When I was little, but just old enough to know that "see oh too" was causing "global warming", I would purposely try to hold my breath for as long as I could so that I wasn't making everything worse. I was scared to breathe while Exxon was happily lying to suppress science.

When I said my prayers at night, I would ask God to "take away all the bad carbon", but little did I know then that we didn't just need to be taking carbon out the air, we needed to be leaving in the ground too.

When I was old enough to learn that Bangladesh was suffering terrible floods because of climate change, I thought that finally, we'd have to do something. But no, because profit was more important to my government than people in another country.

I kick myself sometimes, for not being angry about this sooner. I thought that it was wrong to be angry. I thought that "youth" was synonymous with "bad" and that my voice was both unwanted and embarrassing. Mostly, I thought I could trust adults.

My school spent years making us plan for our futures. They would ask us, "where do you want to be at 25?"
I used to answer with my desired location on a career path.
I'm 21 now. In 4 years, I want to be on a planet with some hope. Not politicians' hope, but real hope

My school never told us that our futures would be full of 2004's plastic. They never told us that we'd have to pay for breathable air. They never told us that we'd live through a mass extinction, or that the areas we'd grown up in would be impossible to visit unless we scuba dive

They taught me that grades and university were the two most important things I had to focus on. In a way, I'm angry, because I spent so long worrying that I would ruin my future if I didn't get all A* and A that I didn't really enjoy my life

I'm angry because I lost some of the best years of my life panicking about a future I don't even care about anymore. My old dreams feel like a fantasy. I wasted all that time and I don't know if any child on earth will ever get to experience such a safe period of time as I wasted

Where do I want to be when I'm 1/4 century old?
I want to be on a livable planet
I want to live, and I want to see others living around me. I want to really live, not just survive one day after another.
But more than wanting this, I need this. We all need this.

I realised I couldn't trust the adults in power, which was hard, because it meant accepting that the future I had so carefully planned out and had worked so hard for was meaningless compared to what really matters.

What I realised on 20/09 was that there was no-one I could trust more than the people alongside me on the streets. I could trust that, for the first time ever, I was good enough for a future.
A*s won't keep me safe. Acting on the climate crisis will.
29/11/19. Please be there.