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't a point about the polling or anything like that. He is likely to lose. It's about my emotional capacity to deal with it if he doesn't. Last time it pretty much stomped the guts out of me for a couple months.

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