This post was originally written on Theresa's previous blog, comedyfeminismlipstick.com, and was first published on January 20th, 2017. 

Headlines like you wouldn’t believe. 

We’re living in a universe parallel to the one we prepared for. We’re living in a universe we only joked about.  

“It would be like that Amazon show about what if the Germans had won the war.” You giggled at the hypothetical. “What was it called? The Man in the High Castle. It would be like that. And there’d be headlines like you wouldn’t believe.”

And you thought, If he doesn’t win, I hope HBO produces a show about What If. He’d be tweeting nonsense, attacking art heroes, appointing billionaires, and there’d be headlines like you wouldn’t believe. 

You thought a lot about what it would feel like when she won. You thought about what kind of tears you’d cry when the news stations were confident enough on their electoral math to call it the results early. You thought about what it would feel like, but you never got to feel it. 

You felt something else. You felt the bully win. You felt stupid about blasting Beyoncé’s “Who Run The World” all week. You felt like maybe women can’t be anything, after all. 

So you bottled the other feelings, the feelings about when she gets elected. You carefully bottled them and put them up on a shelf for safe keeping until the first woman is elected president. Maybe she’s a senator. Maybe she’s sixteen-years-old. Maybe she knows what it feels like to experience sexism in the 21st century. 

Someone on the news says that history is bigger than one election, but the current universe seems scary and absurd. The current universe elected a silly man who lives in a tower and wants to be king. You, your loved ones, and the smartest people you know were wrong about what would happen, and that leaves you feeling uneasy. 

You fear getting your hopes up again. You fear the feeling you felt that night, and the feeling you felt each morning that week. That humiliating feeling. A feeling of mourning. The feeling of wearing all black and walking into that magazine store on November 9th. 

That feeling when you looked at all the newspapers stacked up with headlines like you wouldn’t believe.