We began to grasp the idea that this wouldn’t be a day of celebrating the breaking of the glass ceiling. Instead, we’d be grieving over a man who takes us back decades. When it sunk in who our president was going to be, I broke down.

The issue wasn’t just Trump. What really hurt was that a large number of people in this country pretty much slapped me, my fellow POC, the LGBTQ+ community, Muslims, disabled people and others attacked by Trump. They slapped us hard and told us that they didn’t really care about our safety or rights. They cared about protecting their privilege with Trump.

The first time I felt attacked by Donald Trump was when he announced his plans to run for president. He just seemed like a regular guy, nothing distinguishing him from all the other candidates…  Until his infamous line insulting Mexican undocumented immigrants. Having my family and friends insulted brought out an anger I didn’t realize was in me. I made sure to voice my opinions and to increase my effort to educate myself on policies and politicians.

As the months passed, his campaign grew stronger and more hateful. The list of groups he disrespected increased. Every time he said something that crossed a new boundary, I thought to myself, This has to be too far. This is what is going to open the eyes of his supporters! Every time, I was proven wrong. His supporters only found ways to make excuses for him. People I never thought would be apathetic to these kinds of issues gave their support to this man.

Before this election, I had a certain image of the society I lived in because I was surrounded by people similar to me for years: low-income minorities. I forgot that there are people in this country who think radically different than I do. I believed Trump was an utter joke who could never be nominated by his party, much less win the presidency.

He moved on from just being another candidate when he managed to win the Republican nomination. It shook me that he eliminated his competition with such dirty rhetoric. My level of fear reached a new height when I watched the RNC.

By this time, I was aware that minorities are not treated the same way in this country so it wasn’t a surprise exactly, but I was still reminded me of  our sad reality. I saw this very clearly at the RNC. When the video where he openly bragged about sexual assault came out, I really thought that would kill the campaign. All the news outlets were saying how it would be extremely difficult for Trump to win and every poll showed Hillary leading the day of the election.

But this wasn’t the case.

The day after the election was rough. I woke up looking at the country in a different light, feeling hopeless. However, I looked for support from friends, family, and the Amherst College community. Students organized a walkout, in which I participated, to stand with undocumented/DACA-mented students to show them that students here will do anything in our power to make sure that future new policies won’t hurt them, and to get our college on board with this. It was beautiful for us to stand in solidarity and with strength after such a dark week.

I’m not going to say I feel that everything is going to be fine because I don’t know that. I can already see the hate taking over from the spike in hate crimes around the country and from the cabinet members Trump is nominating.

And yet: We still have power. We have to show to people that discrimination will not win. We won’t stay idle. As long as we keep fighting and resisting against his hate for the next four years, we’ll make sure that the next president and members of Congress know this country is not just for one group, but all groups. This hope is what will give me strength for the future.

The post The 2016 US Presidential Election and Me appeared first on Newfound.

New Brunswick, New Jersey is a post-industrial small city in the center of my state. It’s where I was born and holds all of my hopes for the future. It was settled by the Dutch, then evolved alongside the technology of each passing decade. Ferries, canals, railroads and highways brought people through this city. Manufacturing and warehousing provided working class immigrant families with livelihoods. Those industries left, the working classes suffered, but out of the rubble rises a promising economy based on services, healthcare, and the public university to keep my city’s heart pumping today.

As a professional and as a volunteer, I’ve worked in this city to teach kids life-skills in after-school clubs, to educate others about healthy food, to teach community gardening skills, and to prepare the young adults who live here for college or a career.

It’s all-consuming work and I’m not great at setting boundaries. I work weeknights and weekends, routinely leaving hours worked off my timesheets.

It’s hard for me to care about hours turning into paychecks when the work feels urgent. It’s hard to take time off the clock from work I care about. Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember I have a personal life or a body at all.

Until, of course, people go out of their way to remind me I am a young-ish woman, my body is open for comment, and my work is aberrant and obstructs my actual value.

Like when that community member looked me up and down while I was setting up tables and chairs for an event, commenting, “Your dad must have a lot of money.”

Because there’s no way my work would be paid for, right? A woman in community work must be just filling her time somehow, not fulfilling an ambition or a professional goal. How could community work be her career?

And since she needs to be clothed and fed, and I don’t see a wedding ring, the man supporting her must be her father.

Truthfully, money is tight for me. But I do nonprofit work for a salary and pay for my own rent, utilities, food—all of it. This is all further complicated by the sky-high student debt I racked up earning a degree in Journalism.

If I choose to disclose the reality of my debt to people, I am shocked that no one ever asks, WHY DID A DEGREE COST SO MUCH?

Instead, they act perplexed that I pursued higher education in the first place.

I have had former classmates or other peers seriously suggest that the way out of debt is to marry a man who will pay off my loans. Men and women tell me this. Often.

It’s pretty clear that to them, the problem of my debt is that it’s getting in the way of me getting married, buying a house in the suburbs, producing children, and tending the home. That’s a woman’s real value, right? Why educate a woman?

Why, indeed. I’ve never found a way to succinctly express that I value my mind, so I invested in it. (While also realizing it is completely unjust that tuition has risen well above the rate of inflation, and is a barrier to entry for many bright young people when considering the current cost of living.) I want to do work in the world and see that work valued. I want to cultivate and then use an expertise, and I’d like to be paid for it.

People in my life tell me I accomplish a lot, wonder aloud how I find the time. Well, I am choosy about how I spend my time. Still, every investment of my time somewhere means I am not spending it somewhere else. I will hands-down always put my time into the things that challenge my mind or make me better at work, at the expense of things that would make me better at the performance of being a woman.

Shopping for clothes, getting timely haircuts, dieting or otherwise trying to change my body to be more attractive to men will forever be at the bottom of my list. (Incidentally, when you lose weight because you’re depressed and in an abusive relationship, lots of people tell you it’s a good look. My current boyfriend New Brunswick, for the record, prefers me happy and curvy.)

The exhausting truth is, no matter how hard I work to do good things in my community or how much I invest in my mind, people on the ground will find ways to try to police my appearance, make assumptions about my body, and remind me that as a woman I am a thing. An object for people to comment on.

And that is the best case scenario. Trump’s election has me worried we’re about to declare Open Season on sexual assault with impunity.

The results of the US Presidential election made me saddened and scared. But the truth is, on November 7 I was already tired. My strongest desire in life is to be seen as a person, dammit, to have my mind engaged and my work count for something and my heart known.

It’s been a battle, because for my entire conscious life I’ve wanted to read books, write words, care for others and build something good—while relentlessly being told that my body is unacceptable, and also it is public property, and also my priorities are wrong so shut up and make a baby already. (I want to say something funny here by my hands keep typing, DON’T SEND GIRLS TO CATHOLIC SCHOOL. DON’T SEND GIRLS TO CATHOLIC SCHOOL!)

As of this writing, my body, my mind and my life are the only things that are truly mine. I will use them as I please. For as long as I am able.

The only conclusion I can come to is: I go through every day frustrated that I have to remind folks, I AM A HUMAN AND MY LIFE IS MINE TO DIRECT. But I also read and write obsessively, to feed my mind. Maybe having to constantly express or defend my modus operandi is what I was put on this earth to do.

Other times, I think that I am just going to do the work, and let the work speak for itself.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2008 with a degree in Journalism, and she’s been writing creatively ever since. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post The Personal, the Political, and Being a Woman at Work appeared first on Newfound.