I'm finding it tricky to balance giving myself time and mental space to mourn this defeat with my impulse to start thinking about how to respond. The first is a necessity, and I don't think I'll be able to think as clearly as I need to until it happens. So forgive any fragmentation or randomness in what follows; like many of you, I'm still reeling.

My first Pollyann-ish impulse is to say that there's comfort in knowing that so many people are feeling as down as me - but isn't there also something disorienting about the collective sense of helplessness? It is as if we were all just in a car crash, and are still too disoriented to help anyone else from the accident.

Obviously a big part of this is the sheer unexpectedness of the Trump win. We are so used to the polls being right and to the basic fact that true surprises are few and far between in our politics. And of course we have had plenty of time to get scared about what a Trump win would entail.

I have a sense of having passed through some invisible portal into a cartoonish upside-down universe where the usual physical rules no longer apply. This is not a great place from which to fashion a response to what is most definitely a contest in our regular old world. For me, and I suspect for many others, one of the most important steps will be to fully accept and internalize this awful reality in order to combat it.