Max Repka holds up his protest signs as hundreds of people march down Market Streetv in San Francisco against President Trump’s tweeted vowing to ban transgender people from the military.

In my life as a gay man I have woken up the day after an election disappointed and scared too many times.

And this isn’t unique to me as a queer person. Women, transgender and nonbinary people, people of color, immigrants, the economically disenfranchised, religious minorities, people with disabilities and chronic illnesses; we are the people for whom elections have the biggest consequences. Most of us know the anxiety leading up to every vote, and we’re intimately familiar with the gut punch of knowing there are people in our country who will vote in a way that harms their neighbors.

It may not come as a surprise but it can still be a shock, and the pain runs deep.

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But after we acknowledge that hurt and the grief is when we must plan to protect the most vulnerable among us and preserve the progress we’ve gained in spite of toxic politics.

That pain, the wound that has scabbed over many times only to be ripped open again, is at the core of our resistance and fuels our endurance. Don’t deny it or push it down, embrace it and let it be your companion. Let the feeling remind you to continue to live as your most authentic self as an act of defiance.

Don’t let the pain take your power, let it be your power.

The........

© San Francisco Chronicle