The thing nobody tells you about watching democracy die is how much of it happens on a Tuesday afternoon while you’re trying to remember if you took your meds.

It’s not dramatic. It’s not lightning splitting the sky. It’s a press release. It’s a redistricting map that looks like someone let a “toddler” loose with a Sharpie and a grudge. It’s a state legislature passing something at 11pm that nobody read, and somebody explaining it to me in a voice that I think is supposed to be calming but mostly just makes me want to take a nap forever.

I keep waiting for the part where it feels like a movie. Where there’s a swelling score and a clear villain and a third act. But it’s just… Tuesday. And then Wednesday. And then a friend texts you something deeply unhinged about voter rolls and you read it standing in the cereal aisle trying to decide between two boxes of basically the same thing.

I am so tired.

I have been tired since 2016. I have been tired since before that, honestly, I just didn’t have the vocabulary for it. I thought what I was feeling was a normal amount of bad. And then it kept getting worse and I kept finding new floors under the floors and at some point I just accepted that the basement, in fact, has a basement. And the basement’s basement has plumbing. And someone is down there right now turning off the water.

The election is being rigged in slow motion. That’s the part that wrecks me. It’s not one stolen ballot box, it’s a thousand tiny procedural changes that all individually sound boring and collectively spell out “we have decided you don’t get to vote anymore, sorry, here’s some flag merchandise.” It’s purges and ID laws and gerrymanders and Supreme Court rulings handed down by people who very clearly did not get into law school on merit. It’s a long, deliberate, professional unmaking of a thing I was raised to believe was load-bearing.

And the worst part — the actual worst part, the part that makes me want to scream into a pillow — is how many people I know who have just… checked out. Not because they don’t care but because caring has become an act of self-harm. You can’t watch this every day and stay a functional human. You just can’t. The body wasn’t built for it. We were not designed to grieve a country in real time on our phones while also paying to live.

So we ration. We pick a thing. We donate to the one organization or we volunteer for the one campaign or we have the one hard conversation with the one relative and then we go lie down because that’s all we have in us.

Sarah and I will make it through this how me make it through everything: Together.

That’s the deal we have made. We don’t lie to each other about it. We don’t pretend things are fine. We don’t toxic-positivity our way through the news cycle. We sit on the couch and we hold hands and we say the true thing, which is “I don’t know, but I’m here, and you’re here, and we’re going to keep being here as long as we can.”

That’s it. That’s the whole strategy. That’s the entire emergency plan. Two people, one couch, three cats who do not care about the Voting Rights Act.

I think a lot about how much of my political education was a lie. Not always a malicious lie — although sometimes absolutely a malicious lie — but a comfortable lie. The idea that the arc of history bends toward justice. The idea that the system, while flawed, would correct itself. The idea that there were grown-ups in charge somewhere. There aren’t. There never were. There were just people, and some of them were doing their best, and some of them were doing the absolute opposite of their best, and the whole thing was held together by the polite fiction that we were all participating in the same project.

The polite fiction is over. The project was never what they told us it was.

And yet.

And yet I’m still going to vote. I’m still going to call my reps. I’m still going to argue with my uncle. I’m still going to give money I don’t really have to causes I don’t fully trust to spend it well, because the alternative is to sit perfectly still while the people doing the unmaking get to keep unmaking.

It is, to be clear, a deeply stupid plan. The math is not great. But I don’t have a better one and neither does anybody else and so we will keep doing the deeply stupid plan together until either it works or it doesn’t and at least we will have done the thing.

Sarah will be on the couch. I will be on the couch. The cats will be unimpressed. Democracy will keep dying in slow motion on the TV in the background and we will keep holding hands and keep saying the true thing.

That’s the post. That’s all I’ve got today.

Stay loud, stay tender, stay here.