I think we need to have a talk about America.To start, I wan..

I think we need to have a talk about America.

To start, I want to express my existential disappointment—rooted, ironically, in privilege. The privilege of being American was afforded to me by ancestors who, one way or another, found their way into this country and its myth of freedom. That privilege shaped the trajectory of our family. It gave us stories of stability and prosperity, and for that, I’ve always felt a deep, sometimes complicated, gratitude.

America gave me room. Room to fuck up, to rebuild, to imagine myself into existence. I was allowed to make space where there wasn’t space before—and for a long time, that felt like a kind of freedom.

But lately, every time I wake up, I feel the walls closing in.

Every morning, I open my eyes in a country that looks more and more like the thing we were taught to fear: fascism. Not the loud, jackbooted version with uniforms and flags, but the slow, creeping kind that comes disguised as legislation. As "protecting children." As "family values." As "freedom."

I was taught that freedom meant autonomy, safety, and the right to be who you are. I believed that. I clung to it. But now I watch as rights are stripped away from people who look like me, love like me, live like me—and I’m told it’s for their own good. I see books banned, bodies policed, and truths rewritten in real time. I see people punished for dreaming outside the lines.

It’s dizzying to reconcile the country I thought I lived in with the one that’s emerging. It feels like watching a house you grew up in being gutted while you're still inside it—furniture burned, walls repainted in colors you don’t recognize, the family portraits taken down one by one.

And yet, I know I still have privilege. That my voice still carries weight. That I still have breath in my lungs and something to fight for. That matters. It has to.

So I’m sitting with the paradox. I’m holding gratitude in one hand and fury in the other. I’m reckoning with a nation that raised me with stories of liberty, only to reveal how conditional that liberty really is.

I don’t have answers yet. Just a heart that’s breaking open and a voice that refuses to be quiet.

Because if this isn’t the America we were promised—then it’s up to us to imagine something better. And louder. And freer. For everyone