How (Bad) Do You Want It

On change and the power of perspective

No one ever tells you bravery feels like fear. - Mary Kate Teske

I've been under a cloud. A cloud of grief coated in sadness and despair. From personal passings to worldwide genocide and health crises I have been on edge since 2020 and I don't think I am alone in saying that I truly haven't processed all the grief I'm sure my body is holding. Instead of processing, like many of us, I got to work. I finished law school and got a job as a community organizer. I dedicated myself to learning grassroots organizing, not recognizing that I was already at the point where I needed to pause. So instead I forged ahead, allowing myself to get wrapped up in every attack on my identity and community. Believing that if I just kept going I would find a way out of the darkness. Find a way back to wholeness. Back to agency. Back to faith. But instead, I lost my head. Lost my heart. Lost my imagination. And damn near almost lost myself. I buried my pain in surface level relationships and tv marathons, hoping and wishing that something would change while continuing to do the same old things. Until my body said no more. Until sickness became me and despair restrained me, refusing to let me go. I became the cloud. I was overcome with darkness. Only seeing the pain and hurt and convincing myself that this was all there would ever be. It took my fourth year in a row catching covid around my birthday and spending the entire month of August sick in bed for me to recognize that if I didn’t change I would die in this hell. I would lose the battle before I even put up my best fight. I was terrified. Not only of losing my life, but of losing my purpose. Losing my will. Losing my passion on top of the loss of my imagination. I realized that I only had one choice. To give in to the emotional overwhelm and sit the fuck down. Let myself breathe, and cry, and hide, and sleep, and curse, and binge, and whatever I needed to do shake the devil off before he consumed me whole.

It took three weeks for me to see the light. It took three weeks of panicking, not knowing what to do or where to go. Feeling like the world was collapsing around me and I was stuck in the middle with no energy to move or support to clear the path. Feeling like I would die anyway, because if I wasn't working or moving I would petrify and no one would find me until my mother got tired of me missing her calls and showed up in Miami banging down the door. I woke up every day terrified that my landlord would knock on my door and say even though my rent was paid I couldn't stay here without a full-time job and I'd be living out my car refusing to "burden" anyone with my misery. After three weeks of none of that actually happening, allowing myself to feel without fighting, and really resting I had an idea. I made a decision that made me feel alive. That made me feel like I had power over my life and how it turned out. And that spark moved me to move closer to my people. Reach out and touch somebody- like actually lay hands in person on someone who loved me just as much as I loved them. Who understood me and could relate and still had hope anyway. And from that idea to that spark to that touch I saw hope. For the first time in what felt like years. I saw possibility.

And that was the birth of my Quotes to Live By Series on Black Women Writers at Work, a book by Claudia Tate. A 16 week workshop series that's every Wednesday starting today, February 5th and ending May 28th from 6 to 8pm. It centers the interviews Claudia Tate did of prominent Black women writers of the 70s and how their writing contributed to the work of moving us forward.