To all of the people in my life who voted for Trump, I have just one thing to say to you:
I love you. Amidst all of the hurt I feel, the fear and pain, I have not stopped loving you. You made a decision that I will never truly understand or condone, a decision that has given us a president who goes against everything I am and makes me fear for my safety and the safety of those I love--but I still love you. I still want to talk to you, to work with you as we as a nation figure out how to navigate these troubled times.
I won't lie, when it became apparent that Trump was our president-elect, my first reaction was a visceral desire to lash out. I wanted to scream at every single person who had chosen to vote for a man who bragged of sexual assault, who promoted racism, xenophobia, homophobia, islamophobia, and fear-mongering. I wanted to ask why anyone who claims to care about me would vote for a president, and a vice president, who have vowed to take away my rights as a member of the LGBT community, and my right to control what happens to my own body as a woman. But I have come to realize that many Trump supporters simply never thought of it that way. They have had the luxury of not knowing what it is to be denied the right to marry the person they love, or knowing what it is like to be judged for the color of their skin or the religion that they practice. And that's a good thing--I would never wish those things on anyone.
Now is a time to come together to protect the people who have been made so vulnerable by this election. Hate crimes are already being reported, and people I know and love have already been made to feel unsafe in their own country. I would ask every single Trump supporter to stand with me in denouncing this hate and violence; surely this is not what you voted for.
I also want all of the Trump supporters in my life to know that I am not here to silence them. We cannot move forward as a nation without an open dialogue. Clearly we have wounds that run deep, and in order to heal those wounds we have to talk about them. We cannot afford to stop talking to one another, just as we cannot afford to stop loving one another.
I admit that there are still moments, as there probably always will be, when I just want to isolate myself from all of the hate, to purge every single Trump supporter I have ever met from my life in order to grant myself some relief. And yet I haven't done that, and I won't. That mentality, as tempting as it is, won't solve anything. It will only deepen the divide and create more hate. So instead of hate, I choose love. Every day I plan to make it my mission to choose love over hate, as a reminder that no matter who you voted for in this election, we are all one American people that needs to remember how to be a little kinder to each other. This goes for both Democrats and Republicans, Hillary supporters and Trump supporters. A little love would really go a long way right now.
