Your Own Multi-verse

“CNN is now able to project a winner in Florida’s 6th congressional district… Democrat Mike…”

The decibel level in the hotel room just tripled.

I cheered along with the rest of the crowd. Our guy had won. I had won. Wow. And I just beat Cliff Stearns, too! Oh, sure, I’m not the new Member of Congress, but it’s nearly as good as, since I’ll be his chief of staff in Washington.

I looked around. So many of the people here had worked hard to beat the entrenched incumbent. We beat the odds, and now CNN’s Anderson Cooper is trying to explain to Wolf Blitzer the history we just made.

As everyone calmed down, I made my way through the crowd and knocked on the door into the adjoining room.  “Congressman!”

Another eruption of elation from those around me.

The door opened, and he peeked his head out. “Yes?” he asked, sending the nearby interns squealing.

“It’s time.”

“Sure thing, Golden Bear,” he said before darting back inside his room. I winced at the nickname, a reference to my degree from UC Berkeley. It’s not that I regretted the choice of spending an extra year in undergrad or paying all that much more for tuition. If I hadn’t graduated when I did, I wouldn’t have been picked up for my first paid campaign gig, culminating in this effort as a top political operative seven years later.

Who knows where I would have ended up? Would I have stayed closer to home all this time? Would I have lived a quieter, more predictable existence instead of the higher highs and lower lows, the feasts and famines that have been my career? Would I have not met David, that great and unexpected love of my life? Would I be happy at all with what the last decade has given me?

I looked myself in the nearby mirror. Tired, sunken eyes stared back at me, fighting their silent war with the silly, stupid, ear-to-ear grin on my face.

I reached down and pulled out my cellphone to call home.

Oh, was it all worth it?

In the words of our country’s most-famous half-term governor, “You betcha.”