Would You Rather Die On Your Feet Or Live On Your Knees?

A Politics of Hope

Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

It has been a while since I last wrote on this platform. Even during my absence, people kept messaging me, asking where I had gone and whether I planned to return.

This post is my answer.

I am returning.

But before I move forward, I need to be honest about why I disappeared, especially when this newsletter was growing faster than I had ever expected.

The truth is simple: I was afraid.

During the week I stopped posting, I received an email from Substack warning me about attempts to access my account. It appeared that someone, or people, were trying to uncover who I was.

That possibility terrified me.

What would happen if I were identified? What if I were doxxed, threatened, or harassed? What if my political writing affected my employment? What if people went after members of my family who had nothing to do with this platform?

Each question fed the next until the fear became larger than the actual situation. That is often how my anxiety works. Once I believe something is dangerous, I shut down and avoid whatever I associate with that danger.

At that moment, I thought this newsletter became the problem.

So I walked away from it.

Eventually, a friend of mine with years of experience in activist spaces began pulling me out of that fear. They asked me a simple question:

“Would you rather die on your feet or live on your knees?”

We should not be afraid of this system, government, or the reactionary movements. They should be afraid of us. While it is not the time to be reckless, as security matters, privacy matters, and protecting yourself from repression matters… we must not give in to fear; we must rise above it and stand for what we know is right, even with the personal costs.

There is also a difference between taking reasonable precautions and allowing fear to determine the boundaries of your life.

For a while, I crossed that line.

I became frightened by the new Red Scare taking shape under Trump and the reactionary movement surrounding him. I watched people face surveillance, professional retaliation, censorship, and public vilification for challenging capitalism, imperialism, and U.S. support for genocide. I knew that speaking honestly could have consequences.

And when those consequences began to feel personal, I retreated.

I focused on finishing graduate school, finding stable employment, taking care of my health, and putting my own life in order. None of those goals were wrong. Survival is not selfish. Stability matters, especially when you have spent years struggling to find it as I have.

But I also had to confront an uncomfortable truth: my fear had begun turning into silence.

That silence came with a privilege many people do not have. I live within the imperial core. I am not enduring a blockade in Cuba, war in Sudan, resource extraction in the Congo, or occupation and genocide in Palestine. I can temporarily look away from those realities in a way the people living through them cannot.

My safety and relative comfort come with responsibilities that I cannot ignore.

I do not want to be remembered as someone who believed in liberation only when belief was convenient. I would rather be remembered as someone who stood up for liberation and fought against oppression.

If people eventually learn who I am because I spoke against oppression, I would rather face that reality than know I abandoned my principles simply because being principled became uncomfortable.

Still, fear was not the only reason I withdrew.

The growth of this platform began to overwhelm me. People invited me onto podcasts, asked to collaborate, and wanted to know more about my identity and personal life. What began as a place to think through politics started to feel like a public responsibility I had not prepared myself to carry.

That responsibility frightened me too.

I have remained anonymous because I never wanted this project to become entirely about me. I did not want to turn myself into another political influencer whose personality gradually became more important than the ideas or movements being discussed.

There is an obvious contradiction here. I write about my experiences constantly. My politics are shaped by my struggles, my education, my work, and the things I have survived. The personal inevitably enters the political.

But sharing parts of myself is different from making myself the center of everything.

That is the tension I am still learning to navigate: speaking honestly without transforming struggle into a personal brand; building an audience without allowing attention to become the purpose; contributing to a movement without pretending I am above contradiction.

And I am full of contradictions.

I want to challenge imperialism while still trying to secure stability within my life. I want revolutionary change, yet I recently joined the reformist DSA because it was the only visible left-wing organization active in my area. I once presented myself as militantly atheistic, but I have begun exploring spirituality. I disagree with anarchist opposition to all governing authority, even though some anarchists have supported my work.

For too long, I worried that acknowledging these changes would disappoint parts of my audience.

What would the atheists think of my spiritual questions? What would anarchists think of my beliefs about the state after revolution? What would people think as I worked through ideas publicly rather than presenting myself as someone who already possessed every answer?

That fear created another kind of silence.

I became so concerned with maintaining ideological consistency that I stopped producing the words that felt most honest to me.

But growth is not betrayal. Changing your mind after study, experience, and reflection is not opportunism. Opportunism is abandoning principles for personal advantage. Development is the difficult process of refining those principles as reality teaches you more.

I do not intend to return as a perfect revolutionary, flawless theorist, or unquestionable authority. I am returning as a human being still learning how to live according to what I believe.

My greatest obstacle has often been myself: my anxiety, my self-doubt, my fear of judgment, and my tendency to retreat when responsibility becomes overwhelming. I have spent years trying to finish graduate school, work full-time, protect my health, and understand what kind of life I actually want.

I still do not have every answer.

But I know that I want to help people. I know that I want to expose the systems that make ordinary life unbearable. I know that I want to stand with those suffering beneath capitalism, colonialism, and empire. And I know that remaining silent will not bring me closer to any of those goals.

So I am done waiting until I feel fearless.

Courage is not the absence of fear. It is choosing not to let fear become your political program.

I am returning with more caution, stronger security, and clearer boundaries. I am also returning with a better understanding of what this platform should be. It is not a monument to me. It is a space for political education, reflection, solidarity, and conversation. It is a place where I can work through contradictions without pretending they do not exist.

Most importantly, I am returning with hope.

Not the passive hope that history will automatically bend toward justice. Not the kind of hope that waits for politicians, institutions, or algorithms to rescue us.

I mean hope as discipline.

Hope as the decision to continue when despair seems more reasonable.

Hope as evidence that capitalism has not completely colonized our imagination.

The very fact that this newsletter found an audience tells me that people are searching for explanations beyond what the system offers them. They know something is wrong. They can feel the contradictions sharpening around them. They are looking for language, community, and a reason to believe that another world remains possible.

Perhaps that is why dissent is being targeted. Power does not repress ideas because they are meaningless. It represses them because ideas can become relationships, relationships can become organizations, and organizations can become movements.

I cannot promise that I will never become afraid again.

I can promise that fear will no longer have the final word.

I am still here.
You are still here.
The struggle is still here.

So I am returning, not because the danger has disappeared, but because the reasons to speak have become greater than the reasons to remain silent.