Imagine you’re in a meeting. I know. I know. Meetings are terrible. Just hang with me for a minute.

So you’re in this meeting. It’s not a Zoom meeting. You’re in real life.

For the sake of this thought experiment, let's say you’re seated at a table in a familiar room. You’re coming together with colleagues or folks who do shared work for a volunteer group where you’ve devoted time for a few years.

Got the picture? If you struggle, swap in a room from the most recent work-related tv show you’ve seen. It’ll do the job.

Cool. Now let’s add to this image.

Just over a year ago, I started a blog post with this statement: “I’m tired of answering ‘how are you?’” I stand by my discomfort with the question although my reasoning seems to be evolving. While it’s a social custom, it just doesn’t tell me what I want or even need to know. It doesn’t give me information to help me navigate the situation that is about to unfold.

We do this dance, it seems, to avoid the reality that might be. What if the barista at your favorite coffee shop didn’t just say she was “fine” or “good”? What if she actually told you what feeling she was most identifying within that moment? What if you cared about the response?

I’ve long had the best of intentions for staying organized and being productive. From the outside, I suspect I often look like I pull both of these things off. Inside, however, the story looks a bit different.

I prefer a clean and organized house and a neat and orderly office. However, I confess it’s often organization theatre. My secrets are in my closets, drawers, and little boxes that are stuffed with the clutter and disarray of my life.

When it comes to productivity, I want to have something to show for myself - always. However, I have never felt comfortable observing or even understanding the line between productive and unproductive. Or, perhaps more to the point: between productive and hyperproductive. Desperate to not be seen as lazy, incapable, or irresponsible, I have always aimed to achieve more, to demonstrate competency, and to, well, just look busy!

So where has that left me?

I want to say so much right now, but the words are beyond me. In Hamilton, Eliza says “there are moments with the words don’t reach.” This may be one of those moments for me. However, I think too that the last four years (at least) might have been a season wherein the words have not reached.

And we can do better.

This blog post is inspired by an assignment I’ve been doing with my first-year composition students for the last year. The task, offered at the start of the semester, is for folks to introduce themselves by way of some kind of extended metaphor. I tell my students that they should compare themselves to something out there in the world as a way of helping me know who they are.

I like this assignment because it asks first-year college students to reflect upon that daunting question we’re all out there answering each day: “who are you?” Often when I meet with students to discuss their projects, they tell me that no one has ever asked them who they are. Hearing this really hits me - not because it’s shocking, but because I think forming a strong sense of identity is hard. I also know that the hardest terms I’ve had as a teacher have been those that I started with the assumption that I knew who my students were.

So this post walks through my own sense of self and how it relates to the assumptions we came about the others in our midst. I rarely do the assignments I give my students. And this experience makes me think I would do well to work alongside them more often.

I recently watched Silence of the Lambs again for the first time in quite some time. Over the summer a group of former students and I met periodically as a low-key book club. The first book we read was Silence of the Lambs, and because I learned that most of them had never seen the movie, I suggested (or maybe one of them did) that we watch the film at the end of July.

There’s a lot not to recommend about Silence of the Lambs, if I’m honest. While it weaves an interesting story, it’s important to be mindful of the damaging portrayal of transgender identity that has largely gone undiscussed while we marvel at the genius of Anthony Hopkins uttering, “Hello, Clarice”.

What stands out to me about this film, however, is a different one liner: “it puts the lotion on the skin or it gets the hose again.”

Why?

I can find opportunity in most difficult circumstances. I have found ways to thrive as the world seems to be crashing around us. But last night I fell apart on the living room floor, crying “we’re fucked” while my husband held me close. I went to bed without hope, and most importantly: without faith.

This morning, I woke up at 4 am, looking for peace and perspective. I found myself reading an article written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg for Passover in 2015. The piece was part of American Jewish World Service’s Chag v’Chesed series.

I let her words wash over me and then I wrote in response, using a style that’s become commonplace to me when I write litanies for Sunday morning services at Commonwealth Baptist Church. 

I love well-designed things. I tend toward minimalism. I adore simple designs limited only to black and white. I’ve come to notice I’m drawn to certain florals. I’m a sucker for any shade of teal and millennial pink is my guilty pleasure. 

The truth is that I wanted to go into design work when I was a teenager, but my fear of my own artistic ability caused me to take another route. Truth be told: I would have loved a career as a graphic designer or industrial designer. 

Instead, I turned to the written word and started a love affair with document design and visual rhetoric. I suspect it is this combined love for design and my loyalty to language causes me to be drawn to stationary stores and bookshops like a magnet. 

Jen Sincero frames much of the struggle people face in living their best life as a need to move past their “limiting false beliefs.” Exploring the idea of the unconscious versus conscious mind, she notes how we internalize a lot of input we receive as young people, before our conscious minds fully develop. As a result, by the time we hit puberty we have a set of rules in our heads that we’ve picked up on from life experience, but that we haven’t fully tested from any kind of logical standpoint. Are our conclusions actually valid and sound? Thinking of my internalized “shoulds” in this light of this unconscious versus conscious framework is proving helpful.

I went through a period wherein I listened exclusively to Green Day.

This was a strange rebellion in a lot of ways. I had access to amazing music in my household. In fact, over the last few years I have been actively trying to replicate the modest, yet excellently curated vinyl collection my dad had during those same years. But for a solid three years or so, I only listened to Green Day.

It’s somewhat embarrassing now how much reverence I gave their music, and more specifically, Billie Joe Armstrong’s songwriting. Their songs were a kind of safe place for both my immaturity and adolescent angst. In them I found rest, comfort, perhaps most importantly, recognition.

Just before COVID-19 shutdown the Commonwealth of Virginia, I attended the graveside memorial of my friend Dafna’s beloved father. I stood during the service with my husband and several very dear colleagues, all of us mutual friends of Dafna’s and big fans of Bory, or Papa S, as many of us knew him. 

 The service is touching and Dafna’s tribute to her father is nothing short of exquisitely beautiful. I roll my eyes at myself when the first thing I blurt out to Dafna after the service is something about her eulogy being excellently written. Forever the writing teacher.

I rarely recommend Trouble on Triton by Samuel Delany to others, but I also low-key think everyone should stop everything they’re doing and read it. That’s usually how I feel when something impacts me in a profound way - I want to sing about it from the rooftops. I don’t tend to love things quietly.

Over the years, however, I’ve not had one person take me up on the invitation to read Trouble on Triton and, honestly, I get it. Delany’s novel, which is subtitled “An Ambiguous Heterotopia” is a tough read. It’s science fiction, which does not draw in all readers (a subject for another blog post altogether). The world is unlike ours and the people, as a result of their technological advances, live a reality far different from our life on Earth. New worlds are hard to build in one’s head. Additionally, Delany’s sentences are long, complex, and steeped in vocabulary far outside the layperson’s lexicon. A tough book.

The night before I defended my dissertation, I sat watching the news with my father in my childhood home. I don’t quite recall the exact content of the broadcast that evening, but I remember the subject: ISIS. I remember saying to my dad that I would need to make sure I was prepared to speak about ISIS during my defense the next day. Somehow I knew that one of my readers would call for me to speak to the relationship between my subject and this terrorist group.

I wasn’t wrong. The first question, after my presentation, which framed the concept of guerrilla rhetoric that I had struggled to analyze and capture through my dissertation research, was something to the effect of : “how will you handle the fact that groups like ISIS could take up your theory as a kind of user manual for their terrorist practices.”

Here’s where I had to admit the most startling realization I had throughout my research: the only difference between a terrorist and a guerrilla is whose side you’re on.

Joan Didion keeps a notebook. I escort notebooks - beautiful, largely empty notebooks - wherever I go. I buy journals, Moleskines and other fine paper products. I rarely fill them. I do morning pages (inconsistently) in cheap college composition notebooks, keeping my morning brain dump separate from the “real work” I might accomplish in a notebook of Didion proportions.

I want to write like Didion, but I’m terrified to collect my words in a way that’s purposeful. Writing things down, for me, is a contract with the universe. While I can use the spoken word to think out what I believe and try on different ways of seeing things, I somehow believe writing things down is a commitment to an enduring perspective.