An Offering From Chicago

Over the past few weeks, I’ve felt the weight of what’s unfolding here in Chicago. The fear, the tension, the anger, and the deep love that lives underneath it all. As ICE patrols our streets and political leaders frame our city as something to be contained rather than cared for, I keep returning to the same question that shapes my work: How do we stay human in the midst of dehumanization?

This essay is my attempt to answer ~ or at least to reach toward an answer. It’s an offering for my clients, my community, and anyone trying to keep their heart open while the world grows louder and harder.

The air in Chicago feels charged these days; thick with worry, grief, and a kind of trembling love.
You can feel it in the corners of the city: the boarded windows, the lowered voices, the rhythm of sirens that blend with the wind off the lake. ICE vehicles move through our neighborhoods. Rumors spread faster than sunlight. People text each other warnings, share locations, and hold their breath when a knock sounds at the door.

We are told our city is dangerous.
That Chicago is broken, wild, out of control.
The truth, the one anyone who really lives here knows, is that this city is a sanctuary stitched together by people who keep choosing each other. We are the teachers staying late to make sure kids get home safely. The aunties handing out smiles and food on the corner. The queer teens painting joy into the alleys. The elders sweeping the sidewalk before dawn. This city has always held contradiction and beauty side by side ~ always more vibrant and complex than the headlines that flatten it.

And yet, the narrative is shifting again. Trump threatens military presence, speaking of order and discipline while ignoring the truth of what order has always meant for Black, Brown, immigrant, queer, and poor communities: control, fear, erasure. Veterans, those who know the cost of such violence, have begged this administration not to bring war to our streets. The people of this city have shouted the same. Still, power imagines protection as force, not as care.

I think of the families who now avoid grocery runs or school drop-offs. Of those already living in the shadows, now forced deeper underground. I think of the clients I sit with, whose fears and anxieties spikes each time the news flashes a new headline, whose bodies remember what it is to be hunted. The nervous system knows when danger walks near, even if the body stays still.

When I walk through my neighborhood, I feel both grief and awe. Murals bloom on walls where paint once chipped away. People hold vigils and free-store events in the same breath. We protest and we pray, often in the same hour. We are afraid, yes, but we are also alive, stubbornly and beautifully so.

The truth is that Chicago has never been the threat.
The threat is the narrative that dehumanizes us, that treats our neighborhoods as proof of failure instead of evidence of survival. The threat is the policy that invests in policing instead of public schools, in surveillance instead of safety, in punishment instead of possibility.

Chicago is not chaos; Chicago is consequence ~ of neglect, of greed, of a government that forgets who it serves. And still, this city rises every morning, messy and magnificent, determined to care for itself when care from above has failed.

I think often about what it means to be a therapist here, to sit with people as they navigate fear not just of the world, but of their own city being turned against them. Healing work cannot be separated from this landscape. When my clients tremble, it is not only from personal grief, but from collective exhaustion. We are all breathing the same charged air, carrying the same vigilance. In these moments, I remind myself: to bear witness is not to fix; it’s to stay. It is to keep showing up. To keep the nervous system from collapsing into numbness. To keep the heart open enough to hold complexity ~ sorrow and tenderness, anger and awe, all at once.

And still, I believe in us. I believe in this city that raised me, that taught me to love big and fight harder. I believe in the people who know how to build safety from nothing but presence. I believe in the organizers, teachers, therapists, and artists who keep creating spaces of belonging even as fear tries to hollow them out.

So when ICE walks our streets, when militarized threats hang over us, when headlines call us dangerous, I look to the people. The ones who open their homes. The ones who bring food to protests. The ones who support and shelter others. The ones who refuse to let despair have the final word.

Chicago is not a threat.
Chicago is a promise ~ that even under surveillance, even under threat, we will keep choosing one another.
We will keep showing up.
We will keep loving this place into its next becoming.

Because love, in this city, has always been an act of resistance.

If you are feeling the weight of this moment — the fear, the anger, the ache of watching your city misrepresented or your neighbors targeted — please know that you are not alone. What you are feeling makes sense. Your nervous system is responding to very real conditions of uncertainty and threat. You are allowed to rest. You are allowed to grieve. You are allowed to find small moments of softness and joy without apology.

Our collective healing depends on that ~ on remembering that tending to one another is not separate from the fight for justice; it is the fight for justice. Wherever you are in this city tonight — whether you are marching, praying, creating, parenting, or simply trying to be — I hope you know that you belong here. This city is yours, too. We all belong.

From this city of wind and heart,