Across our country and the globe, millions of people came together to march against Donald Trump and the racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, islamphobia and more that his presidency represents. I was one of those people. I made the last-minute decision to attend the Women’s March in Washington D.C. after much deliberation.

I was on the fence about whether I’d march in D.C. because I followed the critiques and concerns about the Women’s March made by many women of color at its inception. I followed as the organizing efforts made strides toward intersectionality relatively quickly. The reigns were handed over to three reputable and experienced activists who are women of color and when they released the march’s platform, it was unapologetically inclusive (mostly).

Despite these positive changes, I continued to hear women of color, both my friends and activists I follow, share they felt excluded from the march. As someone who has not participated in many protests in the past but cares deeply about racial justice, I felt paralyzed about how to proceed. Do I march? Do I not march? What was the right course of action to take?

While I am not a protestor historically, I have been trying to show up in other ways. I’ve been learning and writing about the intersections between social and racial justice and parenting, I donate to local and national organizations who support social and racial justice initiatives, I participate in a social justice book club and I am a burgeoning parent organizer. Despite these efforts, I’ve remained hesitant to attend protests.

Why was this? What about protesting scared me so much? When I sat with myself and really examined my fears, it boiled down to violence. I was scared of being hurt, whether by police or by the crowd. I was scared of being detained or arrested.

Throughout my life, in history books as well as the mainstream media, protest has been conflated with violence. When I think of protests, I think of tear gas, water cannons, baton sticks, bricks thrown, fires set. I’ve been shown images of violence in relation to protests all of my life and it’s scared me into staying home.

So why was the Women’s March different? Why was I willing to attend this march but not, for instance, a Black Lives Matter protest? These were the questions women of color were asking, and they were important.

The answer, for me, was two-fold: 1) I felt personally attacked as a woman during Donald Trump’s campaign and 2) I knew the Woman’s March would likely be peaceful. I knew the protest would be heavily attended by folks who were just like me: white, cis, upper class women. We were not going to be tear gassed by police. We were not going to be provoked or antagonized. Attending the Women’s March was not a great physical risk, it was a political statement.

This realization was painful to admit to myself and as I shared above, it gave me great pause about whether I should attend the Women’s March at all. On my best friend’s urging to “make a damn decision”, however, I decided to book my travel. I wanted the march to be largely attended and to send a message by the sheer volume of its size. But as my friends shared their reasons for protesting through the “Why I March” campaign, I still struggled to express my mixed feelings about marching.

The morning of the march, I posted the following on Facebook:

#whyimarch does not easily come for me. My reasons for traveling to D.C. are complicated. I march with the weight that I did not do enough to prevent the 45th president. That as a white, cis, straight, able-bodied woman I have not done enough to support black, brown, LGBTQ, Muslim, immigrant and disabled women and communities in the past. To march is a privilege in many ways, due to cost, accessibility and the comfort that I will likely not be targeted during the protest by police or other agitators.