I woke up on the ninth of November to a living nightmare. US voters demonstrated how scared they are of powerful women, as well as the values I hold dear: difference, change, diversity, multiplicity, and inclusion.

I spent the first 48 hours after the election with the feeling of heavy grief, like a loved one had died. I could distract myself for awhile, but then the pain and the fear crept in. The reminder that the curtain had closed on an opportunity, a certain future will not be possible, and that many communities faced imminent violence crept in hit me in the gut again and again. Not just a threat: I traveled to UPenn to speak at a conference of black collegians for work on Friday the tenth, only to arrive an find that black freshmen had been the target of a cyber attack that threatened death by lynching. I learned that the dorm room of three Jewish women students at the New School, my alma mater, had been vandalized with nazi symbols. The nightmare was real.

After those days the fog of grief lifted and I found an oddly calm sense of clarity. I felt something inside me click into place. The feeling was familiar, like muscle memory from the Bush years. There is no ambiguity to the politics of the moment. Grieve, analyze, question, research, organize, share, protest, donate, speak out, actively practice solidarity, create radical art, and build and participate in communities that reflect a vision of a more inclusive, diverse, and peaceful future.

I’ve had a fire inside all week. I know how to do this. I make my living by bringing people together and helping to create inclusive spaces to connect with and learn from others. I’ve had years of experience by this point organizing, buckling down, planning, and executing on ideas and I realized that these “soft skills” are often undervalued in our tech and data driven society are exactly the ones i need to use to survive and resist over the next years (and throughout my life). I’ve based my life and my career around building communities that are oriented towards diversity, inclusivity, learning, connecting, and social justice. Now it’s time to use those skills more directly.

The amazing Grace Lee Boggs, who passed away in 2015, said, “We need to do what I call visionary organizing. Recognize hat in every crises people do not respond like a school of fish. Some people become immobilized… and some people begin to find solutions. And visionary organizers look at those people, recognize them and encourage them, and they become the leaders of the future.” This quote is from an interview with her in the newest issue of Got a Girl Crush (which is great post-election reading, by the way). She spent the majority of her 100 year life working for social justice, from the Civil Rights and Black Power movements onward. Reading this interview reminded me of the many ways there are to resist, political protest and organizing being a part, but that we need to have vision and support each other in expansive, innovative, and visionary fashion over the next four years.

I set up recurring donations to the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. I organized transportation for me and a few friends to the January 21 “Million Woman March” in Washington DC. I applied to volunteer at local organizations that support immigrant families, to do clinic escorting, to commute with neighbors who don’t feel safe doing so, to help out at a shelter for homeless LGBTQ youth. I called my representatives and plan to do so weekly. I invited friends over night of reflection and action planning.

Then I realized, these are all things I should have been doing all along. My rage and burnout from the Bush years, combined with fears about my own economic security during the recession, and the sense that “things were getting better” throughout the Obama administration, let complacency wash over me like a warm bath. This was also a numbing tub of privilege, because things have not been “getting better” for millions of people – the refugee crises in the Middle East and Europe and the continued killing of unarmed Black people by law enforcement here in the states being just two prominent examples. Of course I empathized and felt solidarity with these situations and the movements to address them, but my daily life was not heavily impacted.

I’ve been rereading Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark and she reminded me, “When I think back to why I was apolitical into my mid-twenties I see that being politically engaged means having a sense of your own power–that what you do matters–and a sense of belonging, things that came to me only later and that not come to all… despair is more a kind of fatigue, a loss of faith, that can be overcome, or even an indulgence if you look at the power of being political as a privilege not granted to everyone.”

I work on Wall Street, two doors down from the Trump building, with gold letters glinting out that hateful name at me every time I walk by. I work in the shadow of racism and white supremacy, misogyny, and capitalism run rampant. But these specters are always there, have always been operating, whether in the shadows or out in the open. It’s always been there, it’s just that  it was just that some of us like myself had the privilege to see it, and keep walking, keep living our lives as if it wasn’t staring us in the face, thinking the small acts of solidarity we did take time to create were enough. They were not.

Solnit also reminds me that the impact of activism and the arc of history are not linear. “Progress” waxes and wanes, but that does not mean that we shouldn’t keep fighting for social justice, for the environment, for a world that is understanding of difference, but that the future is full of possibility for change. She writes, “The government and media routinely discount the effect of activists, but there’s no reason we should believe them… To be effective, activists have to make strong, simple, urgent demands, at least some of the time–the kind of demands that fit on stickers and placards, the kind that can be shouted in the street by a thousand people. And they have to recognize that their victories may come as subtle, complex, slow changes instead, and count them anyway. A gift for embracing paradox is not the least of the equipment an activist should have.”

Let’s hope that, no let’s ensure, that this is the last stand of white supremacy. That the republicans are dragging out all these old trolls of republican thought past because they are scared. That their vision of an ultra-capitalism, ultra-nationalist, ultra-white, ultra-macho US narrow, limited, and on the wrong side of history. I know that the future belongs to those of us who believe in equity, social justice, inclusivity, and environmental health. That expansive vision is so much larger and so much more beautiful.

I hope that you will join me to agitate, educate, and organize to bring it to life. And if you are on that path too, I hope I can join you.