Grief Is My Platform

I wasn’t raised to be powerful.
I was raised to survive.
To silence myself. To perform gratitude. To carry wounds like secrets and truths like shame.

But somewhere along the way, I realized
The grief they handed me wasn’t a weakness.
It was a compass.

It pointed toward the systems that were broken.
Toward the stories nobody was telling.
Toward the communities no one was listening to.

And that grief didn’t just sit there.
It spoke.

Grief is not sadness.
It’s data.
It tells us where the wound is.
It tells us what we loved and lost.
It tells us what still matters.

I built Power of the Narrative on that premise:
That if we listen closely to grief, not just our own, but collective, generational, ancestral, we can hear the blueprint for justice.

Grief is a map.
It shows you what deserves to be fought for.

We live in a world allergic to grief.

Policymakers would rather talk statistics than sit in sorrow.
Activists sometimes skip mourning and sprint to the solution.
The media turns trauma into spectacle or skips it altogether.

But I decided: if no one else will hold it, I will.

And I won’t hold it quietly either.

When I speak about a student who lost their brother to violence,
or a mother whose child was deported during breakfast,
I am not telling sad stories to get your sympathy.
I am revealing the cracks in the foundation of this nation.

I am saying:
Here. Look. This is the cost of your silence.
This is the cost of policies that privilege the numbers and punish the people.

This is the real curriculum of America.
And it’s written in grief.

But grief alone is not the point.
Transformed grief is.

Grief can be compost.
Fuel.
Alchemy.

You water it with truth, expose it to community, and let it break down into clarity.
And from that compost, something new can grow.

I’ve seen it in the Sinclair Scholars rewriting the narratives of trauma.
I’ve seen it in the mothers speaking names that were almost forgotten.
I’ve seen it in the elders, finally being asked what they carried.

We are not drowning in grief.
We are building with it.

So no, I don’t run from it. I run with it.
I bring it into boardrooms. Classrooms. Courtrooms. City halls.
I bring it to your microphone and your policy meeting.
Because I believe one voice, cracked by grief, can shake a room more than a thousand sterile facts.

Grief is my political platform.
Grief is my policy position.
Grief is the thing I use to name what’s been erased.

And when people hear it, not the story, but the truth behind it, something opens.
Even in people you’d never expect.

Because here’s the part no one tells you:

Grief unites people who disagree on everything else.

Grief bypasses ideology.
It’s universal. It’s human. It gets in under the armor.

And if you speak to it well, without exploiting it or polishing it. you build something stronger than agreement:
You build trust.

That’s why conservatives, moderates, liberals, radicals, and those who don’t vote at all will listen to me.

Because I’m not trying to impress you.
I’m trying to remind you.
Of your humanity. Of your ache. Of your responsibility.

People keep asking what I stand for.

The answer is simple:

I stand for the people who didn’t get to stand at all.
I stand for the ones we buried without justice.
I stand for the ones trying to live while carrying unspeakable loss.
I stand for the people who want to feel again, not just argue.

That’s not weakness.
That’s not sentimentality.
That’s power.

Real power.
The kind that doesn’t need to scream.
The kind that doesn’t flinch in a storm.
The kind that builds nations.

So yes, grief is my platform.
And I stand on it barefoot
because I want to feel every vibration of the truth rising underneath.

Let the politicians run on their empty slogans.
I’ll run on the names. The memories. The unsaid. The unfinished. The unclaimed.

And I’ll win, not just the race.
But the people.
The trust.
The future.

Because what they tried to bury, we turned into a garden.
And baby, it’s just starting to bloom.