A student called me out for wearing a BLM lanyard. I’ve silently worn it all year, even jauntily added a MLK,Jr. pin in December. Suddenly it has got attention in a way that could potentially make me appear to not be neutral or one sided in my instruction. So…I’m going to switch it out.

I am thinking about Justice Ginsburg and how she’d encourage me to fight this battle of quietly taking down the patriarchy one step at a time.

“Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I am going to continue to be me, to challenge students to take multiple perspectives and to perhaps learn to actively SEEK other perspectives in their learning journeys.

It’s also a little tender and hard and my job could be damaged if this went sideways, so that’s all I can really say about it. I have support and love from my school, and it’s okay to bend.

Learning to bend.

Phew.

Part of my unlearning and anti-racist work in my lifetime has been TO take a stand, TO show up for underrepresented people, TO make a difference. So I am just considering that perhaps, a little less visibility on the outside but with a lot more visibility on the INSIDE is okay. I have these conversations with people in my private life, the ones that I have more potential impact on. And maybe, in this heightened year of intense everything, that’s okay.

I found out how Lucy did on her appraisal today, too.

The appraiser couple that came out to my house was very loving. I felt like they were parental figures, trying to take care of me, offering me support and guidance on the best things to do for my future and my house.

They appraised my house for $1,100 more than it needed to in order to make the deal happen.

When I opened the email from my loan officer I burst into tears.

Lucy and I are also an inside job. The outside of my house is rainbow on the front, and there’s a “no pesticides” sign on my gate, and I had liberal lawn signs out for months supporting my candidates and causes.

But the real work of me and this house is the transformation that took place on the inside. All the pain and hurt and toxic drama from my past was emotionally wrung out and worked through while doing this house. Every inch of Lucy is filled with my joy and my tears as I processed everything that I’d experienced from 2016-2019. Not all of it was bad. I want to make sure I go on record to say, my last relationship and my past life was not all shit and horrible every single second. There were deep gladnesses and rewards and joy. I loved deeply in that space and it meant a lot to me. Sometimes, though, no matter how much love is in a situation, you and the other person seem to bring out the worst in each other. And by that I mean to say, we brought each other’s painful parts to the surface but didn’t have skills and tools to help each other, let alone ourselves. We were two traumatized humans trying to make a relationship work from empty vessels.

In that relationship we built an addition on a house. And while built we had his children 1/2 time. So we bought a motor home to live in. It was needed thing at the time, but for a brief second. We needed it for…4 months. Then we traded it in for a travel trailer at my insistence because the motor home was an albatross that sat in our driveway and was never used. Unfortunately…so was the travel trailer.

When we split up that travel trailer became my responsibility and I had to refinance it in my name at the same time I was remodeling Lucy. It was. Hard.

It was really hard.

Now the work and dedication I have put into Lucy is going allow me to close that chapter of my life. The refinance is going to pay off the trailer so I can then sell it, as I owe more than I could sell it for.

I am not doing this with anger. Not at all, I will bless and love on my trailer until the moment I say goodbye to it and give keys to the new owner. But for me it represents a time that is done. A time that I learned about myself as much as I could, and now that time is about to be officially over.

The fact that I did all of this on my own as a single woman? That is probably the most powerful thing to me and will always, for the rest of my life, be a beacon of hope when I’m in darkness.

Sometimes we have to push through past the muck of naysayers and those that aren’t looking out for us. Perhaps all that is is someone calling you out with microaggressions or pushing you in a direction you know you aren’t supposed to go. Maybe it is someone constantly second guessing you and judging you while you’re trying over here to live your best life.

Keep going.
Keep going.
Keep going.

You can do all of the things you need to do.

I did.

And, I DID THIS FOR MYSELF.

And then I made it.

Namaste.