For Ashlee Marie Preston, Healing is Revolutionary | LATV Exclusive

For public figure Ashlee Marie Preston, it’s all about building community. By openly exploring her own story, she builds relationships and inspires structural change. A representative of the disempowered taking their power back, Preston is a critical, intersectional voice in the movement toward a more liberated society.

“I’m not just out here fighting for Black people,” says the writer and social activist. “I’m fighting for trans people, for fat folks, for women.”

Online, social justice often takes the form of performative grief. On the news, trauma porn. We are pressured to consistently respond and tirelessly produce. Preston re-imagines a simpler, more sustainable approach to the work:

“I heal myself so I can heal others, and then we can heal the planet collectively. That’s the formula.”

Heal yourself

Preston couldn’t wait to get out of her Kentucky High School. She fled to Los Angeles, discovered her trans identity, and found community. But after getting fired, she encountered homelessness, sex work, and drug abuse. Numbing herself to survive, she realized she was worse off than what she thought she had run from.

“We talk about the people who betrayed us,” she says. “But our inner-child doesn’t even trust us.”

Adults encourage children to filter their truth to successfully navigate the world, which ultimately teaches them to oppress themselves and project hate onto others.

“[Oppression] is meant to impede your ability to dream, aspire, [and] imagine,” Preston says. “For people who want to get out there and make a difference, you can’t transmit something you haven’t got. If you want to live in a society where healing is a right, then start with yourself.”

Following in the footsteps of James Baldwin, Francis Thompson, Toni Morrison, and Oprah, Preston is guided by her unfiltered, authentic voice. She re-imagines victimhood as survival. She renames her neurodivergent diagnoses as ‘neuro-festive’ eccentricities. She chooses joy. She rests. In unlearning ‘self-tox’ behaviors, she heals.

“Everything that I thought made me broken or unworthy of love and acceptance and community are now symbols of beauty and strength,” she says.

Heal others

Preston uses her story to inspire others to overcome trauma and reclaim oppression as heroic journeys of survival. It’s these conversations that matter most to her; relationships are planted, and community is born.

Whether she’s speaking at a university, reaching young people on Twitter, or having an intimate one-on-one, she meets people where they’re at.

“People want to engage in these conversations in a way that feel native to their experience and their truth,” she says.

It’s not about being right. It’s about being impactful—getting people to heal themselves, forgive themselves, resist inaction, and join the movement for reasons of their own.

Heal the planet

When it comes to racism, anti-Blackness, and police brutality, Preston challenges the media’s use of Black pain captured on camera and calls on other communities to explore the social ecology around inaction.

When it comes to anti-trans legislation, Preston suggests that having trans family members changes how politicians cast their votes.

“Look around the room and see who’s missing—in your current movements, when you’re advocating for affordable housing, healthcare, employment opportunities, social services,” Preston says. “[Everything] you want for yourself, your family, and your loved ones: I guarantee you we want the same thing.”

For Preston, cross-cultural solidarity and coalition-building will sustain and further protect the rights of underserved communities and, in turn, set them up to win.

As she says: “When the most vulnerable among us are liberated, all of us will be, and not a second until then.”

Thus, we fight on. Watch the full exclusive interview on the LATV+ App  for more.