Reasons to be grateful
Food surrounds me in everything I do and am, and for that I am grateful.
Thanks to everyone who’s fed my body, mind and spirit when I didn’t know that I was starving. I am slowly but surely working through the experiences that taught me not to be in my body in order to survive.
Thanks to everyone who encourages me to tend to and embody the person who loves me tenderly.
Thanks for all the friends who remind me of who I am and who I desire to become.
Liberated and uninhibited.
Well fed and taken care of.
Interdependent and trusting.
Joyful and unconditionally generous.
Fully expressing myself.
Forgiving and accountable.
Driven and rested.
But most importantly grateful for where I am in the moment, a.k.a. being present.
Less curation and more liberation a friend’s partner told me a few years ago in many more words, and I’m more determined than ever to put that into practice.
The Black woman I was taught to be believes that curating only the very best of myself for others is the way the truth and the light, and that liberation is an elusive gift on the other side of the highest mountain, one rumored to be impossible to climb. The mountain may be real, however, the person I’m becoming reminds her that we’ve been blessed with strong legs, hopeful arms, and a determined spirit.
And in fact, I must trust that when I falter over a rock or tight place during the climb, my friends will be there to lend a hand to pull me through it or cheer me on from their own climb.
So, here I go.
Demonstrating some leg strength (2021).
P.S. A less curated me doesn’t mean I feel obligated to share every part of me with everyone, and I believe that the internet offers a one-sided sense of vulnerability if any at all. Instead I think that my real work of being more open and vulnerable happens by putting my values to practice in the day to day, and the interwebs is a space to record a slice or two of some of that.