After the 2019 legislative election, we saw so many videos of losing candidates who became depressed.

Regretfully, their videos went viral on social media. As someone who was also running for the House of Representatives and who lost the race, I quite understood why those candidates could end up in such a state of mind.

Nobody said it was easy.

In our society, sometimes admitting you are having a rough time is “almost inappropriate”. Grief is unspoken, publicly ignored, except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly. I think we need to talk about it so we can shed light on mental health issues in general.

Running for office was not such an easy matter, especially if you chose not to buy votes.

First, it required an extremely fit body. A candidate had to campaign in several places in one day and meet as many people as possible because we needed to boost our popularity. It consumed long hours.

For example, my constituency was in North Sumatra 3, comprising 10 residencies. I could spend six to eight hours in the car daily on the rocky, pothole-filled roads. Skipping meals was normal because sometimes we just didn’t have enough time.

Second, a candidacy required a very tough mentality because we worked with a huge team. We saw the best and worst of people. Sometimes along the way, we lost close relationships.

A campaign also involved incredible highs and lows. It was basically a competition. And like any other competition, your competitor wanted to see you lose by any possible means.

People spread nasty words about you. It was like having your soul X-rayed every day, scanned and rescanned for any sign of fallibility.

I couldn’t agree more with what Michelle Obama said in her memoir, Becoming. She said that “politics would be a fight, and the fight would be wearying, involving standoffs and betrayals, dirty-deal makers and compromises that sometimes felt painful.” Weeks after the elections, you would still carry the emotional baggage on your back.

Last but not least, a campaign requires huge funds. Even without vote buying, you would still need to cover for billboards, transportation, team members’ pay, etc. Some lucky candidates got sponsors who took care of the expenses.

But for most candidates, they had to spend every cent they had on the campaign. It often involved taking on real debt.

Losing a race that you’ve financially invested so much in could definitely lead to incredible stress. And when we got closer to election day, the moments were so intense. Putting a stop on those intense moments all at once was an utter shock.

It was like playing a snakes and ladders game where you were so close to the finish line, but all of sudden you met the snake, then you were thrown back to square one. Just like that.

You wondered what went wrong. You felt like a complete failure. A lot of “what ifs” lingered in and haunted your mind. What if we did it in a different way with different people? What if we chose to run in a different constituency? What if that big money was used to make something more profitable? What if?

Maybe we should try to see the silver linings in the clouds.

Fortunately, our brain has a psychological immune system. Sheryl Sandberg wrote in her book, Option B, that when something goes wrong, we instinctively marshal defense mechanisms.

We see silver linings in clouds. We add sugar and water to lemons.

For most candidates, they had to spend every cent they had on the campaign.

In my Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI), we learned to see silver linings as well. The national level quick count result showed that we got 2 percent of the vote. It meant that around 3 million people cast their votes for us.

Sadly, it was not enough to pass the 4 percent parliamentary threshold. Nevertheless, that number made us happy because we did politics in a whole new different way. We have dispelled some myths about politics.

First, this party didn’t have any prominent figures. Second, we didn’t buy votes. Third, we were consistent in fighting for what we believed: protecting minority rights.

Last but not least, we tried to raise the bar in our politics by showing transparency in our legislative candidate recruitment process.

We were the only party that consistently didn’t allow former corruption perpetrators to run in the election. Losing the election was one thing, but drowning in it was not advisable either.

After spending decades studying how people deal with setbacks, the psychologist Martin Seligman found three “P’s” which can stunt recovery. The first was “personalization”. It’s the belief that we are at fault.

Next was “pervasiveness”, the belief that an event will affect all areas of our life. The last one was “permanence” or the belief that the aftershocks of the event will last forever.

Hundreds of studies have shown that children and adults recover more quickly when they realize that hardships weren’t entirely their fault, didn’t affect every aspect of their lives, and wouldn’t follow them everywhere forever.

Recognizing that negative events aren’t personal, pervasive, nor permanent made people less likely to get depressed and better able to cope. After all, not everything that happens to us happened because of us.

In an election, reality did bite and it’s okay to grieve. For fellow losers take your time, seek or offer support to your closest ones who were affected.

But after all, losing an election is not that bad. We, as humans, are built with the ability to always bounce back. Thank God. And right now, we’re not broken, we are just bent. And we can learn to run again.

_______________________

The writer is a spokesperson for the Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI). She was a candidate for the House of Representatives, running for the electoral district of North Sumatra 3. She graduated last year from the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Indonesia (UI).

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