When you're doing difficult and meaningful healing work - it's easy to get trapped in the work that you're doing. It's easy to feel like the pain and discomfort is all there is. But the truth is I was reflecting on things that I had endured. I'm in a different place now and at a certain point - there must be something on the other side of survival. There must be something on the far side of the bend.

I had a lot of resistance to identifying as “neurodivergent” — I thought it was just a western way of pathologizing difference.

But after doing some research, I realize it’s actually a way to deeply embrace how I’m wired and what I need. It’s a way to make meaning while I reject contorting myself into shapes that comply with a world that largely asks me to shut up and keep up; I’ve never been very good at either.

I think I’m probably on the spectrum and I think how I share and create art has always reflected that.

Because we have infinite creative energy I believe we also have infinite earning potential. That’s a pretty big deviation from the narrative of the “Starving Artist”, isn’t it? I don’t think it’s coincidental that we’re taught to associate *starvation* with the very thing that could get us fed.

For me, my art has been a scared space where I get to remember. A chance to reconvene with the life within me - to become relational with myself, and in that relationship to relearn how to to be of life. To relearn how to listen, how to love, how to ask questions that require waiting for an answer. Not only from myself but from the wind, from the stars, from the ladybug and the leaves and the sun.

Whatever any organization or institution could offer me, I offer back infinitely more.

Why?

Because I’m tapped into something that’s greater than this world.

To see the reality of harm, is to see a messy world. To meet that reality with something other than punishment, as we have been taught to do, is to meet that mess radically. It is to choose open hearts in a world that instructs us to keep them closed. It is to risk being vulnerable in the interest of cultivating a love that perceives us. 

Sometimes we learn love from the absence of love. Sometimes we learn love from attempts at love that don’t actually produce love but more suffering. But if those attempts at love can teach us to love, then are they not love?

How often are we told that love means “forgive those who oppress you”.

That doesn’t sound like love, that sounds convenient.

I believe that we have it in us to really love one another.

And as overwhelming as that might sound - it really comes down to making a courageous choice.

To choose love in these times is not an easy task and it doesn’t appear to be getting any easier.

But Love is the force that sees clearly.

Understanding this allows me to stand in the truth that my way of doing things might be different, but that doesn’t make it wrong. I don’t need permission to be me. And I don’t need to take other people’s projections personally. 

You have to remember that all of the racism and brutality that this world has ever witnessed was justified by perception. Our world is perpetually the outcome of the things we were told, that we believed, that we repeated.

I wrote a new essay on Formula 1 racing, Lewis Hamilton, and the Humanity of Black Athletes that you can click here to read.

So much happens before ground gets broken - before the evidence of growth materializes in a way that can be seen and felt and understood and experienced.

It’s really very casual and practical

Because ultimately;

Who else could I be?

The bee doesn’t spend time trying to be a flower. The sun doesn’t fight the dust for the right to shine. And in being who they are; both the bee and the sun contribute to sustaining life itself.

Love costs us nothing…but love.

My awareness is my anchor and I am the Sun.

We are conditioned to believe that revolution amounts to the conflict of many, but I’d like to suggest that it may be as simple as the actualization of one.

How can a conversation that centers and emphasizes whiteness be effective in dismantling a paradigm that asks us to do the same?