protest: a love letter to reentry

the hermit's descent - bring it all to the revolution

Chapter 1 - An open hand

Protest Preparation

Mom and I made signs the evening before, discussing our exit strategy if things escalated the way they were on the news.

My mom made a few signs, speaking specifically about Trump’s regime, her words eloquent but direct. She has been diligent about staying informed.

My sign was a little half-hearted. I can hardly watch the news now without collapsing into a puddle. I wrote the truest thing I could think to say at the time: “No one is illegal.”

I said a silent prayer, grateful that my mom of the generation before me has the moral backbone to stand up and fight against tyranny.

Simultaneously, I worried myself sick about her safety in the streets of Wilmington as riots raged throughout the country. I knew I wouldn’t let her out of my sight. My fear bumping up against my integrity, I put the cap back on my marker. I would write nothing else that night.

Exposition

I started liberal arts college just a few months after Ferguson. Since then, I’ve been in dozens of protests. Young Democrats, Allies, Students Against Human Trafficking, and local politics were how I spent my days.

We were radicals, steeped in communist texts and social change theory - skipping class to organize, make signs, and blow bullhorns. I know the streets. I know what it is to make noise, both for and against.

At 20, I shaved my head and self identified as an angry feminist. You would find me at Take Back the Night, at Pride, and any time Trump came to town I had a sign opposing him in my hand. I had created an identity and a community around being what the right would call a “social justice warrior.”

It was dangerous. I have been in verbal altercations, difficult run ins with police, threats of violence. I once had a gun pointed at my chest during a counter protest in broad daylight. Thankfully, I have never faced tear gas or physical assault.

The work felt important enough to keep going, despite the chaos and pushback. In fact, the danger was thrilling to me. It gave validity to the cause in some way. The truth is, I wanted to fight. Fight for what I thought was truth, fight for purpose and freedom.

It wasn’t the protests themselves that scarred me. It was the people organizing them.

Deep Dive

For three years after college, I immersed myself in social justice and nonprofit work. I knew then that protesting was only part of the solution - I wanted to be on the inside, laying foundation. I wanted to be a part of sustainable solutions, community organizing, all of it. I ate, slept, and breathed social justice.

I worked in several different organizations, and while some of the experiences were incredible, overall I walked away deeply traumatized.

I watched organizers recreating cycles of abuse and trauma in their social movements. I watched people take advantage of each other under the guise of justice.

The worst part was that I acted under the guidance of people that I trusted had my best interests at heart, who were willing to destroy me in order to get where they wanted to go.

Their direction, I realized, had very little to do with the true health of the community and everything to do with feeding their own ego.

It injured me so deeply, so personally, that I stepped away from the social justice world completely. This had been my life, my source of community and connection for almost a decade, and I walked away.

My worldview was shattered. I have spent years trying to pick up the pieces of that betrayal.

And while activism still informs my artistic work, I have not worked in activism since 2021.

Chapter 2 - Solitude to Heal

The Hermit

A card I’ve been exploring in the Sandbox this month is The Hermit.

love him here as a little hermit crab <3 also, welcome to cancer season

Along the Fool’s Journey, The Hermit removes himself from others in order to find his own light, his own meaning. He quiets the noise, he studies, and he learn the sound of his own inner voice.

The cycles of abuse in the nonprofit/social justice world left their mark on me. Just like the crab, when threatened, I retreat into my shell.

It’s a blessing and a curse. But from within my shell, I develop my own cosmology.

For a few years, isolated during Covid, I leaned heavily into spirituality. Meditation, yoga, my tarot practice. I developed my own inner language, filled with symbols and tools to help me understand the world around me, to help me heal from my wounds.

This work began to materialize. My cosmology began to take shape and form, and this became art. My music, performance art, my writings became the ultimate offering of my deep inner study.

This is an example of the healthy Hermit - one who can transmute their knowledge into a physical offering.

Although, I did not live to become the example of the healthy Hermit.

Too much, not enough

When I discovered this power, I dove straight into making. Creating art that inspired me, spinning wildly from project to project, with very little discernment for who I was collaborating with.

Art filled the hole activism left behind - I felt the community and connection I was craving. But I was burning the candle from both ends. I stepped completely out of my Hermit, and watched in horror as I lost my center.

Creation, my safe space, became confusing. I was ungrounded - the soil beneath my feet volatile as I reached higher and higher towards heaven. My translations got sloppy.

My relationships with other artists became strained. Sometimes it was hard to tell who was doing the punching, but let me tell you - people got hurt.

My heart has been ripped to shreds the last few years. I have opened myself again and again to collaborating, experimenting, building creative projects and communal dreams with people I have trusted. Many of those dreams have not just faltered, but have been burned to the ground leaving the cherished relationships that built them charred and unrecognizable.

This pattern was repeating in not just social justice, but now in art as well. It begs the question - what is the role I’m playing in my own downfall?

Retreat - again

So the logical solution is to return to the silence.

So I did. To heal, to take accountability, forgive and try to move forward.

You cannot properly engage in collective action, without a strong relationship and regular contact with ones inner voice.

Art is justice. Justice is art. Both require that rooted voice. Otherwise, we betray ourselves again and again in the name of the collective.

But you do this work to be in the collective - ultimately to return with more information for grander experiments in liberation.

Not to camp out alone in your shell. Which…. is something that I struggle with.

The shadow

The Hermit archetype has a shadow side. He believes that he is somehow separate from the rest of the world. The exception to the rule. Isolated. Misunderstood.

I have used my art to help me cope with my own version of these feelings. I’ve spent a lot of time identifying with the Witch archetype. Holiness in aloneness, righteousness in persecution.

Isolation is not where pain is supposed to go forever. I’ve spent so much time defending myself these last few years that my hands have turned to fists, and I still am struggling to find a way to unfurl them.

The Hermit is only one stop on The Fool’s journey - he’s not the end goal. We’re not supposed to stay on our own little mountain of solitude, resentful of being alone but unwilling to bring our light down and be part of the solution.

But I understand why he stays up there. When he’s been hurt before, when he has no guarantee that anything will be different this time. When he has no idea if anyone will hear him when he speaks.

His shell is nice. It is warm, cozy. It does not ask for him to explain himself.

Chapter 3 - Traversing the Mountain

Truth is a magnet

So here we are, now four years later standing at the threshold of extreme social/political change. And I am absolutely choking.

Because I am drawn like a magnet to the movement, the revolution. To speak, to find my place in it all. But I keep hitting the same walls.

Last year, I dipped my toes back into the activist scene through attending some protests for Palestinian freedom. This cause is extremely important to me, and despite my misgivings about justice organizing, I wanted to lend my support.

I found the protest extremely unproductive. People were screaming into the microphone that if we weren’t being vocal about what was happening in Palestine, we might as well be killing the civilians ourselves.

I understood the helplessness and rage, but it didn’t feel like truth. It felt like weaponized shame.

I walked away feeling disgusted, disconnected, and as though I had done nothing for Palestine in attending other than upsetting myself.

Street Theatre

Despite it all, I love protests. I’ve watched documentaries about the Vietnam protests. I love stories of the French Revolution. Tank Man from Tiananmen Square was my laptop background in high school. There is something so compelling about publicly defying the status quo.

I like to think of protests as street theatre. Demonstrations of personal and collective power. Expressing your emotions in public as catharsis. Symbolic defiance.

When we acknowledge that protests are for the purpose of expressing emotion and forging togetherness, transformation will naturally occur.

It’s when we believe that protests are the work themselves. When we stay in anger instead of moving it through in community and finding actual sustainable solutions. When we stay locked in victim mentality instead of empowering ourselves to rise up and organize.

And I have seen too many of those kinds of protests to give my energy freely over to every activist movement in town, even when I agree with what they stand for.

So while I felt my mother was brave for wanting to hit the streets, I also was quietly dragging my feet, afraid that this would be like all the rest.

Afraid that we collectively have made the mistake again of villainizing the figurehead, rather than addressing the machine that feeds him.

Afraid that I would realize that I should have stayed in my shell.

Chapter 4 - Together we march

June 14, 2025

I walk out of the theatre I work at straight into the protest. They still meet here at the old city hall attached to historic Thalian Hall, even though it’s been a few years since the government offices changed buildings. It’s symbolic now - the parades and protests next to the big white stairs with old antebellum style columns. It is so muggy you can almost see the steam rising up from the ground.

From when I got hired as a technician at the theatre. On the day of the protest, every inch of these stairs was covered in people with signs as cars drove by honking.

I can hear the protesters before I can see them. My mom meets me on the steps of the theatre. We grab our signs and hold hands as we approach.

I relax when I see there is not a huge police presence. Instead, what I see are the streets absolutely flooded with people from all walks of life. Older white women carrying signs about immigration. Men dressed as unicorns rallying for LGBTQ rights. And people of every kind saying no to dictatorship - no submission to tyranny.

We didn’t know the people next to us, but in our own unique way, we were fighting for them, for their rights, their future. And they were fighting for us just the same.

As we wade through the crowd, I realize that they are all along 3rd street where we started, but there’s tents and organizers around the corner on Princess Street as well. Both sides of the streets are full, and I understand now the scope and size of this protest.

In the days following, they report 5,000-6,000 participants. That’s not including the protests in the surrounding towns that neighbor our little city. It’s the biggest protest ever recorded in Wilmington’s history.

Amid the mass of bodies, it struck me. The heart beat of the protesters started syncing in real time to the rhythm of an embodied hope, tapping into something larger. It was a hope I hadn’t tasted in a long time, one that I could hardly allow myself the indulgence of acknowledging.

But in the mass of sweating strangers all chanting and waving handmade signs, it was a hope that would not be ignored.

A hope that proclaims there could be something better than what we have. And we could be the one to build it.

I felt hot tears on my cheeks, and suddenly I felt cold drops on my shoulders. The rain came in spurts, slow and trickling, and then all at once. Mom and I took advantage of my Thalian Hall parking pass and took refuge in my car as the downpour waned. The weather gods wanted to keep it interesting, but they weren’t going to rain us out.

Our signs melt, and outside it swings wildly from blazing hot to wet & chilly. I am one with both earth and this moment, this movement.

The cracks

But it’s still there. The disorganization, the lack of vision, the mistaking protest for social change.

After the initial event, we were all supposed to march to a local bar for an after party. However, we were told later that the Proud Boys had tagged the location, and that it wasn’t safe to march there, just to arrive individually.

But instead of communicating that to the marchers, organizers split us up and take us on marches to nowhere. We generally all get dumped off in the same location, confused about what is happening.

That’s when things start to feel unsafe. People begin screaming profanities, and the energy is more aggressive and combative. My rose colored glasses shatter again. My walls go up, and I turn to my mom and give her our signal that it’s time to leave.

But despite the cracks, I came home with a feeling of unity. It made me curious - what can I do to support?

Not with the naïveté I once had about social movements, or just the awe I have for the glaring spectacle of protest. Instead with the grounded, root centered Hermit wisdom that I can bring to the revolution.

Chapter 5 - The light in the lantern

A stubborn hope

Despite everything I have seen, despite the ways that I have been hurt, trampled on, and destroyed - that protest planted an undeniable, forbidden, tiny seed of hope inside my largely unwilling heart.

This is the light inside the Hermit’s lantern that guides me, the thing that drew me to the protests and organizing in the first place. The burning belief that has had me laughed at, beaten up, threatened, betrayed, and the one that I still can’t shake.

The vision that there could be a better world. And we could be the ones to build it.

Thank you, Hermit

I want to validate The Hermit in me. The one who hid, who ran, who ducked for cover and had to develop her light in quiet. Yearning for witness, yet being petrified of rejection.

The deep seeker who could not allow herself to recycle old trauma and call it liberation. Who did not want to participate in systemic abuse and used every ounce of her personal power to try to defy it in the way that she could.

I can’t blame myself for who I had to become when it was not safe. When my light was not just taunted & othered, but hunted.

I am not ignorant enough to believe it’s safe now. Far from it - I anticipate that things will get even more chaotic. As the political temperature rises, and people spiral deeper into their personal and collective hysteria, I know it will only get more dangerous.

But goddamn it - isn’t it worth the risk? Doesn’t living with just a shred of hope inside us make life worth surviving?

Earned wisdom

When I was young, I didn’t know how to protect myself in this work towards liberation. I would fling my heart open wildly. I would trust every project, every vision, every person who said that they had good intentions.

My Hermit time grounded me. Sometimes, I mistook this passage for a feeling that “people are bad.” But when I really sit with the medicine of it, I learn to see the nuance in it all.

There is middle ground. The Hermit is self-trust, roots so deep that others can’t just knock me over. I don’t have to be closed off, isolated and afraid because I know people are often full of bullshit. Trust is earned, sacred, and rare. As I inch my way out, I am learning to trust people in a slow, deliberate way.

Bring everything

I don’t know how. I don’t know where. But that little seed of hope has wormed its way back into my heart, and I know I can bring all of myself to the revolution.

Exceptionalism will not save us. Keeping our light hidden at the top of our mountains away from everyone will not save us.

Flinging wildly at different social justice projects will not save us. Spreading ourselves thin by trying to save the world will not save us.

But - bringing our whole selves to a trusted collective, with the wisdom and scars that we’ve accumulated throughout our lives may not save us, but it will certainly make collaborating and surviving the years ahead a hell of a lot easier.

To anyone who’s still gripping onto their light or feeling alone up there, I want you to know - I’m just starting my slow walk off the mountain top. You’re not alone in the descent, and you can take your time. But we’ll be waiting for you, ready to bask in your light, eager to hear the tales of your journey.

When you get lost, the path is well laid by people who have made the journey long before us. I look to their light again and again to find my own.

Benediction

I’m sending so much tenderness to everyone as we are surviving the insanity that is the ICE raids, war with Iran, and this dictatorship. In the midst of it all, we find community, support, and inspiration.

Thank you for reading this long, winding journey. This is not a call to arms, this is a call to center. And I appreciate each of you as we rally ourselves to offer what we have to a truthful and embodied revolution.

We are powerful. We are not alone. It’s not either an open hand or a closed fist - it’s both.

love, mady