Oppression doesn’t just limit us materially—it shapes our inner worlds. When we live for a long time under hierarchy, economic insecurity, emotional repression, constant evaluation, we don’t only lose freedom. We lose the capacity to inhabit it. The confidence, the skills, the nervous system that can hold it. In that sense, fascism doesn’t just control—it trains us to fear freedom.
So when freedom appears, even in small ways, it can feel destabilizing.
I’ve been organizing and facilitating spaces for years. In the beginning, everything was free. As my practice grew into something I never expected, I chose to invest in it, to expand it, to reach more people. And in that process, I learned something simple, but confronting:
Freedom is responsibility.
If we say we don’t want the state mediating our relationships, then we have to take on what that actually requires. We have to protect each other. We have to communicate. We have to stay in conflict long enough to move through it.
But what I keep witnessing in our spaces is a gap. A willingness to name what isn’t working, without stepping into the responsibility of changing it. Long messages, side conversations, frustration that circulates—but very little movement.
And I keep wondering: if something isn’t being done, if you see how it could be done differently, why not do it?
Because freedom is responsibility.
Or maybe because freedom reveals wounds before it delivers relief.
Because stepping in means being seen. It means facing the parts of you that feel not enough, the echoes of caregivers who made you feel incapable, the fear of getting it wrong, the intimacy of trying in front of others. It means leaving the position of observer and becoming accountable for what happens next.
And that is much more vulnerable than critique.
But then something beautiful begins to open as I start to ground in the reality that freedom is responsibility.
Something shifts in my body. I stop waiting. I stop looking around for who is going to step in, who is going to fix it, who is going to hold it. And instead, I feel myself arrive. Not perfectly, not without fear—but present.
I start to trust that I can reach out, that I can initiate, that I can repair. That I don’t need to disappear when things get uncomfortable. That I can stay.
And slowly, relationships begin to feel different. Less performative, more alive. Less dependent on invisible structures, more rooted in choice. In care that is enacted, not assumed.
There is something deeply relieving in that… It’s not easier but at least it’s real.
Because for the first time, freedom is no longer something I’m waiting for. It’s something I am participating in. Something I am accountable for.
On Saturday, March 28th, I will be offering my favourite workshop: We Can’t BE Abolitionist AND Conflict Avoidant. I am very excited about teaching this again, for the last time!
Paid Subscribers, you have 25% on all my courses, and so if this class is interesting to you, feel free to use this code:
