Well. That happened.

I’ve posted a lot in the past year on all forms of social media, about just how awful this year has pretty uniformly been. I admit, this is not a highly original observation, but, it’s a true one. Sure, there are some people who benefited from this year, most of them bearing the last name “Trump,” but overall, we’ve all taken quite a few severe losses. These losses range from the political to the personal to those of the celebrity variety. So, after all this, what do we do now?

Well, if you look over social media platforms, it will appear that many believe the solution is “mope.” And I admit, I am extremely guilty of this; like, extremely. I admit, my response to the election in November was to pretty much do nothing but complain on Facebook about how completely and utterly soul-crushing it was. And yes, it was pretty bad; as a hispanic transsexual woman, the Trump-Pence ticket is pretty much personally against me, not to get too political. Yet, I didn’t actually go out and protest, I didn’t attempt to do anything active; I, like many others, used my keyboard as my only weapon--and what did it accomplish? Nothing. It’s hard to truly achieve things in the face of such adversity. We can try and try and write our Facebook rants and sign our online petitions, but what does that really do at the end of the day? It just makes *us* feel better. I mean, how many people actually believed the electoral college would suddenly turn against the election results? I know I didn’t. Sure, I dutifully shared the articles discussing how this could be achieved, but I didn’t buy it as a possibility. That’s the thing; the truth is always much more boring than our “hope.” This is not to insult or demean people who has used these social media posts as a therapeutic source for venting; I did this myself. Yet, all these posts really did was illustrate the general hopelessness we all felt, without generating much useful discourses or change.

And then of course, there’s the massive amounts of celebrity deaths that occurred this past year, arguably the most heartbreaking of which only occurred in the past week (at least from my perspective; RIP Carrie Fisher). We’ve all been trying to make sense of what “caused" these deaths to happen. A certain writer on the website Medium published a tasteless article arguing it’s primarily been drug abuse; this is ridiculous since most of the people who did die this year had no major connection to drug and/or alcohol abuse; including one of the people this writer mentioned, George Michael (the thing this writer cited in connection to him was merely a rumor). And then of course, another writer, by which I mean me, posted a typically condescending post about how we need to stop anthropomorphizing this year and accept it is reality and time that's killing the people we adore. On some level, this is true; it may seem like celebrities are dropping like flies, but the fact is lots of people we all idolized collectively are getting older, and sometimes awful random stuff happens. Yet, it is easy to blame the year as a whole for these deaths; it can be a sort of coping mechanism, pushing all the terribleness of this year onto 2016 as a sort of imaginary adversary.

This year has left me pretty personally hopeless. I mean, my own father had to undergo heart surgery for something that if left untreated, could have killed him; this left a month and a half leading up to the surgery where I was worried he may die. See? Awful things all around us.

So what’s the solution? I have presented a lot of problems here with no real solutions. And maybe there is no easy quick fix for the awfulness that has been this year. As I sit writing this, it is nearly time for the new year, so what can we do going into 2017? I say we need to be vigilant, and not let this year stop us from our goals. If we’re really this unhappy about the political climate, flex our political muscles in a concrete way, contact our senators (not through social media), or go to protests in Washington. If you’re this concerned about our celebrities, then fight to decrease the stigma surrounding mental illness, as many of our dearly departed suffered from in some form. My point is this: we cannot let our sadness turn into apathy in 2017. We have to be motivated, because there is always a chance that next year will be even worse; if that happens, we can’t be crushed or defeated. We have to fight.