The author, third from right, at Museums Advocacy Day 2020, February 25

Dear Senator Warren,

Thank you.

Thank you for the small things, like hiring staff for your senatorial office who demonstrate the same level of graciousness, dedication, and desire to help that you show daily. I’ve interacted with many of them on advocacy days down on Capitol Hill in the last several years, and it’s always a pleasure.

Thank you for the big things, championing the rights of everyday people, and bending your remarkable intellect to using government to protect people from the power money buys banks, big business, and special interests. I believe in your big structural change, and I believe you’ll help us get there in whatever role you inhabit.

Thank you for serving the citizens of Massachusetts with such energy, enthusiasm, and earnestness.  I am proud to have voted for you, and proud to call you my senator. I would have been thrilled beyond words to call you my president.  I have no doubt you are the president this country needs and far better than we currently deserve.

Thank you for showing the world the power of a passionate woman. In a society that wants us to be small-voiced and conciliatory, you stand up there and use your platform to show us that women can be passionate in public; that sometimes that passion looks like anger, and sometimes it is anger, and sometimes that anger is more than justified.  I will not apologize for voicing my passion anymore.

Thank you for throwing yourself out into the public arena daily.  Thank you for your tireless grace, your optimism, your perseverance.  In the last year, when I collapsed on the couch, exhausted from trying to run a household, keep a full time job, raise a toddler whose cardiologist father couldn’t be around, I would see pictures of you in the selfie line and think, “Senator Warren’s out there, wearing out another pair of running shoes.”  And I would get up.

I’m going to keep getting up.  I owe you that much. I donated, I convinced friends to vote for you, I shared your plans and your ideas in person and on social media, and it wasn’t enough.  I’m sorry.  But I am going to keep getting up, because that’s what you do, and if you can do it then so can I.

I know you’re going to keep fighting for me, for the future of my family, for the planet, and even for all the people who didn’t vote for you. So this is my pinkie promise: I’m going to keep fighting for you, and voting for you. I’m going to keep talking about the importance of intelligence, compassion, a willingness to listen and learn, and an articulate passion, about how those are the qualities we need in leaders.

Thank you for being an inspiration.

Please stick around, Senator.  We need you more than you know.

With deepest admiration and respect,

Meg Winikates