THE MORNING AFTER
I've been living in this incredible Wolford get-up (dress and tights) as of late, partly because I've been leaning on comfort more and more these days, and when you find something that's incredible quality and takes no effort to look pulled together, you wear it over and over.
It also seemed only appropriate to dress in all-black today, considering the ominous events of last night, confirmed this morning. Last night and very early this morning (didn't sleep much), all I wanted to to was curl into a ball and shut the world and the results of the election out. But as the news that our next president will be our worst has really settled in (and as Hillary wins the popular vote), I'm getting something of a second wind. Because no matter who is in office or who holds senate, our voices are still ours and they can still be used. Real strength shows itself best in the midst of struggle and turmoil and that's exactly what I'm looking forward to seeing and contributing to for the next four years.
To badly paraphrase my favorite social theorist Emile Durkheim, we as a society need adversity to be able to define what we believe in. And according to Durkheim, we may even, to some extent, need the unethical to reaffirm what ethical is (he referenced morality, but I'm replacing with ethics here because the term morality is a whole other can of worms). And while it may not seem like it right now, adversity can be often be a beneficial thing longterm. In the last year, the state of this country has divided us, it's true. But it's also brought together and built a bond between people who truly believe in equal rights for all genders, sexes, races, ethnicities, religions, sexual identities, and classes. We've rallied. We've educated each other. We've banded together. We hear each other, and we're still here. And we're going to continue fighting for what we believe in.
xx,
Tienlyn
Photos by Nikko DeTranquilli
