Do you ever pull back form a situation and look at it from the outside and think, “What am I doing there? What am I doing in that restaurant/that shark costume/France?!”

That’s how I felt Tuesday night as I stood in Grant Park with 500,000 people, listening to Barack Obama give his victory speech. I was the least likely person to be there.

I say “least likely” because, embarrassingly, I have a history of political apathy. I’m 31, but I didn’t start voting for president until 2004.

In 1996, I was in college and too embedded in the insular bubble of campus life to care about what was going on in the outside world.

In 2000, my excuse was even lamer – I never registered to vote.

I meant to, I really did. There was a voter registration table outside my grocery store and every time I passed it on the way in I’d think, “I’ll register on the way out.” And then every time I passed it on the way out it seemed like too much of a hassle to set all of my bags down to fill out the form.

At the height of the suffrage movement, some women were willing to lay down their lives for the chance to register to vote. I wasn’t willing to lay down a gallon of milk.

But there I was on Tuesday, in a line outside Grant Park, clutching my rally ticket like I’d found it in a Wonka Bar.

While I now vote, my approach to politics is still hands off. I don’t volunteer, I don’t canvas, I don’t donate. I never thought, in a million years, that I would attend a political rally.

I never thought I would stand in line for two hours to hear a politician speak. Or make frantic phone calls demanding election results. Or restrain myself from hugging strangers over shared love of a candidate.

I never thought I’d shout “Viva Obama!” at a news crew from Spain before adamantly telling them in Spanish that Obama was going to win and everyone knew it, so there.

But really, how could I help it? The air in Chicago was so charged on Tuesday night, it felt like if you lit a match, Chicago just might explode like a piñata. There was an outbreak of Obama Fever and I was not immune.

After waiting in line for two hours, my friends and I finally, finally got to the park. Just as we crossed through the entrance gate, a guy ran by us shouting, “CNN JUST CALLED IT! OBAMA WON!!” I broke into a full sprint. I pumped my fist in the air. I woo-woo’ed. When we found a spot in the huge field where people were gathered, I asked a man in front of me to remove his fedora so I could stare adoringly at a distant speck that may or may not have been Obama’s podium. And when the victory speech started, I got goose bumps.

I was moved by much of what Obama said Tuesday night, but most of all by this: “This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change.”

He’s right, I thought. It’s not enough that I voted. It’s not enough that he got elected. While I’m casually declaring at parties that politics “isn’t my thing,” my civil rights movement is going on around me. The war for my rights is being waged, and not just by other LGBT people, but also by straight allies who don’t want to live in a country where discrimination is law. What will I tell my children when they ask what I did during the fight for equal marriage? That I crossed my fingers and hoped it would turn out okay? That I sat back and let other people win my rights for me? That politics wasn’t my thing?

Externally, I joined the crowd in Grant Park chanting, “Yes we can.” Internally, I vowed to get involved.

The rest of the evening is a blur. We walked the streets of downtown Chicago and bought funny Obama t-shirts and talked to strangers. We met two undergrads from Indiana University who had driven to Chicago that night to be part of the excitement. “I gotta find out if he took Indiana,” one of them said, “‘Cause if he did I’m gonna do, like, five shots.”

Finally, at 3 a.m., my friends and I collapsed in a hotel room we’d booked on Michigan Avenue.
Even though I didn’t drink Tuesday night, when I woke up Wednesday morning I felt hung over. I had an early conference call, so I put on my clothes from the night before and tiptoed out of the hotel room where my friends still slept. I slunk into a Dunkin Donuts and ordered coffee.

This feeling is familiar, I thought. What is it? I took inventory of myself. Bed head. Smeared mascara. Last night’s clothes. Oh, yeah, I thought, This is the Walk of Shame. The Morning After.

We all know that feeling, right? From college? You go to a great party and spend the night there and the next morning you have to crawl back to your end of campus in some incriminating glittery tank top that tells everyone you did not wake up at home. The fifteen-dollars-worth of Obama buttons on my jacket were my glittery tank top. I was totally having a Morning After.

It made me think of how sometimes, when you’re drunk, you and a friend will start hatching crazy plans.

“We are going to Vegas TOMORROW!” you and your friend will declare on a porch at 4 a.m. “As soon as we wake up, we are booking flights and we are GOING!”

And in the midst of the excitement of drinking and partying, this sounds like a GREAT idea. It sounds, in fact, like the only logical thing to do. Then you wake up the morning after and you slowly remember that you promised to go to Vegas and you get kind of nervous as you remember that you have things to do and Vegas is kind of loud and do you really even like that friend anyway?

In a similar fashion, on the morning after the rally, I started remembering pieces of Tuesday night. Soon I was remembering my drunk-on-Obama promise to myself to get civically involved.

I wonder if I’ll actually do it, I wondered.

Three days later, I’m hoping that I will.

I’m hoping that I’ll take President-Elect Obama’s words to heart and seize the chance to make the change that I seek. That I’ll stop relying on others to move this country forward, to win my rights for me, and that I’ll start trying to do so myself.

I’m hoping this is the year, the moment, that I finally lay down my gallon of milk and get involved.

Jenny Hagel is a writer and actor in Chicago.