Finally, I can exhale.

After four of the longest, most excruciating, most demoralizing and recently most terrifying years of my life, I can exhale.

And then inhale. And then exhale again! Because this nation turned away from what threatened to be a long bottomless slide into darkness and tyranny, and instead chose Sleepy Uncle Joe. Thank God! If the worst thing that happens to this country is a garbled sentence or two, how wonderfully restful that will be.

Of course, that won’t be the worst thing that happens, not by a long shot, because many terrible things continue, including racism, the pandemic, the economy and the climate.
But I can deal with all of that.  We can fight those problems together now that there will be a change in the White House.

There’s a lot of thinking still to do about this election, but already some observations are clear.

First, I am awestruck at the sheer number of people who voted — in the middle of a pandemic. Pundits have been complaining, for as long as I can remember, about the puny number of Americans who take voting seriously.

Well, they can shut up now. Apparently this is the greatest percentage turnout (over 66 percent) in more than 100 years. And in absolute numbers, it is the most Americans who have voted — ever.

So, whatever else he is remembered for, we must credit Donald Trump — love him or hate him — with getting a record number of Americans to the polls.

Second, I will never listen to another pollster again. They should all go back to school for something more dependable — like the weather — and try to get jobs predicting that. At least, if they forecast one week at a time, we only have to wait one week to see how they’ve done.

But — word of warning — the bar for that is pretty high. I should know. I used to write the weather forecast for a Sunday news show, and I am amazed at how much more accurate they’ve become since I stopped writing them.

Speaking of lousy predictions, whatever happened to that Blue Tsunami? We didn’t even get a Blue Wavelet. Except for the top of the ticket, what we actually seem to have seen is some Blue Erosion, with at least five seats lost in the House of Representatives.

I think this should serve as some kind of belated validation for Hillary Clinton.

Sure, she had her detractors, and yes, she made some mistakes. But now that we see how hard it was for Biden to win with the greatest voter turnout in history, I think we must conclude that whatever went wrong for us in 2016, it wasn’t just Hillary.

We had no idea what she was actually up against. It’s as if we’d said, “Well, no wonder she capsized, the woman just couldn’t handle a rowboat out in open water,” when it turns out there was a whale underneath. And not a Blue one.

Most of all, I am surprised at how much more bearable even a deadly pandemic can be now that the overarching nightmare aspect is gone.

What has made it such a nightmare for me goes far beyond the deadly details of COVID, itself. I lived in Greenwich Village and worked in Manhattan through the worst of the AIDS crisis, when nobody even knew what caused it, so re-running that experience, while scary and depressing, hasn’t been new.

The nightmare came from realizing that we have had a president who did not have our backs. Who, in fact, was busy looking for ways to hurt us.

When he was presented with medical consensus on what should be done to keep Americans as safe as possible, it’s not even the case that our president did nothing. He did worse than nothing. He did the opposite of all advice: telling people NOT to wear masks; holding mass rallies in states with active outbreaks; attacking state governors for whatever they did, after insisting that they were the only ones who could do anything — which wasn’t true anyway. It often felt as if his goal was — unbelievably! — for as many of us as possible to die.

What a crazy way for a president to behave. What a nightmare!

That’s what will be changing on Jan. 20, 2021, and that’s what makes all the difference. Instead of spending every waking moment trapped in a horror film, where someone is out to kill you and all you can do is hold your breath — it’s as if now somebody has stopped the projector, turned on the lights and said, “Hey, what’s going on here? Let me help you.”

I can breathe again.