For The Person Who Is Afraid to Fight Back

A personal essay by Dissent in Bloom

I don't usually write like this. Most of what you find here is documents, court records, FOIA requests and evidence. But every so often, I think you deserve to know who is sitting behind this newsletter and why I refuse to stop. Even when I’m afraid.

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I was fifteen when I had my first child. Sixteen when my mother died.

I am telling you this not for sympathy. I am telling you this because you need to understand where I come from so you understand why fear never had the final word for me, and why we keep pushing forward, even when we are afraid.

I GREW UP AFRAID

My childhood was hard, I don’t mean it the way most people do. I mean survival-hard.

Every morning I’d have to ask myself… are my parents coming home? Are we eating tonight? If CPS comes, is where they take us going to be worse?

Even at nine years old, I already knew that safety was not a given. That it was something you had to negotiate with the world every single day, and that the world did not always agree to the terms.

I have fragmented memories of my childhood. That is what happens when your brain is trying to protect you.. it keeps some things, discards others, and leaves you with pieces that don’t always fit together neatly.

But some things stayed.

I remember fighting. My parents fought over everything. Drugs, money, the weight of each other’s failures. The reasons shifted day to day, but the noise never stopped, and neither did the fear. The house was always loud in the way that makes your nervous system learn to brace before you even open the door.

I can still see my mom standing in the middle of the street, high, squaring up with anyone who looked her direction. I can still see the family friend who walked me to a corner store one night to get something to eat while my parents lay passed out. It was such a small, ordinary mercy.

And neither of us noticed my little brother slipping out behind us, falling further and further back along a busy road. That was until a semi came within inches of taking him from us.

No one was watching. No one was ever there to watch.

That was the time children services came and took us away. My mom eventually got sober, got us back, lost her sobriety. We fought like cats and dogs, but I loved her in the desperate, irrational, bone-deep way that only a child who has never been chosen can love a parent who keeps almost choosing them.

I loved her the way flowers grow toward windows. Not because the light was always warm. But because it was the only light there was.

The last conversation I had with her before she died, I asked the only question that had ever really mattered to me.

“Mom, if you had to choose between me or the pills, what would you choose?”

She couldn’t answer.

That silence is the last sound I have of her alive. She died at thirty-eight from a genetic heart condition. And fear, the fear I had lived with my entire childhood, did not leave with her. It just packed its bags and moved into a new room.

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My dad was still an addict, and made poor choices. He was abusive but most of the time he was too out of it to harm me. Only coming for me when I offended one of his girlfriends because I am autistic and ask too many offensive questions. That was until he got a new girlfriend who lived wit us.

I have footage of his girlfriend, screaming that I was fat and ugly and that everyone was laughing at me, while my infant daughter sat nearby chewing on her fingers. I tried to fight back but realized I was in danger. My daughter was in danger.

So, I folded myself smaller, because that is what fear teaches you. It convinces you that smallness is safety and silence is survival.

My daughter’s father was the closest thing to stability I had ever known, and I held onto that even when the relationship became controlling, even when he threatened to hurt himself when I said no, even when I was not allowed to wear makeup without being accused. A cage with familiar walls is still a cage. I left all of that at seventeen. I was scared, but I made a jump

I got my own apartment at eighteen. It was a “low-income” apartment, but it was mine. A door that locked from the inside. I never looked back.

That girl who folded herself smaller to survive is a registered nurse now. She is raising a family. She has three college degrees and is finishing her fourth. She built a nonprofit with her own hands because she remembered every person who had no one to fight for them, and she decided to become that person for someone else. They told me I was nothing. I built something anyway. I fight back. That is the my story.

HERE’S THE THING ABOUT FEAR

Fear does not go away when you finally get out.

It does not leave when you close the door of your first apartment and hear the lock catch, or when you build something real from the rubble of everything that tried to bury you.

It does not leave when you finally have something worth protecting.

I know this because I lived inside fear for years. I folded myself smaller to survive it. I stayed quiet because quiet felt like armor. And what I learned, the hard way, in houses that hurt me and rooms that diminished me and systems that were built to wear me down, is that fear is a passenger who never gets off the bus. But it is not the driver.

That distinction changed my life.

I was told, in a hundred different ways by a hundred different people and institutions, that I did not matter. That what I saw was not real. That what I felt was too much. That speaking up would cost me more than staying quiet. And maybe it would. Maybe it does.

But silence has a cost too, and that cost is always paid by someone who could not afford it. I carried that lesson for years like a wound I was pretending was not there.

I was afraid every time I published something, named a name, or pulled back a curtain someone powerful wanted kept closed. I did it anyway. Because the only unforgivable response to fear is stillness. Hell, I’m still afraid sometimes. But I’m still here.

If you are somewhere right now afraid to speak, afraid to strike, afraid to organize, afraid to challenge what you know is wrong in your workplace or your government or your community, I need you to understand that fear is expected. It means you are human, but most of all? It means you’re paying attention. It means what you are doing matters enough to threaten someone.

I stood up against my fear, and now I’m sending this email out to 18,000 people who care enough about what I have to say to subscribe. Thank you all for being part of this journey with me. You truly have no idea how much it means. But back to fear..

Fear was never meant to make you still. It was never meant to make you surrender before the fight even starts. It was meant to make you fight. You are not alone in this. You are not powerless.

And the moment you decide to stop waiting for permission to push back, everything changes. You have already survived more than you were supposed to. Do not let fear be the thing that finally wins.

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