I’ve often reflected on how surprised I felt in December 2021 when I first read that bell hooks had died, surprised most of all by how seldom I heard her name since graduating from St. Olaf College almost a decade prior. Although I never found a place or felt belonging at St. Olaf, it was there that I started to awaken my own consciousness –– a consciousness in opposition to the values and beliefs that I internalized in childhood.

When I posted a feminist quote to social media, and so did someone else, we liked each other’s posts, and I knew I wasn’t the only one. When someone mentioned a feminist author’s name in class, when they shared a video of a speech or poem, when I saw a book of theory or a memoir in someone’s hands in the commons, when we made attempts (that I would now call feeble and inadequate but were, at that time, the biggest steps I had ever taken) to act against white supremacy, against patriarchy, we came to awakening as individuals, but, in some ways, collectively.

Without historical context, I didn’t recognize that the ubiquity or ‘pop culture-fication’ of feminism isn’t the same as seeing a social change that ends interlocking systems of domination. In other words, to talk about feminism isn’t to practice it. Our shared analysis was then, and is now, only as good as the changed practices that it inspires. And yet it was meaningful to me that I wasn’t the only one –– that I felt part of a revolution in thinking that would set us free.  

When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I was similarly swept away by the conversations and stories about unprecedented change, fear, and horror that were all around me. Amid deepening personal crisis, I moved to Germany, where I tried to go through the motions of starting the operatic career I had been trained for. My mental health began to collapse and I went home just months before the first cases of COVID-19 were reported. And then 2 years passed and suddenly bell hooks was dead. I wasn’t sure where the time had gone or how I had gone from that sense of awakening and self-actualization to a world where I only had one friend who mentioned the famous author’s death to me.

As I write this piece, that same friend, now my boyfriend, texts me to share the news that the poet Nikki Giovanni has died. When a revolutionary poet like Nikki Giovanni, or a revolutionary philosopher-teacher like bell hooks dies, it reminds me that everything I learned from their work has become my responsibility to both embody and pass on.

Looking at the year that has just gone by, and the year that is coming, it seems clear that life will be hard. In the face of this, I hope for the courage and endurance to do the work that brings my consciousness to awakening, and I further hope that encourages others to an awakening of their own. Put simply, I would like to live the rest of my life in an awakened state. bell hooks is dead, and the years when I put away her work, the work of other liberatory thinkers, and even my own values, are gone, and they won’t come back. And, there is another year ahead of me, and there are liberatory thinkers around me, who I can learn from, who I can still know –– who I can honor.

In 2016, I was urged to put everything aside, including my values, that might take precedence over the abstract goal of stopping Donald Trump. In 2025, I am not willing to do that. Whoever is in power, and whatever they use that power to do, the decision to practice anti-imperialist, anti-white-supremacist, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal values in our daily lives is an inalienable power within each of us. We choose the values we practice, the conversations we have, who we listen to, who our community is, and how we meet each other, however bad or good things get.