“How do I let people know that I’m safe?”
It was the topic of a big discussion in my circles awhile back. How can men signal to women that they are safe? How can strangers signal to strangers that I’m a person who will help if you are in trouble? How can I communicate that you can tell me things, trust me with things?
People were looking for symbols, secret passwords, a rainbow flag to pin on their backpack—so to speak. Like when queerness was underground but you could find each other by saying you were a friend of Dorothy. A shortcut to flag how safe you are.
I understand the conversation well, the desire for those around you to know you are safe. But I think we’re all asking the wrong question here.
It’s not: how can I let people know I’m safe?
It’s: how can I be safe?
How can I—every day—do the work to become a safer person?
Because the truth is that you don’t have to scream it from the mountaintops. You don’t need the rainbow flag pin. You don’t need a secret password.
Can symbols help? Sure. Do they sometimes act as shorthand that can identify you to people who are ideologically aligned (or misaligned)? Certainly.
But the real work isn’t flagging your safety to others. The real work is recognizing that no matter how wonderful your intentions are in the world, it takes work to be safe (in any context).
Safe isn’t a pin, a label, or even an intention. It’s how you show up every day in your actions.
People don’t feel I’m safe because I say that I am. They feel I’m safe because they saw me opening my home to the community during the power outage across all of Portugal, Spain, and parts of France in the early summer—feeding everyone from the backyard grill because no power means no cooking for most in the city.
People don’t feel I’m safe because I bought the right t-shirt, wrote the right line in my bio. They feel I’m safe because they were at the table with me when someone started joking about violating another person’s consent and I was the one who said “hold on a second.”
Safety is not passive. It’s active. It takes intentional self-education and care. And it’s a skill cultivated over time.
So let’s turn the question on its head. It’s not how do I prove I’m safe or how do I let others know?
It’s how do I become safer every day in a real, tangible sense?
And as you do that, the result is this: you don’t have to tell anyone anything. They feel safe because you show up as you, as the person who cares about being safe.