I was planning to go early vote today and I took a quiz on isidewith.com to see who would be the best person for me to vote for. I got my results and the people I agree with the most aren’t even on the ballot. I’ve voted third party in the past because I’m a firm believer in “if we don’t believe that the third party will win, they will never win” but the third parties were ON the ballot before. I don’t really believe a write-in could ever win.

So I scrolled til I got to one of the candidates who is on the ballot. And even though we agreed on 79% of the questions, it must be the 79% I don’t care much about. Because I noticed we disagree on some of the issues I find most important.

And now I’m in mental turmoil because I honestly just don’t want to vote. It’s against my morals to vote for someone who I don’t support and I support none of the candidates this year. However, with the social pressure of voting and not being someone who “sticks their head in the sand” and vote AGAINST the person you don’t want to win (I can’t because I want none of them to win), I’m struggling to decide 100% to just not vote and be okay with that. I think my time would be better spent bettering my own life so that I can make a big difference in other ways or have more money in the future and a better chance of influencing people politically. However, the thoughts about letting people down are getting to me.

I think:
People will shame me.
People are going to look down on me.
I’m a bad citizen.
I should always vote.
Not voting is not doing my civic duty.

These thoughts create guilt and shame.

From guilt and shame, I hide. I ruminate in my head. I worry about what others will think. I sit in my bed and do nothing. I want to not care what others think, but I do. I also don’t want to vote out of guilt and shame. I want to vote out of support of someones policy and belief that they could win. And I dont believe this year that a write in could win, so I’d rather just let whoever wins win and deal with it.