On Post-Pandemic Levity & Permission to Disappoint

Some stuff I'm carrying with me in a post-COVID world. Yellow Brick Road.

Credit: Ethel Moore

Welcome to Yellow Brick Road, an exploration of the guided path!!

I’ve been feeling like a debutante with stage fright which is a very main character thing to say, but you get it.

I’m not the same person I was in March of 2020; none of us are. Now, there’s an expectation to re-enter the world with a binder of accomplishments in legacy work, a refurbished look, and a memory completely swabbed of the House of Horrors we just walked through. My bones are in 2020, and I’m still making the pilgrimage to collect the person I’ve left behind, and yet I’m expected to host a grand reveal of a brand new bitch. We all joke about having developed at least acute social anxiety, not knowing how to navigate reconfigured boundaries, and inability to host small talk, but I’m. Not. Joking.

The truth is, there is a good chance that the person I am revealing is far less palatable than the one who hadn’t processed global loss, communal depression, visceral numbness and persistent fight or flight mode for over a year which expedited the ending of a relationship, several friendships, some career traps I didn’t even realize I was walking into (thank goddess). And I know we all seek relief from the heaviness of it all. I know we seek frivolity, we want our vivacity back, and we want the ability to march to the ticking clock of reliability again. We want to forget everything. But who benefits from that? The 40 hour work week? The productivity mill?

I don’t want to forget everything. “Everything going on” made me. “Everything” tore me from the quivering, porcelain center and mended me with gold. I want to heal and do it in my own time. And frankly, management has different priorities now. Those priorities have made me accept sensitivity, accept slower pace, accept solitude, and those things may repel a type that I once attracted and tolerated with open arms. My arms are a bit more closed now, because they’re full and not in a “at capacity” way - in a “I have so much I only dreamed of and then some” kind of way. As I tip-toe back to industry events, get-togethers and - dare I say - DaTeS, I’m granting myself permission to disappoint people by not being who I once was and not apologizing for it.

I have redefined the terms of my investment in myself and my community so many times over in the last year. Those terms externalized as daily habits, rituals, and shifts only gifted to me by clocking out from capitalism in the ways I know how, the liminality of heartbreak, the great dismantling of one’s life, and the stillness one finds in chaos when that’s all you’ve known. Here are some of the rituals which have become the foundation of my life since the pandemic restrictions and will continue to be honored as the world beckons me to “return to normal”:

Walking

Yes, I literally mean obsessively walking. Walking hours a day. Incorporating walking into my creative process and letting the life energy we call air move me to a different state of being. Without philosophy, it’s just fucking amazing, and I felt more connected than ever to my cantankerous grandfather who uses a walk as a remedy to everything. He made some points with this. Walking always felt like a dilly-dally, a distraction, and a wild waste of time. And then the pandemic hit and it was the only activity safe enough to partake in, alone or with socially distanced company. Where was I headed when I left my house? Nowhere, but I saw Brooklyn for the first time in three years. I saw the same people on the same block every day and realized they most likely had been there every day prior to the pandemic too, and I was too much in the monotony and hubbub of life to recognize the stories happening right under my nose. I guess what I gained above all else was a bit of perspective from the street when they usually tell you to go up to the mountain, and I learned what can be revealed about ourselves and our surroundings when we journey without expectation.

Nesting

Basically, I got grown and realized I needed kitchen supplies. I sold my soul to the Always Pan by Our Place (this is neither an ad nor an emphatic endorsement, but I do enjoy it) without a single drop of shame. I am now an air fryer sun, a dutch oven moon, and a cast iron rising and I own it proudly. Per the essence of this newsletter and its initial inspiration, I found out what Home means for me right now, and how fruitful life becomes when you allow roots to stretch deeper and wider. For years, I felt myself evolving from the person who once compulsively inserted myself into the most crowded spaces I could find, but absolutely refused to claim the term “homebody.” I was perhaps the most at peace I’d been in my adult life when there was zero expectation to leave home and when the money I was once hemorrhaging on social and day-to-day obligation, I could use to build a space that felt like love.

I am relieved to report I am now the queer, witch auntie with prints of her naked body on her apartment walls. I also exclusively dream of Martha Stewart’s jadeite collection and will not truly rest until it is mine.

Hobbies

None of the adults in my life growing up had a pronounced passion for anything outside of work, and I wanted to make sure to break that cycle so I wouldn’t one day be bitching at my kids about not having a life outside of them. A lot of us get deep into adulting and forget to have hobbies, and forget that hobbies don’t have to take a lot of time even though we use time as an excuse. Stress, which is very real and a huge fucking liar telling us we don’t have time to play, is the real perpetrator of the anti-play time agenda and not time itself.

If you’re a creative, you also know how easy it is to start to enjoy a hobby, discover you’re good at it, and then kind of accidentally make it into a business - at which point it is no longer a damn hobby!! Anyway, I challenged myself to take up some new hobbies over the last year and not feel weird about breaking in a pair of rollerskates at the park at 7 am because I was influenced by TikTok and my pride won’t allow me to bust my ass in front of children at Herbert von King park. To not feel weird about going to a couples ceramics class because it puts me in a trance state like nothing else. To take singing lessons because baby Kendra loved a stage.

Stay tuned for my next trick!

Solitude & Spirituality

Solitude is how we find where we end and other people begin, and our limits are guidelines for boundaries. Solitude was really scary for me, and then witnessing the dismantling of a life built on avoiding solitude at all costs while in quarantine was even scarier so I thought twice about the fear of solitude. I ditched a lot of people this year or rather, allowed them to drift out of my life. Owning up to how much I disregarded my own boundaries because I didn’t want to be alone - physically, spiritually, emotionally - opened up Pandora’s box.

I learned to be alone in a place void of protection, or distrust of other people, or fear of rejection, or unnecessary isolation - but in curiosity and love for what I might find out about myself when I allow space. I strengthened my meditation practice rather than just saying I was going to, and discovered I was actually never truly alone. I was always sitting with my ancestors, with my spirit guides, with my dreams, with my inner child, with all of the loves of my life soon to come when I’m ready and open. In running from my heart’s calling to find solitude at long last in favor of proving something about myself (and my capacity to be loved) to other people, I was creating loneliness where solitude could exist comfortably.

While I’m stoked to be in physical community again, intentional alone time and discovering my own energy has made me extremely aware of when I absolutely do not want to be around someone or in a particular environment. It has made me less accessible, more weird, and calls for stronger boundaries, but I can’t sacrifice my peace to appease in the ways I once did and I don’t want to.

If you’re interested in incorporating a nice voice other than your own into daily practice and don’t know where to start in meditation, there are literally hundreds of guided meditations on Hay House podcast channel.

Centering Pleasure

The first few months of quarantine, the question I asked myself the most was “what would make me feel good right now?” I cried healing tears almost every day at how deeply cared for I felt while showing up for desire with such persistence. The decisions I made for myself when I led with grace and didn’t consider what I should do, eat, listen to, create, and make time for expanded, brightened, and saturated the vision I had for my life moving forward. It occurred to me that much of shame is created in personal resistance and over-complicating decisions beyond simply knowing what we want.

First off, I masturbated a lot and acquired my new fave toy. I ate foods that made me light up from the inside and played around with family recipes for hours because I could. I did what I used to do when I was in elementary school and wrote stories and colored and daydreamed, and I released myself from the self-imposed ridicule of seeking levity, creature comforts and enjoyment without an excuse or as a form of reward. I read Pleasure Activism just a few months before the pandemic and it couldn’t have come at a more perfect time.

Mutual Aid

During the Summer of Listening and Learning, my non-Black friends showed the fuck up. They bought me dinner, sent me groceries, paid for therapy, and just did the fucking thing that needed to be done instead of asking how I was and why. I’m not in the business of patting anyone on the back for being human, but we are all learning what it means to reduce harm and being an active recipient of mutual aid redefined what community means to me.

Opening your purse, dropping off at community fridges, participating in park clean-ups, solving for problems which directly impact the people you look in the eye every day is the future. There was no single organization or power structure which came to the aid of citizens in this crisis like we came to the aid of each other, and that created a lens through which I promote liberation in my personal life and in investment of my community. In Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis, Dean Spade states simply that mutual aid projects expose the reality that people do not have what they need and propose that we can address this injustice together. Spade outlines three, key elements of mutual aid:

1. Mutual aid meets the most basic needs and provides education on why exactly it is that these needs aren’t already being met for all.

2. Mutual aid is the core action of social movements because it mobilizes people and expands solidarity.

3. Mutual aid encourages skill development in how to participate in one’s own liberation instead of waiting for saviors.

This read was an accessible mutual aid how-to. You should buy Mutual Aid and enrich your understanding of this here. It’s less than $10 and important.

While I’m admittedly nervous about integrating back into some version of reality, I am also really excited about the ways in which life will meet me exactly where I am. I’m so proud to witness all of you do The Work on a cellular level, show up for the challenges we’ve been thrown as a society, and still know exactly how to hold each other in tenderness as we find community’s embrace again. It is the greatest honor to meet all of you over and over.