Deep breath. Those of you who are familiar with my work are very familiar with the fact that I approach any political issue with a high degree of trepidation. And this topic is no different.

As a little girl who grew up during the Obama presidency and graduated high school during Trump’s presidency, the jaded feelings that I have toward our current political environment extend a lot deeper than most of my peers do — because of my personal connection to the political sphere. However, there is too much at stake in this election to let it pass by without giving you all my two cents.

Because as a young, intelligent and disabled woman, I tap into several different groups whose rights are at stake today.

To jump right into it — because we all have important things to do today — it’s time to go back to my childhood in order to uncover my complicated history with politics. Another fun fact about me, that will take many of you by surprise, unless you recognized my last name and did some research on me, is my father used to be a politician. He was a state senator for two terms and ran for district attorney in 2010 and lost.

This is a topic that I rarely talk about, for many reasons. The primary one is that my father has a reputation among many people in Hampden County, and I spent a lot of my adolescence trying to distance myself from that. While I was such a daddy’s girl growing up, there is a lot that affected me — and still does — from the experience of having to paste a smile on my face and portray the role of the “perfect daughter” in the “perfect family” for the cameras every time a campaign cycle came around, when our version of reality was nowhere close to that.

But because my father was a political figure for such a formative period of my childhood, I deeply valued his opinions on politics for a period of time, which was before I had full insight into the amount of glad-handing that takes place behind closed doors among politicians.

I can vividly remember an instance of this. In fourth grade, my class did a mock presidential election on Election Day in which every student had to vote for Barack Obama or John McCain. I voted for Obama because I knew my dad, a long-standing Democrat, was voting for him. I chose to follow my dad’s line of thinking because he was in politics, and I genuinely thought that his being in that environment would give him greater insight into who the better candidate was.

I was too young and naïve at the time to understand anything about politics and whose policies/morals my own morals aligned with. So I took the lead of someone else’s and, fortunately, they didn’t lead me astray then.

But the stakes then were arguably not nearly as high as they are now.

And I was a child then, and I’m an adult now. I have had the opportunity to educate myself and cast my vote for a candidate whose beliefs most align with mine.

Still, I’m not going to use this column to convey my political alliances. Instead I am going to use this opportunity to pose some questions to you all.

The questions that we have to ask ourselves on this day are: What will propel this country forward? What are our core values deep in our souls? Are we going to try to see the good in each other and the way that we’re all the same? Or are we going to continue to harp on all of our differences?

Our nation is extremely divided right now, and we all know there is a whole swarm of rhetoric surrounding this election. There is a whole lot of peer pressure to believe that a certain candidate is better because those around you think so. But each of us will have to live with the choice we make today for the next four years. And it’s up to us to be confident in our choices. Therefore, I think the most important thing to remember today is that we need to be kind to each other, regardless of different political beliefs.

Because at the end of the day, we’re all human, and we all want to have peaceful and happy lives. And we all hopefully will live civilly among each other once the votes are tallied.

Today, though, you will get the opportunity to vote for the candidate you want to be our nation’s next president. And I hope you make the decision based on your own thoughts, not anyone else’s.

Gazette columnist Joanna Buoniconti is a freelance writer and editor. She is currently pursuing her master’s at Emerson College. She can be reached at columnist@gazettenet.com.