How the Election Almost Drove Me to a Psych Ward

So this was the first presidential election I ever voted in, and I think I may have a neurosis because of it. With all this noise coming from my friends, family, and the media about why I should vote for Candidate X or Candidate Y, I felt like I was losing control of my life. Politics suddenly became a priority for me, but only according to other people. Essentially, the phrase, “I don’t understand how you can still be an undecided voter,” came up a lot.

To be fair, I hadn’t given my vote too much thought until early this summer when the race to the White House really started to heat up. That’s when the anxiety started. Everyone I talked to gushed about how voting was so important and they were so excited about being able to have an influence on our country. However, I was terrified. I barely felt a sense of responsibility for myself. Now I was expected to be responsible for the COUNTRY? I felt extremely pressured on all sides for my vote. With everyone telling me how important my specific vote was, especially since Wisconsin was such a swing state this year, my opinion was suddenly a hot commodity. Unfortunately for everyone else, it was difficult for me to really sway towards a particular candidate. I’m not affiliated with any political party, nor do I ever think I will be. People yelled and pleaded for me to vote for a particular candidate but it seemed like just noise to me. I didn’t want others to persuade my own opinion, but it was harder and harder each day to ignore them. A favorite technique among them to convince me their candidate was best was to make me feel like a terrible, terrible human being for voting for the other candidate. For example, if I was feeling like voting for Obama, I was told that everyone would lose their jobs and we would become China because of me. If I thought Romney was a good choice, I was told that clearly I didn’t care about homosexuals and women, because I didn’t want them to have rights. And of course, liking a third-party’s ideas made me “un-American” because I was throwing away my vote.

 Obviously, these are all exaggerations, but I was under so much pressure that I genuinely began to feel bad for voting at all. However, quite possibly the worst stigma would be to bear the “I didn’t vote” scar, because not taking advantage of getting my opinion heard would reduce me to the likes of Hitler and probably Satan.

Election Day came and I found myself in a two-hours-long line of registered voters. At this point, I still didn’t know who I wanted to vote for, and all I wanted to do was run away, screaming, from my polling place. I was anxious. I felt sick. I wondered what would happen if I “forgot” to vote for President on the ballot and ran away before the machine had time to spit my ballot back out. I wondered what would happen if I just threw up on the ballot. More importantly, I wondered who I should vote for. Despite the fact that I had plenty of time to decide, I still had no clue once I received my ballot and stood in the voting booth. Ten minutes later, I marked my arrow and immediately left the polling place. I felt relieved that the entire country did not immediately burst into flames upon me submitting my ballot, but I still felt anxiety over if anyone will ever find out my vote.

 The contents of my ballot will follow me to the grave. I feel uncomfortable sharing my vote because I have this constant, yet irrational, fear that someone will exile me from their lives because of it. The worst part is that the people who urged me to vote and “get my opinion heard” will openly judge me because of the opinion they so badly wanted to hear, and I feel that is one of the largest flaws of our own society.