I am a very anxious person.

I cannot remember a moment in my life when I wasn’t just worrying and worrying about ten different things. I credit an abusive, chaotic childhood for that. Having cancer as a kid probably didn’t help, either. But to be honest, living in this century (particularly the last decade) is pretty anxiety-inducing in itself!

Anxiety brings worries, but it also brings wave after wave of fear. Imagine standing on a beach, watching the tide offer reason after reason to be afraid. That’s what it is like to live in my brain sometimes. I would say that one of my talents is recognizing the 50 ways something could go wrong, long before something actually exists/is happening. (And p.s. before someone leaves a comment suggesting therapy, please realize that I wouldn’t be able to write any of this WITHOUT the help of therapy).

That fear kept me quiet for a long time. In the years I worked in the fast fashion industry, speaking up meant losing my job. Standing up to people in my personal life could bring the end of the relationship or worse, physical violence.

In 2020, something changed inside of me. When I lost my job in the beginning of the pandemic, the worst case scenario was already playing out. I no longer had health insurance (during a global pandemic), I wasn’t sure how I would be able to pay my rent and support my family, and I know that my next job was years off (if at all). The waves of fear were now just a massive tsunami of everything going wrong all at once.

For the first time in my life, I let that deluge of fear turn into anger. It felt so strange to sit with my feelings and know that I was full of rage. I had been trained since birth to keep my anger inside, that it was ugly, “unbecoming of a young lady,” etc. And in our house, my mom showed that anger could hurt other people. You never knew if her sudden burst of temper would lead to broken dishes or a chunk of hair being torn out of your head. So I always swallowed any inkling of anger before it blossomed into something I didn’t want to be.

But in 2020, I was fucking enraged. I saw how the wealthiest people in the world were feeling safe and secure, while the rest of us lived in constant fear and struggle. I guess I had known that all along, but now I got to finally really, really think about it. And the industry that had employed me almost my entire adult life was a case study in how greed and injustice was hurting people around the world: the exploited workers, the wasted resources, the landfills filling with crappy plastic clothes.

Clotheshorse was born from that rage. I knew I was taking a big risk. I was going to finally speak up about the fashion industry…and I knew that meant my career in fashion was essentially over, because no company was going to hire a person who was loudly telling the truth about it. The thing is…I wasn’t scared. Not at all. For the first time, I felt like what I had to say was more important than the personal repercussions I would experience.

And you know what? Yes, my career in regular fashion was over. But standing up and being authentically myself? It actually opened my life in all of these new ways that I never saw coming. I ended up finding other work with all kinds of amazing small businesses that share my values. I met amazing people around the world (including you) who are also dreaming of a better future. And while yes, I have had to experience some of the worst elements of humanity via social media (death threats, trolls, and creeps), I have had far more positive life-changing experiences. Nothing brings me more joy than someone saying “Hey, listening to what you had to say changed me and the things I do.”

That doesn’t mean that I am any less anxious. Every time I post something on social media or release an episode of the podcast, I find myself holding my breath for a few seconds, afraid of what will happen next or how it will all go wrong. And I know that is something many of you experience, too. In fact, it is the fear of getting it “wrong” and then being the subject of a social media pile-on that keeps a lot of us quiet. To be clear, I feel that fear almost daily. And even in the six years of working on Clotheshorse, I have still stayed silent (at least on social media) about things that I was very passionate about…because I was afraid of what would happen next.

I know that dreams about flying are pretty standard nighttime fare. But for me, the only dreams I ever had about flying…involved being on an airplane. One time I even dreamed about being on an airplane…while actually flying on a different airplane IRL! Sometimes these dreams were just a series of annoying, liminal spaces (lines, boarding, rude passengers). And other times, nightmares of the plane plummeting until I woke myself up.

But for the past couple of years, I have started having dreams about actually flying on my own. And they always start with me being “WTF how is that I am just suspended in mid air right now,” then being picked up by an air current and sort of tumbling around out of control. I would literally experience that “big drop” roller coaster feeling in my stomach as the wind kind of tossed me around. It was terrifying (but not as bad as the plane crash dreams). The first few times I had these flying dreams, I would just kinda curl myself into the tightest fetal position. I hoped that if I just waited it out, I would be gently dropped to the ground, where I could shift gears into dreaming about something more mundane, like waiting in line at the post office. But that never happened. The dream just got scarier and scarier.

Recently, the dreams have changed a bit. After a few moments of freaking out, I give myself a pep talk. “You just have to stop being afraid. Then you’ll actually be able to control where you fly.” I slowly extend my limbs. I stretch out my neck. I look around me…and I’m literally flying wherever I want to go. And then it’s a blast! I see Dustin down below and wave hi. “I’ll be back in a few hours,” I shout to him. I fly over farmland, rivers, mountains, and out to the ocean. In one dream, I got as far as Japan…and then I realized I forgot to bring my wallet and extra clothes. I landed, found a pay phone, and asked Dustin to wire me some money.

A few weeks ago, I was watching some vultures coasting around in air pockets over the field next to my house and it reminded me of my dreams. Just these massive birds fearlessly letting the wind lift and drop them.

In case you’re missing it (or I am doing a bad job here), these dreams are a metaphor for being brave and standing up/speaking out. During the 2024 election cycle here in the US, I saw accounts/people spreading misinformation or just generally trying to confuse people into not voting. Maybe they were confused themselves. I’m not here to re-litigate that. I stayed silent for the most part because…I was afraid. And my mental health was not in a place that could handle even more shittiness from the internet. But also, I was so angry and frustrated. I just didn’t know what to do.

After the election, I knew that I could never hide away and stay quiet again. My platform isn’t huge, I’m kind of a nobody, but if even one person sees me speak up, they might be motivated to do it, too. The same can be said for all of us. We have major influence in our social circles and communities, no matter the size of them. And I am not just talking about politics, either. Although one could argue (correctly) that everything is political: healthcare, AI, clean water, voting rights, wealth inequality, workers rights, plastic pollution, overconsumption, all of the -isms and -phobias that seem to control quality of life for everyone.

It’s scary to stand up and speak out. The fear never goes away. But what I have learned over the years is that the benefits outweigh the scariness: you find your people, your people stand up for you, and even more people get involved.

Listen, speaking out isn’t always easy. Like I mentioned earlier, I deal with some of the ugliest aspects of humanity on social media. And I’m 99% certain that speaking out about AI cost Dustin a job.

But nothing changes when we stay silent, when we’re too afraid of change. A lot of the stuff I see around me right now (like fast fashion, generative AI, fascism) are relics of a past and present that are NOT part of the future I want for all of us. They exist because of greed, selfishness, and a fundamental loss of humanity. And these systems depend on all of us sacrificing our humanity to keep them going.

Fortunately, there are far more good people than truly bad people. And we get to build the future WE want when we speak up, stand up, and work together.

Let’s be brave.

Let’s stretch out our arms and legs as long as they will go, look forward, and fly into a better future as one massive flock of radically awesome people. We might get all the way to Japan and realize we forgot our wallets, but we’ll figure it out together.

About the images in this post: the animal graphics are from the 1968 Froebel-Kan children’s book OUR NAUGHTY PETS (what a name)! The stationery in the background was thrifted last month at the Re-uzit Shop of Morgantown. This post took more than five (!) hours to make: 90 minutes of writing, another 45 of editing, then the rest of the time designing it in photoshop.