I long ago gave up on my rule of not allowing myself to feel hope about the US election. I am now where I was in 2016: expecting him to lose. This is a very dangerous place.

This isn& #39;t a point about the polling or anything like that. He is likely to lose. It& #39;s about my emotional capacity to deal with it if he doesn& #39;t. Last time it pretty much stomped the guts out of me for a couple months.

So now I think I better engage some & #39;everything is terrible and always will be& #39; part of my brain, not for reasons of objective validity, but as a kind of precautionary therapy.