I expected some sort of new-age woman with long thick red hair and heavy make-up, though I knew I was forming some sort of biased opinion in my mind based on me personal perceptions of psychics. Wait, she didn’t call herself a psychic anyway, she called herself a medium.

Curious, I took a few moments to search what the difference between the two was, and I found an apt description by Rebecca Rosen online: “Psychics tune into the energy of people or objects by feeling or sensing elements of their past, present and future. Simply put, psychics rely on their basic sense of intuition and psychic ability to gather information for the person being read. Mediums take it a step further. A medium uses his or her psychic or intuitive abilities to see the past, present and future events of a person by tuning into the spirit energy surrounding that person. This means mediums rely on the presence of non-physical energy outside of themselves for the information relevant to the person being read.”

I do believe in the human capacity to tune into others. I consider myself an empath; I can sense the emotions of others, and if I’m not careful I can get caught up in the emotions. It takes me mental and emotional effort to keep myself free and clear, and it tremendously aids my work as a therapist. I definitely believe there are mediums and psychics in the world, people who are subject to the emotions and impressions of the energies and consciousnesses of those who have passed on.

When I met the medium, she was nothing like I expected. She was a normal looking person, a beautiful women with long hair, fit and athletic, who talked about her children and her journey. She had kind eyes and an intuitive nature about her, and I immediately felt at ease, once I realized she was not seeking money or recognition or endorsement. She simply had a message to share.

The medium explained to me that she had first discovered her talents a few years before, when she realized she was sensitive to the energies of those close to her who had passed, and sometimes to the energies of deceased loved ones of friends or acquaintances. She would sometimes get direct messages for a loved one, or a gentle impression to do something (like making caramels for a neighbor, a gesture from a deceased grandmother through the medium), and on occasion could have direct conversations. She explained to me that this was the first time she had ever had a direct conversation with someone who she didn’t know.

My best friend Kurt died last April in a small car accident that caused internal bleeding. He shouldn’t have died, but he did, and it was a huge shock. His fiancée had been with him at the time. The medium explained that she had been playing with her children in a park near the site of the accident when she came down with a tremendous headache. She returned to the park a few days later and got the same headache, and she realized someone was trying to communicate with her. After doing a bit of research, she realized it was Kurt.

The medium presented me with several pages of notes she had taken from her conversations with Kurt, a strange stream of consciousness from him to her. He was at peace, he was confused about how abruptly things had happened, he wanted to be sure his fiancée was okay. Most of the notes were about how happy he had been, how he had created a life for himself and how he wanted his fiancée to go on with his life.

I was very moved as she spoke, talking about how powerful Kurt is, how much influence he has. I had tears rolling down my cheeks as she told me things like, “He is such a beautiful spirit. Even thru that confusion/that fuzz, shining right thru it there is joy, love (SO MUCH LOVE) and light (SO MUCH LIGHT) from his being. He is light.”

She gripped my hand across the table as she told me Kurt’s message for me. “You were his rock, his hero, his adventure, his light, his ‘twin’, and he is so thankful for what you both shared and all you taught him about strength and courage and finding your voice.”

My mind flashed with all of my adventures with Kurt, all of our texts and conversations, all of the coffee and drinks and movies, all of the laughter, all of the trips, all of the heart-sharing, all of the dreaming and scheming, all of the quiet moments, all of the assurance that he would always be there and he would always understand me. I muttered through my tears about how much he had meant to me, and how much he had changed me into someone better, and the medium smiled back and told me I had meant just as much to him.

She looked down briefly, and then back up, and met my eyes again, and she told me that something very big was right on the horizon for me, that all of my efforts were soon to pay off in a great success, and she told me that love was on the horizon with someone I hadn’t met yet, the kind of love Kurt had found with his fiancée.

I dried my tears and we talked a bit about life and journeys and goals and dreams, and then the medium gave me a big hug and said that we were supposed to have met. With a promise to stay in touch, we said farewell and she drove away.

It took me a few weeks to make sense of this whole experience, to realize the beauty of the kind of person who would deliver a message like that at no personal gain, but simply because she felt compelled to. I have wondered about Kurt, knowing he is at peace and that he continues to watch out for me sometimes, but mostly that he is watching out for his sons and his fiancée, and that he is of course having a brand new set of adventures, because he can do nothing left than live life at its fullest, in whatever form life takes.

Kurt Peterson, my friend, I miss you every day, and I remember you always. Thank you, thank you, again, for the influence you have had on my life. I’m living strong, and in a way that I know you would be proud of me. Rest well, sir, and journey on.

I haven’t written in a few days. I’ve been distracting myself with projects and workouts and, as always, work. This morning, as I sit down to type my thoughts, I find my insides a quagmire of outrage and confusion, impatience and frustration, sadness and numbness, and maybe more than anything: disappointment.

My brain is spinning in circles, with no clear direction, random facts brimming to the surface in a stream of consciousness that I can’t clearly comprehend.

My thoughts keep going back to the movements of the past. Segregation, for example. After decades of black kids being restricted to poorer educations, people had to force the government to decide to take action, and that took another dozen years before they began enforcing sanctions and made segregation illegal. Even then, local politicians authorized the use of police and military force to keep grade school aged black kids from walking into white schools. It took a few years for the heat to wear off, and then the public stopped focusing on segregation as a hot button issue, and so all of the publicly funded white private schools that were created, and racially based, were ignored. We have seen this trend again more recently with the passage of gay marriage; those opposed went kicking and screaming, and then instead fought for legislation for “religious freedom” which would allow people to discriminate against gays on a legal level.

Then my head spins to the Civil Rights movement, the public marches, almost universally peaceable, that were met with extreme violence on the part of white protesters who refused to give African Americans a seat at the table, and instead murdered, beat, and intimidated them. Then I flash to the Civil War, where hundreds of thousands of lives were lost to end slavery. And then it spins on to a litany of facts, from failure to give women a seat at the table, to lacks of hate crime laws to protect populations that need help, to… on and on.

And then I’m back to where I spent the days before the election: absolute shock and disgust that anyone could possibly vote against measures that accept and include humanity, and how we can possibly give power to a man affiliated with every principle  that goes against my personal feelings and beliefs. How could my own family have voted for that man? How can they not share my outrage, my disgust, my fear?

And then, finally, my rational brain trumps my emotional brain. In the cause of social justice, there are no easy victories. Nearly everyone I consider a hero has been fighting this same fight with little victories and major setbacks since long before I was born. The Equal Rights Amendment never passed, Martin Luther King gave his very life, Emma Goldman was deported for refusing to be silent, on and on.

Despite the ugly corners of the history of humanity, however, this does feel like a very divisive shift. After a handful of years of slow and deliberate progress, this feels like such an angry line in the sand. In a strange and somewhat hopeful way, I see a silver lining of this election possibly being a great unifier: Donald Trump and those he has surrounded himself with are anti-everything: Black, Mexican, Muslim, Immigrant, Woman, Gay, Transgender, the Disabled… we have an opportunity to all be on the same page.

I see people I respect, like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, conceding in a way, with mutterings of giving the new president a chance. I don’t think I can do that. I recognize that there are governments out there without the freedom of speech, who silence those who are not in power, who use intimidation, prosecution, and violence to keep voices from being shared openly. This feels like a step in that direction. It feels disgusting, and scary. And all around me, I see people (most of them white and religious) who shrug and roll their eyes and say this isn’t that big of a deal. To me, it is, and to nearly everyone in my circles, both professionally and personally, both locally and online, it is a big deal as well.

I’ve spent hours in these past several weeks typing about social justice, about logic and human rights and history and celebrating our differences. And I’m realizing that it is almost impossible to reason with the unreasonable. I can’t reason with a political mindset of refusing to teach sex education, then refusing to allow women to get abortions, then refusing to pay welfare to babies born in poverty. And how is it that for the second time in my life time, my candidate has won the majority vote and still isn’t the president?

As I organize my thoughts here, I realize how all over the place I am, how exhausted. I feel like I just emptied the drawers of my desk and dresser and laid out all of the items in a big pile on the floor, and now I’m just standing there, a bit helpless and overwhelmed, with no idea of how to organize them differently, or if I should just leave them all there in a big pile, or if I should just start with one item and begin the job.

For a few minutes, at least, I’m tired of screaming, and I’m tired of being silent. I’m tired of reasoning and being reasonable, and I’m tired of being silenced and being told to wait my turn. I’m experiencing a vast and personal unrest. The fundamentals of my life haven’t changed: job, kids, bills, goals, living life… but my faith in humanity is being stretched and I’m not sure what to do with it.

I arrived early to the rally and stood at the base of the large white monument, looming under the sky, electric lights making it shine up on the hill. I’ve always found the Utah State Capitol Building, at the top of Capitol Hill in Salt Lake City, to be a beautiful building, with an incredible view of the city stretching on for miles around. I’ve walked the grounds many times. But this time, I had a heavy heart, and a heavy clarity.

I stood at the base of the steps in the chill air and looked at the small monuments that have been built there, celebrating the accomplishments of the pioneers who settled Utah. It showcased hard-working religions men pulling carts and women in long skirts bearing and raising children, succeeding in taming the harsh wilderness. The accomplishments of white people in front of a white building. No mention of the slaves dragged behind them, no memorial to the Native Americans that were killed and swindled out of land.

I felt cynical as I looked up to the governmental structure and thought about events in another white building this week, where the first African American president met with a new President Elect, this a white man who has been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. Hillary’s loss has caused me pain this week, but not nearly so much pain as the election of Trump and all he stands for, and all his election says about our country, and the progress we lack.

With thoughts of the unjust loss of Al Gore to George Bush in my head, followed by the loss of Hillary to Trump, with a corrupt system of electoral college votes in place, I ascended the steps at the Capitol to join with like minds, the disenfranchised and their allies. I stood in solidarity in the cold with the gays and lesbians, transgender individuals, African and Hispanic and Asian and Middle Eastern Americans, atheists and Muslims, and women who fall into each of these categories. We stood together and we grieved and processed, talked and shared.

We stood on the steps of a government building all in white, above the tributes to white men, and we grieved our failure to find a place within their government. We stood and grieved that the laws of a country that was built on equality fails to protect its citizens who don’t belong, a country that said equality but from the beginning didn’t include women or blacks or anyone else in their plans.

I got a funny taste in my mouth as I looked over the city. My eyes landed on the Mormon temple and I thought of all those years I fought for a place to belong in an organization that celebrates white men, a church with the same history as the government that Trump was about to take over. I thought of all of the people I love who are in pain right now. And I realized that pain is nothing unique.

And then I realized that this is how it has always been. And this is the way it will likely always be. The fight of the oppressed against the oppressors, it is the way of things. Women wanting equal pay and the right to not be raped and abused and the right to determine their own health care choices, black people wanting to not be profiled by police or to be thrown in jail for minor offenses, transgender people wanting basic human protections against excessive violence, Muslim people wanting the right to worship and to feel safe on their own streets, Native American people wanting protections and sovereignty on their own sacred lands.

We have been fighting this fight since the very formation of America. This country that espouses its freedom and opportunity and American dream-ism with waving flags and fireworks. We espouse hope and acceptance, while half of us complain about their lack of religious freedom and their weariness over being politically correct. This is the country of leading gun violence and murders in the world, of the highest prison populations in the world, of one of the highest inequality rates for women in the world. This is the home of slavery, Native American genocide attempts, sterilization, stacks of unsolved murders against transgender women of color, gay change therapy, Japanese internment camps, lynching, Civil War, lack of representation in government by women, over-representation of African American men in prisons, lack of health care, extreme poverty, Communist witch hunts. This is the country that dropped two atomic bombs and launched a war on Iraq under false pretenses.

I feel practically pessimistic as these thoughts race through my head. I think of my heroes, people who have fought the system and had small triumphs along the way, some of whom were killed for their attempts. I think of Hillary Clinton, and Barbara Jordan, and Sally Ride, and Barack Obama, and Michelle Obama, and Martin Luther King, and Coretta Scott King, and Harvey Milk, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and Thurgood Marshall, and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Margaret Sanger, and Harriet Tubman, and Abraham Lincoln, and Gloria Steinem, and the hundreds of others who spent lifetimes making small cracks in the glass.

After the small rally, and the hugs and handshakes, I walked back to my car in the cold, in the dark, and I sighed heavily. My grief remains palpable. I descended the hill from the Capitol Building, wondering what hope there is for a country that shines its white building on the hill and ignores those on its steps.