Grief distorts our perception of time, disconnecting us from our normal understanding of temporality. The morning Trump was announced as the winner of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, I felt strangely disconnected. It felt odd to carry out the motions of my normal routine as if there was not an irrevocable shift in the present and my vision of the future. As I stepped into the shower that morning, I tried to comprehend the magnitude of another four years under a Trump presidency, reflecting upon the numbness I felt as I watched the United States slowly get swallowed by a sea of red.
I suddenly felt a wave of sorrow, anger, and hopelessness wash over me. I felt as if I were living in reverse and was at the finish line of Trump’s second term; I had already borne witness to the damage of another four years under a Trump presidency on women’s rights, climate change, the economy, and the political divide among Americans.
Later on, I would see other women on social media describing the same phenomena in which they felt like they were living in an alternate timeline or an experimental version of reality that was not supposed to take place. Women everywhere expressed vehement anger and sadness that had altered their perception of America.
The day after Trump’s win was announced, I wanted to feel only rage, the kind I could turn into a determination to initiate change. Instead, I found myself helpless to the shattering blow of yet another highly qualified female candidate forced to concede her defeat to a man convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual abuse, and who called his own daughter “a piece of ass.” I could not help but picture Trump, face contorted with rage as he called Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to successfully run as the democratic nominee, “an evil, sick, crazy b*tch,” and the crowd’s subsequent untamed roar of approval.
Trump used not only misogyny, but also his hatred of the Latinx community and immigrants, queer community, and people of color to misplace blame on them as the root of national problems and successfully divide the country. Perhaps the saddest thing of all about the 2024 U.S. election may not be Trump’s re-election, but the sheer number of Americans who stamped their approval on Trump’s hateful rhetoric, knowingly sacrificing basic human rights for a majority of the nation for Trump’s agenda and the amount of people who will suffer as a result.
I first grieve for all the women and people capable of giving birth already affected by Trump’s policies. I thought of the woman I had seen in the news only several days before, matching her tiny baby’s outfit to her own as she smiled in a photograph; she had been forced to miscarry for days because doctors would not save her until a fetal heartbeat could no longer be detected. By the time the heartbeat had vanished, she developed sepsis and passed away. The Trump Administration took away her right to autonomy, medical care, and in turn her life. They took her away from her daughter, her family, her friends, and her community.
She and thousands of other women like her have lost and will continue to lose their lives unless we take action. Millions of women suffer from reproductive health complications, with 1 in 5 women and people assigned female at birth struggling with primary fertility and there are 750,000-1,000,000 cases of miscarriage annually. Many women will have ectopic pregnancies under the Trump presidency, in which they are forced to endure infection and risk sepsis because doctors cannot legally remove an unviable egg from their fallopian tube. Women, mostly younger, poor women of color from states with the worst abortion bans, will be forced to endure the trauma of giving birth against their will and losing their autonomy.
I grieve for all the American women and people I know that are sexually active and capable of becoming pregnant, whose reproductive rights will now likely be stripped from them on a national level due to the Republican majority’s ability “to enact Trump’s agenda.” I am sorry to all the women in my life and my community, who have been sexually assaulted and faced sexual violence, who are now forced to live out the nightmare of having a sexual abuser be their US president once again. I am especially sorry to the ones who feel they must remain silent, who only speak of what happened to other women, or have written it down between the pages of journals because the world not only actively protects and celebrates men who abuse women like Donald Trump, but elects them as president. I thought about all the little girls and young women, like me, who dreamed of seeing someone who represents them in the White House and who saw themselves in Kamala. I am sorry that America’s resounding rejection of Kamala was also a resounding rejection of female leadership and representation.
I grieve for the communities across the United States who have been and will face the consequences of another Trump presidency. I think of my own Mexican-American family and my Latinx friends who live in a nation which wishes to dispel their very existence from its land. I grieve for those in the LGBTQ+ community, who must live in fear of Trump’s policies impacting their right to authenticity and love. I grieve for those whose access to Medicare will be impacted as well as those whose who will no longer be able to access to financial aid for education. I mourn for the children who will be banned from discussing subjects like critical race theory, gender identity, and sexuality in an education setting and who will be banned from reading books about others like them. Many futures will be irrevocably shifted and forever impacted.
While we have to reconcile with the immense losses that have occurred, our grief is only a symptom of our desire to see all people treated equally. It may feel paralyzing now, but we will learn to rebuild from our fear, sadness, and helplessness, transforming it into momentous power.
I attend university every day because I want to create change. Around me, I see others who want to help the world in a thousand different forms and have taken thousands of different paths to arrive here and achieve their dreams. I am in constant awe and gratitude towards the people around me who demonstrate their passion and love for the world. I am particularly grateful for the highly intelligent, capable, and caring young women surrounding me every single day. The women who refuse to allow men like Trump to decide their future.
I am grateful for the men I know who actively fight for women’s rights alongside us and reject Trump as a role model for boys and young men. Every day, I see people who reject the cruelty and violence Trump instills in his supporters and demonstrate care for one another. I see people outraged, angry, and ready to change the governmental and global implications of another Trump presidency.
The grief of this loss is momentous but we have not been defeated; although we feel as if we are standing at the beginning of a future preconditioned by loss, we are just beginning to fight for the future. As Kamala reminded us upon her own loss, we should “never give up” because we can never concede our desire to see all people treated equally. With time, our grief will transform us.