I resonate a lot with what Catherine’s saying here about focusing on building habits and the opportunities right before me. I had this wild summer job in my 20’s for 7 and a half years selling books door to door. Some days it felt insurmountable that was how I was going to be making a living, but a lot of what we did to survive (and thrive) was built around sustaining habits…focusing on how many households we talked to a day instead of how many sales made, as an example. I was relieved when coming here knowing that there was a prescription of habits to follow, and new ways of relating, reflecting, working to make me safer for Black and Brown people around me. Since then I’ve also learned those habits have to continually be re-evaluated, that it’s not a one-and-done, and that my ‘relief’ at the idea of having a formula or prescription of sorts really said more about my own desire to collect gold stars, and focus on veneers rather than meaningful change. That’s been another important layer for me to learn.
