My mother taught me many things. Primary among them is a love of Shakespeare and stubborn use of the first amendment in the face of power. She protested the draft. She challenged and changed the gendered double standards at her school and the “classist expectations” of her mother’s Elk’s Lodge. She put herself through college. She always preached to me the importance of an educated electorate. But as I stare at the news feed on my phone from one day to the next, with the Twitter feed highlighting new affronts everyday, the “deterioration of democracy” as my mother would put it, I’m stumped as to what I can do—what can be done at all. I feel either overwhelmed or apathetic in the face of all the mean, petty lack of compassion in the world, and powerless to do anything about it. But I’m not powerless, I tell myself; my mother drove home the importance of self-reliance. She taught me to show up and get heard. Yet somehow it doesn’t feel like enough. Sometimes my own resilience is just too tenuous.

Years ago, when I was just starting to feel like I could tell people how long I had lived in Portland without being side-eyed to death, I went to an audition and got the part of my dreams. I would be Puck in a outdoor touring production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I had gone head-to-head in the audition with a performer, now friend, for whom even then I had a tremendous amount of respect. And I got the part. The phone call had gone to my voice mail. I saved it. This was a big deal. I was Puck, and I was getting paid. I called Mom, I played her the voicemail. I texted my friends. I could not believe my luck.

The cast gathered at the costume designer’s house for a meet-and-greet. We were going to be touring for a while, and relying on each other tremendously, so we started building trust and making bonds. I knew some of the cast already, so that was great. The costume designer took measurements then, which felt professional and like they were excited about their job. Compliments were made, all things encouraging. The director leaned in and asked my opinion about the use of my circus skills in the show. I felt trusted already. Respected.

And then rehearsals started. I was not memorized when we started, but our off-book date wasn’t for three weeks, and I was in a good place, I thought. Comments were made comparing cast members’ preparedness. I felt like the rug under me had slipped a little. I went home and drilled lines.

Rehearsals kept going. More comparisons. Side comments. Indirect shots. The costume designer made a point of telling us things the director had said about us in production meetings. The challenges of finding costumes for “non-typical body types” were regularly aired in rehearsal. The ground under me felt wobbly. Every choice I made was compared to what the director had done in previous shows. I started worrying about what to do with my hands, if I even knew Shakespeare, or if the wrong person had been cast. At times, the director said similar things. I thought about quitting.

And yet, as I felt my own resolve weakening, something else happened: I started finding allies, seeing how support can really play out in a community, feeling like I might have value to this company after all.

So when the Lovers got their fight choreography—which the director did himself—there was no way I was walking away. I had spent the previous summer at “Fight Camp” and the last year training under a professional stage combat choreographer. I knew what I was talking about and the choreography for the show was not safe. Not how the director was teaching it. The cast and I met before rehearsals to practice and run things. We worked parts that made them nervous. We rebuilt things, never straying too far from what the director had staged, but adding lift support, or better base set up. I asked a lot of questions. We took care of each other. The show got safer and funnier at the same time.

Yet even during Final Dress, the entire performance was accented by audible sighs from the director and “tsk-tsk-tsks” from the costume designer. The director gave us notes, always adding, “but at this point you can only do what you can do.” Which was accurate. And even though the TD laughed through the whole show, never in my life had I felt so very small.

Even on Opening, I still felt guilty for not being off book the first day. That I had, somehow, ahead of the game, ruined every single performance. I did some yoga and tried to not ruin the face paint with crying. The audience came. The stage manager, with all the encouragement in the world, told me “five minutes to show.” I stood backstage when an upstanding and highly appropriate cast member, who had always blushed or politely declined any “adult” conversations asked me:

“Can you believe that you are f*cking Puck? How fun is that?”

And six weeks of self-critique, crippling doubt, and just flat-out terror, melted. This human, who saw me, reminded me why I loved this part. I was f*cking Puck. Not anyone else, including the director.

The TD laughed. The cast rallied. We supported each other.

Theater reminds me, over and over again, the power of humans taking care of each other. My mother taught me to show up, and my grandmother taught me the importance of having a relationship with the community. And theater, in the face of all my apathy and devastation, encourages me to use those family traits, and gives me a tool to speak to power. I want to give up when I think of all the structures in between us and change. And then I remember, we’re f*cking here.