I was in 5th grade when the cracks in the foundation the United States raised me on really started to show. My teacher taught us about greenhouse gas emissions and said, rather matter-of-factly, that within mine or my children’s lifetime Earth would become like Venus… inhospitable to human life. My 11-year-old self was stunned. “We’re on the fast track to extinction and we’re just gonna… do 5th grade??”

As a person racialized as white, who identifies as the gender I was assigned at birth, whose romantic interests generally have the opposite gender assignment, who is mostly neurotypical and able bodied, who is fluent in English, who has always known the stability of having a roof over my head and access to food… I hold many privileges in this white supremacist, cis-hetero-patriarchial, mess of oppression we call the “modern” world. My experience is that of someone allegedly “protected” by and “safe” from the genocidal violence that built and upholds the colonial world we know. Yet and still, all my basic needs are behind a pay-wall, my bodily autonomy is pending legislation, my neighbors are attacked, my planet is actively being destroyed in the pursuit of capital, and for me to stand up against any of these injustices is to face the threat of intense state repression.

It is thanks to my teachers, Black and Indigenous women, femmes, and gender-nonbinary folks (special shoutout to Nikki Blak!), that I have learned to see the connections and to understand that all of our struggles are one. None of us are free until all of us are. The only liberation is collective liberation. So, abolition is the goal and I am dedicated to purposefully moving in service of that goal.