I know that I’ve said this before, but I hate flying. I hate flying especially for work. My anxiety is usually ratcheted up for days before and after a flight. And flying alone for a speaking engagement, knowing I’m going to be away from my family and surrounded by strangers, makes it even worse.
Because flying is such a large part of my job - and because while I hate flying, I absolutely love discovering new places - I’ve been working very hard on my flight anxiety.
A few weeks ago I few to Sonoma for a speaking engagement and completely fell apart. I had massive dental surgery days earlier (9 implants) and I was not prepared at all for the level of pain that I would be in, and for how different my face would look for weeks after. So, traveling alone in pain, with a puffy face and a mouth full of stitches, I decided that this would be the trip where I’d try to go without my xanax. This may not be the worst decision I’ve made in a while, but it certainly wasn’t one of my best.
I got through my flight okay, but it’s like I used up any reserves I had to handle anything. And the moment I was alone in a depressing middling hotel room that reminded me of the days when I used to be a traveling marketing manager for the auto industry (woooohhh that job sucked) my anxiety went off the rails.
I eventually climbed into the hotel’s hot tub, that was situated right in front of the parking lot, in my underwear, in wind so fierce that it immediately blew my clothes across the pool area. My partner happened to facetime me right as I climbed in, and I sat there on the phone with him, battered by the wind, and cried, while he tried his best to distract me from my meltdown.
The next day, I had an emergency session with my therapist, who tried to bring me out of my body’s crisis response and back into reality. My therapist asked me to look around and describe the room around me.
“I CAN’T!” I cried, “THIS HOTEL ROOM IS TOO UGLY.”
Anyways, I made it through the rest of the trip okay, thanks especially to my dear friend Talcott who happened to be in Sonoma at the same time, and offered me a day of low-key, restorative queer-parent community. Then I went to the airport to fly home, and became violently ill and spent about twenty minutes throwing up in the airport bathroom before stumbling out onto the plane (anxiety or food poisoning? Probably a bit of both).
I was due to fly out to Baltimore for work just a little over a week later, and to say that I was less than enthused is an understatement. My sister lives in Baltimore, so I had scheduled extra days there (all arranged before surgery and subsequent travel meltdowns).
But my therapist is trying to get me to stop thinking in absolutes. The experience that I had flying to Sonoma wasn’t guaranteed to be the experience I would have in Baltimore. And damn, they were so right.
I end up speaking with a lot of white people in this work. I end up speaking to a lot of majority white audiences. It’s the nature of public speaking work on issues of race and racism. A lot of majority white spaces have a lot of work to do, and while I can’t say that they always want to do that work when they ask me to come in, they at least want to look like they are doing the work. I enter a space like this and immediately try to gauge what I can do with the limited time and power I have in that moment to help the BIPOC who are in that space. What initiatives are they trying to push through that their white peers are in the way of? What microaggressions are they being subjected to every day? What space do they need to just be heard?
I am proud of what I can do in this short period of time, but I don’t love these gigs, if I’m honest. We so rarely get beyond surface level. So much of what we talk about is just steeped in whiteness. It is so much less than what we could be doing if we didn’t have to spend so much time just asking people to please stop fighting the real work that we want to do.
But this trip to Baltimore wasn’t that. I was speaking to a majority Black and brown crowd, in a majority Black city. I was speaking with educators who do equity work, many of whom are being actively targeted by white supremacists who have been trying to take any equity or inclusion out of our schools.
I walked into a room full of hundreds of people who didn’t need me to explain how white people need to be less obstructive. I walked into a room full of hundreds of people who didn’t need me to explain why we should be talking about race and racism at all. I walked into a room full of people who are fighting these battles every damn day.
People spend a lot of time trying to make Black people who write and speak on issues of race and racism feel really shitty for the work that we do. We are undermined a lot. I’d love to say that it’s just white people who do this to us, but it’s not. Whiteness loves to treat us both as the greatest threat to America, white people and all that is good in the world - but also as fraudsters who don’t accomplish anything and just make money off of an issue that they swear doesn’t exist. But also, there are people in our community who feel like we shouldn’t be doing this work either. Or if we are, we should be doing it for free to show that we are “really dedicated to the cause” - especially if we’re Black women. People seem to really want Black women to give their whole lives away for other people’s benefit.
And yeah, it can get to me. Not the white people - they are aren’t gonna let us exist in any shape or form without having something to say about it. But from my people - yeah - it can get to me. Part of it is because this racist capitalist system really does fucking suck. And I can sell books and make a living in my work, and so many people who do amazing work in our communities are struggling. And what? I’m at a desk? Complaining because sometimes I get paid to talk to white people?
But in front of this crowd I could feel energy hitting at me that so matched my own. People who spent most of their days in educational institutions that were so dismissive and derisive of their work, that were downright hostile to their presence. Some were doing this work in states that had made their work illegal. And they stayed in those spaces to try to create safety and opportunity for students and faculty of color. It was the work that they had chosen or the work that had chosen them, but it was necessary work. And they were so tired and scared and outraged.
And I drew on everything I had inside of me for that talk. I pulled my deepest motivations, that I turn to when my family has been threatened, when we’re being harassed, or when I’m just so fucking tired of having to have the same conversations over and over and over…
I shared my motivations, I shared my fears. I shared my hopes. I synthesized what I saw as the most useful conclusions of my years of work and I offered them all up as a loving gift to the audience staring back at me.
And y’all. The love that I was met with. The love that radiated back over me. I can’t describe how it felt. I was reminded why I do this work, and what my definition of success in this work really is. And it was in the deep breaths that I could see people in the audience being able to take. It was in the tears in their eyes.
After my speech, I stayed in the auditorium to talk with dozens of attendees who waited over a half hour for pictures and a brief chat. One woman thanked me for the affirmation that the talk gave her, and she said, “I really hope we gave you something too.”
“Oh y’all really did,” I replied.
“I can tell.” She said.
This is the work that I have chosen, or this is the work that has chosen me. I don’t really know. But what I do know is that I’m really good at it. I’m very very good at looking at this messy, complicated, violent and beautiful world and making some sense of it. I’m very good at putting it into words that people can understand. I’m very good at taking those feelings that live deep in your gut and unknotting them and translating them back to you so that you can see them in a different way.
And that work is necessary. It is as necessary as all of the other work for liberation that is being done by countless people right now. It is a part of that work, even if for a lot of the time, I’m doing it alone in my little office that really does need bigger windows because it can get really dark and depressing in here. I am connected because my work connects.
So yeah, I was really surprised this week. I was surprised in a way that isn’t really surprising. I was in community, and community took care of me the way that only community can. Now I’m back home in my little office, working on book edits, and trying to remember that even now, I’m connected to my community, and my work is testament to that.
There is Joy in This Work
"But what I do know is that I’m really good at it. I’m very very good at looking at this messy, complicated, violent and beautiful world and making some sense of it." - This is why I'm here, this is why I spend money on your work. You are what you know you are, and I am better for reading what you know and acting on it to the best of my ability. Solid investment in both of us.
You are really really really good at what you do. Frank, introspective, blunt, analytical, compassionate, caring, no bullshit, smart, so smart, and so much more. Take good care of yourself.❤️