Words are not enough, but words are all I have, and I hate that.

I didn’t want to drop my daughter off at daycare this morning. I wanted to keep her home and hold her all day, but she’s too young, she doesn’t know, and the disruption to her routine and the moroseness of her father wouldn’t have helped her or me, so I let her go.

Haven’t slept save for handfuls of minutes, stolen bits of panic-streaked dreams in darkness. I want to believe — desperately — that this is just another gone-bad election, that I survived Reagan and Bush and W., that it’s no different, but of course it is, it is.

For years, we’ve mocked the right for living in the Fox News/right-wing bubble, but — as Bill Maher has pointed out repeatedly — there’s a left-wing bubble, too. Social media allows us to communicate with anyone, but more often than not, we choose only to communicate with people who agree with us, who reinforce our beliefs, our wishes, our desires. When Nate Silver had the temerity to suggest that Hillary wasn’t a lock on election, for example, the left went crazy and bent over backwards to “prove” him wrong. It sure felt good at the time.

How’s it feel now?

I’ll tell you how I feel: I am absolutely petrified for my friends who do not have the luxury, as I have, of having been born white, male, cisgender, and straight. If this is a nightmare for me, I literally cannot imagine what hell they’ve already conceived, with the knowledge that reality very well could be worse. I yearn to be a comfort to them, yet I know that nothing I do or say will ever — could ever — compensate for what our fellow Americans have unleashed.

We’re living in a dystopian novel, but there’s no plucky hero who can rise up to save us all.

So, we’ll have to do it ourselves.

Don’t think of 2020. That’s too far away. The midterms are in 730 days. It’s time to purify Congress and the statehouses, and start to build a new future. Let’s do it. It’s the only thing we can do — the only thing — that will both make us feel better and actually make things better.