*With the title of this week’s post, I give a huge nod to Ta-nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, which I’m reading currently and am astounded by. Both because of the topic (a letter to his son about the experience of inhabiting a black body in America) and his talent with prose (the man just flows & goes, once I climbed aboard, it’s felt like I’ve been on one of those amazing rides where you’re hyper-alert to what comes next).

And this is the mad thing I find about words: when they’re put together just so, they can transport to a place I’ve been but never quite seen, or transform a situation I’ve lived in but never felt fully.

Take this morning, for instance, reading the NYTimes Book Review section and I come across an interview with Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman who have a podcast, “Call Your Girlfriend,” which I’ve just added to my library of listening because it feels spot-on at present, and a new book called Big Friendship. In the piece, Sow, who is Black, said, “There is no way to be intimately close with people if you refuse to engage in the truth of how the world is organized. For a lot of people conversations about race are new. Most of those people I would venture to guess are white.” Friedman, who is white, commented, “White people in particular want to believe that our relationships are somehow insulated from these bigger forces,” and added with a dose of irony, “Yes, we recognize racism exists in the world, but we are really connected, and somehow special, or safe from those dynamics.” And Pow, I got it. There’s work to be done in my own house. It’s not as if I hadn’t been aware of this, most especially recently, but for some reason today the message really landed. As I’ve been reading and listening and looking and activisting (yes, I made up that word), I’m seeing that it’s been situated outside my interior life. And while I plan on continuing to be active on the larger scale, there are personal moments for me to attend to. Why haven’t I had those conversations? Because I haven’t focused on how to start them. Because when that awkward sense rises up in me, I distract it by signing another petition to defund the police. But truthfully, right now, starting to take care of my inner workings is a task I’m beginning as a companion to the petitions.

A really important friendship during my twenties and thirties spanned multiple cities and many hours of intimate conversations, yet I don’t recall asking her once about her experience of being a Black woman in the world. We wove in our personal stories throughout the friendship, but my curiosity around her moments growing up in white America was not a specific ask I remember posing. And there were plenty of racially charged moments to discuss as we watched Rodney King get beaten and OJ get chased. That happened then, and right here, right now, there’s a woman in NY who I’ve known for over a decade and is one of my all-time favorite people in the world. She’s funny in that smart, side-eye kind of way that makes life awesome, while also being singularly stylish and inspirational/aspirational as a movement teacher. I always feel happy when I’m around her. Yet I’ve never introduced a conversation around how she lives as a Black woman in the world. So now I start using my words.

And since we’re on the topic of starting, another a-ha moment within the last little while: A recent discussion about a couple of my blog posts reminded me that I cannot control the place my words land for any individual. I can’t write to make someone happy. I can write to make a point regarding something that lives in my heart. And I’ve been more aware lately about being honest in that as I carve out a topic, write, reread, rewrite, and finally hit publish. But from there, it’s anyone’s guess how my words will hit the limbic. In a huge way, the realization inside of that conversation freed me to understand that I just need to write and not let anyone’s stuff get in my brain. This is a challenge, but it’s the only way I’ll get it done.

So I start. New novel in progress: I’m getting reacquainted with some characters I’d left on the page about a year ago because I had no idea what they were trying to tell me (or what I wanted them to tell the world). I’m remembering the process of just-keep-going: With my first, it was all new and I kept telling myself that I could stop at any time. I think that’s some kind of preservationist line we tell ourselves when a task seems really large. Same with running the marathon. But at some point I couldn’t really stop. I was too far gone. Mile seventeen, page seventy, and no rescue vehicles in sight. And then I found the finishing was in some ways just another beginning. Revisions and submissions and more revisions and frustration and more fun with adding and subtracting words, plus other things I basically don’t even remember but would never go back and change. (And during that, endless love&thanks to my writing partner and all my first readers, who kept me honest in the process.) The funny thing about so many of the arts—or let’s be honest, just living authentically—is that a lot of folks read, see, hear, watch someone or something and think, I could do that, which is a good sign that the person doing the doing is doing it well. (If you have 24 minutes, please listen to this, which is to me an amazing example of something that for most of us seems easy, but in this case is really hard.) For instance, Dennis learns lines one by one, that become a soliloquy or a song, people hear the moment not what led up to it. My dad goes into his studio damn near every day and puts elements together to create a collage, then he rearranges it, puts on the wall and steps away for a look-see, then takes it down for a little more something. I get the pleasure of the finished work and know his dedication and the hours spent on it only because I’ve been lucky enough to know both the pleasure and pain he puts into the creating.

There’s so much going on in the world right now that is huge and important, that can take all my time if I give it, can feel overwhelming if I choose to let it, that can trigger the impulse to pull in and drop the shades, but I actually know that I can hold a few things at once. One word becomes a paragraph becomes a page becomes a first draft, and so on. I can make room for what wants to be said. It feels like this particular time in history is introducing an inner reckoning, no matter age, make, or model, and that finding the kernel of our best creative, compassionate selves is more necessary now than ever. That outcome also seems more doable somehow. Humans are coming together to get things done in an astounding way as the people at the top drop the ball, pull back from responsibility, and leave the work undone. I look and see words into actions.

• The pandemic is still among us, and with the breakdown of our government, since the beginning, it’s on citizens to take care of each other as much as we can. Masks and S.distancing are the obvious personal ways, but beyond that, the United Way has a good website with info on how to help. Also now that extra funds have ended in unemployment benefits—and no, that extra was not a disincentive to going back to work as this study finds—people are suffering possible evictions and choices between food or other essentials for real. If you go to the Instagram page of a trusted friend or #rentrelief there are informative crowdfunding links to explore and then do the extra step of confirming as a trusted site. And of course, this leads to the reality around BIPOC and trans folx suffering on a much larger scale during this time.

• The movement toward racial justice in America is one that needs to continue. I get worried that as time goes on, interest shifts. But I’m also heartened every time I show up to my weekly WP4BL zoom meeting that more people join each week for activist work. Here’s an incomplete, but important list of those killed at the hands of police in case anyone needs reminding why the work needs to keep on going. And the website for SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) to find a local chapter for all sorts of involvement.

• And let’s not forget that there’s an election in November that will without doubt be contested by the current administration and is being (and has been) manipulated both under the radar and through words meant to spread fear by the man in the White House and his mouthpieces. The first step has been to undermine the media (which started from day one of his presidency) and is now going into full assault with hits on the post office and fictional tales about the failure of mail-in ballots. We need to keep our eyes open and not step back, to not be scared, to not stop demanding our rights and pleeeze check all sources before believing what you read. Keep supporting that post office!!! And get involved in local campaigns!
• The tragedy in Beirut is heartrending: the townspeople have picked up brooms and whatever else necessary to begin the process of repair while their government denies responsibility. Here are some ways to help.