This has been something of a constant prayer since last February.

Let’s talk about it.

More than one person has asked me how I have kept going since the debacle with Holly and Annie and Chris last year.

It’s never easy to give a good, cogent, and it’s definitely been difficult to give a brief answer. 

But I’m going to try right now. Minus the brevity, perhaps.

I think it’s important that you are able to see my thought process and how I have walked this crucible over the last 12 months.

It’s important for a few reasons.

It’s important that I model the type of woman I say I want to be and who I exhort each of you to be.

I cannot ask more of you than I ask of myself.

So when I look at this admonition which is also an encouragement, I think about the woman who faces each and every one of you every day.

There is no way that I can keep my eyes fixed on Full Respect Living and the North Star without making a conscious decision every day to do so.

That was true even before the events of last February but it is doubly true now.

Here is the second reason.

Let’s go real talk: I know you all are watching me.

And that’s not at all a bad thing. 

And I am acutely aware that I am speaking to several different groups as I face you all.

There *are* different sorts of you observing my journey, and I am acutely aware of this fact.

There are those who walk and have walked with me steadfastly, who hold my shoulders and my waist and walk with me step-by-step. You  know exactly who you are and who you have been.

There are those who *hope* I really can live out what I have exhorted and encouraged for the last four years now, but they’re not entirely sure that I will and that I can and that I want to and that I have the agency to choose the path about which I flap my jaws every day. 

Because they know it’s hard. 

They’re right, it is. It has been.

I’m no saint.

And so this group of people hope that I can, so that they can too. 

This is the other definition of performative that few people talk about. Not performative in the sense of the disingenuous, but performative in the sense that it’s permission giving; that it has power; that, ultimately, it has movement and meaning.

Then there are people who aren’t at all sure but kind of hope I’ll crack under the pressure.

Because that gives a different kind of permission; it gives them the permission to bail out of the car, because it’s obviously an impossibility to live a life that Lace seems to think that they can live. I mean, damn, she obviously failed, so why should I even begin to try?

And then there are those who have a different kind of hope. They hope I fall on my face. They hope for a professional, and even an existential, death. And believe me, I feel it every day. Every day.

How do I hold each of these cohorts well? How do I cradle each of these cohorts with Hesed?

Welp, it’s easy with the first two. To those who have walked steadfastly–or however intermittently– with me over this last year; who have literally and metaphorically held my face in their hands and kissed my forehead, obviously y’all are so easy to love. So easy to be grateful for.

There are those where it is not necessarily harder, because the love is certainly there, but there is frustration. And a deep sadness.

There is frustration in knowing that some people observe just to see potential or possible Trainwreck.

Those are the ones I am not reaching. If you have watched the struggle of mine over the last year however silently (or not so silently), waiting for the day when I press the delete button and call it a day, knowing that my struggle has been for your amusement is a devastating thing. 

And, frankly, that’s true of a lot of you, if not most of you. And believe me. I feel it. From those in the community, however nominally. From my friends, Facebook *and* 3-D.  From my followers.

So if I feel a sense of failure, it is not because of Holly or Annie or Chris, it is because of my failure to reach you. 

You specifically.

 But then I tell myself this I have not reached you *yet*.

We have *never* lost eyeballs. Money, yes. And yes, absolutely: If we do fold, it’s because you all will have voted with your wallets, or, more accurately, with your paypal trigger fingers. That’s most of you. 

It’s probably specifically you.

But.

There *has* to be some Mustard Seed of *something* that, even as you’re hoping for my flameout like I’m a car crashing against the wall at a NASCAR race after being clipped, there has to be some part of you that hopes that I can climb out of the driver seat and roll away from the flames. That hopes that, on some level, however imperfectly, that I might, just might, be on the right track.

That gives me hope. 

And as I have come to you everyday, my prayer is that at least one of you that hoped for a ball of fire will somehow find it in yourself to look me in the eye, even through the smoke, and choose instead to stand with me and the community as, together, we quench the flames.

____

Fiercely kind is the absolute embodiment of Hesed. 

This means that, for me, loving those who, for whatever reason, do not love me back is a non-negotiable.

That does not mean that there have been no scars. No lesions. No keloids.

 Owning the anger and disappointment over the last 12 months has been quite the task.

Acknowledging, pivoting, flexing,and leveraging that anger into constructive and productive choices and actions has been one of the things that people think would have been the hardest, but not really.

Doing my level best to make sure that self-awareness and self-reflection and self interrogation does not devolve into self-pity, or its cousin, self flagellation; that’s something else that people have thought would be difficult. It hasn’t been. 

Choosing against meanness, and, yes, there are other more flowery and intellectual words I could use, but the eight-year-old in me that I was rocking in a corner this time last year would use that very word–mean–eschewing that has been reflexive. 

Who else could I be? Over the last four decades, I have systematically stripped myself of a lot of possible relational doors. Doors that, as I have said before, others slide through with abandon and impunity. But the choices I have made, over and over and over again, preclude and foreclose on the paths they trod. And *I want you to see it*. I want you to see it as not constraint, nor limitation. 

I want you to see this as a very particular, and a very attainable choice. Hard won, yes. Sometimes lonely, again yes. But I have never promised you ease. Nor have I promised you the common. 

I have promised to walk with you as you develop and nurture Hesed Heart. Difficult by design. Discomfiting and dangerous. But an ethos deeply married to your marrow. Forged by the crucible. 

And this is the Crux of it. As a Black woman I deal with meanness every day. I deal with small slights, microaggressions that aren’t micro at all– Death by a Thousand Cuts. 

But I have been lucky in my own life to have experienced this level of meanness only once before. That was fully 20 years ago, and I didn’t think I would ever experience this level again.

 But the muscle memory remains. I know what it feels like. I vow to never do it to another. Ever. Yes. It *really is* that simple. 

When it comes to sorrow morphing into self-pity, there is a difference between sorrow and grieving as opposed to self righteous self indulgence.

And oh, believe me. I have. Grieved. In a different way that I am anticipating grieving my mother, who will leave us any day now, but I have indeed grieved.

I grieved the loss of the people who left even more than I grieved the people who chose to lob the bombs. 

Again, if I feel a sense of failure it is because of this; how little I had (and have) inculcated into you as a group; as a community. 

It means that if this ever happened or happens in the future to someone else that you followed or said you cared about that you would act in the exact same way. That you would, as 8 year old Janine would say, that you would let meanness win. 

Again. And my heart hurts at the thought. Who you are here is who you are. And it’s impossible to call it an aberration. If you are living with Hesed, that carries everywhere. If you are not, that follows you too.

This is unacceptable to me. This is what galvanizes me. What has made me fearless as I double down on theory, method, and Praxis.

Because this is not the legacy I want to leave when, in 30 years, I will be ready to go. I want more. For me. For you. For our shared North Star.

____

This is a learning lab; this is a rehearsal space, and so many of you, particularly those who have shared with me your little victories in your great Triumph in your walk towards Justice in this past year  have made my heart sing.

 But I always toss and turn about the people for whom our shared ethos did not durably land. 

So no, not self-pity, but deep self-reflection.

I am not *thankful* for any of my afflictions. But they can be, if I allow them to be–they can definitely be instructive. 

This year has been the year that I have written a road map to facing and walking through The Crucible. And not being afraid of it. Learning how to anticipate it. 

Because each of you, if you do this work with durability and relentless reliability will walk through your own Crucible, and if you will allow me to, I will be your GPS. 

I know the terrain painfully well. And I know that glimmer of light at the end. Sometimes so hard to see. I know to my marrow that that is the North Star; lessening and mitigating the harm endured by Black and brown people, perpetuated by white people and white supremacy. And I am absolutely fixated on that. Because that is why we are here. No other reason.

I am not going to say, because I don’t think I could say it with absolute integrity, that I particularly thank the people who initiated what happened last year. 

But what they did do that I might not have gleaned otherwise was to give me a Topography of the worst that people can be.

 I am now something of a cartographer.

We need to intimately know the landscape, not just the trees and the flowers, but also the minefields and the poisonous plants that will always, always, litter the terrain.

And we cannot either be surprised by or afraid of any of it.

My mother at this time last year was in and out of the hospital, I was dealing with my father, putting the finishing touches of forming as a formal entity, and then I was dealing with this maelstrom. And it is very similar this year, except this time Mom is in hospice.

I will *not* compare my mother to the people who did what they did last year (and, like Holly, who weaponized her) or to those who continue to do it this year. 

But my mother and I *have had* something of a complicated relationship over the years and, while it was not and is not hard to find the love for her, deep love, it was a complicated and sometimes ambiguous and fragmented and fractious love, as indeed most love is.

Same with my ex-husband, with whom I walked the crucible of twenty years of acute mental illness.

Robert was not hard to love, but sometimes he was hard to serve in ways that mattered. 

And one of the deepest grieving points in my journey with him was that I could not love him more effectively. But I did my best. 

I would like to think that I’ve lived out this prayer with every single one of the people who, either by action or inaction, wounded me and attacked the community that I curated.

But let’s be absolutely clear.

It was not a charlatan cult leader that they left and abandoned. And they, and you, know it, which is why I’m not giving that pejorative very much oxygen.

They didn’t leave because I was a cult leader. They attacked, and those who left and or became silent spectators did so *precisely because I wasn’t.*

And I’m not. And they know it. And so do you.

So loving, however wounded, has not been hard.

What has been hard is never knowing who among the metaphorical spectators in the stands meet my gaze with love.

 But now we come full circle, yes?

 *It doesn’t matter*.

Who I am, who you are–who *we are* cannot be contingent upon the actions of others or by our own transient and sometimes deceitful feeling states; I say this not only from a professional place but from a deeply personal one. 

I love the people who look at me with Hesed, I love the people who look at me with hope, I love the people who look at me with wary and cynical eyes, and yes, I love the people who look at me with hatred and contempt. 

I can get there because of 35 years of *practice*.

And so can you. You must, if you have any hope of glimpsing the glimmer of the North Star.

Blindsided as I was, I know the contours of The Crucible well.

And if you will allow me to, I will continue walking through The Crucible with each and every one of you who will allow me to, because that is my holy privilege.

I hope that you will continue to support me in this space, to support the community who has deeply earned the name of community by The Crucible that those of us who have chosen, with their capacity, volition, and agency,  to have walked through with Relentless Reliability. 

If you are one of those I thank you. If you were or are not, the door is still open. There will always be a place set for you at the flat and round table.

My mother told me today that she would be completely okay with closing her eyes and not waking up. This is a woman who has taken more body blows than anyone in the last year who came for me and our community could even conceive of. She survived the wrath of a very particularly brutal form of white supremacy. For way more than one mere year. We can do no less.

The woman is tired. She has been ill and incapacitated for half of my life and more than a third of her own; fully 31 years. She is ready to go. And I am ready to sing her and hold her through that transition. 

But she will live through me and I am not ready to go yet.

I hope that you will stand with me as I continue the legacy of Mrs. Watkins and build a legacy of our own, with you.

I’ve learned much over this last year. But it has not made me hard. My heart was broken, and maybe I should have showed it more, or maybe I should have showed it less. But it stayed intact and beating and soft, and my hands, the calloused and gnarled, have stayed gentle, and I have never wavered. 

That is not any particular accomplishment. It is because I have practice in being, and ever more becoming, the woman I have said I wanted to be and would be my entire adult life. I say that without pride. But I do say it with conviction. My boots took on water and mud, but I kept walking. So can you. So must we all.

This is what I should have written a year ago. But I was bleeding out and timid. Thanks to so many of you my wounds are bound. And I am ready to rumble, into 2022 and Beyond. I hope to do so with you.

Join us in the Bistro for the discussion!