My Contribution Is the Trembling Truth

For the ones who can’t march —yet still refuse to look away.

It’s a snowy Sunday, and as I typically do on Sundays, I’m lounging comfortably, reading. I stumbled across a post titled Writing as Resistance, and it captured my attention, so I decided to give it a read.

As I’m reading, I can feel it impacting my body the way great writing does. It stirred up something in me that hadn’t been touched in a while. It hit me right in the gut just as truth does — the kind of truth that exposes what you’ve learned to avoid so you can keep functioning.

Emotions started rising.
Old thoughts came back right along with them.

I didn’t want to overthink it. I definitely didn’t want to dismiss the moment. So I did what I typically do when I need to get my thoughts out — I recorded a voice memo.

What surprised me was how much came up once I started talking.

Tears.
Gut-wrenching feelings.
A heaviness I hadn’t let myself feel in years.

And the thing is, once it started pouring out, I realized I wasn’t just reacting to the post. I was reacting to a pattern.

Here’s what I mean:

When I read the work of brilliant writers and thought leaders — people writing about social justice, or the history of Black people in America — I am both in awe and in shame.

In awe of the depth.
In awe of the courage.
In awe of the way they can hold the weight of this truth and still stand.

In shame because I haven’t been able to the same.
I grew up in a religious household where the world’s suffering wasn’t something you sat with. Instead, you were encouraged to:

Just pray.
Read the bible.
Keep your mind on jesus.
Focus on your reward in heaven.

And honestly, it helped.
The avoidance insulated me from the grief of what was really happening in this country…what was really happening to us. Just to be clear:

I’m not indicting faith. I’m naming the way I learned to use it to avoid the grief of social injustice. This isn’t the kind of programming you switch off. My body learned it as a coping mechanism and it runs because it worked. What works gets wired in.

There’s a threshold in my body. I call it the lid—my internal exit sign.
When the weight of awareness gets too heavy, it kicks in without asking permission.

This is too much.
Go back to happy thoughts.
Go back to what you can handle.

And I do.
I close the book.
I go check my email.
I go back to work.
I survive to live another day.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped using faith as my shield and started using busyness.

Work.
Responsibility.
Being a provider, a parent, a professional.

Different object, same mechanism: Don’t look. Don’t feel. Don’t let it in.

As I was pouring out in my memo, the incident of George Floyd’s murder came to mind. That horrific incident rocked me to my core, and I was undone for a very long time — internally, privately — while still showing up to work, answering emails, and making sure the bills got paid.

But I thought: I don’t want to be ignorant. I don’t want to stay numb to this.

So I bought the books. 1619. Slavery by Another Name. White Fragility. The New Jim Crow and many others.

I even listened to Joy DeGruy’s lectures on post-traumatic slave syndrome.
Every single time I tried to go deeper, the lid kicked in.

Here’s what the lid cost me:

I feel like I don’t belong anywhere.
Sure, through my skin and gender, I can be categorized.

But not through my experience.
Not through my participation.
Not through my courage.

If I were in a room full of people doing the work — activists, scholars, organizers — I would feel completely out of place and utterly alone.

Because I’ve emotionally disconnected from the experience of what it’s like to be Black in America.

What it’s like to be a Black woman in America.

I can’t bear it.
It’s too heavy.
It’s too painful.
It’s too exhausting.
It’s too disappointing.
And so I stay in the gray. Neutral. Safe and alone.

I remember reading Dancing in the Darkness by Otis Moss III, and I kept thinking: could I have done what his father did? Could I have trusted love enough to stand up to evil, ten toes down, unflinching?

I don’t know.
I don’t know that I trust love that much.
I don’t know that I trust good that much.
The thing about not trusting love is that it doesn’t come from nowhere.

My mom left when I was young. My father stayed — sure, he was physically present. But was also emotionally unavailable.

And through that I formed my definition of love:
Love is unstable.
Love doesn’t fight for you.
Love is not something you lean on, because it will leave you.

And if I can’t trust love, how am I supposed to stand beside people who do?
How am I supposed to fight from something I don’t even believe will hold me?

I recently came across a line from bell hooks in All About Love that stopped me:

“The practice of love offers no place of safety.
We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”

And I realized — maybe the people I admire aren’t trusting love to keep them safe. Maybe they’ve just accepted that it won’t.

And they choose it anyway.

That’s a different kind of trust than the one I’ve been looking for.

For a long time, I thought this made me a coward. I thought I was absent from the fight. Sitting on the sidelines while others carried the weight I couldn’t bear.
But I’m beginning to see things differently.

Here’s my untrapped perspective.

I’m not absent from the fight. I’m wounded in it.
The lid isn’t cowardice. It’s a trauma response.
It’s my nervous system’s way of saying:
we cannot metabolize this yet.
Not alone. Not without breaking.

I still vote with my conscience and have a strong view on right vs. wrong.
I know what side of history I want to be on. I feel the grief — deeply enough to cry through my voice memo, deeply enough to write this essay you’re reading right now.

I’m not on the sidelines. I’m injured on the field.

Therein lies the difference.

The Revelation of my Contribution

When I was an undergrad, I remember studying drama and Black Theatre. I fell in love with how playwrights took the issues of the day and turned them into story. It inspired me to become a be a playwright. I wrote a couple of plays for church based on the culture I observed and was told to soften it. So I lost interest.

Then I came across Shonda Rhimes work through my obsession with Grey’s Anatomy and she inspired me to want to be a screenwriter. I wanted to make people feel the way she made me feel, but divorce, single parenting and survival mode put those dreams on the back burner for years.

In 2020, I revisited my love for writing and decided becoming an author was in my reach and in 2022, I self-published my first book. I can see now that these experience were seeds for my life’s work. Thankfully, in spite of everything I’ve overcome the seed didn’t die.

I’m now convinced that writing is my contribution.
Not the marching.
Not the organizing.
Not the scholarly deep dives my nervous system can’t yet hold.

But this — the raw, honest, trembling truth of a woman who was taught to look away and is now intentionally looking back.

Who doesn’t trust love but still wants to live fully.
Who feels like a fraud and is saying so out loud.
Maybe that voice can reach people who would never pick up a history book.
Who have the same lid as I do when trying to connect with what is happening collectively.
Who need someone to say: me too. I’m afraid and I’m still here.

If you write, teach, or speak — and you’ve been holding back…
waiting until you’re ready,
waiting until you’re healed,
waiting until you’ve earned the right to take up space — I want you to hear this:

You don’t have to carry the full weight to matter.
You don’t have to be unafraid to contribute.
Your don’t have to heal your wound to qualify.
Your experience and point of view are connection points.

The people who need your voice aren’t waiting for you to be whole.
They’re waiting for you to be open and honest.

Yes, I still have the books on my bookshelf.
And I still hit the lid from time to time
But I’m not waiting to contribute anymore.

Tell me: If you’ve been holding back your work, what’s your version of “the lid”?