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I Attended My First Protest at 48…and It Kinda Sucked
But I’m not giving up
I knew about the Hands Off protests about two weeks beforehand. I was considering going, but didn’t have much confidence that I would follow through. I’ve been struggling with pretty severe anxiety since January and worried how I would respond to being in a huge crowd.
It didn’t help that I had no idea what to expect. I’ve never attended a protest before.
I considered doing so several times in 2020, but ultimately, I chose not to due to the extreme stress of navigating long stretches of quarantines that I had to go through in order to safely visit my family members with vulnerable health issues.
But something surprising happened just a few days before Hands Off. I got an email from a local organization’s newsletter about a last-minute decision to hold a meeting to discuss their intention to move forward with a political coalition involving a few other organizations around the region.
When I’m as anxious as I have been lately, it usually takes me days to hype myself up to do something new — especially when I know there’s a long drive involved and/or a large group of people. And yet this time, I just did it. I still don’t know how it happened, but somehow, I found myself sitting there in roomful of at least 100…
