Election night, 2016.

Five of us crowded into my best friend’s living room, riding that quiet hum that lives inside a group of women on the brink of history. We were ready to celebrate. Ready to witness something we’d been told would never happen in our lifetimes.

And then… the map started bleeding red.
Slow at first. Then steady. Then undeniable.

At one point, a friend turned to me with that look people get when the world stops making sense.
“Jamie, you’re a librarian. I trust you. Tell me it’s going to be okay.”

I froze.

Not because I didn’t want to reassure her. I did. But because I could feel something heavy and honest inside me — the knowing that the night was shifting beneath our feet. Finally, I squeezed out the words she asked for: “It’s going to be okay.”

But the truth?
I wasn’t answering her real question.

The next morning, I flipped open my laptop and saw that face. And I felt this quiet sadness settle in met. Not so much because of that face staring back at me, but that a man who so easily spouted hate and divisiveness into the world had enough votes in enough places to become the leader of our country. A grief that the fault lines in this country that had been widening for years had led us here. To this response to nobody in power listening to the vast middle of us–half of whom couldn’t vote for Clinton and half who couldn’t vote for Trump — we, the people who were not so far apart from each other, the ones united in not feeling seen or heard in their own country. 

I also knew something else: I needed to tell my friend the whole truth.

I really hated coming out back then, but the truth is… I have always toggled toward hopeful.
It made me feel so naive. 

But it’s baked into my spiritual DNA. My heart will break open at the cruelty in the world — and then, somehow, my soul will tilt back toward beauty again. Toward connection. Toward that quiet shimmer of hope that keeps rising even when it seems it shouldn’t.

So I called her the next day. And I gave her the whole truth behind that simple answer: “It’s going to be okay.” Because in my heart I knew it would be. And then I said it:

“I’m a Pollyanna.”

The words kept tumbling out of me until I knew my own truth:

“If I’m going to be a Pollyanna, I’m going to be a Badass Pollyanna.”

Those words . . . I felt something shift. It felt like reclaiming something I’d been trying to hide: the fierce hope, the grounded optimism, the belief that even in hard times Life is nudging us toward our good.

And ten years later?
I’m finally starting to see that woman in the mirror — Badass Pollyanna — the one who sees the cracks and the light, the one who refuses to apologize for believing in both.

Because hope isn’t naive.
Hope is rebellion.
Hope is resistance.
Hope is the quiet fire that keeps us moving toward a world we can build. A world big enough for all of us to thrive in. 

And maybe that’s the real story I needed that night.
The one I tell now.
The one I live into.
The one I return to again and again.

That Pollyanna, Badass Pollyanna was there all along.
She just needed to be welcomed home.