I try to make myself small. I fold into myself hoping that if I don’t make eye contact, if I just don’t look up, no one will notice I’m there. I pack away my loud laugh and hunch my broad shoulders.

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My mom mentioned the same thing to me in a phone call last week. On her daily walk during her lunch break, she asked me if she could share something that had been weighing on her recently. Her whole life, she said, she has tried to make herself invisible. As a child, she tried to make herself invisible as a means of survival. As a teenager who was undocumented, she tried to make herself invisible so that she wouldn’t be detained by INS. And as a single mother, she tried to make herself invisible so that she could raise me in an environment that was safe. Recently, people have been cutting her in lines, as if she isn’t there.

“I’m starting to think I got too good at making myself invisible. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I do.”

The concept of shrinking one’s self down to navigate the world safely is not at all new. When what you have learned in life is that self-preservation may be your only means of survival, invisibility is a refuge. But over the past year—a year in which our country has been led by a man who won the White House by being sexist, racist, and violently anti-immigrant—invisible people have stepped into the light.

When being seen is dangerous, choosing to be visible is an act of resistance and radical love.

We see this with young undocumented activists who are protesting at the Capitol: seeking out the elected officials who would deprive them of their home, knowing fully well that they could be arrested and detained. We see this with the members of ADAPT who fought to take down Trumpcare, through arrests in front of the White House, in the Capitol Rotunda, and Mitch McConnell’s office. We see this in the survivors of sexual harassment and sexual assault, ranging from movie stars to domestic workers, who are speaking their assaulters’ names.

We are done making ourselves small, and we are done staying quiet out of fear.

There is no asking for access anymore, or asking to be listened to. Instead, there is truth telling and a demand for acknowledgment. We are showing up, in record numbers, and we are not losing energy.

We have realized that our seat at the table will not be given to us if it requires someone who has privilege to relinquish it. So we are doing what Shirley Chisholm taught us, and bringing our own folding chairs. And in doing so, we have stepped out of our invisibility and into the light.

And for about 24 hours, maybe more, they didn’t stop.

Many LGBTQ people know what it’s like to feel rejected. Too many know what it’s like to be attacked. But to feel terrorized was a sensation that many of us weren’t familiar with. A year later, we are still grappling with it.

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I remember reading through the last names of those who were killed and seriously injured that evening. Those last names looked just like mine, and like those of the people I love and consider my chosen family. These gorgeous Latinx people went to a club—which has always been our safe place—to celebrate their community, to dance and release their inhibitions, and to be understood. Their freedom to express who they were, their right to create space in a world that didn’t always celebrate them, was brutally stomped out. There is no reconciling that.

That morning, I called my mom, wrote a piece on Medium, and then went to church. I sat with a friend, in my usual pew at St. Augustine’s—center aisle, four rows from the back—and listened to the chorale sing about love, piety, and stewardship. After the second hymn, I felt the lump begin to form in my throat and I started to cry again. Seated in a beautiful house of worship, surrounded by stained glass and marble, I felt robbed of something sacred to me: my sense of safety. I know that many of my friends felt the same way I did, and some still do.

I dragged myself into the office the next day, knowing it would be painful. I didn’t get much work done that day—at least, not as it was written in my job description. Instead, I helped fill our biggest conference room with staff who needed to feel heard and safe. We shared stories about ourselves, about our families, about being survivors of other horrifying acts of gun violence, about solidarity. The raw emotion shown in that room was so powerful. We cried and held one another, and we were honest with our allies about our fears. We gave each other what we needed that day: reassurance and compassion.

In the year that has passed since the Pulse shooting, we have learned a lot about our country. We have learned that homophobic politicians will do whatever is best for them, including ignoring the identities of the people we lost that night. We have learned that the gun lobby will use any tragedy to encourage the proliferation of gun use. We have learned that it continues to be dangerous to exist in this world as Latinx and LGBTQ, let alone both. And we have learned that the pettiness of Donald Trump, who thanked people for congratulating him “for being right on radical Islamic terrorism” instead of mourning the 49 lives we lost, knows no bounds.

But the most important lesson we have learned is that the LGBTQ community is strong. We are resilient. We are beautiful. We are politically powerful. No mad man, or coalition of racists or homophobes, can take from us what we manifest in each other: unapologetic love.

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I have always asked you a lot of questions about your arrival in this country. It’s probably because I have a hard time picturing you ever being out of control and out of your element. You moved from the ranch to a sleepy seaside town. From what you’ve told me, you were shocked by all of the white women running around in sports bras and teenagers driving—and subsequently wrecking—brand new cars. Ronald Reagan just became President, Hall & Oates and Blondie were dominating the charts, and you were getting ready to start high school in the U.S. without speaking a lick of English.

People underestimated and dismissed you, but you worked and you worked and when you got tired you worked some more. You mastered the language, passed the California High School Exit Exam (which is no easy feat), and you became the first person in our family to graduate from high school in this country. I can’t imagine the level of pride Grandpa had when you wore that cap and gown and got that piece of paper.

As a young woman, you helped agricultural workers navigate the maze that is the naturalization process, all the while your own status as a resident was hanging in the balance. You sat in a room and translated for men with hands that were rough from working in the fields, across the table from the same force of people who could have detained you. (How brave are you, lady? Seriously.) You went to trade school, got some business savvy, and started establishing your independence. You got a car, you got your own studio, you got a perm, and you started living your best early ’90s life. I imagine you spending these years dressed in some sort of spandex awesomeness in the club, dancing to Bell Biv Devoe and Janet Jackson.

And then yours truly came along. You became a single mom, and your biggest point of pride in my early days was being able to take care of both of us without financial backing from anyone else. We had each other, we had our one-bedroom apartment, and we had our health. You raised me in a community of other strong women, and I never knew what it felt like to be hungry or unloved.

I remember being afraid of you because you seemed so serious. Now I understand that you were just tired—tired from working so much, tired from worrying about money, tired from being two parents in one to a rambunctious kid who talked a lot and watched the news too much.

That unfaltering hustle you have, that you’ve always had, pushed us into a new tax bracket. You found time when you weren’t working to study for the citizenship test, and in 2000 you became an American citizen. We moved out of the apartment and you bought your first home, right down the street from the brand new high school that was being constructed in San Marcos. For the first few months the house was full of dust from contractors sculpting the fixer-upper into your vision. I can still see you standing in the middle of our new living room, surrounded by furniture covered in sheets, describing paint colors and granite countertops. You looked so proud.

For the first time in my life, I had my own room. I still slept with you for the first three months because I didn’t know any other way. But eventually, I got used to having a space of my own to clutter (I’m really sorry about that).

You held my hand when I came out at age 16. You tried to protect me from the homophobia and rejection that came with that, whether it was from California residents under Proposition 8 or our own family members. You made sure I graduated from high school, even after my grades started slipping. You helped me finance my college education, and you were there when I was the last student to cross that stage. My cap had your high school portrait pasted on it, and the message “this is for you, Mom.” And it was. That degree is yours just as much as it is mine.

I left the nest and moved across the country. You have endured the phone calls when I droned on and on about politics, and always responded matter-of-factly: “I am not political.” That was before.

It was before the national conversation turned on our family. Before the vitriol was about people like Grandpa, Grandma, and your siblings. Before the twin monsters of ignorance and xenophobia gnashed their teeth at you, my idol.

The surge of hatred towards immigrants has angered me. And it has angered you too.

For a year now, you have been calling to tell me about polling you heard about, and about PBS specials on the candidates you watched. You’ve been sharing stories I’ve never heard before about being undocumented, about being a woman of color in this country, about “becoming” an American. We FaceTimed when you made your first-ever campaign contribution, 16 years after you became a citizen (I’m sorry you keep getting spammed).

In 50 years you made it out of abject poverty, to the U.S., to independence, then to comfort. You accomplished more in half a lifetime than most people could in centuries. Now people are trying to argue that you aren’t a real American, but what they don’t realize is that you are the building block of this country. You embody what this country has sought since its establishment: exceptionalism.

So on this, your day of birth, I wish you a restful day full of flowers, Godiva chocolates, and love. I have so much to thank you for, Mom. Thank you for showing me what real strength is. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for being a hesitant audience to hours of Lady Gaga and RuPaul’s Drag Race, for your grace and dignity, and for being a light in the lives of all of the people who have known you. And thank you for being political. You are my hero.

A modified version of this post originally appeared on the Human Development Project.