This morning I started a new household policy; every morning, I will walk my roommates to the bus stop and watch them get on the bus, and then walk down to meet them at the bus stop everyday when they get off work. Why?

Because for all of the years I have lived between MLK Drive and Cottage Grove on Chicago’s beautiful, historic, and proudly Black South Side, I have never felt a moment of fear out on our streets until the US government decided to turn our neighborhoods into a wannabe war zone.

You see, if you are new here, you may not know that I am a white woman and I live with my two beloved best friends, who happen to be a Black couple. In this house, we celebrate Black Love and Black Excellence, and we live in full joyful celebration of our neurodivergence.

We choose, everyday, to live out loud in a world that would rather see friendships like ours criminalized, and have spent over a decade keeping each other safe. As the world outside becomes more and more entrenched with authoritarian Nazi Idealogy, it would be easy to come here and act like I am a fearless warrior in the fight against hatred.

But I am not fearless. I am, in fact, full of terror. I know what happens when authoritarianism tightens its grip; how it dismantles safety, rewrites truth, isolates communities, and feeds on silence. How it turns “good people” who have spent years sitting in the safety of their privilege into silent observers when their neighbors are being ripped from their beds in the night. How it turns formerly brave advocates into cowards.

Every time I speak up, I can feel the fear buzzing under my skin. As someone who has a severe panic disorder, I am terrified to leave my house on the best of days, and I am naturally extremely adverse to confrontation. I spend the first hour of everyday vomiting my terror up out of my guts, and then wiping my face and getting to work.

But the fear isn’t a stop sign. It’s a signal: that what I love is in danger, that the people I cherish (my friends, my neighbors, my chosen family, myself) could be next if I don’t stand up now. So I keep pushing forward and reaching a hand out to those who also want to keep pushing forward in this fight.

Sitting here last week in pitch darkness after Comed turned off my electricity for failure to pay the bill, I used the last bars of my phone battery to do relay check-ins, and make sure the organizers and workers that I love and cherish were safe, and organize moves for this week.

Even having lost everything, on the razor’s edge of destruction, I take every seed of courage and plant it in someone else’s garden because courage, in times like these, isnt being fearless; it is refusing to let terror shrink your purpose.

It’s understanding that fear is a natural response to cruelty but submission is a political choice.

Courage is showing up to defend each other when institutions fail. It’s late-night planning calls, encrypted group chats, and the quiet, unglamorous labor of making sure everyone has a place to go and someone who will fight for them. It is a work that never ends: the work of loving your neighbor.

People like to call activists, organizer’s, independent journalists, community advocates“fearless,” but that’s wrong. Right now the bravest people I know are terrified. They are terrified of losing their livelihoods, their safety, their reputations, and they keep showing up anyway.

Because that’s what courage actually is. It’s not a posture; it’s persistence. It’s waking up each morning and saying: I am scared shitless, and I’m still going to do something.

This weekend, I wrote letters to the people I love, letting them know what they have meant to me, just in case I get arrested, rounded up, or go missing. While many sat in silent complicity as our Black neighbors were ziptied in the back of rental vans with their naked children after unwarranted Nazi goon squads reppeled onto their roofs from US military helicopters, I prepared my final effects…”just in case” it is my building that is next. Because I know I will not be able to watch masked men rip my best friends from their bed in the night without a fight.

There is no option to “sit this one out” when this is ALL OF OUR fight. As a white woman, I am calling each of my white sisters and brothers out to the carpet right now, as we have an absolute obligation to use the privilege that has granted us comfort to speak out against every single injustice against our Black, Hispanic, Latino, Immigrant, Palestinian, and LGBTQ neighbors.

I fight because I love people. I fight because I know what it feels like to be abandoned by systems that were supposed to protect you. I fight because I know what it is to be left bleeding and alone, while everyone who claimed to be in the fight, turned their back out of “fear” of losing their job, their friends, their proximity to power.

I fight because my fear does not outweigh my commitment to dismantling injustice. Throughout my life, terror has become my teacher; it reminds me how fragile freedom is, and how sacred it becomes when shared.

So no, I am not fearless. I am terrified every damn day, every single moment. But courage isn’t about feeling safe.

It’s about deciding that love is more powerful than fear, and that silence is complicity. The world doesn’t need fearlessness right now; it needs people who are afraid and still refuse to give up. I will never stop fighting for the communities that I love.

Why?

Because: From The River To The Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.

Because: Black Lives WILL ALWAYS Matter.

Because: “Fearfully and wonderfully made” will ALWAYS include the lives of my Trans brothers and sisters.

And because: La Raza unida, jamás será vencida!

Stay safe, stay connected, and God save us all.

In Solidarity and In Power,

JJ