Anybody Else’s Body Physically Unable to Process Good News?

From Cosmopolitan

On August 11, 2020, at exactly 4:17 p.m., Oval Office hopeful Joe Biden announced that Kamala Harris would be his running mate in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. At exactly 4:18 p.m., which is when I usually schedule my daily sob between afternoon Zooms, I cried salty, warm tears into my lunch: stale Wheat Thins. They transformed into not-so-stale Wheat Thins and I proceeded to eat them while texting every woman I know all the exclamation points I’ve been refraining from using at the end of work emails. I finally felt free. For a moment, I forgot I had spent the past six months in captivity and that my toenails, if angled the right way, could cut a Persian cucumber or injure a small child. Suddenly, it’s like I wasn’t in the midst of a scary global pandemic. Everything felt possible again. I considered joining the Hype House.

What was this? Was it…? Ah, yes. I remember now. Joy.

In the demonic year of 2020, “good news,” much like the honeybees, is going extinct. Sometime between the president’s inconsequential impeachment and Ivanka Trump’s second post about pinto beans, my otherwise average to well-functioning fight-or-flight stress response completely gave up understanding what the heck is going on. Up until yesterday, I didn’t even know I could still experience a shred of positive emotions. I mean, the last time I felt something was when I came across a picture of Dr. Fauci in the early ’90s holding a large phallic microscope. But that was months ago.

Maybe you found yourself in a similar predicament yesterday afternoon. Experiencing that strange, forgotten sensation: a pinch of joy. The news was big. Kamala Harris became the first Black woman and first South Asian American person to be on a presidential ticket. Almost exactly 100 years after white women’s suffrage excluded Black women from being able to vote, we finally have one on the ticket and I, for one, did not know what to do with all my feelings about it.

Suddenly, the throbbing pain in my temples went from excruciating to tolerable. What bliss! What good fortune! I could finally hear myself think. I even unclenched my fists long enough to take up knitting but immediately quit it five seconds later in favor of tending to Animal Crossing.

These bodily reactions—they were familiar yet different. Tears streamed down my face. (Fine, that part wasn’t new.) I wasn’t crying out of panic because the president suggested I sip on some bleach to cure a deadly virus but rather out of excitement that such an astonishingly competent woman was going to be a whole half of the Democratic ticket. I started to shout. Not because the president can’t pronounce (and probably can’t locate) Thailand but because the most reliable voting force for the Democratic party—Black women—could finally be reflected in the highest leadership of the progressive movement. My heart stopped. Not thanks to Ben Shapiro yodeling about vaginal lubrication but because I remembered that Harris was the daughter of immigrants, the very backbone of America. Even the tic I developed in the hours after Herman Cain died mere days after tweeting about how masks were dumb was totally gone! For a moment, if I closed my eyes, I could imagine myself on a sandy beach where it was 2012 and Mitt Romney making a joke about cookies was the most controversial political gaffe of the week—not Jared Kushner scaling back the federal response to COVID-19 because it’s going to kill people in blue states.

I already know this joy will be short-lived. In fact, as I write this piece, hunched over a celebratory Wheat Thins and hot mustard sandwich, I’m already seeing the president pounce on Harris for being “mean” and “nasty” to credibly-accused-of-rape Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. As Jessica Bennett at the New York Times pointed out, Harris has already faced sexist backlash having been labeled “too ambitious” and will undoubtedly face bigoted attacks from one of the most overtly racist presidents of all time.

Go ahead, start a mood board in preparation for October 7 when Harris will eat Mike Pence for lunch in the vice presidential debate. If the hellscape known as 2020 has taught me anything, it’s that this little good news treat probably won’t last long. All the more reason to soak it in.

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