When the 2016 election results were announced, I was devastated. I was angry and sad. Trump wasn’t just anathema to everything I believed in–he seemed like a danger to everything I loved about America.

But I never once allowed myself to believe fantasies about Hillary getting reinstated halfway through the term, or conspiracy theories about the election results getting overturned. Not only because overturning the results of a legitimate election would be wrong, but because this just…was not…reality. And I knew that allowing myself to believe in fairy tales would only bring me pain and suffering in the end, when they turned out not to be true.

So instead I worked my butt off to promote my ideas and values on the local and state level, and volunteered as much as I could during the midterms and presidential election. It was sometimes discouraging and hard, but it was the only way to really make a difference and move things forward.

It’s rough–I know!–but the only thing to do when you’ve lost an election is to work to get the vote out and persuade voters that your ideas are the ones that will help them. Anybody telling you about a quick and easy solution is trying to sell you something. And threatening violence is truly the lazy person’s way out. “We can’t have our way, so we’ll have to shoot you.” Guess what: that only makes things worse, and more complicated. And it does not bring other people over to your side.

Please, don’t buy what the Russian bots are selling you. It will only make your life, and all of our lives, more difficult.