How I outran Trump’s victory

I forgot which message or DM I received first. The first few moments of a traumatic event always feel a little fuzzy for me. But eventually it sank in. 

Trump won the 2024 election without so much as a doubt hope for recount. 

I felt betrayed. Social contracts hung to dry. I was so angry. Everything felt hopeless as scenes of Handmaid’s Tales repeatedly flashed across my mind. 

At a loss as to what to do and half dressed for a run in the park - I robotically put on the rest of my running outfit and left my grenade of a phone behind and ran!

Weeks later, I am reading The Body Keeps Score by Bessel Van der Kolk and it suddenly hit me why I felt so apathetic regarding the election result after the first couple of days. Strange, because in 2016 I found myself in a deep depression that raged on for months. 

In the book, Kolk wrote “If the fight/flight/ freeze response is successful and we escape the danger, we recover our internal equilibrium and gradually “regain our senses” . . . If for some reason the normal response is blocked . . . the brain keeps secreting stress chemicals, and the brain’s electrical circuits continue to fire in vain.”

So in hindsight, I was literally able to exercise fight/flight/freeze in response to the trauma of Trump’s victory and outran its shitty impacts and continue to cope with life as is. It’s the equivalent of accidentally stepping on a dog shit, wiping it off, and moving on - as opposed to stepping on the dog shit and staring at it in disbelief for weeks and months on end feeling (stinkily) hopeless. 

With this basic awareness of our body’s trauma response pattern, I understood how pivotal the initial physical response is. It is not about taking the best response but feeling the control of being able to make a response that might save years of therapy. 

Let me preface it by saying that I am a newbie runner who has never turned to running as a coping mechanism before. And boy oh boy, is that going to change!