Written November 12th, 2020, midday. I was out of sorts most of the morning when I picked up that silly small pad and wrote this. I felt lighter. 

I’m having a hard time.

For the past year or so, I have felt myself disconnecting. Head, heart, and hands are in alignment but in parallel play. Rarely do they intersect, let alone weave together.

Early this morning before dawn broke, I learned that a dear friend‘s mom passed at the glorious age of 99. Earlier this fall, her daughters, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren pilgrimaged from across the US to gather to celebrate her birthday. How fortuitous to have had that time together, full of joy in the now. Weeks later, they gathered again to say goodbye.

This is on us. Those of us who purport that our work, our craft is to contribute to knowledge generation through research, evaluation, and learning are complicit in the US being this close to a White nationalist authoritarian federation of states.

It’s November 1. The clocks went back last night. My body wakes up at the same time no matter what so I have been up since a little before 6 am. The sun is rising. I can hear birds both near and far, crows, song sparrows, scrub jays, seagulls, and more. The day is here.

It matters what you say as much as how you say it.

It matters what you do and why you do it.

It matters that you show up even if you don’t want to.

It matters that you remember your humanity and respect the humanity of others.

It matters that we love fully - eyes wide open - and that it starts with loving ourselves.

It all matters.

It's one of those Saturdays where, if you stay off social media and don't listen to any news, it's easy to think it's like any other late October Saturday.

My restlessness tells me that that is not true.

We are “in it.” I think of it as a reckoning with the roots and the realities of this federated union of states.

When I say “it” - we are in the beginning.

Sometime this weekend I DM’d a friend, inquiring as to whether it was time for a phone call. Today, I realized that I had nothing to say.

And if they were like me, the sound of the human voice has lost a bit of its charm lately. So many saying so much and so little simultaneously - much of it simplistic, ill-informed, contradictory, and increasingly full of hate and not love. It is a deafening cacophony.

I awakened tired this morning - a rarity for me. If you know me, you know I wake up at full speed. It is not my preference, it is simply how I am wired.

It is Sunday, October 4th and the weather is changing a bit. It feels like a day where a midday nap was possible.

Yesterday was tough.

The constant reminder of how little my life matters and is unprotected continues to move itself more deeply into my being.

This is not new news. The message is simply coming more often and with greater clarity.

We have hid from our collective truths some full of joy and others not so much. our lack of a moral underpinning that reflects love and respect for all humanity in our evaluative work is one factor that brings us to today.

So it’s been about an hour since I learned Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has passed.

I sat with it for a while thinking that I could just let it go. That this was just another one of those moments in 2020, that tells us that the reckoning is here. We have to decide who we are, who we are for, and the world in which we want to live.

in·tim·i·date

/inˈtiməˌdāt/

verb
past tense: intimidated; past participle: intimidated

frighten or overawe (someone), especially in order to make them do what one wants.

"he tries to intimidate his rivals"

As I seek to maximize the moment, I am also trying to be as authentically me as I can be – one that is ever shifting. I am not who I was even a month ago. I can feel it. Those closest to me can sense it.

“Imagination is one of the Spoils of colonization, which in many ways is claiming who gets to imagine the future for a given geography. Losing imagination is a symptom of trauma. Reclaiming the right to dream the future, strengthening the muscle to imagine together as Black people, is a revolutionary decolonizing activity.” - Adrienne Maree Brown

So I go back in time to music. It's not the music of my childhood but songs which, for some reason, engage my full self and as such quiet my mind for as long as the song/playlist lasts and the voices stop.

I offer this playlist to you to stop your voices and invite you to create your own.

In the days when we used to be in person, my prep work, besides design and listening to my playlist, included how to manage perceptions about my physical self so that what I said and did would more likely be received as intended and we could embrace the charge to which we collectively agreed.

I can’t name it yet. I wrote about not being able to cry and tweeted about my current state. I have opted to stay in the space and not try to diagnose and rush out of it but just be. Paying attention to what I notice through all the senses and to the degree to which I can, noticing my reactions and responses to things, people, and experiences.

Every single episode of season four of Queer Eye on Netflix brought me to tears. ‘I can’t write left-handed' and 'Grandma’s hands’ by Bill Withers never fails to elicit the same response. That Christmas commercial where a family or a group of kids decorate the home of the elderly single person has made me cry for decades. 

Who you are not now is not who you will become.

Your work is to find your truest joyful self and to surround yourself with those who see and love you as you are and as you may be.

People will constantly be surprised by you because in this country they believe you to be less in all things.