Next month, after celebrating holidays with family and ringing in the new year with friends, Americans will watch a compulsive liar accused of sexual misconduct take the highest office in the nation. ’Tis the season for never-ending despair!

Among those of us who didn’t vote for Trump, the post-election vibe is downright funereal. We’re confused and depressed, disgusted and heartsick. (In some cases, we’re literally sick – among a group of my feminist friends, many are suffering from some sort of stress-induced illness.) Michelle Obama articulated the moment perfectly when she told Oprah this week: “Now we’re feeling what not having hope feels like.”

It’s a feeling that stands in stark contrast to the lead-up to the election – a time marked by lefty self-assuredness and optimism. The energy coming out of the mainstream feminist movement, especially, was ebullient: We were “with her”. Our daughters were going to be able to see themselves reflected in the nation’s highest office, and love was going to trump hate.

Even when the horrific Access Hollywood tape was released of Donald Trump bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy”, the feminist response was defiantly confident: pussy was going to grab back!

That hope, of course, was sadly misguided: misogyny and racism won the day. As the writer Jamil Smith tweeted on election night: “I knew my country hated me. But this much?”

Already, the progress made under Barack Obama is in danger; racists and sexists across the country are emboldened; and those who don’t fit into the GOP’s narrow definition of what a “real American” looks like fear for their safety even more than they did before the election.

Racial and gendered hatred has always been normalized in the United States, but now it’s blatant and unapologetic. This week, a man was apparently kicked off a Delta flight for speaking Arabic, and a woman at JC Penny was berated by another customer telling her to “go back wherever the fuck you came from”. In both instances, hardly any bystanders spoke up for them. As the man who was forced to leave the plane did so, his footage of the moment shows several white passengers joyfully waving at and mocking him.

How can we find hope when a new story of malice and bigotry is around every corner? Maybe the truth is that we don’t need to be optimistic for the future in order to change it. Hope isn’t necessary for action.

No one has written about hope and politics better than the sociology professor Tressie McMillan Cottom. After the election, Cottom noted that the hopelessness new to some had long been a reality for others – black women, especially: “Everything from reversing Roe v Wade and police surveillance to mob rule in public discourse and delegitimized claims to citizenship have been true for us for a long time.”

“My hopelessness is faith in things yet seen and works yet done,” she writes. “Hopelessness is necessary for the hard work of resisting tyranny and fascism.”

The summer before the election, I wrote a book in which I argued that the danger of a feminism obsessed with silver linings and positivity is that it necessitates smiling through tremendous grief. Feminism isn’t a Pinterest board, it’s a movement – and we don’t always need to be inspirational.

Still, I allowed myself to be carried away in optimism before 8 November. I forgot myself – in part because hope is a privilege, and in part because I needed to believe something non-horrible could happen for women.

It’s a mistake I won’t make again. But that doesn’t mean I’m done fighting for a future better than the one we’re fearing.