crash landing
3 hacks for a more meaningful life
I got my kwanzaa candles in the mail two days before christmas. that week in between christmas and the new year feels like some kind of time warp. In this provincial, college town, traffic flows differently. instead of waking up at 6:30, you give yourself a break and snooze until 8. the cold in the air makes going outside a whole ordeal so you put off things like taking out the trash, grocery shopping, or going for a walk. all that in conjunction with seasonal affective symptoms, and suddenly Sunday has become WednesdayThursdayFriday.
over the years since i’ve been away from home, it’s a ritual i’ve created for myself in this wacky week be present with myself when the hustle and bustle is on hiatus and there’s less external factors to distract me from the loneliness, anxiety, and grief i’ve collected over the year.
not a year goes by that i don’t recall childhood memories of a fellowship hall full of the smell of several roasted things, baked goods, simmering cajun gumbo. the sound of cousins laughing, kids running and squealing playfully together because its been months, if not years, since we’d all been gathered in one place. i miss that place. so i’ve taken to lighting these candles to remember better.
i did remember to light the black candle on the first day.
U-N-I-T-YYYY: Umoja
when it’s all said and done: people are all that we have. i hear you universe. damn.
when i was younger, i used to say “i hate people” — in a dry, ironic way. it was how i processed being an introvert with social anxiety constantly having to navigate group activities, institutional communal spaces, and straight up just being in public. not accounting for the neurospicy-ness that i later learned was also at play, interacting with people was one of my least favorite activities. i much preferred my solitude. there, i knew how everything worked. i was safe.
but then i moved to new york city - one of the loneliest places ever when you’re afraid of people. out in the world on my own is where i began to learn.
spirituality and faith formation were huge themes of my year. if someone had told me that I’d leave new york city to be a seminary student in new jersey… i would have shrugged and said your guess is as good as mine. i rediscovered my faith in new york city through a really amazing community in the bronx. it became such an animating force of my inspiration and motivation and encouragement at a time when life was getting ready to deal me a doozy.
God really does work through people. i often say people are the best mirrors. maybe that’s why i used to think i hated them - i wasn’t ready to have the things i was ashamed of, afraid of, resentful of; things that contradicted the version of myself I made in my head on display for another to see; i wasn’t ready to have those things reflected back to me.
i was lying to myself. the truth is, I love people. in 2024, i learned that because i love them so much, i’m deathly afraid of disappointing them. not doing so consciously or maliciously, but just by virtue of my own limitations.
that’s what the challenge of Umoja is: learning to be in that vulnerable space of allowing myself to be witnessed by people not just when i’m in a good mood and feel like kicking it, but when i’m angry, when i’m sad, when i have nothing to say, when something terrible has happened and i need to process, when i need to scream and shout and let it all too.
it’s an invitation to think about the evermore critical question that is: “How do we be together at the end of this world?”
The next couple days are a blur. I went to bed at 4pm, wake at 9am the next day. i subsit on charcuterie meats and cheeses and thai take out. i didn’t leave my apartment for much of anything besides chicken chores. God is in the chickens too. chickens are people too, you see. and they need me. so, depressive state or not, i show up.
A conversation from friendsgiving is still playing in my mind: 3 Hacks for Building Community. we were laughing at this making fun of social media’s latest obsession with hacks that is the latest attention-grabbing device/hook for content engagement.
Everybody wants hacks for everything now. To make big tasks seem manageable and attainable. To simplify complexity. “hack” is just the latest jargon for an old fantasy. that someone will raise the magic wand or release the genie out of the bottle to make it all better.
hack 1: show up
hack 2: be present
hack 3: stay when it’s hard
In light of this election, more and more people are having some version of this conversation, asking some version of this question: How do we be together better? Because just looking at all of *gestures around me* this, the evidence suggests that we’re all we got when the government institutions that are supposed to buoy and support
On the day that I can hear the snow dripping as it melts from the chicken coop, tree branches, and barn, I lit the candles for Kujichagulia, Ujima, and Ujamaa and stared at the flames as they danced atop the red and green candle sticks.
Kujichagulia affirms that we have the right to exist. We have a right to feel affirmed in our bodies. That we deserve access to dignified, gender-affirming care. That we get to stand up for ourselves. We get to have boundaries. We get to be in spaces that make us feel safe. We get to dislodge our shame. We get to be flawed.
all you need is a bit of creativity and faith. how do we be together when we’re all doing our best and it’s still imperfect?
when we all need a fucking nap?
when money is funny?
when you’re depressed?
when things are left unsaid?
when we are getting on each other’s fucking nerves?
when we all still need to be tended to?
when we all need each other?
We are each other’s harvest. We are each other’s business. We are each other’s magnitude and bond. - Gwendolyn Brooks
hack 1: show up
hack 2: be present
hack 3: stay when it’s hard
i wrote these reflections over a year ago now, and in many ways they are still present for me and — surprisingly — increasingly relevant. uprooting from my community in the bronx of 4 years. ending a romantic relationship. which shifted other relationships. the anxiety and grief of which trigger disociative coping habits, like me smoking weed and going down a Hot Ones rabbit hole on Youtube.
the joke is that all these hacks are way harder than they sound.
at the end of 2024 and closing in on 29, i’m feeling the closing of a chapter. leaving the ambient sounds of car horns and train tracks and sirens that used to inspire me. feeling a closing of this era of individuation that encapsulated my 20s. moving to new jersey. going to seminary. and really liking it. making new friends. building new habits. intentionally forming my own faith and relationship to God.
in 2024, i showed up; however imperfectly. learning to show up for myself opened the door to my being able to begin to figure out how to show up for the people in my life that i cared about.
i worked really hard to be present for my life. in ways i haven’t probably ever. doing a lot of internal work around substance useage, building new routines for myself. participating in the community. in 2024, i became a member of Princeton Theological Seminary’s Assoc. of Black Seminarians. I’m on the garden team for my community garden. i’m on the farm team at the Farminary. i finally decided to stop hiding from people.
i thought i was gonna go out last night, maybe bring in the new year with friends in the city, but i just was not feeling it. my knees and feet were achy and it was pouring raining by 4pm. i watched a marathon of Youtube videos about farm management and regenerative agriculture, had some beers, and smoke hookah in my living room. i talked to a couple friends on the phone.
then i wake up, and suddenly it’s the first of a new month and a new year.
i like that the final day of kwanzaa and the first day of the year is faith (imani). it rings with knew resonance this year. faith, which interpret as hope, is the ground in which my purpose stands.
The aim of each thing we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children more possible. With the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision — a longed for bed which i enter gratefully and from which i rise up empowered. - Audre Lorde
hack 1: show up
hack 2: be present
hack 3: stay when it’s hard
let’s be clear. ain’t nobody condoning staying in an abusive situation. and obviously everybody is not meant for everybody. some people are only in your life for a season… yada yad… and/but i think there’s something to be said about faithfully navigating conflict with those we call our people, the ones who we can’t imagine our lives without. after all, if healing happens in community, how can we heal when we abandon each other for being broken?
in 2024, navigating conflict was a significant and recurring context that i found myself inhabiting. from unexpressed expectations, withheld emotions, differences in perspectives, the shoulda-couldas, triggers and traumas — they’re just human responses to the experience of living in this world. the imperialist-whitesupremacist-capitalist-patriarchy has done a number on us all!
what’s hard about conflict is that a lot of conflict is framed is through the lens of carceral logic. accountability can read as blame or punishment. for a lot of people, conflict means violence isn’t far away.
being conflict averse isn’t a character trait as much as it is a coping mechanism for the violences of systemic oppression.
over the friendsgiving dinner table, sue ann painted the perfect metaphor:
“it’s like riding through a tunnel. i’m thinking about that time i rode my bike through a mountain. it’s just dark for a long time and you can only see what’s directly in front of you. after so long in the dark, it starts to get scary and you think it might never end. but you just have to keep going. cuz you know eventually there will be a light at the end.”
for me, that’s where the creativity (kuumba) and faith (imani) come in.
in 2025, i’m trying to do the work to show up better and lean into to the hardness that emerges. in 2025, my faith is planted in the good news that the season of advent is over and the kingdom of God is drawing near. and i believe it looks like me and you.
John 1:5
The light shines in the darkness; and the darkness did not overtake it.