After a while Trumpism got to be an almost regular part of our lives. We’d sort of shake it off, as just another petty annoyance. Trump wasn’t going to war with North Korea, or at least he probably wasn’t. And, as with any insane situation, there were the people who would normalize it and make fun of me for “taking everything so seriously.” People who would say I was over-reacting. Sure, Trump was gassing children on the border, but I didn’t need to get so hysterical about it.

Joe Biden’s win is like finding out the tumor is benign. It’s like finding out that the baby doesn’t have the birth defect you were worrying about. Joe Biden’s win is being treated as if America has dislodged a dictator, and that’s because we have. Defeating an incumbent president is deeply difficult and America has done it.

Biden is a good, decent man, a stark contrast to Trump. Watching the American people elect him fills me with a kind of hope for the future I haven’t felt in four years. On the Saturday the election result was finally called for Joe Biden, people danced in the streets, and I could hear cheering from my window. Sure, people were happy for Biden, but they were mostly relieved. They were so happy to be done with the tweets, the Trump kids, the federal agents of nebulous provenance grabbing people and taking them away in unmarked vans, the immorality and the chaos. After four years of watching America become Belarus, we are no longer hostages to Trump’s dictatorial machinations.

But Trumpism is hard to shake. Four years ago, on a cold November Wednesday, I went into my daughter’s butterfly-wallpapered bedroom and woke her to tell her that the guy with all the sexual assault allegations was going to be president. Perhaps she wasn’t old enough to know what the next four years would bring, and perhaps I wasn’t either, but we both knew the election of Trump was a loss for women everywhere—and, even more than that, it was a loss for decency.

The memory of telling my then eight-year-old daughter about the election of Donald Trump is seared into my brain, indelible. Even now, with 2016 firmly in the rear-view mirror, it’s hard to forget what a loss the defeat of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump was for women everywhere. And it just got worse, culminating in the installation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in RBG’s seat as the 2020 election was already happening. In fact, the last four years have been an enormous shit sandwich for people who believe that women should have the same rights as men, from the end of the Violence Against Women Act to the expiration of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Some people will be tempted to call Trumpism an aberration, a deviation from the norm, a momentary lapse in judgement. But we all know that’s not true. There is much soul-searching that needs to happen to prevent something like this from ever happening again. But the soul-searching should come later. Right now we need to take the win, to celebrate history made and dictatorship averted.