Photo by Paul Mayer.

This post originally appeared at Kimberly Mayer’s blog and is reposted here with kind permission.

I have my father on speed dial. He said to call any time I need to hear that our country, our world, will survive president-elect Trump. While the nation is going rogue, I am sitting on my island in the Salish Sea thinking this is not far enough away.

On election day, I wore ironed white linen in honor of the suffragettes. And Buddhist prayer beads around my neck for good measure. We were giddy then.

It’s an awful lot like my divorce.

But I should have known. A Trump-sized migraine had preceded the election. His supporters were hiding in plain sight. Some were even hiding in my extended family.

Without ever having met, Donald Trump and I go way back.

My first husband was a narcissist, and I am here to tell you that nothing good can come of it. I don’t know how I survived, but imagine arriving in NYC in the ’70s after the storm of the marriage, arriving on my arse, so to speak. In an era when Donald Trump was the golden boy, or so he thought. Building golden towers, hideously gaudy to everyone else.

Even then I loathed him. I may have had conflicted feelings about my ex, but I was very clear on Donald J. Trump. I had a plan to walk out of any venue should he saunter in, or cross the street if I saw him coming—but of course he was always riding limos, then as now. And fortunately I was spared.

Over the years, after extensive analysis of these two men, I was able to define my feelings as a toxicity to narcissism. And so I stay away from those types. Now here it comes back to me, embodied in one of its original suits.

What to do? What to do? First I will write this. It’s as much for me, you understand, as it is a message-in-a-bottle to the world. I need to know that I can still write.

Then what? This is what it’s like after that election, when you don’t know if you can see straight, if you can find your feet, or get out of bed in the morning. It’s an awful lot like my divorce.

Next I’ll retrieve the piece that I had started to write before the election. On the Madrona Tree, and our shared DNA with trees. For someone is going to have to care a wit about the environment in this new era. Right?