It all still feels so surreal to me. It still takes time to process seeing the title “President-Elect” followed by the name “Donald Trump.” I’ll wager it’ll still take time to process this in the coming days, weeks, months.

I cannot think of any other word to describe how I felt onelection day other than rage.

After I cast my ballot, I could not help but feel rage for how long this process took, for how much it has pulled back the blinds that covered just all the misogyny, bigotry, xenophobia that continues to exist. I felt rage for how much this process made me question things I took for granted as a given, especially my identity.

As states started to go red, I could not help but feel rage for how much everyone got this so wrong, including myself. Even if Clinton still had a chance to squeak by, I felt rage for the sorts of arrogance and dismissals and assumptions made by the media, the politicians, the populace about how this was impossible, about how the American people were better than this, about how foolish it would be to think it would ever come to this.

Who are the fools now?

When it became clearer and clearer where the result was headed, I could not help but feel rage at myself. I could not help but feet rage for the color of my skin my parents passed on to me. I feet rage at the obviousness of my otherness. I felt rage about the fact that I looked foreign despite being born in Queens and that the only language I speak fluently is English. I felt rage that the first question I was always asked would be “What are you?” if it wasn’t “Are you Filipino?”

Why has no one ever asked me if I was American?

I could not help but feel rage that the opportunities that my parents left their home for to give to me and themselves soon might not be available. I felt rage that my immigrant parents are still not citizens despite living here for twenty-plus years. I could not help but feel rage after living all those years in Queens they’ve now moved into a hugely white-majority neighborhood in Long Island and I can’t help but feel their safety is uncertain. I could not help but feel rage that my late Uncle was Indian and that my half-Filipino, half-Indian cousins are probably more scared, more confused than I am.

I could not help but feel rage that some of my best friends, the kindest and most caring people I have met in my life, were Bengali, Pakistani, Indian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, and now they live in an America encouraged to hate them more than ever. I could not help but feel rage that the Hispanic-majority community where I attended middle school might as well be gutted by deportations. I could not help but feel rage that every intelligent and talented person of color I’ve met who have made the most of every opportunity they’ve given might find themselves without further opportunity. I could not help but feel rage that every strong female I’ve had the pleasure of having in my life would now have a president who thinks they are less than who they truly are.

I felt rage because I could not help but just watch our democracy in action. I think I just found another word for what I felt that night besides rage: helpless.

That helplessness only fueled that rage.

I was among many of my friends who took the Facebook to express my anger that night. I wrote statuses about the anger and disgust I felt. I tried answering questions from my friends about the electoral college and third party candidates and why at midnight did we still have to play this waiting game that only disheartened us more and more. I asked a friend in Michigan how in the world this was happening. I hoped with a fellow Pinoy that, if worst came to worst, we’d be on the same plane to Manila together. We talked until we both decided that we were tired.

I went to sleep thinking there would still could be a chance Clinton could win. I woke up reading from my phone the words “President-Elect Donald Trump” hoping I was still asleep.

I went to class that day after Election Day still not feeling awake. Not even Manhattan felt awake. That rainy day-after proved that the city that seemingly had been through everything and would be able to get through anything with a steel-hardened heart still could be heartbroken.

It all still feels so surreal to me. Even after the protests, the concession speeches, the meetings in the Oval Office, the op-eds about how we all got this all wrong, it does not feel like the I am in the same reality I was when I went to sleep that election night.

It all feels like it should not have gotten to this point. Yet, here we are.

I have expressed all my sadness, fears, disgust, anger to my friends, who have done the same to me. We, the people of color, the Muslims, the immigrants, the LGBTQ, the women, the marginalized, all know what lies ahead of us. We’ve already been taunted with slurs, harassed for wearing hijabs, hounded with calls for papers and green cards, and we know there’s a great chance that the worst has yet to come. We acknowledge that with all the hate that has already been exposed, there is still more out there to be enabled and brought out from the darkest depths of our society.

We acknowledge there is a need to defend ourselves against these evils that threaten our existence, our identities that we are unable to change, our values that we are unwilling to compromise under any circumstance, even the direst ones we have yet to face.

Perhaps that need to defend ourselves can be superseded by our desire to defend ourselves. Perhaps we find that this desire turns into a desire to go on the offense and attack, that we must resort to violence (in both the physical and metaphorical senses) to fight the violence we anticipate to experience.

This is where everything gets cloudy.

We may already have an adversarial outlook. We can be justified in this outlook by citing the implicitly and explicitly bigoted ideals they hold. We can be justified in this outlook by citing all the violence already being perpetuated against us. We can be justified in this outlook by citing the history, both recent and past, of our oppression. We are justified in thus defending ourselves.

Yet we have to be wary of walking the line between fighting violence and inciting it. I’m not just talking about (god forbid) physical violence; there is, of course, verbal violence, mental violence, the clashing of ideals.

We must be careful not to think of the other side just as “adversaries” and not as “humans.” This is not at all to delegitimize our anger and sense of betrayal that we know they have caused. We’ve all felt the pain of it and we’ve all been trying to reconcile it, but we cannot let this pain and anger blind us from the fact that they perhaps do not know any better, that they feel the very same universal emotions we feel.

As the oppressed and the marginalized, perhaps it’s not our jobs to be the ones to lay down and take things as they come as we’re the ones owed a debt to by a history that tried to convince us that we are less than who we are.

Yet, if we fight only violence and not the ignorance that causes it, we only further feed this cycle of violence and become no better than the violence we fight. Perhaps as much as they do not know any better of the struggles we face, we do not know any better of the struggles they face. Perhaps both sides have constructed these echo-chambers to heal from the alienation caused by the other side, to only emerge from them with the illusion that listen and process what the other side wants to say only to find the alienation has become too much to surmount, or worse yet only interact with the other side with the desire to pummel them into submission.

How did things get this toxic?

I’m an optimist, so I want to believe that things can get better, that instead of facing violence maybe we can face each other and start meaningful dialogue and learn from each other how we got to this point and how we can improve from here on out. But with all the vitriol that has already consumed us, and neither Trump and Clinton supporters can deny that they haven’t given into it, maybe it’s not possible anymore. Maybe things will somehow get more catastrophic than it feels at this very moment.

One of the things that inspires this violence is the anxiety of what is to come.

How do we defend ourselves without finding ourselves filled with the very hatred that drives the violence we are trying to fight?

None of these are easy questions.

I don’t know the answers. I don’t even know if the premise of these questions are legitimate. I am as much searching for concrete questions and answers as the next person. Maybe I am just ignorant and talking out of my ass.

I am just tired. I am tired of the rage. I am tired of trying to reconcile that rage.

I will defend everything I stand for, all the people I love, all the values I hold dear against the evils this world throws against us. If someone wants to tell me I'm doing something wrong, I'm willing to listen if you don't attack who I am as a person. I'm just trying to do what I think is right.

I think we're all just trying to do what we think is right.

How did things get this toxic?