"When I use my strength in the service of my vision it makes no difference whether or not I am afraid"
About this Quote
Fear is allowed in Audre Lorde's sentence; it just loses its veto power. The line refuses the fantasy of the fearless hero and swaps in something more workable: alignment. "Strength" here isn't brute force or swagger, it's capacity - the stored-up muscle of survival, anger, craft, community. "Vision" isn't a hazy dream either; in Lorde's universe it is a politicized imagination, a picture of what life could look like when the terms of living aren't set by racism, sexism, homophobia, or silence. Put the two together and fear becomes background noise, not the conductor.
The phrasing matters. "When I use" makes agency the trigger: the moment isn't waiting for courage to arrive, it's a choice to deploy what you already have. "In the service of" is a radical reframe of power; strength isn't for domination, it's for dedication. That servant language also hints at discipline, even sacrifice - the daily labor of turning conviction into action, poem into practice.
Context sharpens the edge. Lorde wrote from inside compounded vulnerability, where fear isn't hypothetical but structural: the fear of being harmed, dismissed, misdiagnosed, rendered invisible. By saying it "makes no difference", she isn't minimizing terror; she's demoting it. The subtext is instruction to anyone trained to equate fear with stop signs: your body can tremble and you can still move. The work doesn't require purity of feeling. It requires fidelity to the vision.
The phrasing matters. "When I use" makes agency the trigger: the moment isn't waiting for courage to arrive, it's a choice to deploy what you already have. "In the service of" is a radical reframe of power; strength isn't for domination, it's for dedication. That servant language also hints at discipline, even sacrifice - the daily labor of turning conviction into action, poem into practice.
Context sharpens the edge. Lorde wrote from inside compounded vulnerability, where fear isn't hypothetical but structural: the fear of being harmed, dismissed, misdiagnosed, rendered invisible. By saying it "makes no difference", she isn't minimizing terror; she's demoting it. The subtext is instruction to anyone trained to equate fear with stop signs: your body can tremble and you can still move. The work doesn't require purity of feeling. It requires fidelity to the vision.
Quote Details
| Topic | Vision & Strategy |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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