Opening

The last 20 months or so, if we are being real, the last 45 years have been a real whirlwind. In that time, I've moved from my hometown of Detroit to both California and Texas, and then back to Detroit. If you ever need to ship across the country, call me. At the same time, I left a job I loved and built, started and completed a fellowship, freaked out about what to do next, and started working as a coach with local news architects across the country because everything is always working out for me even when I think it's all falling apart.

Friendships have been built, and others have ended in that same period, and because the universe thinks I'm its personal plot development device, I find myself in love. Not kinda or sorta. I am IN LOVE.

Shit.

As I type all of this out, it sounds like I have been living a really lovely version of my life, and somehow it all left me feeling hysterical, a word that, as a woman, I do not like assigning to myself, but dammit if I wasn't. This was not the first time I'd found myself in the goodness of life and somehow received it as a cataclysm.

Welcome to my brain, ladies and gentlemen.

After months of rumination over this, it occurred to me that when my definitions change, I struggle. Going from startup builder to Fellow. Hard. From Detroiter to wanderer. Hard. From the single “rich” auntie to lover girl. HARD.

Last week, I was having a conversation with a dear friend who has been experiencing a season of hardship that has lasted longer than we expected. They found themselves at the part of life where you have to lean into help from the village because the weight is no longer bearable as a solo carrier.

For those of us who pride ourselves on being able to do all the things for ourselves, and more importantly, support the people around us, it was heartbreaking.

We come from people who understand village instinctively. We are village babies. But somewhere along the way, many of us started living like emperors instead of townspeople. We like the village as long as we don't need anything from it, which is wild because noone is a village is more needy than the emperor.

We give to control, to keep the definition of having it together in place because, God forbid, in a society collapsing in on its outdated ways, we find ourselves out of sorts.

As I was talking to my friend, I had to laugh because, beloved, you're in this movie, too.

So much of the struggle I described at the top was less about the changing definitions and more about the amount of control and village support it required. I had to get more honest about what I needed and wanted, and that not all of it would come from me alone.

As the fellowship wrapped, I still wasn't sure where I wanted to live or what shape my work would take next. A friend offered me the opportunity to housesit in California. The village gave me respite from the immediacy of needing to know my next steps.

“Order my steps,” I've cried out to my maker many days. Yet when the order came in the form of an offered home, borrowed space, and extended care, I received it like a handout instead of what it really was: evidence that I was deeply sustained by my village.

It is one thing to let people admire you. It is another thing entirely to let them support you.

The truth was, I didn't just struggle with changing definitions. I struggled with dependency. With uncertainty and with allowing myself to be witnessed as I was becoming. 

I knew how to reinvent myself as long as I could still perform competently in the middle of it.

I am still learning how to be a townsperson deliberately. How to need without shame. How to receive without narrating it as failure. How to let my life expand beyond the definitions that once made me feel safe.

This life, it turns out, requires softer definitions. Ones that can hold harder realities, make room for agility, and bend with the constant winds of change.

I still panic when the shape of my life changes. Some days, I mistake the goodness of forward movement for instability. But I am learning that the unraveling was never the problem.

The problem was believing I had to hold everything together alone to deserve the life I was building.

Music is my most consistent thinking companion. Many of the essays you’ll find here borrow their titles from songs that shaped, steadied, or stretched my thinking while I was writing them.

The song behind this essay
“Opening” by Robert Glasper
from The Photograph (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)