The Math in Stepping Outside

Sometimes my partner is already gone by the time I get up. The foggy memory of a kiss on the forehead lingers. And some mornings I get up in time to make their lunch and say goodbye.

This wasn’t one of them. The apartment is quiet, a silence that echoes when the person who fills it with comfort has left. Cosmo is somewhere jumping off furniture and training for Cat Ninja Warrior. Wanda is being judgmental about it, sighing with her head on my lap. The pain is already doing a number on me, draining my batteries, making me recalculate my day before I’ve had a chance to start functioning like a person.

This is 2026. The math starts before my feet hit the floor. It always did, but now it’s requiring algebra I haven’t used since 8th grade.

Do I go outside today? That’s the question. Not rhetorically. I used to ride my scooter through Baltimore and give strangers compliments. Dancing as I’m riding, jamming to music. Nothing but whimsy. That was before I had to run the numbers every time I reached for the door: how visible am I, how tired am I, what is the cost today of being a body that reads trans from across the street.

Most days, the people who misgender me are not confused. They’re making a choice. Right now, that choice has a president behind it. They are emboldened in ways that are dangerous and fatal and not going away. 

I think about the looming threat of emboldened bigots and ICE raids every time I step outside. I know my whiteness insulates me from what immigrants face right now, people swept from their lives without warning, without recourse, without the basic dignity of being treated as people.

I know in my heart that the fear I carry at my own door is not the same fear. I will never pretend to know the terror people of color are facing right now. Yet what I am feeling is still fear. I am being called a domestic threat due to my gender. And that is not based on any phobia — they just give it a clinical name so they can be victims of their own game, where they already make the rules. 

Domestic terrorist is the language this administration chose as its masked army of rebranded slavers and Nazis roam the streets rampant, instilling terror in its own citizens. 

I am a disabled, AuDHD, chronically ill trans woman in 2026, and what I feel in my body is not just anxiety in the clinical sense. Chronic pain began flaring more than two years ago. Fatigue that sits in my chest like an immovable boulder. I am Sisyphus. Taking naps I didn’t use to need, still waking up exhausted.

Stress makes a home in the body, and it festers. Even still, my creativity is through the roof, a driving fire. On the days when the weight I’ve been carrying since this monster took office presses hardest, my fire burns brighter.

My emotions are running higher than when I was a 13-year-old pumped with hormones and middle school drama, moving from home to home while my mental health surfaced for the first time. This administration lit something under me that I did not ask for. I’m using it anyway.

I stood at a microphone at Baltimore City Hall for Trans Day of Visibility and read my work in public, as myself, as a visible trans woman in a political moment where visibility is a calculated risk. I felt it in my body before I went. I went anyway because freedom and justice are worth defending when you have the capacity to show up. Because silence is also a choice, and I know what it costs.

We are watching racism being normalized. We are watching children killed in countries across oceans while the man responsible calls the weapons exquisite and grins for the camera.

We are watching an undertrained, financially incentivized force terrorize communities with zero accountability, led by a dog killer, staffed by people who are too loud and too unqualified to fill the space they occupy. They are doing their best to drown us out. 

It is not working.

My partner brought me my inhaler without me asking at all last week.

That’s the whole sentence. They just know me, my needs, my soul. That’s what love looks like when everything outside is trying to drain you. My community holds what I can’t carry alone. Maryland protects me in ways residents of many other states cannot say, and I don’t take that for granted for a single day. We are not one country. We are fifty different territories, each one facing a wrecking ball wrapped in an American flag, with its destruction called God’s will.

If all you can do today is survive, that’s enough. If all you can do is exist in a body that they are actively trying to legislate out of visibility, that is not small. That is a blazing fire. Living out loud when they want you silent and shrinking and gone. Existing joyfully as yourself when the entire architecture of this moment is designed to make that nearly impossible.

The one thing they keep trying to extinguish.

Precisely the one thing they cannot.

I’m still opening the door.

I’m still going outside.

I’m still here.