​With age, certain things become easier to see, like the way our lives move in seasons. Those moments when there are overarching themes and it’s our duty to recognize them and dissect what it is they are trying to tell us about ourselves, our lives, and how they are calling on us to determine where it is we want to be when that season is over.  For the past year, I’ve been battling a suffocating bout of depression.  If I’m truly honest about it, it's been creeping up for a good while now and I’ve tried my best to manage it while still weeding through the triggers that were setting it off.  I’ve struggled with admitting the root cause because then I would be sitting in this season of my life and reevaluating where I saw myself in the future; I wasn’t ready to do that.  The root cause or theme for this season has grown increasingly loud and I can no longer ignore it if I wish to thrive in future seasons.  

My proximity to whiteness is killing me in both a literal and metaphorical sense.  My proximity was manageable when I was single.  I could build walls around the areas of my life where I wanted peace and keep those who were trying to get good white people stickers in strategically placed zones.  I did the work I felt called to do and moved my energy when they crossed boundaries.  I still experienced hurt, those gut-wrenching and soul-crushing moments when folks you have put your faith into show you that they are still 110% invested in whiteness didn’t stop, they merely became manageable.  Recovery was easier because I had it all contained.  I had places of refuge from the onslaught of inhumanity I experienced.  Then I remarried and said I do to a white man and to a job position in a predominately white faith that had already shown me some yellow and red flags, but I made a leap of faith that ushered in years of trauma. I find past me apologizing to present me a lot. I thought those yellow and red flags were fixable, and I thought this interracial marriage would be different from my first one.  I walked with faith and not facts, and time and time again my heart has paid the price for my faith.  

It started off small, as it always does. In my marriage, it was comments and derogatory language by his friends and family that I would ask him to address and instead of jumping at the opportunity to show me my humanity was a priority to him he would become combative and demand that I consider how uncomfortable it would be for him to have to confront those people. He had known them for years. I was asking too much.   

In my job, while I was fighting for my humanity at home, I was debating with my supervisor, a white man in his late 50s, on the best course of action for discussing racial justice.  He didn’t want to make the white children and parents uncomfortable or have to deal with any potentially racially insensitive moments happening.  He drove this point home by saying “what if some kid says at home we use the n-word and my dad says that’s fine”, except he didn’t say “the n-word” he said the word! The N- word. With the hard motherfucking r.  He stared at me, and I stared at him and all I could get out was “I don’t even let my children use that word.” Then, I left for the day and called my spouse who had no real comfort to provide and somehow managed to make the whole moment even worse.  So I reached out to friends who could hold space for me while I worked on drafting an email that stated what happened and how things would be going forward in regards to the professional relationship between my supervisor and me. 

Small churches don’t have HR departments and the minister had already made it clear she wasn’t thrilled that I was given the job, so I was effectively swimming in shark-invested waters alone. When I finally started to test the waters and shared that a racist moment had happened -without going into details- I was asked “who did you tell” not “how are you”.    

I wiped my tears and kept my head up, but my sanctuaries were eroding.  There were no longer spaces for me to lay down my load and breathe.  For the next four years, I went from one trauma experience to the next, all while navigating raising children, trying to build some sort of career, and moving through a pandemic that still isn’t over even though everyone else is over it.  

I did my best to push all the hurt down.  Every fight for my humanity, for my people’s humanity, chipped away at the walls I had built to keep my mind and heart safe.  Every time I had to say this is what your family, your friends, or you have said to me, this is why it’s harmful, please correct it, and was met with an opponent instead of an ally, my wall crumbled a bit more.  Every time I said this is how I and/or my children feel excluded by this activity because have a conservation about it and was met with resistance, the cracks from the years of abuse I had endured in other seasons of my life got deeper.  

Every meeting or discussion where I pointed out an issue in the church and then was dismissed until someone white regurgitated what I said, took a sledgehammer to the layers of my walls that were clingy desperately to each other.  Every meeting or class where a white person said I was angry or “acting out of character” was like chucking grenades at the walls that no longer had anyone left to defend them.  My armor was gone.  I no longer had spaces for renewal with the pandemic putting literal barriers between those who held space for me and myself.  I wiped the tears and tried to keep up the good fight.  

These issues were fixable, I told myself over and over again.  White people can be moved and for some reason, the universe has put me in this body, in these spaces, at this time and it must be to help these people move to a better place.  I chose my tone and my words meticulously in each interaction.  I took my yellow brick road and covered it with eggshells in hopes that it would help me tread carefully.  With each step, I erased my own humanity but I wouldn’t allow myself to see it until a stack of beautiful glass and crystal literally landed at my feet.  

It started on a Monday afternoon, I had already spent the morning running errands and taking a small human to an appointment.  I had items I needed to prep for that evening and I was on a tight but doable schedule.  And then I glanced at the top of my fridge and thought “I’ve told them countless times to not stack those like that or they’ll fall. I’ll deal with it in a moment.”; as that last thought left my mind the platters shifted and tumbled off the fridge.  I tried to catch them and watched helplessly as they eluded my grip and crashed onto the floor. 

As I looked upon the broken glass all I could think about was the way each platter represented every cross I was bearing, every single day, and how often I felt voiceless.  And I was angry about all of it.  So fucking angry.  I wanted to make the world a better place.  I wanted to give my children a safe and loving home.  I wanted peace.  And in those pursuits, I put my peace to the side and there it sat on my kitchen floor, broken into a million fucking little pieces waiting for me to clean it up.  I sat in my shower that evening crying trying to push the voice down that was screaming to be heard.  After 30 years with my shadow mistress, I know she only screams when I’m being stubborn and ignoring the red flags my trauma has taught me to see clearly.  

There was a theme for this season of my life and acknowledging it hurt in a way I couldn’t put into words, only my tears could spell it out as they mixed with the hot water.  I’d given whiteness too much access to my mind, body, heart, and soul.  And whiteness did with that access what it does with everything, it ravaged me and left me battered and broken, like the fragile glass that had littered my kitchen floor that afternoon. 

I stopped ignoring the voice and leaned into what it was saying, run or die there is no staying.  I calculated the logistics of death and realized I didn’t want that.  I want to wake up every morning. I want to love on my children until I’m old and gray. And I want to continue to make the world a better place, but it needs to be in a way that affirms my humanity. Doing so means walking away from the people and spaces that I had once committed myself to.  I left the church job almost a year ago and haven’t secured anything in that realm since, aside from some freelance projects. I do my best to honor red flags, raise awareness of the red flag, and then cease contact.  As I sat in my shower, I had to ask myself if the few commitments I had in that faith were worth the investment of seeing them through before completely walking away.  I told myself they were because they were a small step in a larger plan that I can’t quite see right now and that’s ok. I’ll finish my last projects this summer and the relief that provides me is invigorating.  I’m on the right track.  I feel it in the depth of my being.  

Then I had to have a real conversation with myself about my romantic relationship.  Things had improved, slowly and painfully from the day we had said I do, but they still weren’t where they needed to be.

There’s a beautiful song by Priscilla Renea called Let’s Build a House, in it she says: 
“You on the edge, me on the ledge
Clinging to you, driving a wedge
Just tryna keep this thing floating
…
Let’s build a house, tear this one down
Might take a while but it’ll be ours
Let’s use the stones that everyone’s thrown
We need a sanctuary of our own”

I tried to weave those words into the gaps left by the pain that was inflicted.  I had hoped they would be the glue needed to piece me back together so I could feel completely invested in the relationship; as the tears fell I found that those words created a false hope in my mind because, at the end of the day, I’ll never be able to fully trust that my humanity will be affirmed and protected by the people and institutions that have already shown that they would rather fight me than love me.  Ultimately, I would have to rebuild the walls that whiteness tore down and for that season, those who caused harm would need to be on the outside of those walls and those who respected the distance and did self-reflection in the process may be granted entry in another season. 

But that entry is not guaranteed. 

I know that now.  I can’t guarantee that I’ll ever allow any white person or institution to get that close to me again.  Does this mean that my current marriage is over?  No, it isn't.  We have an understanding.  The house, my essence, is being torn down and rebuilt so that it is once again mine and mine alone.  I’m using every stone that has been thrown at me to shore up my foundation.  Once the fortress is built there is no guarantee that he will be permitted a key.  He was given the choice to leave or wait, understanding that I’m not guaranteeing anything other than my own peace, he has chosen to wait.  

What does the next season hold? Only time will tell.  But for now, I’m ready to finish sweeping up the broken glass of this season in my life and move on to the next lesson with my walls firmly intact. 

I’ve struggled with how to write this reflection. At first, my concern was that I would sound facetious, my life has ensured that I am painfully aware of racism and bigotry. From having a white grandmother who was openly racist toward her children while claiming she couldn’t be racist because she had married a Black man, to being raised by her son who still to this day hasn’t unpacked the harm his upbringing caused; I received all sorts of conflicting messages about what it meant to be Black, a woman, and the value my life had when those two identities intersected. 

Years of unpacking the bias, anti-Blackness, and trauma inside and outside of my home taught me that the world was not fair and there are places I hold power and places I most certainly don’t. What I do with the privileges I have and with the oppression, I face not only impacts my own existence but others as well. While I grappled with how to be clear and concise without being condescending, I found myself dealing with the ever-prevailing racism in Unitarian Universalism. 

Having to reconcile how I must prove in this essay, to a predominantly white panel, that I understand racism and the need for anti-racism to be weaved into every fabric of this faith, while battling the depression that being ambushed by someone’s vitriol in a Zoom meeting has caused is asking for a level of cognitive dissonance that my brain refuses to create. Not a single white person who was in that meeting interjected, after the fact they were all in agreement that what happened wasn’t ok and they felt bad that it caused me harm, but their feelings did not compel them to action when the harm was happening. Which is a pervasive problem in white liberal circles, UUism being no different. 

Do I understand anti-racism? Yes, on a deeply personal and nuanced level. It isn’t only the MAGA hat-wearing, Confederate flag-waving stereotype of whiteness that exhibits racism. It is a multilayered system that operates in every facet of our lives perverting even the most well-meaning of spaces with its toxicity. It is the colorism that allows me to move through white spaces with more ease than other members of my family, but the internalized anti-Blackness that leads my white colleagues and congregational members to recoil and clutch their imaginary pearls at the sight of my box braids. They would deem themselves to be anti-racist, but anti-racism is not a bumper sticker you can throw on your electric car. It is work, lifelong work, that we each must do to break the hold white supremacy has on our perceptions and understanding of who does and doesn’t have humanity and whose life is and isn’t worthy of existing wholly as they are. 

I know the assignment calls for these essays to be separate, but to be true to the intersections of who I am and what those identities mean in this faith I can’t compartmentalize these reflections as each part leads to the whole of who I am. To create balance and set boundaries I must be keenly aware of the way white supremacy moves in UU spaces and how I move in return impacts any anti-racism work that is or will be done. My tone, body language, and even appearance must be weighed when I’m establishing a boundary. Even more so when the request for my time also includes emotional labor. There is an air of entitlement to the labor of BIPOC UUs by white UUs. BIPOC UUs are wanted, or needed as we’re told, in UU spaces and at UU tables, but when we establish that our labor isn’t free, we’re met with pushback. Every time I instill a boundary, say no, or state that I will not overextend myself to save whiteness from itself I am doing anti-racism work. 

This also ties into my self-care and life balance. To do the anti-racism work needed in UU spaces I keep what I reveal and how close I get to others to a minimum. My personal life is sacred and maintaining the peace that exists in it is vital to my well-being, this means limiting and curating how much of my personal life is exposed to UU spaces. I am even more particular about how and when I express discomfort and disappointment with Unitarian Universalism. It’s a constant dance of code-switching that allows me to experience peace while doing the hard work needed. I still struggle with finding spiritual renewal. UU spaces, in theory, should provide that for me but under the weight of white supremacy, it’s hard some days to feel renewed when I’m constantly being siphoned from. The mentors I’ve made during this process have helped me understand the importance of finding little slices of UU heaven in all the commotion of change. 

The Finding Our Way Home retreat is what I envisioned Unitarian Universalism to be when I landed on the Church of the Larger Fellowship’s virtual doorway 14 years ago. The experiences I’ve had during FOWH services and workshops last year filled my cup in a way I was starting to believe wasn’t possible in the world of UUism. It restored my hope in what I was doing, it made me want to get back to the work of dismantling white supremacy in our faith, communities, and the larger world. I wish I could experience that soul-shaking joy more often in UU spaces. Which brings me to the last reflection, what do I envision for my role going forward?

​It’s easy to get disheartened being Black in this faith, I’ve walked away a few times due to the suffocating racism at work and understand why others do as well, but I believe this faith and our aspirations have the potential for great change. Change doesn’t happen without immense work and discomfort, though. I’ve approached the process of credentialing as a discernment period, an opportunity to dig deeper into Unitarian Universalism and decide if it’s a place I can -or even should- be. I’m still in that period and I don’t believe I’ll ever leave it. By constantly evaluating my place in this faith I’m able to stay objective about the pros and cons. This allows me to lead in my position from a place of understanding for white UUs who are waking up to the realities faced by those of us not sitting atop privilege mountain, while also giving me the strength to keep picking away at the table that UUism built out of oppression so something better can be built in its place. 
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This means pushing for, and creating, lifespan faith development opportunities that look critically at our past, imagine our future, and then put those desires into action. Allowing UUism to move from being an aspirational group of predominately white people who rest on their laurels, to the Beloved Community of rich diversity and radical inclusion that exists in small sub-sections of the Unitarian Universalist faith. 

As for what’s changed for me, I was always on the fence about wearing the label of Unitarian Universalist. How can I claim to be something when I don’t see myself represented? How can I claim a label when that label asks for my humanity to be the kindling in its chalice? How can I not wear the label of a faith I’ve given 14 years of time, money, and labor to? I’m no longer on the fence. This faith isn’t where I need it to be for me to comfortably claim it loud and proud, but I want it to be. I can give my labor; I can nurture the faith and tend to it as it grows and changes into something I can proudly claim as a part of my identity without having to claim it as part of my identity now. 
​
Being a Black religious professional in Unitarian Universalism means I can’t compartmentalize anti-racism, self-care, and my professional future. They exist together in the intersections of my identity. To respect myself and my worth, I refuse to put each of those layers into boxes. My lived experiences inform my anti-racism work. My self-care, my spiritual health, and most importantly the boundaries I set are part of the anti-racism work I do and vital to me being able to continue to do that work in this faith. My future in this faith, in leadership, changing the narrative on what Unitarian Universalism is and isn’t, is wrapped into the work I do personally and professionally. I am a multifaceted being who wears many labels, and it is my hope that one day I can wear the label of Unitarian Universalist with the same pride I wear the others. 
​
Until then, we have work to do. 

​Once upon a time there was a prom and a personal determination to look phenomenal while being comfortable.  To accomplish this, I slid on a gorgeous teal dress shirt that popped against my skin and then paired it with a fitted black suit jacket. One pair of ultra-black skinny jeans, some black and white high-top Chuck Taylors, a blinged out bowtie choker, a dash of red lipstick, and a head scarf from the Mother Land later; I was in peak “steal your girl” mode and immensely comfortable. 

My father, on the other hand, was on the verge of an aneurysm. 

He tried to persuade me to wear a dress.  It was prom season and there was no shortage of gorgeous dresses I could scoop up for the night.  I wasn’t interested in getting zipped into anything and when I informed him of this, he offered to get me a nice skirt and new top. Anything other than what I had picked out he pleaded.  If it was feminine presenting, he was willing to buy it.  I declined each offer, completely comfortable in what I had chose for myself.  When my best friend arrived, he tried to persuade her to talk some sense into me.  “She can’t go out like that” he insisted.  My bestie, the amazing woman she is, brushed him off and stated that as her date I was dressed as I should be.  After my father clutched his invisible pearls, we snapped some pictures and went out into the night, my father still shaking his head in disapproval as the Lyft drove off.   

This was less than a month ago. 

​Since it's a new year, for shits and giggles, I'm going to take some time to share 10 simple truths about myself.  So buckle up, readers!     

1. I love the word fuck.  I use it every fucking chance I get.  It’s a beautiful word.  It’s linguistic magic.  
​Even my Facebook statuses reflect this love: 







           








Yes… fucking and people were my top two words in 2015…

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2.  Fucking people annoy me.  The results of this annoyance are either well-crafted blog posts or rants on my personal Facebook page *hence those being my most used words*.  If you are hip to that whole Myers-Briggs thing, then it makes sense based on my personality.  I’m inclined to think it has more to do with the level of stupidity in the world than my actual personality but, hey it’s kind of fun to know which Doctor Who character you are.  

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3. Of all the fucking people that annoy me, I annoy myself the most.  

4. My inner circle is full of people whose mere existence brings me so much joy that I don’t even care they’re humans. 

5. A debate over Prop 8 is what finally knocked me off my fence of doubt and into the field of godlessness.  Even though I’ve been an out and proud heathen for 7 years I still listen to K-Love on occasion.  NEEDTOBREATHE’s song Brother was one of my favorite songs from 2015.  Seriously, Google it! It’s fucking fantastic! Better yet, enjoy: 

6.  I was offered a scholarship to Mars Hill College to study Youth Leadership (youth ministry).  I had lofty ideas about what young people should learn about love and acceptance.   I still have those ideas, minus the Christianity. 
 
7. Losing my religion was one of the most painful experiences of my life.  Losing the top spot to a 2009 pregnancy lose and the ending of my marriage last year.   

8. I never planned to homeschool my kids.  We’ve been at it, officially, for eight years.  
 
9. When it comes to parenting I have no fucking idea what I’m doing. 

10.  I’m fairly certain my children are aware of this fact. ​​

What are some of your truths?  Do you have the adulting parenting thing figured out or faking it until you make it?  Are you still dancing in tube socks to Bruce Springsteen?  Tell me more, tell me more, right down there in the comments.