Showing Up: Resistance in new ways
we are growing, we are changing
I’m pushing myself in different ways this year, with my number one way being showing up for community organizing. While I’ve been an avid participant in protests and rallies over the years, I’ve never let myself be known by those organizing and building community within those spaces. I’m all in at the rally, just silently hoping they don’t ask the crowd to turn around and talk to their neighbor, and when they say the rally is over, I’m out before anyone can talk to me.
There are many different reasons I’ve been more absent than I wanted to be from these spaces from years, the main one being social anxiety. As a kid I felt strongly about things, but was painfully shy and tried to mostly go unnoticed until high school. I high school I pushed myself to start making eye contact with people other than a small circle of friends, which was the beginning of what I now call expose therapy (ERP) for my OCD. While I have slowly gained a better ability to allow myself to take up space and be known, it’s still anxiety inducing and exhausting for me to be in the company of people, and I can’t shut the part of my brain off that is trying to figure out what they are expecting from me, and how they are doing emotionally. While I’ve very much become a person who does my own thing and lives by the beat of my own drum, I begin to feel trapped and boxes into a script of social convention and trying to make others have a good time at the expense of my own emotions.
I feel remnants of this every time I push myself to go to another organizing meeting, rally or protest. Instead of turning the car around when I see it's a smaller protest crowd or meeting, I make myself go in (thus continuing that same type of ERP this year that I started 20 years ago in high school). Even though the smaller crowds make me uncomfortable and increase the chances that I will have to meet new people, I also understand this is the best way to build community bit by bit and also change my brain to make the world feel safer and more open. And that fills me with as much social anxiety beforehand as it does hope after the fact.
The vibe is so different going into the 2025 Trump presidency compared to the 2016 Trump presidency. Though I have always wanted to be involved in activism since learning about the hippies as a kid, I really got to dive in when big protests became accessible and known and I cut my teeth in social justice activism that my partner had engaged in during college, which I was still too shy and still too worried about fitting in to do.
From 2013 to today I have educated myself with leftist media and books and shown up in organizing and activist spaces against the prison industrial complex and various other issues, sporadically and most of the time anonymously. Being anti- war is one of the core tenants of my politics, I had promised myself long ago that is an active anti-war movement ever took place in the US I would be on the front lines. When the genocide in Gaza started in 2023, I was not in a good place mentally and while I tuned into protests when I could, my capacity and ability to push myself at that time was low. By the summer of 2024 however, I had gained resiliency and my mental health had improved and I was ready to make good on my original commitment, though it was late.
My new nephew was born in Chicago the day after the March on the Democratic National Convention, and I got to meet a few KC organizers there who opened up the possibility of connecting with other groups and organizers in KC. Since then, I have shown up when I can and tried to follow through on my commitments to the anti-war community and the abolitionist community in my city. It’s been a slow start, but it’s building at the speed of trust, which is how it should be (for capacity reasons for me, and also for safety reasons for the movement). Earlier this summer I was dipping my toes in, but now I will say I have a whole foot in.
And who knows how deep I’ll be in the future? Building community and organizing together is an antidote to pessimism, fear and complacency. Which I think I need now more than ever as we slog into the second trump presidency as a nation. While I am disheartened by the numbers in the streets organizing, it’s also nice to know that it is the truly committed activists out there right now, and it’s a great time to get to know them, and become one myself.
