I haven’t written here in awhile, and it’s for good reason(s), the main reason being I haven’t known what to say. There’s an element of realizing I haven’t been entirely honest in my work here, too, and if you can’t be honest in your writing, then can you be honest at all?

Realizing it has mainly come from living life. That’s about all I can really say about that, at least right now.

I had hoped for this blog to be a platform for something bigger than myself, but as events transpire and change unfolds, I am also learning that maybe that’s not possible. Not on this scale. Maybe this is just a piece of that something-bigger, or a refraction of it. I still stand by a lot of what I said here when it comes to what’s happened over the course of the last several weeks (and months).

In light of that, I remain wary of any action that seems like it won’t last, or make a difference in the long-term. Or acknowledge the breadth of our collective humanity. There’s a lot out there right now (i.e. on instagram) that warns about letting this turn into a PR opportunity and I think that’s really great advice to heed. Because any kind of justice-seeking is a piece of something larger, and that something larger is a culture that does not value who you are as a person at all. And the more the language around this moment gets commodified, the less likely it is to reflect any kind of reality, and that cheapens any good intentions.

The way the average person is conditioned to have knee-jerk activist reactions is not unrelated to how the culture at large has trained us to be hyper-responsive to any and all needs. And it’s not sustainable and it’s not okay.

So that’s what I mean by wariness — it comes from how easy it is to perform a certain perspective, especially now. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s possible to break completely free from that performative nature, not in 2020, but the reason I’m not convinced is because I know I have the tendency to get sucked into it too. Being reactive is exhausting, and I know because I can be a pretty reactive person and thus I’m often pretty exhausted.

I’ve also come to see that there’s a huge performative element here, in this space. And so I’ve been trying to deal with it by archiving a great deal of what I’ve shared. I don’t know if it fits anymore.

And I also don’t know that this matters that much, except to me. But this is my blog, so. Posted, said.

It’s not to erase anything I don’t agree with anymore or make myself look better (okay, it’s a little bit curation-y). But moreso it’s an acknowledgement that some truths can’t actually be communicated in words. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just hard to come to terms with it.

And I do think there’s a lot of truth getting overlooked out there, right now, regarding the fact that none of our actual human-ness is really being valued (I’m looking at you, phased school reopenings in Virginia), but maybe we’ll all get clear on it together before the year is over. It’s not like it ever can be hidden for very long.