I write books for kids, which qualifies me not at all to proselytize about politics. Or maybe it does. Maybe the fact that I spent most of my waking hours, as a parent and a children’s book author, thinking about the world our kids live in, the battles our kids fight, the challenges our kids face…maybe this does qualify me.

I don’t really care either way. As we have seen over the past four years in this country, being qualified has never mattered less.

After the election of 2016, I started a challenge to myself: #SustainedOutrage. I worried that it would be easy for me, a white woman in New England, to get lulled into complacency and lose the urgency of working to push back against the new administration. (Of course, this was wistful thinking…their actions have been so egregious, so painful, so cruel and arbitrary and unceasing, that it would be hard to ignore).

But anyway, I started the challenge: every day I had to do SOMETHING, ANYTHING, to push back against what was happening. I could donate to ACLU, Planned Parenthood, The Southern Poverty Law Center, Color of Change, or hundreds of other organizations. I could call my elected officials and make my voice heard. I could attend a protest. I could even sit and read, educate myself about how deeply and pervasively unequal the country already was, and how much I had been missing by living in my bubble.

It has been 1,460 days since the last election. I’ve missed a few days, but not many. The work has been ongoing. And it has not been done alone.

So this is for you, my fellow travelers.

This is for the teens like Izzy and Sarah and Hannah and Soph, who organized and showed up week after week for months for Black Lives Matter protests in our town. And teens like Ayele and Avery and Izzy, who wrote the school administrators to push for more diverse voices in the History and Language Arts curriculum.

This is for activists in my town, like Ted and Ann, who work on gun control, or Keith, Ted, Robin, John, Boyd, Kath, Karen, and Judy, who I hadn’t met before the launch of our local Indivisible chapter, and who I’ve seen or talked to almost every month since.

This is for activists among my friends, like Erika who fights for climate justice, and Jenny who fights for reproductive rights, and Tony and Alex and Karolyn and Robbyn and Gen and Celina and Susan and Meg and dozens of others, people I’ve known for years or decades. Some of you have been doing this work forever and some I never knew were activists, but wow, it’s awesome to witness.

This is for activists in my family, Peggy and Susan and Liz and Marshal and Larry and Paul and Erica and Steve and Mary and Julia and Sam, who laced up their boots and held signs at protests…some of them eighty years old, some of them eight years old, all of them showing up.

This is for the activists in the kid lit community, Marietta and Ellen and Kekla and Martha and Kate and Brendan and Jason and Lamar and Varian and Mike and Hebah and Heidi and literally hundreds of others, who put their money where their mouths are, who risk losing their livelihoods when they speak up, but do it anyway.

This is for you.

We are not alone, and never have been. If the past four years of daily actions, of #SustainedOutrage, has taught me anything, it’s that we are not alone.

I don’t know what will happen over the next few days, as the votes get counted. The current occupant of the White House has been desperately trying to invalidate an election that hasn’t happened yet, because his chance of winning is so poor. The polls all look good. But this isn’t a book, and sometimes the ending isn’t what we would have thought possible. One thing I do know, though, is that even the best result doesn’t mean we are out of the woods, and even the worst doesn’t mean all is lost.

We will wake up in the same country we live in today, and we will have to keep working, every single day, for the country we want. We need to continue #SustainedOutrage. We need to push whoever is elected — tomorrow and next year and next decade — toward that more perfect world.

The moral arc of the universe only bends toward justice if we put our shoulder against it and push, gently but constantly, day after day.

So my fellow travelers, thank you. And see you tomorrow, because the work continues, no matter what.