Tonight, for the first time since I was legally able to vote, I blew off an election. With a reported 35% voter turn out in today’s California primary election, I am THAT person: The one who doesn’t bother to show up, the one I always disdain, the one the other side counts on. Today, I joined the 65% of California citizens in apathetic solidarity.

I wish I could say it was apathy that led me to hurl my yellow absentee ballot along with the voter guide into the recycling bin more than a week ago, which at the time, felt really good, I’ll admit. Indifference would be so much more preferable to the real reasons I shrugged as I pitched the material into the square straw bin beneath my office desk and then walked to the kitchen to pour myself a whisky. Why does it matter? I thought to myself in the days before I made my decision.

My voting materials sat for three days, untouched, on my dining room table where I’d neatly stacked them. I’d eyeball the sealed booklet and envelope—the window of which displayed my name with an extraneous initial I’ve attempted to correct with the registrar’s office multiple times—on every pass through the room, contemplating whether I could actually go through with it. On the fourth day, I picked them up and moved them to the office. I sat down on the chair, pressed my toes against the floor and launched myself into a slow spin while I wrestled my thumb into the corner of the envelope with the yellow ballot. I yanked at the paper, making a jagged, uneven tear, immediately giving myself a paper cut.

“Shit!” I said, tossing the half-opened envelope away from me, sucking the blood from my thumb. Clearly, I was supposed to sit this election out.

“MAH-ahm! You owe a quarter,” Ruby said to me from the other room.

And thinking about that quarter got me thinking about all of the many quarters I’ve paid for my potty mouth, which got me thinking about my daughter’s college education, which got me thinking about the state of public education in California, which got me thinking about our fiscal nightmare, which got me thinking about the self-interested, re-election-happy representatives too paralyzed to do anything productive, which got me thinking about how our public offices and initiatives are really just for sale to the highest bidder, which led me to the conclusion (again) about how this is all a big dog and pony show.

I’ve always operated under the philosophy that it’s my obligation to vote. That by doing so, I’m at the very least staking out my right to complain. But I’ve started to think that if I participate in a broken system, then I am part of the problem. So I decided to skip it.

And all day,  I felt nothing. Until I began watching the returns and realized that I didn’t know a single local initiative. Certainly, there is a peacefulness in having no investment and I am definitely a happier person by not following politics as closely as I did way back when I was more hopeful and less cynical. Still. I started to feel sorta bad when I couldn’t have an intelligible conversation with friends.

Maybe I should have voted…not that my voice would have mattered. But what if even half of the other 65% of us had voted. Would my voice have mattered then?