I am so angry. & so tired. It’s difficult to believe so much in the macro-world could happen alongside so much in my micro-world & that it could all be crunched into a matter of days.

Katherine McKittrick tweeted recently about this time as Black time: tangled, impossibly elongated, unrelenting. & it helped me to think about my experience living through the last couple of weeks. For anyone not experiencing time the same way, I’ll just quickly say that the global unrest, the multiple murders of Black people, and the pandemic & subsequent national mishandling of the pandemic/lockdown coincided (for me) with my winning an award (s/o to the Warfield Center!), with my mother moving to Austin, with my most recent op-ed going live, with near constant arguments with my partner, & with an internet beef with a white supremacist somehow becoming newsworthy. & all of this leading up to my 33rd birthday.

There was a moment last week, at the height of my now infamous Facebook beef, when I asked my ancestors for guidance. A few minutes later (honestly!), my old office mate, kihana, messaged me the link to her article about anti-Blackness which had just gone live on NYT. (You can read her beautiful & important writing here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/opinion/george-floyd-anti-blackness.html ). In our ensuing conversation, she told me that even though her op-ed had just been published, she’d already started receiving threatening emails.

& I took that as a reminder that in the work I hope to do & in the future world I imagine & call others to imagine, I will encounter resistance. It’s just a part of it. No one who does this work is exempt & no one does this work without making enemies.

I’m no where near kihana’s level. I haven’t written the things I hope to write or started on what will be my most important work. That fact is exciting & even so, I need to be mindful that I will be pushed back against—a lot. I have to be okay with that & do my work in spite of that. Perhaps, this moment is calling me to consider how my work is important, not in spite of people who would like to stop me, but *because* the voices of those who take issue with my work have been prioritized for so long.

I’ll close by saying that last week, I wrote for HyperAllergic about how much I dislike the blackout squares that are so popular in moments like these. I’ll post that link, as always, under my “elsewhere” tab.