In the early hours after the election results, the week-long rain clouds over London were dissolved by morning light, and it’s been sunny ever since. I hadn’t expected this result, so I didn’t anticipate how I would feel afterwards. I didn’t expect everything to suddenly appear in Technicolor and alive with possibilities. I’m slowly getting used to having hope and a sense of belonging. These feelings have been so absent over the past couple of years that it almost feels uncomfortable to have them.

Only since the election results has it become clear to me how deadening it’s been to live under an austerity-obsessed Tory government for the past seven years. It’s been a glacial process of my insides turning grey. A social contract that promises to look after people was utterly trashed by this government, (especially by George Osborne, who is currently being reinvented as a moderate) and it seemed the only certainty was deterioration. Whenever I dared picture the future, I imagined being at the mercy of rich landlords and taking out loans to pay for healthcare, before languishing in pensioner poverty – alone, without children, because I couldn’t afford to have any.

As I write this we’re still living under a Tory government, propped up by a homophobic, anti-abortion, occasionally creationist DUP. But the current arrangement looks shaky, and a general election is a real possibility. And if that happens, a Labour party running on an explicitly socialist platform could very well be elected. Even if there isn’t an election any time soon, nearly 13 million people have already voted for that platform. We are now a political constituency with power: we must be listened to, and we’ll only keep building from here.

For the first time in a good few years, I’ve stopped worrying about money. I can imagine living somewhere nice without having to move to another country. I feel less worried about my parents, who could now be cared for by a properly funded NHS as they get older. I have hope that we may start taking climate change seriously, and people my age and younger won’t be left scooping out buckets of murky water from our living rooms every year. I may finally stop being a member of a sprawling precariat without sick pay, holiday entitlement or job security. It’s amazing to think my parents took those things for granted, and only now do I realise how low my expectations have been.

This demographic doesn’t care that Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t look like a conventional politician – they like it

I know these things won’t happen overnight – maybe they won’t happen at all – but finally there is the possibility of them. Hoping for a better world doesn’t feel like a cruel and futile process any more. It feels rational; it feels like something we deserve.

Last night, when I was out celebrating, I met a 25-year-old woman who was in a two-year unpaid internship and still living with her parents. I spoke to a man in his 30s who said he felt like he was still living like a student. Is it any wonder that the surge for Labour was driven by people under 45? This demographic doesn’t care that Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t look like a conventional politician (they like it), or about things he did before they were even born. They just want the constant tension that pervades their lives – the tension that comes with having virtually no financial security – to be lifted.

Of course they were going to vote for Labour’s offer in huge numbers. As the woman I met last night put it: “I have to vote Labour, I want to get on the housing ladder.” The commentators currently clutching their pearls about the fact that young people are apparently attracted by socialism should consider that maybe they wouldn’t be had capitalism not treated them so badly.

And there’s another thing: the young who drove the surge to Labour are less likely to be hostile towards immigrants , they’re liberated in terms of sexuality , they’re more likely to be feminist – and they don’t want Britain to turn into the kitsch 1950s throwback Theresa May seemed to represent. Every young person I met who voted and campaigned for Labour did so in part because they were tired of feeling like they were marooned on an island of curtain-twitching bigots. They wanted to stop the country being flooded by the Daily Mail’s narrow-minded effluent.

And they – we – are getting our wish. For the first time since David Cameron and Nick Clegg stood in that rose garden and announced a coalition, I don’t feel like the only thing I have in common with the British people is that we’re all on the same landmass. I am part of something – there is no such thing as individuals and their families, there is only society. And at long last, it’s becoming the kind of society I want to live in.