On 12 August 2017, I ran from the car that James Alex Fields, a white supremacist, plowed into a crowd of anti-racist organizers in Charlottesville, Virginia. Other people’s blood splattered on me. I lost my friends in the crowd and panicked. I thought I might die.
A month later, I woke up on a work trip in a hotel room alone in Oakland, California, with my hands trembling, and an unshakeable feeling that I was being chased by a pack of wild animals. I was having a mental breakdown.
This feeling did not cease for months. Repairing myself from that breakdown took years. In many ways, it is ongoing.
