A Looking Glass

A year ago, on this exact date, I packed up a car with my belongings and headed towards a new city. 

In the weeks leading up to my departure, people kept telling me that my upcoming move was an act of bravery. It puzzled me to think that leaving my birthplace and starting a new job was brave. Surely there were other and smaller words that described what I was about to do. Brave felt too big, too strong of a word. Brave is reserved for larger, scarier, and more unknown things. 

However, as this year unfolded, I realized it’s the bravest I’ve been in a long time. 

I’ll finish that thought in a moment. 

To desire comfort is truly human and often times comfort is given a bad reputation. In spaces with privilege, access, education, and money, desiring comfort is to be lazy. It’s to lack ambition, it’s to be a waste. Even people like myself, who ascend to these privileged spaces we’re not born into, begin to take these ideas to heart. But with the world unraveling around us at all times, who doesn’t want to be comfortable? To be around things that are familiar and make them feel safe? Being in your comfort zone is intrinsic. Especially when you are not a man, especially when you are black, and especially when you aren’t afforded monetary privilege. 

I’ve realized that most people in this world are not afforded the ability to be in a comfort zone, contrary to popular opinion. How can a comfort zone exist when you have to figure out where the next check, meal, and rent will come from? And if I am being truly honest, I’ve began to see that luxury is akin to comfort and a lot of folks who “step outside their comfort zone” use luxury as a means to challenge themselves. But that’s a different topic. 

As we all know, this past year highlighted many injustices in America. I won’t spend too much time on those injustices because it’s apparent. It’s so clear, that to not see it, is to make a conscious choice to be blind.

Personally, 2020 turned my being into a looking glass. Reflected back at me were my deep inherent beliefs, my true desires, and that no matter how much I question myself, I have an unabashed amount of blind faith in me. As my beliefs and desires took shape and ricocheted colors off one another, I stood in awe, honored to be a witness. 

Yet, I started to see that the people around me may not hold these same beliefs. See many of you reading this are not in the group of people who don’t have comfort zones. I say that not to indict us, but to help all of us see where we stand a bit clearer. 

For me, it was intuitive to take a form of collective action. To put a pause on my life for a moment in order to keep others alive. I was okay sacrificing a lot, because if the option was between my fleeting happiness and another person’s life…well we know which one I’d choose. Some of you might think while reading this, that it is unfair of me to equate wanting to live normally for even quick bits of time, to the death of someone else. My response to that? The numbers of deaths in this country tell us that my equation is not far off. 

But my apologies, I went off course a bit. Let me get back to my thought regarding bravery. 

I lasted 9 months of the pandemic in my apartment before going back home to NYC. In totality I spent 11 months in a new city, with a drastically decreased amount of community than I previously had. I also spent a good chunk of those months in solitude thinking, writing, watching more tv than I have in years, and turning into a looking glass. It was a hard 11 months, as I not only had to adjust to a new place, job, and people, I also had to adapt to the new normal of a pandemic. When I got off the plane and went home to my mother in November, I’m not sure if she noticed the tears building as we hugged. If she didn’t, she now knows reading this. I missed her.

If those last few sentences didn’t tell you, it was a really hard 11 months. These 11 months were my choice, and I made a decision to forgo normality because I knew that in the wide scheme of life, my life did not change as significantly as it did for others.  I’m usually not in the camp of comparison, because I do believe there will always be someone who has it better or worse than you. But if it’s between life and death…comparison is necessary in order to be grounded, to make collective decisions that benefit us all. To question the structures that so call govern us and to call ourselves out for the individualistic choices we make. I say we because I am not exempt from this introspection that is needed. 

So yeah, I was really brave in 2020. I wasn’t afraid to confront the deafening silence and see myself. Two days ago, as I sat on a plane, I realized it’s been a year since I left. When I got back to Chicago that day, I read my last few journal entries of 2020. Without realizing as I wrote them, all of my entries, written nonconsecutively over the span of 4 months, had a common thread. 

In each of them, I grappled with the concepts of home, love, and community. What I found most poignant is that in the last two months especially, I repeatedly wrote in subtle and blatant ways that I am always covered and loved. I’m sure this need to remind myself of love was compounded by me becoming a year older, the death of a friend, and coming home for the first time in 11 months. It brought me to tears to see how much I worked at grounding myself and how at peace I was at seeing myself with no distractions.

This got really long, so I will end this with something I wrote on 11/10/20, my birthday: 

"I am loved. I am loved. I am loved.

I am loved and I am so committed to knowing myself. It is so fucking hard, but I know that truly knowing myself is what holds me steady when the ground feels shaky."

Despite the ground feeling shaky in every way and at every point this past year, I’ve never liked myself more. I’ve never been braver.

I wish you all a year of health, bravery, and love.