As I have every election night since 2016, I mixed myself a very stiff cocktail, turned off my phone and went to bed. At that point, there wasn’t anything I could do about the outcome of any races, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to stay up doomscrolling.

When I turned my device back on just before midnight, the phone lit up with a torrent of messages that can best be described as wildly disparate. There were either joyful congratulations for my cousin, Maryland’s new Senator-elect Angela Alsobrooks, or baleful statements of mourning and despair about pretty much everything else.

The feeling at Angie’s watch party in Prince George’s County was “joyful,” said my sister, who joined most of the rest of my family there. But as the evening went on and news from the states started to roll in, “you could tell the mood had changed.”

I had declined to go to the party, both for journalistic reasons and because it just felt physically safer to be here in my house with the alarm on. I wish I’d been there to hug the new senator, and it’s nice to have something positive to focus on. I am proud to be a Marylander today because of that and the vote to protect abortion rights. But much of the rest of country voted for authoritarianism and chaos. And that’s on them.

Actually, it’s on all of us.

This is not hyperbole. I am not being a hater or a divider. I’m just reading what the people that have been voted into power say they want and are going to do. I have to assume that means some voters’ proximity to power and racism is more important than those they claim to love. So you know what? I’m not going to waste time trying to make anyone feel good about this. I’m not kumbaya-ing any more. Live with that. People are allowed to feel despair and anger, and we’re not going to make them feel bad about it.

When I moved back to Baltimore in 2020, I had so many Floridian friends — and some Maryland ones — who were dismayed that I was returning to a place they only knew from “The Wire.” I can say resolutely that it’s the best decision I have made as a parent. Even with its shortcomings, whether that’s violence or infrastructure, my neighbors overwhelmingly voted as if my life matters. As if the lives of my trans friends and nieces of childbearing age matter. They made history by voting for a Black woman to represent them in the Senate, joining Black men in the state’s mayoral and gubernatorial offices.

But this doesn’t let the rest of the country off the hook. Whatever is coming is coming, whether you voted for it or not. Mass deportation. An end to national protections for abortion rights. Threats to Social Security, Department of Education and FEMA. I did all I could about it.

I’m not sure what’s next. I don’t even have a pithy way to finish this column. I’ll just say that my joy for Maryland is tempered by my sadness for my country.