Fuck 2016

It’s November and 2016 still isn’t fucking over. You’d think by now it would be finished with us, but instead there’s something new every day. Another shock, another betrayal, another thing to learn to live with.

Trump won. I keep thinking about that—not that he ran, but that enough people actually voted for him. And I watched women in my life realize in real time that none of it mattered. Nothing they’d believed in, nothing they’d been told, nothing they’d done. He won anyway.

Then Prince died. Then Bowie. Then Rickman. The year didn’t just destroy the present; it was erasing the past too.

John Oliver did this segment where he got people to just look at the camera and tell 2016 to fuck off. Celebrities, random people off the street, everyone just letting it out. There was this moment of collective relief, like we all needed permission to say it together. But it didn’t fix anything. It just proved we were all aware we were fucked and desperate for some kind of ritual to make it feel like we had control.

By late November I wasn’t thinking about what comes next. I was just hoping nothing else would break before January, which was obviously a stupid thing to hope for.