"Who cares, I'm winning Tetris!"
Posted on 10/17/2017 11:56:56 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
As an employee of Hillary for America, I spent that night in the staff room at the Javits Center with my coworkers, underneath a literal glass ceiling...
(Excerpt) Read more at womenshealthmag.com ...
I know you might be angry, too. Instead of resisting it, or avoiding it, let your fury push you to action.
Damn these people got nothing better to do in their lives then be angry!
Nope, it’s one of the funniest articles you’ll read this week. Just depends on how you look at it.
A word of advice for the snowflake...Get over it, you lost.
She sounds mentally disturbed.I took a deep breath and squirmed out of my co-worker’s embrace, uncomfortable with the wave of emotions about to come flooding out. And then, I got back to work. We had to prep the website, go home, and come back for the concession speech the next day. We had things to do, and I could focus on that for at least a few more hours. But of course, that didn’t last. Because when you’re part of a losing campaign, all of a sudden there’s nothing to do—just looming unemployment and your own greatest failures being dissected on the front pages of every newspaper.
I didn’t recognize who I was anymore. Before the election, I was never a yeller, a crier, a feel-anything-all-er, and yet now, somehow, I’m all of those things.
I wake up and go to sleep angry.
Especially in those weeks after the election, every new headline about Trump’s administration felt like a gut punch. I couldn’t look at the New York Times push notifications on my phone without thinking about the alternate universe where Hillary was president and Trump was a joke. I wanted to apologize to every woman I met on the street for letting her down. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, “This isn’t what was supposed to happen! It wasn’t supposed to feel this way!”
But just feeling angry and upset and tired was unsustainable and unproductive. And as someone unaccustomed to feeling anything at all—let alone this all-encompassing rage—I couldn’t tolerate it. So I went with the only coping mechanism I know: work.
In the weeks after Election Day, I had been hearing from high school and college friends who wanted help running for office. They were angry, too. They wanted to do something, but they didn’t have anywhere to turn. I noodled on the big problems in the professional progressive ecosystem and why it was so hard for young, diverse people to get in the door in the first place. I questioned the entire idea of gatekeepers, of a party that prioritized the ability to get donors to write big checks over a candidate’s talent or hustle. I made call after call to learn as much as I could about why progressive institutions weren’t supporting younger candidates for office.
RELATED: Two Women, Two Candidates
And then I spent hours with my friend, Ross Morales Rocketto, writing a strategic plan and dreaming up the outline of an organization that would recruit 100 people—100 doers!—who’d run for local office, where the real work gets done. I wanted to find people like me who wouldn’t be satisfied with just being angry. I wanted to find people who were ready to get to work.
When Ross and I launched our organization Run for Something on Inauguration Day, I wasn’t sure what would happen but I immediately felt better for having tried at all. Ten months later, we’ve recruited nearly 12,000 young people who want to run for local office. We’re a staff of four, supported by a nationwide network of donors and volunteers with partners at nearly every political group in the country. As of this writing, we’ve endorsed candidates running in 19 states. At the same time, I wrote a book that represents the mission of our organization, aptly entitled Run for Something: A Real-Talk Guide To Fixing The System Yourself, which came out from Atria Books in October. (With a foreword from my old boss Hillary about why it’s still worth it to run for office, even if you lose.)
In so many ways, I feel better than I ever could have imagined when I dragged my tired body to that concession speech on November 9, 2016. I see Run for Something candidates taking on challenges, knocking on doors, and talking to voters about their own visions for what the future holds, and I can’t help but be hopeful.
Sign up for Women's Health's newsletter, So This Happened, to get the day's trending news stories and health studies.
That hope keeps me going. But even still, I wake up and go to sleep angry. Because in 2017, it is exhausting and frustrating to be a woman in America. Each day brings another indignity, another outrage—another story of a powerful man who’s built his career by literally and figuratively pushing women down and taking advantage of them.
I’m told that it’s okay to feel a feeling for its own sake; that it’s enough to just to be mad and then move on. But I’m simply not capable of that kind of processing. My anger is my cup of coffee in the morning. It gets me out of bed and keeps me focused. And I'm thankful for the work I get to do, which allows me to focus specifically on the future. As it turns out, simply doing the damn thing has soothed me and brought me back to myself. Every memo I write, every donor I meet with, every reporter I speak to, each conversation I have, is guided by strategy but fueled by the fury I feel at my country, at dangerous men, at my party, and at the very system of democracy I love that painfully let me down.
I know you might be angry, too. Instead of resisting it, or avoiding it, let your fury push you to action. Embrace your anger and put it to work. This is our collective fight-or-flight moment. Pick fight. Pick leading. And dare I say it: Pick running for office.
Amanda Litman is the co-founder of Run For Something and the author of the book Run for Something: A Real-Talk Guide To Fixing The System Yourself, published by Atria Books.
I think she’d feel better if instead of going to bed angry, she went to bed with a man.
"Who cares, I'm winning Tetris!"
I found that I am more interested in the article that says
“My husband tried to divorce me over Trump, what to do?”
/of course I didn’t read it
I Wake Up And Go To Sleep Angry—And That’s A Good Thing’
It’s okay to get mad. It’s what you do with it that matters.
By Amanda Litman October 17, 2017
amanda litman run for something book essay about angry women
Photograph courtesy of Amanda Litman / Atria Books
I didn’t cry right away on Election Night. Instead, I made jokes.
As an employee of Hillary for America, I spent that night in the staff room at the Javits Center with my coworkers, underneath a literal glass ceiling that we were planning to metaphorically crack upon our shared victory. We watched the results roll in on a projected TV, laptops out and phones plugged in, refreshing Twitter and expecting good news—and then, later that night, praying for a miracle.
So This Happened
When it became evident that things weren’t going our way, I perched myself on a table and asked my co-workers which Friends scenes they could recite by heart and whether they were Team Dean, Jess, or Logan from Gilmore Girls. Each time a pundit called another state for Trump, I focused on my singular goal of making people smile—or at least, distracting them.
It wasn’t for their sake (I’m sure they’d say it was kind of annoying, in retrospect). It was for mine. I’ve never been good at feeling my feelings; my friends would even joke that I’m a little dead inside. I don’t cry easily, and before the 2016 election, I would’ve said one of my strengths was my even-keeled temperament. Sure, once in awhile someone would piss me off—usually by making their own incompetence my problem—and I’d blow a gasket. But much to the dismay of a half-dozen therapists over the last decade, I’ve always been a pro at shutting it all down.
So, on Election Night, I did what I did best and turned off my feelings. Even while everyone else around me was crying, hugging, and shaking, I couldn’t let more than a few silent tears slide down my cheeks, even though there was truly no shame in weeping. Especially in that place. Especially at that moment.
That lasted all of maybe two hours. Sometime before 1 a.m., I stepped into the hallway and saw the co-worker who knew me best, who’d seen me cry before, who often knew what I was thinking before I’d even said a word. We’d been fighting in the weeks leading up to Election Day, but in that moment, we put our skirmish aside as he looked me dead in the eyes, reached over, and put his arm around me. That’s when I broke down.
“All the little boys who are going to grow up thinking they can treat women horribly and still become president..,” I raged between ugly-cries. “All the little girls who are going to think they deserve it...” I sniffled again. “What was it all worth? What was the f-cking point of anything we just did? Two years of our lives, for what? For that racist to win?”
I took a deep breath and squirmed out of my co-worker’s embrace, uncomfortable with the wave of emotions about to come flooding out. And then, I got back to work. We had to prep the website, go home, and come back for the concession speech the next day. We had things to do, and I could focus on that for at least a few more hours. But of course, that didn’t last. Because when you’re part of a losing campaign, all of a sudden there’s nothing to do—just looming unemployment and your own greatest failures being dissected on the front pages of every newspaper.
I didn’t recognize who I was anymore. Before the election, I was never a yeller, a crier, a feel-anything-all-er, and yet now, somehow, I’m all of those things.
I wake up and go to sleep angry.
Especially in those weeks after the election, every new headline about Trump’s administration felt like a gut punch. I couldn’t look at the New York Times push notifications on my phone without thinking about the alternate universe where Hillary was president and Trump was a joke. I wanted to apologize to every woman I met on the street for letting her down. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, “This isn’t what was supposed to happen! It wasn’t supposed to feel this way!”
But just feeling angry and upset and tired was unsustainable and unproductive. And as someone unaccustomed to feeling anything at all—let alone this all-encompassing rage—I couldn’t tolerate it. So I went with the only coping mechanism I know: work.
In the weeks after Election Day, I had been hearing from high school and college friends who wanted help running for office. They were angry, too. They wanted to do something, but they didn’t have anywhere to turn. I noodled on the big problems in the professional progressive ecosystem and why it was so hard for young, diverse people to get in the door in the first place. I questioned the entire idea of gatekeepers, of a party that prioritized the ability to get donors to write big checks over a candidate’s talent or hustle. I made call after call to learn as much as I could about why progressive institutions weren’t supporting younger candidates for office.
RELATED: Two Women, Two Candidates
And then I spent hours with my friend, Ross Morales Rocketto, writing a strategic plan and dreaming up the outline of an organization that would recruit 100 people—100 doers!—who’d run for local office, where the real work gets done. I wanted to find people like me who wouldn’t be satisfied with just being angry. I wanted to find people who were ready to get to work.
When Ross and I launched our organization Run for Something on Inauguration Day, I wasn’t sure what would happen but I immediately felt better for having tried at all. Ten months later, we’ve recruited nearly 12,000 young people who want to run for local office. We’re a staff of four, supported by a nationwide network of donors and volunteers with partners at nearly every political group in the country. As of this writing, we’ve endorsed candidates running in 19 states. At the same time, I wrote a book that represents the mission of our organization, aptly entitled Run for Something: A Real-Talk Guide To Fixing The System Yourself, which came out from Atria Books in October. (With a foreword from my old boss Hillary about why it’s still worth it to run for office, even if you lose.)
In so many ways, I feel better than I ever could have imagined when I dragged my tired body to that concession speech on November 9, 2016. I see Run for Something candidates taking on challenges, knocking on doors, and talking to voters about their own visions for what the future holds, and I can’t help but be hopeful.
Sign up for Women’s Health’s newsletter, So This Happened, to get the day’s trending news stories and health studies.
That hope keeps me going. But even still, I wake up and go to sleep angry. Because in 2017, it is exhausting and frustrating to be a woman in America. Each day brings another indignity, another outrage—another story of a powerful man who’s built his career by literally and figuratively pushing women down and taking advantage of them.
I’m told that it’s okay to feel a feeling for its own sake; that it’s enough to just to be mad and then move on. But I’m simply not capable of that kind of processing. My anger is my cup of coffee in the morning. It gets me out of bed and keeps me focused. And I’m thankful for the work I get to do, which allows me to focus specifically on the future. As it turns out, simply doing the damn thing has soothed me and brought me back to myself. Every memo I write, every donor I meet with, every reporter I speak to, each conversation I have, is guided by strategy but fueled by the fury I feel at my country, at dangerous men, at my party, and at the very system of democracy I love that painfully let me down.
I know you might be angry, too. Instead of resisting it, or avoiding it, let your fury push you to action. Embrace your anger and put it to work. This is our collective fight-or-flight moment. Pick fight. Pick leading. And dare I say it: Pick running for office.
Amanda Litman is the co-founder of Run For Something and the author of the book Run for Something: A Real-Talk Guide To Fixing The System Yourself, published by Atria Books
These crybabies give a bad name to women everywhere. Get over it already.
This girl has seen a half dozen therapists over the years???
Maybe she’s got some problems and yet another therapist could help her???
Another thing is that I couldn’t believe publishing such rot would HELP improve Women’s Health.
/shaking my head
You're right, that's one of the funniest articles I've read in a while. It would be much, much shorter if somebody had stolen the "I" key from her keyboard, but we get the gist.
Rage and hatred really were the cornerstones of Hillary's campaign, and left her supporters shaking with frustration when she was denied her entitlement. It gives us all an idea of what they'd have been like in power: vengeful, self-righteous, and insufferable. To see them weeping is to see something evil get its just desserts.
Great pic, my favorites are the old, confused feminist in the lower right, and the soon to be pussy hat wearer right behind her.
You’re absolutely right, she’s a loonytune.
<< “Every memo I write, every donor I meet with, every reporter I speak to, each conversation I have, is guided by strategy but fueled by the fury I feel at my country” >>
I appreciate Olga’s honesty. Hatred for America fuels leftists’ every thought, word, and act. It’s their religious cult.
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>>>another story of a powerful man who’s built his career by literally and figuratively pushing women down and taking advantage of them<<<
Is this article about Harvey Weinstein?
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