Fear as a Compass

I grew up in the wealthy, white, conservative western suburbs of Minneapolis. My childhood was shaped by contradictions: a blue-collar, union dad in an anti-union time; a Catholic upbringing that preached "service" while reinforcing hierarchies of “saved” and “unsaved”; a suburban life that existed alongside deep, invisible precarity, one where I started working at 11 years old.

One of my earliest political memories is standing with my dad on a picket line in downtown Minneapolis. He worked produce at a union grocery store, and Whole Foods was moving in, refusing to unionize. I was a teenager, but I understood enough: here was a company building its business model on breaking the very thing that gave my father dignity and protection.

From that moment, I started to understand that our economic choices are political choices—especially around something as fundamental as food. Back then, a grocery store was either a co-op or union. Whole Foods helped change that. Today, the landscape is far murkier, and many of the union groceries near me have been gutted, while big-box stores and boutique markets thrive. The terrain of “doing the right thing” is no longer simple, if it ever was.

But this isn’t just a story about unions and grocery stores. It’s a story about fear—and what we do with it.

When Fear Shows You Who You Are

In high school, my Catholic schooling wrapped “service” in the language of charity: help “the less fortunate.” I didn’t yet have the language to critique that framework. So I went along. I volunteered at soup kitchens and in programs with unhoused gay, queer, and trans youth in Minneapolis.

I came into those spaces carrying a quiet arrogance: white, suburban, Catholic, close enough to wealth to feel its comfort even if we didn’t fully have it. I saw myself as a helper, a giver. But being in rooms full of peers my own age, living on the street in Minnesota winters, shattered my understanding of class and safety.

How could someone like me—same age, same city—be surviving outside in subzero temperatures, while I went home to warmth?

That question lodged itself inside me.

Later, when I came out in St. Paul, that question became a warning. Coming out meant risking everything: family, housing, church, and whatever future had been scripted for me. I was terrified—not in an abstract way, but in a very concrete, “I could end up homeless” way. I had seen what that looked like. I knew it wasn’t hypothetical.

Fear pushed me to seek solidarity with people who didn’t look like me and didn’t share my background. That’s how I connected with folks like Stacey, a young Black man from North Minneapolis, and Lorena, a Mexican student who would later come out as queer.

One day, in a moment etched into my marrow, Stacey looked me dead in the eye and said to me, “You seem kind of racist. Go work on that.”

No roadmap. No reading list. Just a mirror.

I was already terrified—of being queer, of being unhoused, of being excommunicated from everything that raised me. And now I had to face the possibility that I was also racist, that my “good intentions” were soaked in bias and entitlement.

Fear was no longer something happening around me. Fear was now me.

Stacey and me my freshman year of college.

Fear as a Doorway, Not a Wall

I didn’t know what “go work on that” meant. But I knew how to use a library.

So I sat in the stacks, day after day, pulling cards from the catalog, tracing keywords like “race,” “racism,” “prejudice.” I found books like The Nature of Prejudice and Peggy McIntosh’s “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” I followed footnotes to Langston Hughes, Sojourner Truth, Malcolm X. I moved beyond the safe, sanitized version of Martin Luther King Jr. we were taught in school.

I wasn’t doing this out of academic curiosity. I was doing it to survive.

I understood, instinctively, that my survival as a queer person in this country was bound up with understanding race and racism, with confronting my own internalized white supremacy, with seeing how the systems I benefited from were built through the subjugation of others.

Fear pushed me into that library.

But once I was there, fear became something else: a compass. It kept asking:

• What are you afraid to see about yourself?

• What are you afraid to admit about your country?

• What truths terrify you enough that you’d rather look away?

The more honestly I followed those questions, the less abstract “liberation” became. It wasn’t a slogan. It was a daily, uncomfortable practice of turning toward what I feared, letting it change me. 

This Country Is Terrified of Its Own Reflection

I live now in San Francisco, on Yelamu, surrounded by imperfect, brilliant communities of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, queer, trans, non-binary, poor, unhoused, disabled comrades, neighbors, and beloveds. My life is possible because so many people—many of them not white, not cis, not safely housed—have extended care, critique, and courage toward me.

When I look at the United States, I see a country that refuses to do what I was forced to do in that library: to turn toward its own terror and contradictions.

We love to recite the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights as if they are sacred scripture. But this country is not those texts. This country is the policies and laws written in their wake—policies that have consistently and deliberately subjugated, dispossessed, and exterminated Black people, Indigenous peoples, and people across the globe: Vietnamese, Koreans, Iraqis, Iranians, Palestinians, Congolese, Sudanese, and so many others.

The state’s function has always been Power-Over: to control, to discipline, to contain. It is terrified of the people—terrified of our capacity to organize, to care for one another outside its logic, to refuse the narrow futures it offers.

And that terror shows up on our streets: in policing, in houselessness, in medical neglect, in borders, in war. The state is executing people in front of us, directly and indirectly, every single day.

Choosing Power-With Rather Than Power-Over

I don’t write this from some moral pedestal. I still buy food that would have made my union dad furious. I still live inside systems I oppose. The grocery stores that once were clear sites of solidarity have, in many cases, been gutted by the very forces he protested against. The choices are more complicated now.

But I can choose to shop at local markets, talk with workers, support farmers’ markets, build relationships rather than transactions. I can choose to be accountable when I am called in or called out. I can choose to stay in community even when it’s uncomfortable.

These are not perfect choices. They are partial, messy, human. And yet they matter, because they’re rooted in a different orientation: Power-With, not Power-Over.

Liberation, as I understand it now, isn’t a fixed destination. It’s a continual practice of:

• Turning toward our fears instead of letting them harden into walls,

• Letting critique—especially from those most impacted—actually transform us,

• Unlearning the stories we were raised with about who is “deserving,” who is “normal,” who is “dangerous,” who is “less,”

• Building and sustaining ways of caring for each other that do not rely on the state’s permission or control.

An Invitation: Be Constantly Fearful

In some ways, I am asking you to be constantly fearful—but not in the way this country trains us to be. Not fearful of your neighbor, or of Blackness, or of queerness, or of migration, or of poverty.

Instead, fearful of your own complacency. Fearful of the harm you might be doing without examining it. Fearful of turning away when your communities need you to turn towards. Because if we can learn to sit with that fear, to listen to it, to let it guide us deeper into truth rather than further into denial, something shifts. Fear stops being a weapon used to isolate us and becomes a doorway into collective liberation.

The path to liberation, as I live it, is not fearless. It is full of fear. But it is also full of beloveds, of comrades, of communities that hold each other through that fear, that insist another reality is already here, being co-created in kitchens, streets, libraries, encampments, backyards, and living rooms.

We are making that future—not someday, but right now. Outside of the state.

With and for each other.

And that, to me, is what makes all this fear not just bearable, but necessary.