faithless electorates. So much I was depressed over for a few more days before finally heading straight back to denial where I’ve been living ever since. Shonda Rhimes said it best: "it ain’t just a river in Egypt, it’s a freaking ocean".
I want to fight, I want to keep pushing, I want to get my words out there, but you guys, I’m exhausted.
They say the hardest thing you can be in the world is a black LGBT woman, a set of identities where privilege doesn’t know your name and refuses to acknowledge your existence. I have so much respect for the black community that I can absolutely without a doubt recognize my privilege in being more white-passing, even just as a Latina. I’ve been constantly battling with myself as to whether I get to have to right to be exhausted when I see my black sisters of color still speaking out on Facebook and still organizing and still finding it within themselves to wake everyone up to the reality of this current racial situation having always been a fucking thing. I think of myself as woke, so I could say I knew that, but I without a doubt can’t say I’ve ever known it more than they have. So when Black Lives Matter came to the surface, I made a simple status saying that if anyone needed me to march or protest or organize, they could automatically count on me. That I would stand with them and kneel with them and put my fist up in the air with them.
Imagine my surprise when I woke up the morning after the election to text messages from all kinds of friends – close ones, distant ones, people I hadn’t talked to in years – all of them telling me that they loved me. That they would fight for me. To be safe. Over the course of the next several days, 16 different friends contacted me to tell me the same. And for the briefest moment I contemplated if maybe I had less privilege than I thought I did. If maybe my optimism and hope and oblivion to believe otherwise clouded me from the idea that I fulfill many token identities being targeted by, not just the President-Elect, but his followers. His endorsements. Many of his voters. If maybe those identities have been dangerous all along.
I was born and raised in Houston, Texas. I’m lucky to have been educated to an extent where people would argue I have an academically elitist privilege just by hearing me speak English. I’m also ethnically Mexican and, in two separate phone calls with my divorced parents, they both asked me to avoid ever speaking Spanish in public again.
I’m queer. I never thought I’d come out like this, upset and confused and in shock, and I’m so scared what the ramifications of being public about it might mean for me on a professional and personal level that I might have the editors remove this bit in the future, but there it is. I could say I'm wholeheartedly proud of it, but that would be a lie. The internalized self-loathing is a testament to the growing culmination of hate I've faced both directly and indirectly over the past decade; I mean honestly, there's really nothing like receiving death threats at your catholic high school and knowing you can't speak up about it. I had no choice but to keep on keeping on. When the time came, I only applied to colleges in the North, and when neither my freshman roommates nor classmates nor coworkers had a problem with it, the decision to eventually settle here was obvious. I live in Boston these days, and although I felt safe before, I’m still gauging the public reaction here to LGBT members now that apparently it’s totally okay to externalize your discriminatory beliefs... but I held a girl’s hand for the first time in almost 24 years of life just last week while visiting the South, and the immediate change in crowd demeanor had me promise myself I would never risk our safety again below the Mason-Dixon line.
I’m a woman. And if you’ve managed to read this far, managed to stomach 900 words of a scared citizen’s discourse who has yet to mention anything about being stripped of unalienable human rights as laid out almost condescendingly to me per the constitution of this so-called great country – because by simply coming in to existence, Thomas Jefferson found it so absurd anyone might be inhibited by others from life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – if you’ve managed to connect the fucking dots? Then I don’t need to explain why just being a woman feels like there’s already a bullseye painted on my back.
And now I’m angry again. Because what right do I have to feel this amount of fear when I’m still white-passing? When I’m not Muslim? Or Jewish? When I’m not an immigrant? When I’m not disabled or physiologically needing medical help? And I’m furious because at what fucking point did the cis-white straight man decide he and his likenings had dominion over all of it, over the plan involving everyone else, over how things are gonna go from here on out?
There’s so much to say. I said it before in this article and others, and I’ll say it again, but I’m exhausted. Minorities of any identification shouldn’t have to explain their frustrations and grief. It is now achingly obvious that we are so lacking in compassion and empathy as a society, we’ve forgotten that everyone experiences grief. But there's a stark difference in that when minorities are unrepresented and their voices go unheard, they get tired and wither and silence themselves because what’s the fucking point and we end up with nationwide “surprise” when there’s outcomes like this election and its supremacy charged aftermath. But I’ve decided there’s too much to say. And with the help of some friends, I’m damn well gonna say it.
