One warm Sunday when I was in Elementary School my grandma handed me a copy of the Los Angeles Times and turned to the comics section. It was love at first sight. However, I soon became dissatisfied. It just didn’t make sense that a newspaper with so many pages would only dedicate a few measly inches to Marmaduke. One day I bravely decided to go on a quest to find more cartoons, starting with the front page.

I actually did manage to find one more comic to read but it wasn’t very funny and also I realize now it was actually an advertisement for a male performance pill. Although I had failed to find more visual entertainment the news stories, particularly the political ones, drew me in. This was how, at a freakishly young age, I became inducted into the world of politics.

Inducted isn’t really the right word though, because I wasn’t participating. I became invested in politics the way people become invested in their sports team. It was a lot of fun to follow the game and cheer from the sidelines but it was never anything more than entertainment.

In middle school I discovered The Daily Show and the Colbert Report and the Democrats became my home team.

In High School I met my first real activist, a woman who I still greatly admire to this day. She told me that the mark of a true activist was fighting for people you weren’t one of and causes that didn’t directly affect you. After carefully thinking it over and measuring myself against this definition, I decided that I wasn’t an activist and had no desire to become one. I was self-aware enough to realize that my vaguely supporting a cause didn’t count as fighting for one. I realized there wasn’t any cause or group of people I cared enough about to fight for and I was fine with that. In fact, I was proud of myself for having the maturity to recognize I was no activist and from that point onward I never missed an opportunity to sneer down my nose at the people who I judged as fake activists.

I ended up going to a college where being politically passionate was fashionable like Gucci at a prep school. It didn’t take long for me to gain a reputation as someone who knew what he was talking about. I was courted by the Democrat club, the Republican club, the Socialist Collective, various non-affiliated Anarcho-Communists, and Tea Party sympathizers trying to keep a low profile on a liberal campus. I floated from group to group, stylishly encased in an iron-hard crust of smug superiority, never fully committing to any of them. Politics was an icebreaker or a way to make friends and anyone stupid enough to think it was anything more was wasting their time.

A few months after I had left college and returned to Los Angeles I began volunteering for the Clinton campaign. I did it for three reasons. First, most of my friends growing up had moved away and I wanted to meet new people. Second, I wanted to claim some credit for playing for the winning team. Finally, I bet my last English professor a hundred bucks that Donald Trump would never win and I didn’t actually have a hundred bucks. Around the same time I started volunteering I hit a massive case of writers block and bought a video game called Darkest Dungeon to fill up all the time I wasn’t spending writing.

For those of you who have never heard of Darkest Dungeon here’s what you need to know for the purposes of this story. In the game, you play as a prodigal son who has returned to reclaim his ancestral home. Your ancestor, bored with his life of idle decadence, spent the family fortune learning Lovecraftian-type forbidden knowledge until accidently unleashing the eldritch horror that was sealed beneath the manor. Unable to reach the house, you establish a base of operations in a nearby hamlet and begin recruiting various outcasts and misfits to do your dirty work for you, sending them to clear the infested lands surrounding your birthright.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. In a similar game, success would depend on acquiring superior weapons or skills. If your heroes are strong enough they win if not they die. In Darkest Dungeon your pawns almost always begin as strong or stronger than your enemies on a physical level. However, as they crawl through twisting passageways by the light of an ever-diminishing torch, constantly ambushed by inhuman monstrosities, they become increasingly terrified. If one of them accumulates too much stress, one of two things happens. In most cases, they will succumb to insanity. They become selfish and use their team-mates as human shields or hopeless and refuse to fight or abusive and torment their teammates or masochistic and turn their weapons on themselves. However, rarely, one of them will not succumb to their terror but transcend it instead. They may become vigorous or courageous or powerful. If just one teammate finds that strength they can save the lives of their teammates or salvage a hopeless mission.

On November 8th I put on a button down shirt, stuffed a bottle of Jameson in my backpack, and got on the train to the Hillary Phone Bank. The sun was just starting to set and there was a cool breeze coming off the ocean. I was ready to party. When I got there about 200 people were still hunched over the phones. Nobody was celebrating. CNN was playing on mute on a large flat screen TV and the results for Florida were just starting to come in. It was too close to call but the Panhandle hadn’t voted yet which meant we had lost Florida (the Panhandle always votes Republican no matter what). I saw something in the eyes of all these people I had worked with or trained over the past few months and I knew. I walked out 10 minutes later and didn’t look back.

I didn’t want to go home, I didn’t want to go anywhere. The sun went down and it got cold. Every so often my phone would ding to let me know we had lost another swing state. The farther I walked with no real destination in mind, the heavier that bottle got.

Eventually, I wandered onto Main Street and had a vision. Not a fantasy or imagined scenario but a real, honest to God vision. I looked at the skyline in the distance and saw downtown LA engulfed in a golden sun which became a mushroom cloud that rushed toward me with a sound halfway between a roar and a thousand people screaming. It wasn’t any of that Terminator 2 BS either, there were no aerial views or cutaways or close-ups; just the exact same sensation I had when I was 11 years old and swam too far out into the ocean and only had a single moment to take in how small I was compared to the waves before I was crushed under the water and tried to swim up for air but couldn’t as the pressure pinned me to the seafloor. One moment I could feel my skin burning and then next I was standing in the middle of a brightly lit crosswalk with my mouth hanging open like an idiot. Groups of people my own age passed by on their smiling pilgrimage to the next bar without a clue that the earth had just shifted under their feet.

The people on the train knew though. There was a tension in the air so heavy it sank into your bones. As I got off and the doors closed behind me a girl was sobbing somewhere in the back. When I got home I made the fateful decision to check Facebook before opening the bottle. My friends were posting, all of them at once. In Darkest Dungeon characters will have lines of dialogue as they succumb to madness or give up. It was viscerally disturbing in a way that I can’t really describe to see my friends writing posts that could have been taken straight out of the game word for word. It was even worse than what I saw on Main Street.

Facebook posts are almost always dishonest on some level but these weren’t. As I sat in the dark watching my feed flash by I came to a realization. I realized that the old definition of activist I had believed in for so long wasn’t true to me anymore. I realized that we were now a team of 300 million people clawing our way through the Darkest Dungeon. I realized that whether we chose to accept it or not, whether we voted Trump, Clinton or Johnson, our survival now rested in each others hands. I realized there was no hamlet, no safe haven, no safe past to take shelter in. I realized that the game was wrong, despair is not irreversible and courage is not random. To be an activist now is simply to be active in determining our own fate. Now, all of us need to become activists because the only way out is through.