by Sarah F.
Winter funk, burnout, overwhelm, pick your poison. For the past few months, I’ve mostly been surviving. Doing the minimum necessary to keep our name out there and remind people we still exist. Not because we stopped caring, but because sometimes life hits all at once and passion alone doesn’t magically create more hours in the day.
In February, Tiffany and I launched The Stanly Independent. We knew it would be hard. We did not fully appreciate just how hard. Independent media sounds romantic until you’re balancing deadlines with laundry, community organizing with homework help, news with dinner plans, and trying to hold together a personal life somewhere in the middle of it all.
Grassroots work rarely looks polished from the inside. It is messy, exhausting, imperfect. It is built by ordinary people squeezing purpose into the cracks of already overcrowded lives. And yet, despite all of that, we are still here. Because silence has never changed anything.
June 24, 2026 marks four years since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Four years since millions of Americans lost a constitutional protection generations assumed would remain settled law. Four years of politicians insisting “small government” should somehow include exam room decisions, pregnancies, miscarriages, and deeply personal medical realities they will never personally face.
And yet, increasingly, those choices are being monitored, legislated, and criminalized. Here in North Carolina, that reality feels closer than ever. North Carolina House Bill 1232 seeks to establish that life begins at fertilization, opening the door for women who terminate pregnancies to face charges as severe as attempted manslaughter or first-degree murder. The bill also contains language asserting that individuals may use force, including deadly force under certain circumstances, in defense of what it defines as unborn life.
And honestly, neither abortion nor LGBTQ rights should have become political battlegrounds to begin with. These are not abstract talking points. They are not campaign strategies or political pawns in partisan conflict. They are deeply personal aspects of our lives. Who we love, how we identify, whether and when we become parents, and what happens within the privacy of our own bodies and families.
Somehow, we reached a point where basic human autonomy became partisan theater. A person choosing who they marry does not threaten your marriage. A medical decision made between a patient and their doctor does not interfere with another person’s faith. A human seeking to feel at home in their own body does not take anything away from you. None of these things should require political permission. Freedom was never supposed to mean “only for people who live exactly as I say.”
So, we are coming back loudly. We are planning a Handmaid’s Tale inspired vigil not because we enjoy theatrics, but because symbolism matters. The imagery resonates because it reflects a very real fear many people carry: that bodily autonomy in America is increasingly conditional. Conditional on your zip code. Conditional on your gender. Conditional on who happens to hold power at a given moment. Let me say something that should not be controversial: your personal beliefs belong to you. They should guide your life, your family, your choices. But in a free society, they do not become mandatory for everyone else simply because you feel morally certain.
That principle extends far beyond abortion. Last night, we “chalked the walk” for pride month in downtown Albemarle with messages supporting members of the LGBTQ community and bodily autonomy. Predictably, some people will act as though acknowledging another person’s humanity somehow threatens their own. It does not. If you are not gay, no one is asking you to be. If you are comfortable in your body, wonderful. Some people are not, and the choices they make about their lives are deeply personal. Their existence does not diminish yours. Their freedom does not erase your beliefs. Their rights do not invalidate your values.
What actually threatens freedom is the growing belief that other people must live according to our personal convictions in order for us to feel secure. That is not liberty. That is control disguised as morality. Most of us are just trying to live honestly. To love who they love. To make medical decisions without political interference. To exist publicly without being treated as threats. To build communities where difference is not viewed as danger. Peaceful coexistence, not compelled conformity.
Despite the exhaustion, despite the burnout, despite the moments where it would honestly be easier to disengage entirely, some of us will keep speaking anyway. Not because it is easy. Because it is necessary