Amanda Gorman reflects on the year since Biden’s inauguration

Amanda Gorman is reflecting on the year since she shot to fame after reciting a poem at President Biden’s inauguration, saying that “this past year for many has felt like a return to the same old gloom.”

“Our nation is still haunted by disease, inequality and environmental crises,” Gorman wrote in a Thursday op-ed in The New York Times, timed to coincide with the anniversary of Biden’s swearing-in.

Yet 23-year-old Gorman, who became an overnight sensation after reading “The Hill We Climb” in January 2021, shared a message of unity for the future and urged Americans to embrace fear.

“But though our fears may be the same, we are not. If nothing else, this must be known: Even as we’ve grieved, we’ve grown; even fatigued we’ve found that this hill we climb is one we must mount together.”

“We are battered, but bolder; worn, but wiser. I’m not telling you to not be tired or afraid. If anything, the very fact that we’re weary means we are, by definition, changed; we are brave enough to listen to, and learn from, our fear. This time will be different because this time we’ll be different. We already are,” Gorman wrote in the Times.

“The truth is, hope isn’t a promise we give. It’s a promise we live.”

Gorman also revealed that she nearly declined the inaugural invitation due to fears about the coronavirus pandemic and potential violence following the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol by supporters of then-President Trump.

“I was scared of failing my people, my poetry. But I was also terrified on a physical level. Covid was still raging, and my age group couldn’t get vaccinated yet,” Gorman wrote.

“Just a few weeks before, domestic terrorists assaulted the U.S. Capitol, the very steps where I would recite. I didn’t know then that I’d become famous, but I did know at the inauguration I was going to become highly visible — which is a very dangerous thing to be in America, especially if you’re Black and outspoken and have no Secret Service.”

Gorman recalled getting messages from friends advising her to wear a bulletproof vest for her inaugural appearance, while her mother went through a drill in their living room to practice shielding her from a hail of bullets.

The writer said she told friends that she would likely pull out from the ceremony, but ultimately decided to go forward with it because she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life “wondering what this poem could have achieved.”

“I’m a firm believer that often terror is trying to tell us of a force far greater than despair,” Gorman wrote. “In this way, I look at fear not as cowardice, but as a call forward, a summons to fight for what we hold dear. And now more than ever, we have every right to be affected, afflicted, affronted.”

“If you’re alive, you’re afraid. If you’re not afraid, then you’re not paying attention,” said Gorman. “The only thing we have to fear is having no fear itself — having no feeling on behalf of whom and what we’ve lost, whom and what we love.”