I'm quitting the Trump #Resistance. I'd rather put my energy into building good things. I was a Trump Resistance leader. But after a violent political encounter and a near-death experience, I'd rather help people rebuild their homes and lives.

Ryan Clayton | Opinion contributor

Despite the protestations of the nation’s citizens, Brett Kavanaugh now owns a lifetime seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. In the aftermath of his confirmation, it is tempting to ignore our collective political exhaustion and prepare for the next defensive battle against this president and his enablers in Congress. I know how you feel, as I was a proud and publicly prominent member of the resistance to the Trump administration even before its team walked into the White House.

Since Election Night 2016, my work has been the subject of countless headlines, cable news reports and nightly television talk shows. In Michael Moore’s new movie "Fahrenheit 11/9," I can be seen getting arrested during the 2016 Electoral College proceedings in Congress. From dropping Russian flags emblazoned with Trump into the Conservative Political Action Conference and coordinating the Hamilton Electors campaign to override the election results, I have personally given the man in the bully pulpit quite a few bad news days.

But if you have engaged in these resistance efforts relentlessly since the last election, like me, there is a sinking feeling that fighting a president without access to any real levers of power is akin to fighting the tides of the ocean. Thankfully, a near-death experience halfway around the world awakened me to the need for a new kind of civic participation and the benefits of seeing this problem in a new light.

PTSD after a violent attack by Trump backers

This chapter of my story begins shortly after Trump's inauguration, when I was violently attacked by a group of Trump supporters in downtown Manhattan. They choked me around the neck with a military-style chokehold and then threw me down an entire flight of stairs.

In response to this incident, a close personal friend recommended a psychological evaluation because, she told me, trauma can affect you in ways you don't understand. I took that advice, which became a lifeline, because by the time the results came back, I was in a very dark place. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and severe depression.

The daily life of PTSD is accompanied with a low level hum of your fight or flight response system, which gets activated at full volume by the slightest provocation. Any little bad thing that happens becomes a reminder of every bad thing in your mind; a parking ticket on your window becomes a reminder of getting thrown down a flight of stairs. After attempting traditional therapy, I decided to take a different path altogether on the road to recovery. A good friend offered a round-trip ticket to Asia for two weeks. I accepted her call to adventure and ended up traveling for nearly six months.

On a plane leaving the United States, it felt like I was running away, but now I know that I was running toward a higher purpose. Among my many adventures during this time, I hiked the world's highest navigable mountain pass in Nepal, visited the 88 temples of the Shikoku Trail in Japan, and witnessed first-hand the beauty of hundreds of people working to save the lives of 12 kids and a coach trapped in a cave in Thailand. It was certainly a trip that permanently altered my perception of life on Earth.

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While on this journey, I discovered that travel can be a potent treatment for ailments that affect the soul and realized the power that is inherent in healing. I no longer suffer the daily symptoms of PTSD and depression, and it feels like a reset button has been pressed in my brain. It would be difficult to overstate how rehabilitative this time away has been, but nothing could have prepared me for the near-death experience that was just around the corner.

While swimming at sunset on an island near Lombok, Indonesia, a riptide pulled me out into the the middle of the ocean. Without anything to float on, I was lost at sea and completely alone under the stars for 12 grueling hours of treading water. I swam like my life depended on it until sunrise, when a miracle happened. A local fisherman named Pur from the nearby village of Nipah found me in the water and saved my life.

Just seven days later, Pur’s fishing village would be destroyed by a 7.0 earthquake. Nearly everyone in Nipah survived, but every home is severely damaged or completely collapsed. Though these kind and generous people have lost almost everything that they own, they are simply grateful that their families are safe and alive. Since then, I have helped Pur and his family rebuild their home, and we have started work on rebuilding other homes in Nipah.

My experience in Nipah has shown me the healing power of rebuilding, especially if you are erecting something new out of the rubble. At our most basic level, humans want to help each other build things, and we build things to help each other — this is the foundational premise of government and it’s why I got into politics nearly two decades ago. During my lifetime in politics, I was incessantly forced to choose between the lesser of two evils. Now I’m in more of a mood to construct something unquestionably good in the world.

Take a step back, start building something good

If I could go back to the day after the election in 2016, I would remind myself that whatever you are fighting, you are feeding it your time and energy. Resistance only has value as damage control, so there is no amount of battling Trump that will build a better world. You cannot begin construction on your own home by poking holes in your neighbor’s roof. While Trump's time in office may serve as a neon light pointing to all the skeletons in America's closet, we must use it as a lighthouse pointing us back toward a more perfect union.

Because the same is still true today as it has been throughout all history: the status quo does not get destroyed, it gets replaced by the people creating something new. And as the old saying goes, beware of wrestling with monsters because you will become them, but hopefully the same is true of working with our better angels as well. So my advice to those still in the political trenches is to take a step back and start building up something more people can get behind, because America needs a positive vision of the future now more than ever.

Please consider this my official resignation from the resistance, effective immediately. My current plan is to put on a hard hat and head back to Nipah to help build homes. After that, I look forward to helping people who have experienced trauma to rebuild their lives, which requires us to create a mental health care system where everyone has access regardless of insurance status.

I hope Americans of all political persuasions will join this construction crew, because whether you like it or not, building the future is something we always do together.

Ryan Clayton is the founder of Rebuild Nipah and a former Democratic strategist.