(ThySistas.com) Nobody hands you a manual for the season that follows a public falling short. You get parades for the wins. Flowers show up at the door. A hashtag trends for an afternoon, and folks who barely spoke to you last year suddenly remember they believed all along. Then it turns. No one warns you how quiet a room gets once the crowd thins, how quick the same people who chanted your name go looking somewhere else. You are left holding the whole load by yourself.
Kamala Harris knows this silence now. Stood on the biggest stage this nation offers, reached for the highest seat in the land, came up short in front of the entire planet. Cameras everywhere. Millions studying that face for the crack. What Harris did in the weeks after that November night matters more to me than any speech from the trail, and plenty of us have been slow to notice why.
Rewind a minute, though. That fall means nothing unless you clock the height she dropped from. Prosecutor in Alameda County to start, then San Francisco. District attorney of San Francisco came next, followed by attorney general of California, a statewide seat with real teeth. A spot in the United States Senate by 2017. None of it held her, so in 2019 she reached for the presidency, and the run fell apart before Iowa even voted. Money ran dry. Polls sagged. Quit the race before the early states could embarrass her. Plenty of folks would have read that as the ceiling and made peace with it. Not her.
Then Biden tapped her for the number two slot, and she spent four years riding shotgun, doing the kind of work that stays invisible until the day somebody needs a scapegoat. Summer of 2024 wrecked the plan. One debate went sideways on the president, bad enough that his own side quit pretending, and the knives came out fast. Within a few weeks the old man was out and she was the pick. No new primary vote from Democratic voters, none of the usual runway or ceremony. Suddenly the nominee inherited a machine already rolling and had just 107 days to convince a divided country she should be running it.
Sit with the size of that. Just 107 days to do what usually eats up 2 years. Money poured in at a record breaking pace, arenas filled, a coalition took shape, and for a stretch there it looked as if history might actually turn. First woman president. First Black woman president. A daughter of immigrants reaching for a place no woman had ever held. Sistas across the country felt it in their chest, that maybe, just maybe.
And then November came, and it broke the other way.
We love a climbing story. Give us a sister on the rise and we will shout her name until our throats give out. Corner office. Book deal. A ring, finally. That clean scan after the scare, a diploma with her name in script. We know how to celebrate ascent because it feels good and it feels safe. Nobody ever taught us the harder lesson, though. Few people sat us down and walked us through what to do when the thing simply does not come. When the job goes to someone else. Or a marriage folds, or a business you bled for shuts its doors on a Tuesday like it meant nothing.
That silence is where Kamala has been living, out in the open where all of us can see.
Here is what pulls me back. Kamala did not vanish. Refused to paste on some phony grin for the cameras either, pretending nothing had cracked underneath. Made it real instead. Turns out you can carry grief and steel in the same body. Flattened by a defeat on a Tuesday, then standing up straight in a packed room by Wednesday, both true at once. Watching that play out has schooled me harder than any lecture ever did.
Alpha Kappa Alpha claimed her back at Howard, the first Black Greek letter sorority among the Divine Nine, founded there in 1908. She was barely grown, still sorting out the woman she wanted to become. A bond like that leaves marks a person carries for life. Pledging those letters was never about the parties and the pretty colors. Sisters get in your business. They do not let you fold in on yourself when the load turns heavy, and they will not stand for you skipping the work on the mornings you would rather stay buried under the covers. A vote count going against you does not touch a bit of that. If anything, it hands you a floor to stand on when the rest gives way.
I have watched too many of my own girlfriends come apart after a setback and confuse the event with a verdict on their entire existence. Divorce papers arrive and a friend decides she is unlovable. A promotion skips past her a third go round, and doubt creeps in that the talent was ever there. One closed door, and a whole identity caves in. That collapse is the real tragedy.
Kamala is modeling another road, whether by design or not. You can lose the race and refuse to lose yourself. Two separate things, and mixing them up has swallowed more brilliant Black women than I could count in a sitting.
Consider what people expected once the votes were counted. Vanish. Go write your memoir, teach somewhere far from the cameras, watch the whole mess curdle into a cautionary tale folks whisper at dinner parties. Instead the candidate keeps her name in the conversation, keeps talking, keeps refusing the smallness others tried to hand over. Has not begged a soul for sympathy, which I respect down to my bones. Pity is a trap dressed up as kindness, and that trap got sidestepped clean.
A particular pressure rides on Black women in these moments, and I would be lying to skip past it. When one of us stumbles on a big stage, some corner of the world treats it as evidence about all of us. See, they were not ready. Told you it was too much. So the demand to be flawless turns suffocating, and the room to simply be human in your disappointment gets stolen right out of your hands. Watching her reclaim that space, a person who lost something enormous and kept breathing anyway, felt like air to me.
My great aunt buried 2 husbands and a son. Lost the little house she had scraped and saved for when the bank did what banks do. And that old girl rose every single morning, put on good earrings for no reason on earth, and brewed coffee like the day owed her something worth savoring. I did not understand it back then. Figured denial had set in. Now I know better. My aunt had worked out the very thing Harris is showing the rest of us on a national scale. Your circumstances can crumble without any permission to crumble you along with them.
Grief is allowed. Let me say that plainly, since some of us try to skip it. You are permitted to be furious about what you did not get. Cry in your car in the Kroger lot. Go quiet for a stretch and let the people who love you sit in it with you. What you cannot do, what will cost you everything you have, is hand your sense of self to a single bad outcome. A setback gets to visit. It does not get to move in and rearrange your furniture.
Where these politics travel from here, I honestly cannot say, and that is not the part I keep chewing on anyway. What she left us, with no press release at all, is a picture of dignity after the fall. A woman standing in the wreckage of the biggest disappointment of a long career, not crushed, not faking, just present and upright and still herself. That picture is worth more to my nieces than any office a ballot could have handed over.
So the next time life slams something shut on you, and it will, hold onto the distinction on display here. Losing a thing is not the same as being a loss. Grieve hard. Make it honest. Then wash your face, fasten those good earrings, and let the world watch you keep moving.
Sistas, look at what she is showing us, the chapter nobody ever wanted to narrate. And thank God the telling is out loud, because a whole lot of us needed to hear exactly this.
Staff Writer; Jada Williams
This sister writes about politics, money, family, and the issues that shape everyday life… Her work looks at how decisions made in government, changes in the economy, and challenges within our communities affect Black women and their families…
Feel free to email her at: JadaW@ThySistas.com.