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because for the first time in my life, I feel like I’m searching for somebody to look out for me. I want to be the kind of person who can be vulnerable and share what I’m going through. I remember one thing very vividly about my childhood: the way that my dad handled things when he got angry…. I want to feel like I can finally breathe.

It’s like there’s a constant, low-level threat that I can sense in the pit of my stomach from the moment that I wake up in the morning. It’s like this white noise humming in the background, and it’s saying, Something bad is going to happen, any second now . Everybody who goes through mental health issues has a unique story, but for me (and I think this is probably true for a lot of people), my entire identity was tied to one thing in a really unhealthy way. When I was lying on the floor of the trainer’s room during my anxiety attack back in 2018, it was probably the single scariest moment of my life.

I may be Thabo’s friend, or Ekpe’s teammate, or And it’s about understanding that Black Lives Matter, and movements like it, matter, because — well, let’s face it: I probably would’ve been safe on the street that one night in New York. It’s the kind of racism that can seem almost invisible — which is one of the main reasons why it’s allowed to persist. And it’s a position that makes me a symbol for a lot of things, for a lot of people — often people who don’t know anything about me.

In Georgia, one lawsuit alleges that 53,000 newly registered voters have been placed in “pending” status because of a law that disproportionately affects minority voters, while another claims that 340,000 voter registrations were incorrectly canceled by Brian Kemp, the secretary of state who is currently running for governor. In North Dakota, a state with a hotly contested Senate race, a law that went into effect in 2016 may block 70,000 residents from voting because of a strict I. D. requirement. There are races for governor in Florida, Georgia and Pennsylvania, where the candidates have sharply divergent views about whether or not to spend the money necessary to fund devastated public schools, whether or not to ensure our laws protect all citizens instead of a select few, and whether or not to roll back mass incarceration rather than continue with tough-on-crime policies. There are races for district attorney in Boston, Birmingham, Dallas and San Antonio, where the winner will be able to end a bail system that holds people who have been accused — but not convicted — of a crime before trial simply because they are too poor to pay for their release.