Happy November ninth. We have now passed the point when the election matters. The majority selected Donald Trump. That is the way our world is right now.

It just is.

Opinions on Trump vs. Hillary vs. Whomever Else entering the White House no longer have the power to bring about change. Now, the change has to come from things that are less set in stone.

It has to come from us. Our voices, our experiences, our creative expressions, our empathy.

I received a sharp, jolting shock to my system when I went online at 6 a.m. and found the polls to be nothing like what I imagined they would be. Going to sleep the night before I felt reasonably secure in the predictions I had read about before the election. I thought I understood the level of change the new president would bring with them.

I didn’t.

This morning I scrambled to think what this new degree of change would mean. I still don’t know.

My first instinct was to seek out my friends, family, and the places I felt safe. I wanted to settle in and stay there until someone could tell me exactly what all of this change meant. As many of you know if you have been following me on Odyssey for a while, I am many thousands of miles away from home right now. Since I couldn’t be with them, I started thinking about my family and the life in the United States that I have temporarily left behind.

My family is financially stable. I grew up in an environment that encouraged me to be exactly the person I feel I am. I possess a legal document that guarantees I will be allowed to return to the place I consider my home when my time abroad is over. People don’t form immediate negative judgments about me walking down the street because I was born white, female, and attractive.

Are you noticing a theme with all of these amazing privileges that I have?

They are all accidents of fate.

There are so many people who were born differently than I was. Right now many of those people are grasping for a feeling of security and safety much more desperately than I was this morning.

One thing that has made me uncomfortable on both the Democratic and Republican sides of this presidential race is the heavy use of appeals to fear. Fear can never be the answer. The election of one individual person does not guarantee apocalypse or utopia. You as a voter are not evil or stupid for picking a certain side. Fear appeals only sew panic and tempts us to close our eyes tightly.

One thing I would ask of you in the coming months, is please don’t close your eyes. Look around you and realize which things are different, and which are exactly the same. If fear blinds you to everyone else’s story in the name of your own self-preservation, think of me. Understand I am the same as many other Americans. Except for the fact that they, by whatever accident of fate, were born in a different skin or in love with a different person.

The more people you meet when you go out into the world, and the more you try to put them into boxes, the more you realize how little there is to pick at. Division solves nothing and it changes nothing. Unconditional hatred is just fear by a different name. Categories are things we make up inside of our heads in an attempt to sort out our hectic world a little more easily.