I never knew I was involved with politics until the 2016 election when I started realizing that my extra curriculars, my interests, and my work with others best aligned with a more progressive platform. I was a senior in high school during that election and my favorite subject was humanities, a class in which we read works like the Prince and Canterbury Tales and studied Greek civilization and philosophers. Later in the year I would study the Federalist Papers and Alexander deTocqueville’s observations about Democracy in America.  

         

          I was, for lack of a better word, infatuated with the formation of ideas and beliefs. I remember calling my grandpa, who was an English professor at Western, and ranting about Plato and Aristotle and their seemingly unhinged beliefs about concepts that humans still do not fully understand.  I began understanding the value of democracy and voice—and not the voice of just the few—but the voice of many.  I volunteered with Planned Parenthood my junior and senior years of high school to become a Peer Sex-Ed Educator, where I taught to high school classes about sexual health and identity.  There, I acted as a confidential source for peers to come to and talk about sexual identity-related issues.  I soon realized the immense vulnerability of students struggling with identity and the lack of resources our schools and communities were providing to youth. I desperately wanted to make a change.  Unfortunately, I was not able to vote during the election as I was not of age yet.

     

        Growing up, my parents taught me values such as love, empathy, compassion, and balance. They played devil’s advocate with me a lot through my middle and high school years when I would come home from school with a new, passionate opinion.  “Why do you feel this way?” they would ask me.  “What about this perspective?”  They forced me to think deeply about the opinions I held and challenged me to think about policy and law from multiple vantage points.  I grew up watching Barack Obama on TV and I idolized his values of inclusion, hope, and the dismantling of injustice in the United States.  

            

         I know better now, that Obama was not perfect and that he made many mistakes during his time as president.  But as a 13-year-old who was struggling to find her place, Obama served as a source of inspiration and perseverance for me.  

            

         When I woke up on November 8th, 2016, I felt as though everything I had ever worked for and believed in was reversed.    My parents woke me up that morning and I knew immediately the outcome of the election.  When I went to school, many of my classmates had their heads buried in their desks, some were crying.  The rallies I attended, the immigration seminars I sat in for, the essays I wrote about history and racism, the conversations I had with transgender students who lacked mental health resources, the canvassing I had done, and the moral debates I had with adults and students—it all seemed so distant now. 

           

        I was told by several teachers that day, as well as my parents, that the work so many had done was not for nothing—that, in fact, the world was a better place for it all.  But when I turned on the TV after school, I knew our newly elected president embodied the opposite of nearly everything I believed in.  Video montages of his rallies resurfaced on the internet that day—the violence, the racism, sexism, and classism, the mockery of a disabled person, and the repulsive comments made about women throughout his life.  Those videos filled me with anger and sadness and other feelings I so badly did not want to feel.  It was hard to not let that sadness infiltrate me and debilitate me. Yet, when I graduated later that year, my cap was decorated with the words, “Nevertheless, she persisted.”

           

         Last November, I went back to my old elementary school to cast my first vote in a national election.  When I walked through the double doors of the school, I saw a long, single-file line of people waiting to cast their votes.  The line extended down the hallway of my fifth-grade classroom and into the auditorium.  I felt young and almost out-of-place as I took my place in the line. When it was finally my turn to receive a ballot, my hands became clammy.  I was handed a large, envelope-looking sleeve with a coveted ballot on the inside.  It felt heavy in my hands.  I took my place at my secret station, guarded by a large piece of patriotic cardboard. This was real.  I was participating in democracy—not just reading about it.  I filled in the ovals carefully and completely and then made my way to the large computer voting machine.  I watched my ballot get quickly sucked into the device and disappeared from my eyes in seconds.  When I left my old school that day last November, I felt the most overwhelming sense of pride and happiness.  My voice was one in several million, but on that evening, it mattered, at least to me.