When I started this blog a bit over a year ago, it was with the intention of being fashion-focused in an eco-conscious kind of way. Does This Make Me Look… was the phrase I chose as a prompt. Normally what would follow would be “good,” “fat,” “fantastic,” “scary,” and so on like that. But I wanted to flip the phrase to put some emphasis on the verb look. Does this piece of clothing make me look closer at where it came from, how it was made, who is literally behind its creation and how does that company treat its employees. I was aiming to steer the conversation toward more earth-friendly choices. But then, as always happens, the road forked and I veered in a slightly different direction. I jumpsuited my way across the country and not long after reaching the left coast, joined the world in a Covid-19 retreat indoors, then found my way to racial justice involvement after watching George Floyd’s murder. So back to the words Does This Make Me Look… and how the phrase represents something different now in 2020 than it did in 2019. It’s become more Does This Make Me Look [closer at what is going on around and within me]. A funny thing keeps happening as I approach from that angle: I’m realizing that if it’s gonna fly, more bravery in my convictions is called for. I’ve been having that thought on the regular as I focus on what writing I’m going to start on outside of these blog entries. How I need to be bold in my prose since readers know the difference: My Dark Vanessa vs The Bookish Life of Nina Hill. they’re both good reads, but the former is stunning in its willingness to take the reader into territory that’s blazingly honest. There’s also the realization that a tale twists and turns depending on what angle the story is told from. There are the things we want to believe. There are the things that are shown to be true, proven to be true, and disproven as well. There are the moments we decide whether we want to look or not, especially if it requires rearranging a whole lot of moments that have previously been settled upon as real.

I grew up in SoCal (not in the house pictured or really any house that looked like that, but it is a pretty fair example of the style one sees around most often). As is usual with the youngsters, I’d never done much exploring about my ancestry or whatnot as I was still creating my own history. But something about being back out here now, the way the light slants in the afternoon and reminds me of leaving my last class (social studies) in high school and heading home with my best friend to watch The Love Boat and stain my fingers orange with Dorito dust. Or the canopy of oleanders that drapes over me during a morning walk and takes me right to the confusion of my teenage-hood. I have no idea why that flower reminds me of that time, but it does. In the last few weeks, I’ve been reading and listening to fill in the gaps of US history that I wasn’t taught in school. The messy things that some would say make us look bad, and of course do, because in no universe is the slaughter and displacement of Native Peoples from their land and the enslavement, rape, and bigotry of Black folx in the service of our country a good look. (And as I’ve mentioned before, colonialism and the abuse of a people is a world-wide phenomenon all the way through history, but I’m just talking about America right here/right now.) But looking at it honestly, working toward a way that we can come together to stop the killing and oppression from systemically happening and calling it out for what it is: hatred that needs to be looked at honestly and stopped from going further, is, I think, the only way forward to healing. And for me to fully move forward, I also need to understand my history.

Years ago my mom had sent me a folder of some genealogy a cousin had done that traced her family tree to include John Hanson, the first (at least the first who held the office for an entire term, which was a year) President of the Continental Congress in 1781. I pulled the folder out last week to take a look. Knowing about John Hanson meant understanding that he owned slaves who worked his plantation in Maryland. It also meant realizing that, yes, that was what the majority of well-off white gentry did in the south back then. And while I have a very hard time squaring the cruelty of people to visit the kind of physical and emotional abuse from rape to the separation of families that was done to Black people back then, I know from history that the way slave owners explained being fine upstanding humans while debasing in the cruelest of ways other humans was based on the belief that the Black race was inferior and that they were doing them a favor by taking them on. It’s a way of thinking that still lies just below the surface in much of the country—even though most would deny it and claim they were not racist and just shut up about it. But it seems clear from not only the man who is currently squatting in the White House, to the police who shoot first and suffer no consequences, to those who won’t even have the conversation around racism and swear they don’t see color, which in itself is an insult given the color of one’s skin is as much a part of them as their hair and eye color, that the fight for racial equity is alive and kicking today. But because it’s buried under so much magical thinking around how our country has grown, it’s even more insidious. (Digression number two: Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of living in a society that does not judge people by the color of their skin has been so taken out of context as to mean we don’t acknowledge color at all. So many articles to let us know that is not what he meant.)

So there I was, as I imagine so many are, looking down the canon of personal history and seeing who is back there and being made aware that there is something dark. And what do I do with that? Pulling it out into the light, I can find a place to start. And I’m honestly just beginning. I haven’t found the balance yet. All I can think to do is to keep looking and listening. Stepping forward and not being quiet, but also respecting what needs to be done because I have a stake in it. I’m not in this moment out of a sense of helping others, but more out of a sense of helping us all and helping myself. Because we’re really truly all in this together and I’m only starting to do the work I need to do to strengthen the muscle of bravery and honesty around who I am, where I’ve come from, and what I am capable of doing.

“We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.”
The Places That Scare You
A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times
by Pema Chödrön