The long, dark winter is upon us. While I live for 70-degree summers, the late fall/winter in Washington State is enough to make the most energized person to hibernate and become depressed as all get-out.

Darkness when we wake. Darkness when we return home. Darkness in the news. Everything darkness. From a pandemic, to lockdowns, to an election that is a big fustercluck, the fatigue of 2020 has set in. If we hibernate and come out in the spring, in 2021, will all be back to normal? Or will we continue to hear the same catch phrases of 2020? Mask up. Social distance. Six feet apart. Distance learning. Asychronous learning. ZOOM. Teams. PPE. Toilet paper. Cancel this, cancel that. To-go orders only. Don’t accidentally kill someone. Wash your hands. Not forever but for now. No more than 10 people to a room. We’re all in this together.

Except we’re not. Not even close. Some of those people we are closest to are scared to come close to us. Our political differences put us on even farther sides of the spectrum. FaceTime becomes heated during election season. Work meetings become intense. Text messages get you blocked without explanation. The air is thickening and we’re having a hard enough time breathing because of these masks on our faces.

Yet, all some of us want to do at the end of the day is come home to those we love and trust and hold them close. We have watched and witnessed a train wreck of a year. Pandemic, riots, fires and now round two of pandemic. Let’s add onto this unemployment, businesses shuttering, vacations canceled, depression, increases in suicides, alcoholism and drug addiction, weddings postponed, our elderly dying alone, our kids out of school for almost a whole year and parents who are doubling as teachers after the 9-5 grind (if they are of the lucky few to still be employed).

Devastation. For most of us who were wanting another four years of President Trump and dreading fours years of a Biden-Harris administration, coming home to the news over the past few weeks has been disheartening. Seeing election numbers flip, seemingly overnight while we slept, would have left the other side cynical and bitter for sure. And I have to hear one more touchy, feely, social-distancy (yeah, I made that one up) commercial narrated by some voiceover talent who sounds like Christine Blasey-Ford at the Kavanaugh hearing in between all of it, it may be all I can do to not shatter my TV. I admit, I have been guilty of turning off the talking heads. I have stayed away from Facebook. I want to hibernate. I have done everything but check the news to include untangling the mass amounts of Christmas lights that I will put up this week because NO ONE cancels MY Christmas.

To those of you who wanted a Biden win and may be reading this, these admissions are not the “I’m so sad Trump may not win this election pity party”. We here at Victory Girls don’t whine. We don’t “do” pity parties just like Andrew Cuomo doesn’t “do” pandemics. We are a well-rounded group of women from all walks of life who like to hold their heads high and have our own battles going on in every day life. You will not see us screaming at the sky if it is determined that we are stuck with Biden for four years. But, I must admit that I have felt a bit beaten-down by the realistic possibility of a Biden win. So much so, I’ve gone into what a friend and I used to call “Cave Girl” mode. Back in our single days, it was when we turned our phones off and sat by ourselves and ate all of the chips and drank all of the Sangria and watched all of the movies. Times of “Cave Girl” have changed a bit-I just hibernate with my people-human and furry-my husband, my son and my cats but the premise remains the same. We have turned off the news, we eat dinner without the television in the background. I blast my 80s and 90s indy-pop-punk collection to and from work and think of simpler times.

Country in a Coma, I know, I know, it’s really serious…

As a writer here at Victory Girls, I have felt less-than inspired over the past few weeks. Perhaps you have been, too. Maybe you may have put down your phone. Maybe you got off Facebook. Maybe you may have had enough of the news media. Maybe you don’t believe any thing they have to say any more. But news media and politicians that don’t have the opposition listening in-zoning in-is dangerous for us in the long-run. They want us depressed and downtrodden. They want us defeated and hopeless. They want us in a long, dark winter’s slumber because they want to make the terrible look not so terrible. I venture to say, at risk of sounding like the chick with the annoying vocal fry in that social-distancing commercial you’ve heard 1,000 times over, “we’re all in this together” because, well, we are. We may not be happy about the state of things right now but we need to stay awake and be vigilant. While we want to hide and take that long winter’s nap, we need to be doing the opposite. Asking questions. Creating dialogue. Holding feet to the fire. Staying razor-sharp and mentally and physically fit. It’s time to take heart, to not hibernate. It is time to embrace the suck that has been 2020, crawl out of this cave with a loud roar and not back down. Our lives depend on this. Our liberties depend on this. Our nation depends on this.

Photo Credit: FlickR/Creative Commons/Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)/Cropped