“Give me something hard to do tonight,” I texted my dad early on Election Day. He’s been coaching me for months now, sending me weekly running workouts ever since I began training for a half-marathon back in July. Since then I’ve been sweating through after-work speed intervals in Central Park two evenings per week, as well as waking up early most Saturday mornings to run “long” across all five boroughs of New York City. The work has been paying off; my body weight and my pace time have decreased dramatically as a result. Running hasn’t just been a way of feeling good and building self-confidence; during these past few weeks it’s also provided a welcome respite from anxiety about the election.

So last night I figured my streak would continue as I got off the subway and jogged over to a public track in Brooklyn, eager to knock out the eight 800-meter reps my dad had assigned me. Then I’d cruise home and watch Kamala Harris make history. Suffice to say the laps didn’t go as planned. There’d been early warning signs, like the fatigue and scratchy throat I’d felt on the way over. There was the initial exuberance I experienced on arrival, as I surveyed a lively scene of runners sprinting under the bright lights and enjoying the warmth of our neverending Indian Summer. 

Then an actual mistake: I started out much too fast during the first 800, my heart rate close to the max, well above what I knew would be sustainable for seven more reps. It wasn’t long before I was completely winded, and began feeling nauseous. I’d hit a wall, the limit past which my body could or would not go. I ran a few more laps to save face then gave up. Perched and panting on the bleachers, I had an odd premonition: what if my poor showing presaged a poor Democratic performance later in the evening? 

We know how that turned out. But unlike 2016, I’m not feeling that same sense of doom and despair when Trump was last elected. Back then, in the midst of a fellowship at Yale, I spent the day after Trump’s victory wandering through a shell-shocked New Haven, watching students and professors commiserate and offer each other cookies in the hallways and hugs on the street. “Now’s not the time to mope,” cautioned chef Claire Criscuolo, owner of the popular vegetarian restaurant Claire’s Corner Copia, where I sat picking at some lentils during lunchtime. “Now more than ever, we have to resist, to stand up and fight for our values.”

So I did, becoming first, for a brief time, a Jesuit novice in Syracuse, where I was assigned to help a local Catholic Charities office resettle refugees, mostly from Africa and Syria, in clapboard wood apartments across dilapidated neighborhoods of an already gritty ex-industrial city in central New York. It was the same year of Trump’s travel ban, when he also cut quotas for asylum seekers. I remember how good it felt to throw darts at a board bearing Trump’s face during downtime between medical appointments, where I served as an interpreter for a man from the Central African Republic named Raphael, who, despite his long separation from his daughters and the four bullets still lodged in his spine, which caused him to walk with crutches, found and articulated, in ecstatic French, reasons to be happy each day. 

I kept “resisting” after I left the Jesuits too, working over the years on numerous Commonweal articles and editorials critical of Trump. “The best answer to the civic nihilism and despair that now imperil our hyperpolarized country is for American voters to reassert their agency in the face of a right-wing personality cult that would prefer they see themselves as passive subjects, not self-governing citizens,” we wrote most recently, in our pre-election editorial a little more than a month ago. So much for that. The record turnout we were hoping for did in fact materialize, just that millions more Americans voted for the cult. 

Still, I’m not despairing. Why? It’s not just that, as of 7:00 the morning after election, I’ve permanently removed myself from ‘Elon’s’ X, sparing myself not just the embarrassment of my inability to accumulate actual human followers, but also the steady torrent of snark and sniping and self-pitying know-it-all-ism that regularly filled my feed. There will be time, perhaps very soon, for fury, for casting blame, maybe even for righteous scorn, for scolding Democratic strategy and elite spinelessness and whatever other sins the party may have committed in choosing to run a dynamic, intelligent, accomplished Black woman—a woman those same voices on X used to hail with “brat” memes and coconut emojis—against a racist felon and abusive demagogue who has promised to prosecute his political opponents and muses about using the military to both deport undocumented migrants and disperse peaceful protestors. 

Maybe some of those horrors will actually come to pass. Hopefully they will not. But for now, I am holding it together by releasing my anxiety and redoubling my commitment to living in a way that cuts against the cynicism, fear mongering, braggadocio, and casual racism and misogyny of our next president and his pliant “Catholic” running mate. I am showing up for work; talking with friends and family; praying and doing spiritual reading; writing; making plans to volunteer, looking for other races to run, places to visit, ways of staying active and engaged and fully alive. 

This doesn’t amount to a political program, much less an ideology. It certainly won’t help the Democrats lock in a winning coalition. Yet it’s political in the etymological sense of the democratic polis, a word the ancient Greeks used to refer not just to actual city-states but to communities of citizens. 

Cutting myself off, shutting others out—that is what Trump and Vance are counting on. It is also how they win, at least for now. That their victory was so decisive represents a serious challenge for me and the many millions of Americans who see things as I do. For many, and especially for the most vulnerable, things will likely get much worse before they start getting better. But isn’t that the point of faith, and the virtue of hope? Community, justice, fairness, decency—none of these things is impossible. Give us something hard to do.