Made-up verbs and Hillary Clinton streamers
Memories from four years ago––and a lifelong search for truer stories
This is a story about stories.
In 2016, I worked with Democrats Abroad Chile to host an Election Night party for more than 400 people at a California-themed bar in downtown Santiago. The turnout was a mixture of US citizens, Chileans, and others interested in celebrating what we all thought was going to happen that night: the election of the United States’ first woman president. (Chile had elected Michele Bachelet, the country’s first woman president, six years earlier.)
The event was the culmination of our group’s get-out-the-vote work, which had included voter registration, phonebanking, monthly events, debate parties, and navigating a labyrinthine series of states’ rules for US voters living abroad.
I spoke to the Chilean media early in the evening and made very clear we were not concerned about a Trump victory. It just wasn’t going to happen, so we were focusing instead on how we’d celebrate a Clinton win. (Side note: What I was concerned about was the fact that no one had told me the interview would be live. My on-air jitters may have led to inventing a few highly creative verb conjugations in Spanish.)
Here I am in my suffragette white, ready to celebrate the milestone that would not come.
Because as we all know now, history and the Electoral College had other plans for November 2016. That New York Times needle began dipping into the red side of the graph. Swing states were lighting up with massive R’s. Nothing was going as planned. One of my fellow Democrats Abroad leaders fled to his nearby apartment because he couldn’t stop crying.
I don’t remember what time we called it and said everyone needed to go home. It was late, though. Chile’s two hours ahead of New York City this time of year, and we were all exhausted and confused and trying to understand what would come next.
We’d promised the cantina’s owners we’d help them clean up. So the next morning, I found myself back at the bar, bleary-eyed, a little hung over, and sweeping party decor with Hillary Clinton’s face on it off a sticky floor. Journalists kept calling to hear our thoughts on the news, and we pulled together a statement in English and Spanish expressing our disappointment and promising to keep working on behalf of the American people and blah blah blah.
But mostly I was just thinking: what is going on?
The answer, of course, was racism, sexism, disinformation campaigns, and a terrible system where you can win almost three million more votes than the other candidate and still lose an election. But even though I knew all this consciously, there was no place, in my personal 2016 story about the United States, for something like Trump’s victory to have happened.
I got out the mop. I threw red and blue streamers into an industrial-sized trash can that smelled like old limes.
It was the first day in what would become four years of undoing. Letting go of old stories. Beginning to write new ones.
There are few stories more powerful than the ones we tell ourselves about our nations. That we are good. That we are just. That history has an arc, and it inevitably bends the way it should. Even after living outside the US for years and having so many of my cultural and political assumptions challenged, I still carried these stories inside me: part myth, part elementary school history lesson, part white lady only seeing what was inside her white lady bubble.
And definitely part coping mechanism, too. It’s a lot simpler to move through the world believing your country isn’t deeply broken.
Now it’s 2020. And I’m not saying I have this all figured out. But I do know that in the past four years, accepting this fundamental brokenness––and listening to people who had seen it and lived it a lot earlier than I did––has made room for new narratives in my own life and in my understanding of the world.
As I write this late Wednesday, we still don’t have an official winner of the 2020 election. I’d hoped to discuss those results in this newsletter. But I think it’s okay that I can’t. Because no matter who wins, for many people, the story we believe about the United States is different than it was four years ago. And this difference gestures toward the storytelling’s radical core.
The more we think about the stories we tell ourselves––about our world, our country, our own identities––the more we’re forced to question everything. It’s pretty painful. But there’s a lot of power in it.
I’ve heard many writers speak about their revision process as sitting down to the page and asking themselves, “Is it true yet?” They don’t stop revising until they can say, yes, it is. I try to do the same when I’m telling a story, and that goes for the stories I tell myself about the world, too.
Is it true yet?
It’s a question I’m going to be asking for a long time.
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Erin Becker (she/her)
Writer | Communications Consultant | Storytelling Expert
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