I arrived to Lace on Race from that same list, and about the same time Christina did. I remember us commenting together hours or days apart as we worked our way through the onboarding info. I remember feeling some jealousy that it seemed like she was grasping all the concepts so easily, knew just what to say, had already done so much more work and had such a bigger knowledge base than I had. I say that to display my whyte woman clenches…while Christina describes her clenching of her scholarly self-improvement approach that was getting in the way of the work, the one getting in the way for me was comparison, yet another version that focuses attention back on me from where it should be. Focusing on deficits and what I don’t have in this work distracts every bit as any other thing, and leads straight to offending from the victim position. We each have to show up as we are, eye to eye both with ourselves and with others, getting out of our own way, in whatever way that may be, so that we can get out of others way…shifting focus back to what will actually move the stone not create more barriers in front of it.
