HERE ME READ THIS POST INSTEAD.
Old skin.
That’s what I’ve been calling the aspects of my life that’s been feeling so womp-womp lately. My habit of spending hours on social media with no satisfaction in return was…THAT. Old skin shit. How I’m spending my time and my attention during this break is new skin. I turn 38 on the 13th, and how I usually approach my birthday plans felt like no-thank-you this year. What I’m doing instead is feeling more like yes-please. [Read about that here.]
Krak Teet offerings were feeling like old skin too.
“What you working on these days?” Lillian Baptiste, a gorgeous celebrant and storyteller of 30+ years, asked me. I’d invited her to dinner last week.
“Okay, so don’t judge me,” I started.
“I won’t,” she answered before even knowing what I was about to say.
“I was getting tired of only being recognized as the historian. Like, that’s only ONE part of what I do.”
She nodded. “I understand. Trust me.”
“So I’m experimenting with this new thing,” I said, leaning in, showing all 32.
The new thing is a live reading and reflection. But it’s not my books. I curated short excerpts from a stack of books about untamed women and showed how their “misbehavior” is not only liberating but refreshing. I talked about it briefly in the last week’s post, but, like I predicted then, the line-up of women I talked about was likely to change. It did.
Jezebel was the first! I shared an alternative to the misrepresentation we’ve been repeating throughout history. I read from Temple of My Familiar, showing how Shug Avery pivoted from being the famous blues singer to someone who enjoyed preparing delicious meals from local, seasonal ingredients for people she loved, and even founded a new religion. I shared a dozen examples of how liberating Alice Walker has lived her life, yet how her daughter felt deprived as a result. And we had a conversation about that. We meditated for 60 seconds on Janie Crawford saying “You got to go there to know there” after I read that part in Their Eyes Were Watching God. We laughed at the image of Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Nugent walking down Harlem streets smoking cigarettes in public, drawing stares and Nugent jokingly referring to them as “a fallen woman and a sissy.” We had a deeeep conversation after I read an excerpt from my friend Akilah Richard’s book, Raising Free People. After I read the post script from Assata Shakur’s autobiography, we stood and stretched and each shared a small vision of the world we’d like to live in.
We had the BEST time!
I tell stories that connect the dots. That’s what I do! Like, another dot that I connected, was realizing that on this here Sunday that I’m talking to you about shedding old skin and trying something new is the same day that Malcolm X officially separated from the Nation of Islam in 1964. Though he felt pushed out, the separation stemmed from him wanting to embrace a new skin. After going to Mecca and completing Hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam, he came back with new revelations and ideas and audacity.
Another dot worth connecting here: Today is daylight savings time. If we look at nature instead of the time change, which is a man-made thing, we see that the Northern Hemisphere been slowly tilting more toward the sun since the Winter solstice. So minute by minute, the days have already been getting longer. (If you fast for Ramadan, you already know that, because the time you can eat in the evening gets about one minute later every day.) By March, though, the longer days are more noticeable.
Aha moment: I didn’t just wake up and decide I wanted to do something different, just like the earth didn’t just up and decide to get more sunlight. It’s been inching inside of me, minute by minute, day by day. Before it was clear what I wanted to do differently, I was just unsatisfied with what I was doing. A snake shedding goes through a similar process. First, its skin becomes dull and its eyes get cloudy. After some days or weeks, it’ll start coming up outta that old skin, but it ain’t an instant thing; it takes time. Same for us.
That’s not to say that what I was doing last year or the years prior weren’t true to who I was. They were. But I wanna do something different now. Just like Rob Bell, the author of Everything is Spiritual who walked away from pastoring a church that had grown to thousands of members because “it was time to do something else.” It’s just time to do something else, and I’m sure El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, formerly known as Malcolm X, would nod to that, like “I understand. Trust me.”
Ikigai is a Japanese philosophy that means “reason for being.” It’s the intersection of what you love doing, what you’re good at doing, what the world needs, and what you can be rewarded for. How we express our ikigai manifests in different ways. It shouldn’t be a single, life-defining expression but flexible and evolving. The root of all those expressions, however, is one simple thing. Tim Tamashiro said his ikigai is simply “to delight.” Mine is connecting the dots.
I was on an author panel yesterday and had a beautiful conversation with a woman in the audience. After she thanked me for what I’d shared on stage, I sat next to her for a bit. She told me her husband recently passed, and that she’d spent some time in California with her daughter for support as she grieved. Her daughter suggested she move there permanently, but she declined. That made me think of a line I’d read at the Untamed Women event from Toni Morrison’s Sula, when Nel tells Sula she shouldn’t be staying alone as sick as she was, and Sula interrupts her and says, “I like my own dirt, Nel.” When I shared that with her, she smiled and said if she were the tattoo type, that’s exactly what she’d get: I like my own dirt.
If you’ve been actualizing your purpose a certain way for a long time, especially if you’ve become recognized for doing it that particular way, and ESPECIALLY if you were paid a lot of money for doing it that way, shedding that old skin can be a lil scary. New skin requires taking risks. I had no idea if this offering would be valued. I just did it, and three organizations have already asked me to repeat this event for their audience. So grateful for that and so grateful to have put myself out there and taken that chance.
And it’s not just me feeling this shift. I’ve shared that I feel like I’m shedding old skin with several people, and every single one of ‘em, regardless of age, shared that they could relate. The levels of comfort or urgency varies across the shedding experiences, and some weren’t even aware that’s what was happening until it was named for ‘em. It’s like…they’re grateful for what they have and where they are, but they want more and they’re growing clearer about their desires and what would deliver deeper satisfaction. And the more I hear these stories, the more it feels like a lot more of us are in some version of this same season.
What about you, cousin? Can you relate?
P.S.: If you, *|FNAME|* want me to come to your city and facilitate a live reading and reflection, lemme know. Can be a gallery, a library, a bookstore, a coffee shop, church, a living room bookclub meeting, etc.
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