I just read a piece I wrote over six months ago, and it could have been written yesterday. What worries me most is that someone may read it six months from now and feel exactly the same. It was about the stagnation of social movements and the failure to mount any meaningful resistance to the social deconstruction being carried out by this newest surge of our very own tyrannical regime. 

I am stuck in a moment, in a feeling. Standing at a fork in the road.

When I left the States the moment the government changed, everyone asked why I didn’t wait to see what would happen, fight it out. I didn’t wait because I had an opportunity and a feeling. I’ve learned those two together don’t come for no reason. The opportunity part is about my willingness to accept risk for freedom. What I didn’t realize was that I’d been building it for years without knowing it. 

I’ve had a passport since I was 13 — thank you, parental unit. I’ve been a single mother for most of my life — thank you for every lesson I learned about staying deep in the hustle. I’ve gone without what I want to get what we need, and I thank my communities for showing me, again and again, that I already have enough. A fleeting desire is not the end goal.

I know my mind bends toward freedom. That means I stay alert to imagined shackles and to real ones. Any routine that could quietly calcify into stagnation is left behind. Risk, for me, is a necessary part of every decision I’ve made where I was unsure of the end but certain the alternative was finished.

The moment the many voted to hand control to the few, it was a signal. One I heard clearly.

I kept waiting for a real reckoning, some collective awakening about what we owe each other across differences. Instead, I keep hearing a desire for more of the same, just with a better tone. The task seems to be: Get the sane ones in. More affluent, cisgender, heterosexual white men take the reins from the deranged ones. The hands change. The grip doesn’t. I fear we may have missed the cue.

The population is avoidant, most people have decided the known risk of compliance is safer than the unknown risk of disengaging entirely. The gas prices rattled some people loose, but not enough to recognize what we’ve actually agreed to: that the authority in our lives belongs to institutions, not to our communities. And that agreement is not accidental. It is structural.

The airports are owned by state and federal governments. ICE’s presence there is a paid contract. The coffee shop you walk into every morning is contracted to law enforcement or some surveillance system, and if it’s a chain, it answers to federal agreements. The organizations we work inside, spend inside and move through daily are not neutral structures. They are the infrastructure of a system that requires our participation to function. We are a fundamental driver of capitalism, and most of us haven’t fully reckoned with what that means. Our collective power is enormous. 

However, our unwillingness to use it? That’s not confusion, that’s a taught behavior. We have been educated into our own entrapment, conditioned to see these institutions as simply the way things are, rather than arrangements we fund, staff, and sustain and that tells you exactly who controls our relationship to collective liberation.

So there’s the fork.

I don’t know if my Black mind and body can keep fighting for the ideal. I’m starting to see it differently. The ideal exists not through competition or institutional power but in spaces where people are the center of the purpose. Where the why lives in the community: In family, in each other. It isn’t a dream. It’s a clear statement of values, a reality even as active bombardments of insanity attempts to erase it.

I want to walk into that peace, and at the same time, I want all of us to know it’s a viable option. I want us to lock hands and demand it: physically, financially, unapologetically.

The work I do keeps me emotionally regulated on this planet. I work with organizations that want to function in a human-centered way. Organizations that understand the respect and potential in diversity as a fact of operations, not a program. Organizations that know equity requires patience, intentionality and transparency, which is not inherent in the structures handed down to us. I help with that transformation. I help helpers. I hold that work as evidence that another way is possible, especially inside the systems actively falling.

I hope we can each find something, some daily act, that reminds the person next to us that they matter. Keeping the light on. Saving dinner for someone after a long night. Scooting down the bench for a stranger with a smile. These are the gestures of people who choose kindness as a practice, not a sentiment. Practiced collectively, at scale, with intention, kindness becomes something else entirely. It develops into power.

The real question we struggle to answer is: are we ready to take that risk together — for something entirely different, and for the greater good?

Ayisha Elliott is an executive leadership coach and founder of Black Girl From Eugene LLC, BlackGirlfromEugene.substack.com. Through internationally recognized coaching and organizational strategy, she helps leaders close the gap between intention and impact — deconstructing white supremacy culture within workplace culture.