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Here Again
One woman’s dread approaching the 2022 midterm election
The 2018 election drove me to write and publish my first article on Medium. I wrote again before the 2020 election, though by then sharing my thoughts and words had become a habit. We are now three weeks out from the 2022 election, and last night, as I flirted with sleep, whispers swirled around me.
Here we are… again.
Yet this time feels wholly different to me. The feeling of dread that’s eaten at me for seven years has become a dead weight. Mornings I wake with an anchor tangled around my body, lacking the intestinal fortitude to get out of bed and face the countdown to November 8th.
So much has happened since I first felt the dread. Back then it felt big, but vague — a fear of something to come, something catastrophic, but undefined. I was teaching at Bastyr University, burned out, trying hard to reach my students, keep up with new research, meet administrative demands, and stay sane.
By 2017, I opted in favor of sanity; I quit my job, moved in with my mom, and took a self-financed sabbatical. It took a year to recover from burnout and regain my health. When I stuck my head out to rejoin society, I was smack in the middle of a train wreck. During the year I’d been in hiding, my country had devolved.
