I voted tonight.

That’s a bigger deal than it sounds.

Very loyal fans of this blog will know that voting is not easy for me because of my social anxiety. To vote, I have to go to someplace I have never been full of people I don’t know, and when I get there, I have to prove who I am before I am allowed to play my part in the future of the nation.

Absolutely everything about that makes me anxious.

But luckily, I have Joe and Julian in my life. Julian was kind and persistent enough to gently prod me about going to vote, and I was very reluctant to do it before I got my ever-so-important photo ID in the mail. I had been planning (inasmuch as that is possible when gripped by terror) to vote on actual election day, which is a week from today on the 19th.

But Julian did his best to remove my excuses, including the question of identifying myself (turns out, photo ID is not needed. I could even have brought one of my prescription bottles… far out!), which he solved by looking up what ID was accepted online.

And the first time he asked today, I said no. The anxiety was in the driver’s seat, and to my social anxiety, showing up there and then being turned away for lack of identification would have been absolutely crushing. Easier to kick the ball down the field and leave my fate to the whims of ICBC and the provincial government.

Julian waited around an hour, and then poked his head in to say that he and Joe would be going to vote around 6 (it was just before 5 at the time), and that was the ramp I needed to get over myself and I said I would go along.

Knowing that I had a ride there and back, that I would have two people I know there, and that I had enough of the ID that they took, made it possible for me to commit to going. Also helping was that Julian said we would be going to eat later. This gave me something I knew I would enjoy to focus on when I started getting anxious. Just have to get through this, and then…

Our polling station was in a small (but very nice… they had a Fireside Room. I want one) church nearby, and there was quite a lineup, as I knew there would be. Apparently, there has been a rush on the advanced polling this weekend.

I am choosing to interpret that as good news for Canada and bad news for Harper. Canadians seem very eager to vote, and to my mind, people are way more eager to vote against than they are to vote for.

So, fingers crossed, this will mean victory for the Anybody But Harper contingent. And I really don’t care how that comes down. Ideally, we will see a repeat of the 1993 federal election, when the (then Progressive) Conservatives lost every single seat except for two held by politicians so beloved by their constituencies that the only thing that could have prevented their reelection was an assassination.

So yeah. Like that. Minus two. I want Harper’s name to be as reviled and poisonous as that of Brian Mulroney, and here’s the rub : compared to Harper, Mulroney was a wonderful prime minister.

At least Mulroney had the humility and respect for the people of Canada to make his systematic dismantling of everything good and Canadian seem like an accidental byproduct of some sort of blithe ignorance of how things work, instead of the front and central aim of absolutely everything he did as PM, like Harper.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Voting.

We got to the church and there was a line. It moved fairly well. There was an Asian lady with her extremely old and frail mother ahead of us in line, and at one point, she asked us to save her place in line because she had to take (or rather, FOLLOW) her mother to the bathroom. We were happy to do so.

After all, we’re Canadians. We’re civilized.

As we were waiting in line, someone from Elections Canada came down the line to check our… whatever it is you call the little postcard type thing they send you to tell you where to vote…. things. I had mine, so no prob. Then another came down the line to check out ID. Moment of truth, and I was really nervous.

Yeah, I know I’m crazy. Like, for real real, not for play play. I know it all too well.

Anyhow, everything was fine, of course. So technically, that meant I had already passed the identity hurdle and could relax while waiting in line. But of course, it’s not that easy.

To be honest, I don’t think I really relaxed until we were five minutes out the door. And even then, only partially. That’s the problem with depression : good things disappear almost before they happen, but the bad things linger on and on in the mind.

Because deep deep down, you don’t feel safe, and you are always on guard. And that’s no way to run a railroad.

After voting, we went to McDonald’s to get drive-thru. I couldn’t really afford it, but WTF. We were midway through ordering when the voice at the other end tells us that their CO2 system was broken so they only had iced tea.

Seriously, people? I can’t drink iced tea (sugar), but even if I could, I don’t like it. We were outta there and off to another McD’s in our area. That one had sodas that worked.

I need my Diet Coke, man.

So, now I have voted. I am so glad. By voting, not only did I do my duty as a Canadian, I headed off having yet another thing to feel stupid and lame and fragile and weak and horrible about.

Depression covers a lot of adjectives.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.