Last week, I completed my 35th rotation around the sun. It was my 5th birthday since the beginning of the pandemonium.
And BAY-BEEEE, it feels so good to be ALIVE.
The audacity of that statement though, am I right?
But I say it boldly, in full acknowledgment that since October 7th of last year, over 100k Gazans have been killed, injured, or disappeared due to yet more state sponsored and syndicated violence against melanated humans.
I have the capacity for this celebration of my own aliveness only after spending the last 5 years contemplating these questions:
What responsibility do I have because I am alive in “Unprecedented” or better yet, “Revolutionary times”?
What gifts do I uniquely have to offer?
What Am I deeply in service to?
What does the way I spend my time, say about my values?
Value- That’s a funny concept. Especially for someone who has spent years making a living by brokering solutions that drive "value" to the bottom lines of some notable VC backed companies. The unicorn startups that claim to operate under certain values to justify their reason for existing. Companies that when mentioned on a CV, instantly add to your credibility and "value" as a candidate to be hired, onboarded, and extracted from like the Cobalt mines in the Congo or my ancestors who’s stolen labor built the economic backbone of this country.
As a descendant of those divine, discarded peoples- How do I, Alysa, a salesperson by trade- asses my own self- worth and value?
It couldn’t be tied to my professional accomplishments because I’d been laid off. I was already labelled as one of the dispensable ones by my employer. And since that first layoff in May 2020, 3 more employers have labelled me the same way. Was I the drama? A pattern had emerged. It looked like this:
YES, I am the drama. But not just me. In July of 2020, one of my faaaaaves, Megan Thee Stallion, caught the hellish backlash of Misogynoir after she was assaulted with a deadly weapon, out of spite- by now a convicted rapper whose name I refuse to include. Like the Hot Girl Coach herself, black women like me are blamed, harassed, and not believed about our lived experiences of othering, marginalization, and outright violence- and them shamed as we work towards healing through that same trauma.
"Black Women live, create and build with the future in mind because the present has no place for us. In order to stay alive, we have to imagine ourselves in a future where we not only survive but thrive. A place where we are understood. A place where we still exist. This is a tall order in the world but this is the way we make the present work for us, every day and it's the reason I'm most proud of us." - Shayla Lawson
The additional work of constantly “thinking outside the box”, boundary setting and resetting, appealing for dignity and the right to just be a human with emotions is the unseen, unappreciated, and unpaid labor that has always just been expected from us.
It’s been over 30 years since bell hooks wrote Aint I a Woman, and she was quoting Sojourner Truth from 1863 THEN! So don't get it twisted. I WILL NOT spend ANY energy here convincing a presumed white audience that what I’m talking about is real. Too often-we are gaslit once we arrive and excel in predominatingly white spaces. “Bring your whole self to work” they say. “DEI is part of the DNA of our culture” they say.
But what happens when a Black woman (who by nature of our intersectionality are 34% more likely to have PTSD than white women) is experiencing a mental health crisis, and her soft spoken, white lady manager doesn’t believe her?
Without bearing all my scars, I’ll summarize by saying- I knew I was not safe working in these conditions, with my conditions. In her January 14th Medium article, Dr. Ciera Graham has the words for me and every other black woman when she says,
The resignation of Harvard President Dr. Claudine Gay, the untimely suicide of Dr. Antoinette Candia-Bailey hit hard. But so did the suicide of Entertainment Journalist and Former Miss America Cheslie Krys ESQ. before her, and the live-streamed collapse and subsequent death of Temple University JoAnne Epps. These are all tragedies that point to the answer.
So now here I am, back on “social media” to tell y’all that I refuse to be complicit, and I do not recommend that anybody (but especially folks with black bodies) attempt to live in the dissonance of manufactured capitalist urgency while fighting to find meaning amongst collective and personal grief, financial insecurity, caretaking, and mental illness. Your email found me grieving the loss of my own family matriarch, Sandra Bland, Nia Wilson, and Toni Morrison. “But the SLA’s!" Chiiiiiiiile
The contemplation continues...
What responsibility do I have because I am alive in “Unprecedented” or better yet, “Revolutionary times”?
What gifts do I uniquely have to offer?
What Am I deeply in service to?
What does the way I spend my time, say about my values?
I don't have all the answers, but I am ready to share my work.
I'm writing this to publicly renounce my allegiance to the structures, and practices that exist to extort and extract from me without respect for, or right relationship to my humanity, my community, my dignity, my ancestors and the history of my people in the United States. Why? Because offering my gifts in service of extorting my own people, being a gatekeeper to resources, and hoarding belongings I don't need while the planet burns, Fascism is trending, and another genocide ensues- is in direct conflict with the person I've taken 35 years to become.
If now isn't the time for dissent, what more dire circumstances am I waiting for?