Creativity, Connection and Care are the Antitode to Fear

Thank you to everyone who supported my work and mutual aid efforts in 2024. We raised over $6,000 last year for Palestine, Congo, Sudan, abortion access, queer and trans care, food access, and disaster relief. Every contribution, no matter how big or small, was an act of solidarity—a reminder that building webs of care and mutuality is not just an ideal but a daily practice.

Even though I see the quantitative evidence that we are persevering, it doesn't feel like I'm doing enough. The despair is a knot in the pit of my stomach. It takes the form of a nagging, undulating creature that tells me my efforts are worthless and impossible. Why try? No matter how much we give, how many resources we mobilize, and how many conversations we have, will it ever be enough to break the cycles of violence and dispossession?

We see the evidence confirmed all around us. It’s etched into our skin—the trauma of increasing brutalization, violence, and criminalization. Our bodies are the sites of the recurring violence of empire. We are reminded every day that the brutalization, gaslighting, and violence have not stopped despite our efforts. We see it in the copy-pasted responses from legislators denying culpability, in the ways our grief is co-opted for political gain, and in our protests met with police brutality. In the last three weeks alone, we've been inundated with a deluge of legislative and executive actions criminalizing trans and gender-expansive people, migrants, people of color, disabled folks, and people accessing abortions and reproductive care. Access to information that helps healthcare providers and government workers provide guidance has been censored and purged from the internet. It seems insurmountable.

As a Black, queer, nonbinary person, it feels like the threads are coming undone faster than our stitching toward a new world. It is soul-crushing.

This lie of not-enoughness is not accidental. White supremacy culture breeds fear—fear of not doing or being enough. It tells us that because we haven't seen a seismic shift from our actions on a local, national, and global level, we must be failing. This fear is designed to immobilize us, to crush us into believing that because we haven’t dismantled the death-making machine—the erosion of our bodily autonomy, the mass displacement of humans, animals, land, and water—our work is meaningless. As a result, we fall into despair, eroding our belief in each other and in our capacity to effect change.

What happens when our fear is weaponized? It blooms into self-hatred and destruction. We start to turn against each other, hoard resources, surveil one another, and doubt our ability to enact meaningful change. Trump and his oligarchs are employing fear to recruit us into surveilling each other. Librarians, healthcare providers, school teachers, neighbors, and employers—are being sold a lie that censoring, criminalizing, and devaluing one another, ourselves, and our non-human kin will somehow keep us safe. All the while, capitalists continue to accumulate resources freely given by the Earth.

But once you're able to make the connection that the not-enoughness you feel, the isolation that threatens to consume you, and the despair that turns your goodwill into meanness are rooted in fear, you can shape it into something productive.

I'm still grappling with understanding my body outside of a means of production, so bear with me here. My analytical brain often jumps into gear. To counteract the fear of my not-enoughness, I researched irrefutable evidence that things are getting better. The evidence was confusing. By most measures, human life has changed for the better. In our incredibly brief time in human form on this Earth, global life expectancy has increased over the last decades, though unequally. Conditions have markedly improved for folks living in rich countries (who extract the wealth and resources from the Global South). However, for the millions of people across the world facing famine, sexual violence, and disease due to human-made conditions, health outcomes have improved at a slower pace or stagnated.

Dissatisfied with the answer, I knew my analytical self wasn't well-suited for this quest. So, as my therapist often inquires, "What does this part of you need you to know?" So I've quietly and sometimes anxiously noticed over the last few months. The way my body suddenly feels rigid and out of place in predominantly white spaces. How I wake suddenly in the middle of the night from nightmares of police break-ins. The deep burning when my partner describes how their patients are struggling to access care because of their immigration status or fear of being denied access to gender-affirming care.

As I sit with this fear, something stirs just outside of my logical gaze. It is profound sadness at all of this loss. It is also a burning rage at all of this destruction. How have we turned this precious gift of life on this planet into so much suffering? How have we so egregiously violated the agreements of this miracle? I am most afraid that we will be unable to save ourselves in time. It is a tremendous tangle of feeling that statistics and facts cannot undo alone.

And then I feel a gentle tug of clarity again. What logic cannot answer, spirit offers an opening.

As I work to undo the trauma of white supremacy culture in my body, I am given these wondrous moments to shift from thinking to feeling as a means for proof. My not-enoughness, fear, sadness, and rage are designed to separate me from my body and our collective body. But the only antidote I’ve found is to get more in my body—to feel the pulse of our collective body. That is, to connect to myself through creativity, community, and care.

Creativity is a lifeline for fighting this despair. Our bodies are capable of reproducing so much beauty: dance, song, art-making, laughter, wailing. And as long as I have this body, and you have your body, we can choose creativity in spite of this fear. It is free, and it is abundant. Despite the efforts of white supremacy culture, our creativity cannot be taken away from us.

We can choose community—that is, to connect truthfully with one another. To tell the truth—to each other and ourselves. I don't have to pretend that everything is alright, and you don’t have to either. We can acknowledge that right now feels insurmountable. We can meet here, in this place of reality, and choose to spark a connection to a world that feels far away. This moment in our history is heartbreaking, and won’t you join me in putting the pieces back together?

It's in the action of caring for each other, the continual affirming of the dignity of all of life that happens when we keep showing up. To choose, every day, to look out for one another in ways that may seem small but are, in fact, profound. Because it is in these everyday choices—of sustaining, uplifting, and affirming life—that we begin shaping the world into something new.

White supremacy culture is rooted in a very real need to survive. But, we are given the false antidote that separation is the only means of survival—that we can only succeed if we fight against everything: the Earth, each other, ourselves. But spirit tells another story. My spirit is tethered to my sense of belonging—to the Earth, to myself, and to you, dear one.

It may not seem like enough.

But I invite you to close your eyes, take a deep breath, and loosen your tether on the limitations of what your eyes can see. Feel the remnants of light playing across your closed eyelids. Imagine you are connected to the groundswell of infinite goodness and love. We are connected by the eternal stream of love that came before, all that is fighting for love today, and all that be into eternity. 

You are alive, and you are fighting. You are not alone.

Thank you to every person who continues to support my art and writing practice. This publication is free. You can support me and my ongoing mutual aid efforts by purchasing my art, sharing this newsletter or leaving a comment.