This is not a suicide note, but a huge part of me died today.

America didn’t fail, but it functioned as intended. A system designed to reward wealth and excuse privilege again elevated a craven and mediocre white man to the most powerful position in the land. When offered someone with competence and compassion, we chose the circus clown with the orange vest. When women needed protection, we chose an adjudicated rapist. When we needed to save democracy, we gave into racism and misogyny.

This isn’t 2016 when we could hope he would grow into the job, and the laws and guardrails were in place if he didn’t. This time, we knew what we were getting, and we chose it anyway.

We Americans deserve whatever happens to us now. And there’s no safe place in the world we can flee to. Remember, Anne Frank and her family fled to what they thought was safety in the Netherlands only to find the danger came for them there. All they could do was hunker down and hide and hope the danger would pass.

Now, I have to do the same for my family.

I can’t be an author anymore and write about the stories that matter to me. I can’t play the artistic martyr when too many people depend on me. All I can do as a writer, besides providing for my family as a technical writer, is to bear witness to what will happen next. I hope I could leave behind a testimony, like Anne Frank’s, that survives if I don’t. Perhaps there will be a day when I will be free to write my books, to publish Christina’s Portrait, and tell hopeful stories about the new world that emerges from whatever is to come.

And better days will come. The words of Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator still reverberate:

To those who can hear me, I say—do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed—the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

So don’t lose hope. We need that hope to sustain us in the difficult days ahead. But gather your strength by taking care of yourself. Turn off the news. Stay away from social media. Watch a favorite movie or curl up with a good book. Spend time with your family. Walk in the park. Self-care is not a privilege, but necessary for survival.

For me, survival means setting aside my dreams as an author and shelving my stories. It’s goodbye to being an author for now. Perhaps, in better days, I will take it up again.

Update

Since posting this, family and friends have reached out to me. They urged me, “Please don’t give up on writing.” I told them, “I’ll still write, but I need to write about different things.”

However, I pulled out of my other author events this month: the Local Author Fair in Fullerton and Loscon. I didn’t feel right about getting up in front of a crowd, and with a big smile, pitching my book and giving writing advice as if everything is OK. One of my friends replied, “I can’t imagine. I couldn’t even make it to SoulCycle.”

I then spent some time today thinking about how we’re going to get through whatever will happen. We’ll do what people have always done in challenging times: adapt. Think about the pandemic and all the changes we had to make to keep ourselves safe. Working and going to school at home. Wearing masks. Washing our hands for 20 seconds. Binging Netflix. We had to adapt to keep a virus from killing us. We got through that moment. We’ll get through this one.

What’s also important is to find moments of joy where we can. Spending time with family. Enjoying a home-cooked meal. Going to a baseball game. Savoring every happy moment we can in case we never have another one. Those memories can sustain us when things get dark.

But what about fighting for democracy? Standing up for the oppressed? Confronting tyranny? Resistance isn’t always done with grand gestures and heroic sacrifices. It can be done with quiet words of encouragement, donations to causes, and building community. Mostly, resistance is in our own minds. We need to resist the temptation to normalize injustice. Don’t let them make you call bad things good.

And there’s writing. While I need to put some dreams on hold and set aside the books I want to write, I can still look to the things I’ve written for encouragment. I’ll close with this passage from Amiga:

“Henry, no one knows what the future has in store. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now. No one knows the outcome of our choices, no matter how well we think them through. All I know is that we have to carry on, no matter what happens next. We can’t hold on to the past or run away from the consequences of our actions. We can’t give up when things get too hard or too scary. All we can do is live.”

We will find a way to carry on. We will live.