As I began to write today, I realized that it has been almost exactly 6 months since my last post. It felt at that time (May 2020) like we were in a collective transformation, and I felt drawn to reflect on the experience of COVID and lockdown. And then we went to even greater depths, the realities and legacies of colonialism, racism, and patriarchal oppression suddenly visible for so many white Americans, some for the first time.

As of today’s writing, the people voted and Donald Trump will be leaving the White House on January 20, 2021, whether he wants to or not. If he has done anything positive for this country, it has been his personification of our collective shadow. And I will never, never say that a presidency such as his was a “good thing” for that reason, but only that if anything good came out of it, it is that.

It’s been almost two weeks since the election, although it feels much longer, and I can feel myself letting down in a certain way, and also grappling with a lot of feelings of all kinds. Like many of you, on the night of November 8, 2016, I deeply contracted. I didn’t sleep. I cried. Then, I went to work and saw clients, being with them as they wept, expressed concerns, and processed what had happened. As I reflect now, since then I have been on a kind of endless marathon, deeply doing my own work around what has emerged for me personally as a I also worked to stay balanced and in a place to offer some hope and process for others during these long, long 4 years. I have learned so much.

There is so much work to do collectively to heal our society, our planet, and to get on a track that will lead us into a livable future. As I sit with the victory of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris (still quite unreal, honestly), I find myself in deep contact with a sense of the importance of these times, now that there will be some room to move.

I think that we will all be touched for the rest of our lives by these past 4 years. In some ways, that has been, again, a positive thing: the emergence of racial justice and social issues, greater understanding of trauma and healing, and female empowerment to name a few. But it has not been a light thing to live with this shadow figure brought to life; to endure it not just in dreams or instances here and there, but everyday, day after day for 4 long years. I think we will all need time to recover, and to figure out what balance our lives might both regain and newly establish as we move forward together. And I have great hope, not because of what I ignore, but because of what I see everyday.