Yesterday I voted for myself. What a strange feeling!

Maybe some first-time candidates dream of seeing their name on a ballot the way some girls dream of their wedding day. I’m not that candidate.

I also wasn’t that girl. Until Tim proposed to me, the thought of marriage (to anyone) hadn’t crossed my mind. I’d just turned 21, we were seniors at UT, and we’d been dating three months. He had a ’64 Dart with a red vinyl front seat, a green cloth back seat, and cafeteria trays where the floorboards should be. Which is to say there was no ring. He just turned to me one day and said, “Do you want to get married and have kids?” I waited a beat to make sure he wasn’t kidding, then said, “Sure.”

It took me longer to say yes when I was asked to run for State House. The thought hadn’t crossed my mind until someone from the Hamilton County Democratic Party proposed it. But I knew that someone needed to run and I was, maybe for the first time in my life, in a position to do it. Our youngest child was graduating from college and Tim would be retiring soon. He could handle things at home if I was elected, and I could go back to freelancing if I wasn’t.

Instead it’s serving wealthy donors while distracting the public with culture wars. That’s been the Republican strategy for decades, but it played out in a slow-boil way that was easy to ignore if you weren’t one of the groups getting the worst of it. Then Donald Trump turned it up to eleven.

Trump’s America felt so dark, so Orwellian, so un-American to me that less than a month into his presidency, I felt compelled to write about it. I sent the piece off to Chattanooga Times editorial page editor Pam Sohn, who didn’t know me from Adam. She published it as an op-ed.

Writing it was revelatory, and it led to where I am now. I realized that my power to change my larger circumstances may be limited, but I’ll always have the power to help people.

That will be true regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s election.

Allison
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