Today is my last day at my current job. Looking for a new job is exhausting.

I know I call A Gentle Landing “a poetic playground for restless dreamers,” but I do try my best to keep the restlessness away from this page. But to be honest, these days I feel like I am racing:

Racing to catch up with loved ones. Racing to figure out my neurodivergence. Racing to find new sources of income. Racing to survive fascism.

I am trying to overcome the latest bout of burnout, wrap up my current job, look for work, and read book after book in a quest for solutions to the problem of myself.

Has anyone been there?

After waking up at three or four am several nights in a row, I remembered this poem that meets my restlessness:

night vision by Lucille Clifton
       
the girl fits her body in
to the space between the bed
and the wall. she is a stalk,
exhausted. she will do some
thing with this. she will
surround these bones with flesh,
she will cultivate night vision.
she will train her tongue
to lie still in her mouth and listen.
the girl slips into sleep.
her dream is red and raging.
she will remember
to build something human with it.

train her tongue

What stands out to me today in Clifton’s poem are the lines “she will train her tongue/to lie still in her mouth and listen.”

This year began with surgery and as I end it, I still feel like I am stitching together the threads I need to care for my body well. This line reminds me that underlining my frustrations is a deeply dysregulated body, a body in need of rest.

Thanks to the support I have gathered from my subscribers here, I could afford to sign up for a course that will take me through The Embodiment Institute to help me ground myself somatically.

Softness is still the foundation of my approach to the work of A Gentle Landing before I get to this:

first studio.lab project preview

I had a lot of thoughts about how to share about the work I want to do. You can click here to see my last newsletter where I spelled out a lot of different dreams I’ve been holding.

Here is a free preview on Patreon of one of the projects I want to produce through the studio.lab. You can access the same preview through the Substack dedicated to the Woven podcast if you would prefer to listen follow the journey outside of Patreon.1

This is the description:

It will be available wherever you listen to podcasts. Support from Patreons will help fund the work and rest necessary to produce it. This includes being able to pay guests!

a new AGL ecosystem

I used to have a process. I would (over)think and (over)think and (over)think. I would have conversations that help me “detangle” my wiry thoughts and make sense of the overwhelm. I would practice archival devotion, coming back to words I’ve written or read from others and in that process, I find my way back to precious, hard-won truths. Then finally, I’d chart that journey here in posts that help bring together ideas I find interesting with practices I find grounding.

It is all experiential and dependent on a lot of vulnerability.

In these last few months, I have taken away the part where I chart that journey here, in part because some of what I am learning and unlearning feels too fresh to make public.2 I want to honor what this space has been while acknowledging the need for a new ecosystem to emerge, one where I can slow down even more and produce quality content that reflects my best creative and spiritual work.

I read a quote that said “Being an entrepreneur is like going to a casino with your reputation.” I had to put that in calligraphy. It feels so true—I am sticking my neck out here, trying my best to build a foundation I can build my dreams on.

It’s still vulnerability but it looks and feels different.

help me get there gently

So all that being said, will you help me? One holiday we should all celebrate this month is my birthday month and all I have is one wish: to be grounded in the work my soul must have.

My friend and I have had many conversations about what a gentle landing is together. I have shared many ideas I did not have the bandwidth to produce over these last few months, as I dreamed up possibilities for spaces I want to create and works of creativity I want to produce. Her affirmations keep my dreams warm:

“Your natural state saves Black women all the time.”

“I want everything good to come for you twice.”

“I truly believe in the depths of my soul that you are THAT GIRL TM.”

I am sending this post so close to the holidays, in the event that you would want to join me on Patron, where no matter the tier, members will have access to all posts.

I will be resting, reading and leaning into my relationships over the holidays. I will be offline, but happy to respond to questions and comments when I return in January. For now, I celebrate the support I have already felt from you friends like Bethany Nicole and you all, as I have crossed into 1.7k subscribers here. We’ve arrived gently here together. May we continue to grow in more beautiful and gentle ways in the new year.

this is my last landing track of the year

What lessons of gentle landing will you carry from this year into next year?

[Woven: Reflections on the Wonderfully Weird Web is a series that weaves together stories of how I have been shaped by the internet. This series comes with reflective questions to help us think critically about our engagement with digital media and develop better practices of care for ourselves and others we are in community with online. You can explore more in this series here.]

the original confession

“Today I’m struggling with confidence induced by Substack. I want to know my words resonate with my peers.”

—me, in the group chat

It all started on July 31, 2024, which was a Wednesday. I remember because my Substack posts are published on Wednesdays. I remember because I used to check my Substack periodically throughout the day when I publish. During this time, I was also very active on Substack Notes, which, if you haven’t explored the app, looks something like a Twitter feed. Notes can sometimes feel like the writer’s lounge of Substack. It can be a supportive place where writers share advice and uplift each other. It can sometimes feel like just the right kind of nerdy experience between writers who are also readers of each other’s work. Notes started to become a feature of this site I would check daily and contribute to with my own thoughts.

Over time, I started to compare myself to some of my colleagues on here whose work generate lots of comments on their posts and restacks on Notes. This comparison made Wednesdays my least favorite day in my writing routine. Every Wednesday was another reminder that I was not one of those writers.

On that faithful day in July, I shared this confession with two of my writer friends, who also have Substacks. The response of one brilliant friend met me like a blanket of deep care: Publish and walk away, friend. The words you write are not just for the folks here, they are for the future. For the generations after. For people not yet born. That’s how much weight they hold. Likes and hearts are ephemeral.

I responded saying I would make a little social media self-care guide for myself and add her advice to it. I had no idea I would journey down a rabbit hole that would reflect on months of reading, writing and shifting how I engage online, leading to this series.

All I wanted was to do better by my mental well-being. I did not expect to have completely reshaped my life online and my life offline.

what we’ve lost…

“If we are to restore and document our humanity, we must refuse the spectacle for the everyday.1 The archive has privileged the spectacle to our detriment. Today we can chant the names of a handful of the dead, but these are not litanies for survival. Even community-based archives have proven woefully inadequate in recording the names suffering slow deaths of incarceration, poverty, and environmental toxicity. We must first seek to archive lives lived in spaces of impossibility.”

—Yusef Omowale, "We Already Are." Sustainable Futures2

I knew how I wanted to end this series before it began. I had written the final part months ago, including my original confession. I saved it in a knowledge management system I had been experimenting with, but somehow it disappeared and I can’t find it. So what you’re reading today is my best effort to recover what was lost and make space for something new. I suppose that is the heart of this series.

I took a day to sit with the weight of the loss—it was written so long ago, I cannot reconstruct it from memory. All I have are fragments.3

For so long, the archive for so many of us only contained fragments. I am thinking specifically of my skinfolk. For so many of us, when we reach back into our pasts to learn something about ourselves in the future, we are grasping at straws. So the idea of building archives in the present that make looking back a bit easier holds so much weight.

Luckily we can build with fragments. As you know, I love a good bird metaphor in this space. There are over 176 species of birds that weave their nests with twigs alongside materials they source from human trash.4 They are able to form soft places to land for their offspring from things that weren’t alive.

What I keep calling archival devotion5 can look like this; the preservation of the seemingly insignificant in the present with the hope that they will hold what we call precious in the future. We can look tenderly upon what has been overlooked, and Yusef Omowale says, “refuse the spectacle for the everyday.”

Seeda School

Don’t Do It For The Gram, Do It For The Archive

Dear Worldbuilder…

Read more

2 years ago · 44 likes · Ayana Zaire Cotton

…and what we keep

Unless we are vigilant, the current design of much of our technology will block us every step of the way, deliberately creating false targets for self-reflection, curiosity, and a desire to belong to a community.

—Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

I have just shared that I struggle with wanting my work to be appreciated by my peers. A desire for their feedback is embedded in the afterlife of each post.

I have just shared that I am impacted by the lack of response I must often sit with after I have published.

As I write, I hope this vulnerability doesn’t cheapen your experience of a gentle landing as a reader. It is true—I want you to take your time, lean in and return to these words as often as you need to. It is true that I want to center reflection and hope that those reflections continue beyond the comment section and into your daily living.

It is also true that my internal dialogue often sounds like this: “Am I doing okay? Was that post okay? No one commented. Maybe it sucks. Maybe I’m not making any sense. Maybe I should write less. Maybe they all find my emails annoying.”

I see a connection between being able to “publish and walk away,” and trusting in the work of building an archive. That work isn’t one that can be evaluated on the same day a post is published. The evaluation of my peers in the present, however kind or unkind can only go so far. Especially if I see the call to write into the future as one worth leaning into.

But what do I do about this desire to be “woven” into the story of something that matters, here and now? And how are you, gentle-people, a part of what I am weaving here?

This is certainly not a call for you to leave more comments to help me feel better on pub days. Throughout this series, I have pushed back against the idea that our being woven together has anything to do with engagement—it is more of an inevitable entanglement.

Engagement is fleeting but entanglement lasts.

The call I feel rising up in this series is one of examining our entanglements—the good, the bad and the ugly—and deciding what to keep.

My confession last July was a realization that I couldn’t keep up the practices that led me to experiencing so much dread when I share my writing. My hope is that by examining our relationship to social media, we might realize there are some things we can’t keep up. Some of it will be lost, but some of it we will have to learn to let go so we can turn toward keeping ourselves.

time travel

To get over the sting of losing my writing, I reached into my archive. I dug up an old writing archive from Evernote, which I used from 2010 to 2019. I read through old poems and blog posts from a very different version of myself. I even found a list of resolutions I wrote in 2014 for myself in the year 2030. I was surprised to see that I achieved many things on list I had never revisited until now.

In a Black women’s writing group I am a part of, I was led in a writing exercise to write about the year 2040. I did the math and calculated my age, realizing I’d be almost 50. I have never thought of myself at that age. To craft my response, I used one of Natasha Marin’s questions from Black Imagination, which we started this series with: Imagine a world where you are safe, valued and loved.

I saw myself as an accomplished6 writer, who had achieved many of her career goals, finally seated in her chaise lounge chair. I saw myself advising someone who is my current age, someone who came asking “tell me it gets better.” I readied myself to revisit my archives, to show this person I was once where she was—to prove to her there was more to life than that moment. After this exercise, I realized, with my highest imagination, I conjured a scenario where someone came to me for wisdom. Where I was able to offer it, seated in my softness. And the wisdom emerged from what I have kept.

I traveled forwards and backwards to fill the void left by my missing words. It all left me with this resolve:

To aspire to creating something that lives beyond this moment. To write, into the counter-archives. To nurture these dreams. To keep moving toward the softest version of myself.

terms of devotion

“Creatives should take social media metrics with a grain of salt, and focus their efforts more on community-building factors.”

— Matthew Prebeg, “‘A quiet shift is taking place’: On being a creative in the age of content”

I intended this section to be its own segment in this series. But the more I wrote about it, the more I found myself embarrassed by my hopes. What has shaped this embarrassment? Well, have you ever shared something you were really excited about with someone only to receive a flat, alienating response? You hoped you could have connected, with shared enthusiasm, over how great this thing that has enamored you is…only you are left feeling alone in your devotion.

That is what I feel, so often as a writer. Each word I write feels as if it ventures off to find family. I do not care to be in a conversation by myself.

“What we consent to—what we agree to—is the consent not to be a single being. It’s a kind of extra-social, non-contractual consent. It’s not the consent of the individual who stands alone. It’s the consent of entanglement, of inseparability, of having always been with.”

— Fred Moten

I am continually in awe of Fred Moten’s writing. I am particularly appreciative of the ways he moves through scholarship in community and collaboration. He is not interested in being in a conversation by himself, either.

This quote reminds me of the kind of community I want to be in. I am making community moves, inspired in part by a book I read called Belong: Find Your People, Create Community & Live a More Connected Life by Radha Agrawal. I am making community moves, so that when I publish and walk away, I can join in conversation with those who have consented to living their lives to reflect this truth:

Engagement is fleeting but entanglement lasts.

I know this is true when I am not paying attention to the timeline and whether or not my writing is resonating with my peers (who are all likely overwhelmed by the multitude of good writing out there). I know it is true when revisit past words and I practice writing into the future.

I know it is true when I see your comments on this series—so many of us are trying to find our way through this digital media literacy crisis. So many of us want something better than the channels we currently have for digital social connection.

So many of us want:

our complexity back from branding
our self-worth back from metrics
our stories back from context collapse
our time back from timelines
our attention back from algorithms
our careers back from content creation.

And I want to make community moves—where I get to be part of setting the terms of devotion.

This series was born from that confession of insecurity, shared among confidants. Friends I made from a season of being online in another way I have changed. Somehow, this group chat formed because we knew we needed to be in each others lives in a way the algorithm didn’t allow for. Four Black women made community moves and exchanged phone numbers. Since then, I have been a participant in the joy, grief, humor, curiosity, hope and terror that has been shared in this group.

Our terms of devotion is simple: we long to embrace our softness, and named our group chat “Black Girl Softness” as a reminder of that.

Our words led us to one another, but there is a deep love that sustains us beyond what we can find words for.

It is exactly this kind of community building that has helped me adjust my expectations online.7

for the strangers

"I cannot remember the name or face of this stranger, but I saw him once. He looked thoughtful. I imagined he had a soul I could talk to. I walked home filled with the desire to know him, to talk with him for hours. I dreamed of meeting someone I could say everything to.”

— from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s journals

I remain open to the possibility, echoing my friend , that I haven’t met everyone I am supposed to love yet. Everyone who is going to love me.

The aperture of that openness shifts, as I account for the trauma I carry an the memories of times I was not met on the same terms of devotion. But just as Emerson recognized that he might have shared an inner landscape similar to the person he was describing, the possibility for a new soul friendship is always looming.

So I will end this series, remembering those who are strangers to me now—those I write for into the archive, with the dream of a response that comes long after I’ve (been) called. I write to the ones who have found space on this wonderfully weird web to carve out some kind of belonging.

Those who have, at least once, thought their connections online would not be taken seriously because they were…online. Those who have retreated here to find a sense of agency and voice through the muck of it all. Those who know that as complicated as the internet is, it is also a wonderfully weird place to connect with wonderfully weird strangers. Those who have come close to saying everything or anything (confessions included) to satisfy the desire to be known.

For those who will find these words on the internet, long after I have published and walked away—

Let us never diminish the care that can generate, even if others look down on it as a lesser form of connection. Let us reflect, gently on how we are being shaped by those connections.

Let us name its weirdness without diminishing its wonders. Because we, the co-creators of these connections, are also a little wonderful and a little weird.

Somehow we keep coming back here, finding each other and entering into something of a confessional through these words. Somehow we are woven, despite—and because of—the screen between us.8

landing track

The goal of landing tracks has always been to give you all a chance to check in with yourselves and your own stories as a place of rest. It is also to offer practices that might help facilitate a gentle landing.

Today, I offer only one: share whatver reflections you delight in sharing, as they arrive for you.

I’ve been called “too rigid,” in the past for practices like memorizing scripture. I am still overcoming the sting of feeling ostracized in church spaces for being too into church. As I have come into my own and found spiritually expansive ways of living—alongside some reclaimed practices— I have chosen the word “devotion” over “rigor” to describe the passions I bring to this way of life. I want to be remembered as devotional. Will you please hold onto that word with me as you read?

What I share here has been developed over months, starting from last fall when I realized I needed an extended break from social media. It began with a question, as my fractured attention was mending itself: What do you intend to do with this newfound capacity?1

attention & intention

It has happened to me so many times that I've picked up my phone meaning to open up a certain app and look something up or check something and I forgot why I was doing it. Somehow, in a series of clicks to get to the app that I meant to get to, I lost my way. Then, it takes me a while of recentering to figure out what it was I was trying to do. For me, this highlights the connection between attention and intention.

Attention is the energy of your presence; intention is the purpose behind your presence. They both rest so close to each other, sharpening one another as they pull what matters into focus.

the rule & the exception

In a conversation with my brilliant, genius-writer-sister-friends, and , I found my woven confession for this post. There was once a time when I thought I would arrive at some measure of success in my career as a ____2 from having a certain number of followers. In the absence of having a grasp on what professional development looked like in the ___ field, social media success felt tangible and approachable.

For awhile, it was easy—until the algorithm began to demand bigger and bigger sacrifices.

My confession: I made a spectacle of myself, time and time again and called it strategy. I contorted my life around a square or 240 characters, while playing tug of war with magical thinking.

I was simply emulating what I knew. But what I saw as success through amassing large social media following was the exception and not the rule.

Let me explain—In the movie He’s Just Not That Into You, the phrase “you’re the exception, not the rule” is used to challenge the tendency—especially in romantic contexts—to hold onto hope based on rare or unlikely outcomes, rather than accepting the more probable reality. This movie is filled with misogynistic tropes, rooted in helping women embrace a strict gender binary—so I will need you to take *generous leaps* over to my conclusion:

I decided I was going to learn the rules—and live as if they apply to me. Not assume I’ll be the exception who gets to bypass them. Not rely on virality to choose me just because I strung together the right amount of hyperbolic speech.3

For a strategy that embraces this kind of revelation, from a similar revelation about success, here’s a lovely guide put together by Camille for authors:

Back to attention and intention: One of the things I've realized since reshaping my relationship to digital media, social media, algorithms and whatnot, is as I gain my attention back, I am also asking questions about my intention. As I have found more time, more space and capacity in my mind and heart, I have had to ask myself, What will I do with this newfound sense of presence? And so I am beginning to stretch the edges of my ability to move through the world with more intention. I wanted to go deeper with my 1) spiritual and creative practices and 2) my journey of somatic healing, 3) my desires for relational growth, 4) how I steward my finances, 5) the things that I want to learn and 6) the ways I want to move purposefully in my career.

So all these things led me to decide to create a rule of life:

A Rule of Life is a framework that helps you live with intention, clarity, and care. Rooted in monastic spiritual tradition, it names the practices and postures that sustain you—guiding how you spend your time, tend your energy, and align your values with your daily rhythms. It’s not a rigid system—“rule”comes from regula which is Latin for “pattern” or “guide.” It is a living rhythm that honors who you are and who you’re becoming.

This is something I learned about in undergrad,4 but never thought I would need or use. I have since developed a deep respect for monasticism,5 as I have leaned in more intentionally to my contemplative identity in recent years. I don't see it as a set of rigid practices. This is about setting rhythms. And one thing that is true is that rhythms can change. And so this is a document that I measure my day to day life and commitments against. And if I look at the activities that take up my time and realize they don't reflect what's in my rule of life, I have to decide—do my activities change, or does my rule of life have to change?

I have found it very helpful. But I had to adapt it to suit me and my concept of a gentle landing. You’ll see.

beyond the rule of social media

I want to briefly share why I think having a rule of life has helped me and why it might potentially be helpful to you.

1. Social media rewards visibility, speed and reaction. A rule of life calls for an examination of the invisible at work within you. It demands slowness of integration and proactive living.

2. Social media platforms disrespect your time by deliberately enacting malicious tactics to pull you away from a sense of attention and intention. A rule of life calls your attention to the intentions you’ve set for your time, shaped by a desire for flourishing.

3. Social media conditions us to externalize our inner voice constantly. A rule of life invites you to cultivate an inner knowing through reflective practices that remind you that you don’t have to be seen to be real.

4. Social media conditions us to randomized dopamine rewards, spiked by the act of scrolling. A rule of life can point you to practices that center nervous system regulation, like a morning walk, journaling, yoga, or poetry reading.

5. Social media invites you to perform your becoming for external validation via content creation. A rule of life invites you to mark your becoming through acts of archival devotion, or a practice of reflecting on work crafted for sacred returns.6

from morning pages to the rule of life

Yes, that was the journey. It began with morning pages.7 After seeing the same complaints come up numerous times in my morning pages, I grew sick and tired of seeing them. I started taking note of what I wanted to make room for and began to make a list. Month after month, the list would grow with things I wished I was doing, habits I wanted to stop or start, dreams I wondered if I had the ability to center. I also took note of the places where I declared or affirmed something about myself. It wasn’t really organized into a rule of life at first. At first, it was a mangled list of to dos, dreams, affirmations and values.

There were things I wanted to do alongside who I wanted to be, but it was only recently that I realized I had somehow overlooked the main desire that anchors everything for me: I choose to live as a Soft Black Woman seeking a gentle landing.8

Once I had that, everything in my rule of life simply needed to respond to elaborate on why and how, for those six main sections above: 1) my spiritual and creative practices, 2) my journey of somatic healing, 3) my desires for relational growth, 4) how I steward my finances, 5) the things that I want to learn (and unlearn) and 6) the ways I want to move purposefully in my career.

Each of these sections in my rule of life is divided into affirmations and practices. I will share some from the section on “Learning & Integration,” since I have shared this journey with you all in way:

Affirmation

• I honor the small, daily patterns of my life as sacred sites of transformation. I will return to the micro—my breath, my boundaries, my relationships—as places where liberation is practiced.

Practice

• I will study works that support my theological, creative, and material flourishing—including how I care for my body, my time, and my resources.

Some people outline metrics for each of their practices (ex. pray 2x a day). I chose not to do this. This category has four values and five practices. I like having options for helping me notice where I am growing, as I lean on different practices in different seasons. But to start, you might want to chose one affirmation and one practice that makes that affirmation more true as you practice. Or make sure your affirmations remind you to approach your practices with softness (as example does).

Build slowly and sustainably. Move at the speed of self-trust.

how it started vs how its going

what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up

— Lucille Clifton

On social media, I’ve seen so many post side by side photos for “how it started vs. how its going.” They are sometimes funny and sometimes beautifully reflective. Sometimes both. Very often, we do not get to travel through the incremental moments of growth and shifting that led from one picture to the other. We don’t see the twists and turns—the moments of vocation and devocation that shaped the journey.

I will speak for myself—I used to struggle with asking but what did you specifically do to get there? Show me the way. I’m struggling.

Sometimes I would ask and the answers would be too vague or too simplistic for me. I want the how-to book from them I may never write for anyone else. Yes, I see my hypocrisy.

Sometimes, I have instead of asking, I held my tongue and read books. The answer has got to be in a book, right? I just have to find it.

I have on occasion, reached out and formed relationships with people I’ve seen the “how it started vs. how its going” story of their lives, whether through social media or otherwise. Things have gotten a bit better now that I have (mostly) stopped expecting them to be able to map out their lives in a blueprint.

What I realize people are doing in their “how it started vs. how its going” posts, in the more serious/reflective ones, is inviting someone(s) to bear witness. It is in some ways a hope for some measure of accountability: “Here is where I said I was going…now look, I am there.” | “This is where I unfortunately was, now I have gratefully landed in a better place.” | “I said I cared about this…here is what I mean.”

Let me put some pictures side by side for you:

This past week, I met with my former supervisor at my last job to get her insight on some things I am working on in my current job. While I learned a lot from her when we worked together, I realized there was more I could learn, since realizing my current job is much like hers—only I am building systems from the ground up.

I was nervous so I prepared a thorough agenda, afraid to waste any time. But our conversation barely needed my agenda—she asked me so many great questions that helped me put some pieces together. She listened to me share about how I was used to having to fight for my perspective to be heard, especially with the ideas that I've learned in school. I would learn these beautiful ideals and ask “Why are is the church not this way?” And now I'm in a position with (more)9 influence to determine the shape of things—and yet I am still in the habit of fighting—now, against my imposter syndrome.

She met me in her own “how it started vs. how its going” story, telling me a story of self-doubt from her early days in leadership. Her encouragement, paraphrased in my notes, resonates in its clarifying truth:

Trust yourself and your vision. You've studied and prepared for this role, and you deserve to be in this position. It's okay to be learning and to show vulnerability. Remember that you can do this, even though it will be challenging and you'll make mistakes along the way. Focus on being an open, flexible leader who listens and invites collaboration. Being a leader doesn't mean you know everything, but that you're open to learning. Celebrate yourself. Celebrate your accomplishments and the opportunity to shape the church the way you want it to be.

“Celebrate yourself.”

When she said these words, I shed some tears. I had spent that morning meditating on Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me?”

This poem to me is a reminder that we are meant to be witnessed. Our stories of becoming are meant to be shared. It reminds me that some “rules”—not the ones I have intentionally named to guide me, but the ones that govern this beautiful but oppressive world— “ha[ve] tried to kill me and ha[ve] failed.”

This poem reminds me, that every day I am here, there is something exceptional about my survival.

“won’t you celebrate with me?” — what I have shaped into a rule of life?

Because I am me—and no one else—I will steer my attention and intention towards making the most of this life I have been given, as I make it up. I will make a record for how I got here, even as the rules change. I will invite witnesses into my celebration, shaped by what is eternal (starshine) and material (clay)—in me and the world taking shape as I live. I will claim and reclaim this joy continually.

I am still here—attending and intending—so I will.

landing tracks

1. When was the last time you paused long enough to ask: What am I doing—and why?

2. What rituals could help you recover your attention from digital extraction? Bonus prompt: consider weaving those rituals into a (digital) rule of life.

3. What’s one affirmation and one practice you’d like to live into this season? Bonus prompt: write one of each for 3 areas of your life.

4. Who do you want to invite to witness what you’ve “shaped into a kind of life?”

Today’s offering is in the form of an audio reflection on the escape button. I hope this is a helpful point of discernment for those thinking about coming to the Woven:mini retreat.

[Woven: Reflections on the Wonderfully Weird Web is a series that weaves together stories of how I have been shaped by the internet. This series comes with reflective questions to help us think critically about our engagement with digital media and develop better practices of care for ourselves and others we are in community with online. You can explore more in this series here.]

Sources mentioned in the audio

• Jeff Raskin - “the user’s attention is sacred” | I read this in Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus

• Cal Newport - Digital Minimalism

• Undistracted: Making Art in a Time of Digital Interruption (PDF) from ArtistU

You can find the books mentioned here and other books that inspire this series on my Bookshop:

Woven Reading List

Learn more about the woven: mini retreat

RSVP to the Retreat

I am writing this newsletter post with the intention to update it throughout the month leading up to the Woven: mini retreat, which I will talk more about below. I know it will land in your emails in a static way, but like a lot of my work, it will live online as a place for folks to return to over and over. That means if you are reading this via email, you might want to click here to see the most updated version of this post.

This has been a long time coming that I’ve wanted to create gathering spaces for a gentle landing. I am excited to do what all my training and researching boils down to:

Community.

Practice.

Community practice.

RSVP to the Retreat

When I started writing the Woven series, I had some inkling that I wasn’t the only one with an increasingly ambivalent relationship with social media. Since last fall, when I began this journey of detangling, I have learned so much more about how wired many of us are. In response to my writing, many of you have shared of your exhaustion and named some of the ways you are tracing a way back to yourself, reclaiming your attention and living life beyond the algorithms.

Throughout the series, I’ve shared this survey, which invites readers to reflect on their relationship with the internet — especially social media:

“It’s too much. I want a dumb phone again.”

“I feel like I spend too much time marketing myself instead of enjoying it.”

“It’s better than before — social media breaks have been a game changer.”

I saw some responses that acknowledge the ways the internet helps us organize mutual aid, increase donations, and stay loosely connected. But for many, it still feels like an uneasy space. I have heard echoed in some of your reflections is a quandary: what does community online look like beyond the algorithms?

Well, it has been my question, too. In particular, I have been wondering what community building for the work I am doing here looks like in ways that respect your time and attention.What I share in this post I hope, is a step in the direction of a response.

“Conflicting,” one person wrote.

That word keeps echoing through me.

Holding all of this, the Woven: mini retreat was born from these tensions and the ache for something quieter, slower, more whole.

I want to be clear: this is not a rejection of technology but I hope it is a reimagining of how we want to show up inside and beyond it.

“Woven may start with my stories, but I hope it inspires you to reflect on (y)ours.”

— rose j. percy, “I know those edges” | Woven: Reflections on the Wonderfully Weird Web, Part 2

Woven: mini-retreat — May 31, 10am-1pm EDT

You’re invited:

Come lay down the burden of performance and weave a rhythm of softness that is already yours.

Come tend the part of you that seeks wisdom without rushing.

This is a space for the spiritually weary who find themselves fatigued by algorithm-driven content—

—a space for the scattered creative reclaiming their relationship to wonder.

If you are longing for digital spaces that heal rather than hollow you out, come rest here awhile.

If this sounds like a space you need, click here to read this detailed brochure1 (best viewed on a large screen):

Retreat Brochure

Questions? Concerns? Drop a comment.

If you have any questions that aren’t answered there, please leave a comment on this post and I will respond and add them to the main body of this post for future readers. Here are some I am anticipating:

• What if I can’t afford it?2 Please do not let price be a barrier. I have set this up on a sliding scale, hoping some of you will lean into the spirit of a gentle landing and fund access to this space for those who cannot pay. If you are someone who is currently experiencing financial challenges, please message me personally, email agentlelandingss@gmail.com or reply to this email to let me know how this space would impact you. I will be in touch if I can make room for you in the retreat, as the generosity of this community allows. If you are someone who wants to extend a gentle landing towards those who want to take this opportunity, click this link to go to my Buy Me a Coffee page or visit the event page for more giving options.

Donate Towards Scholarships

• Is there an age limit for this event? You must be 18 or older for this space. I recognize the ongoing concerns about teens and screens and would one day like to adapt this for teenaged participants. I have experience working with middle schoolers and would love the opportunity to shape a retreat for kids. However, I would prefer to do that work in person and in-person communities I am accountable to.

• What if 3-hours is enough? Included in the brochure are some tips for expanding your retreat. One of the tips is to do a 48-hr social media fast. There are a lot of suggestions but you are free to pick and choose which tips make sense for your life and capacity. But let me be clear: this is not about a digital detox—While that can be a part of it, this is about resetting in a way that helps us move intentionally towards new ways of connecting with ourselves and others.

• Will the retreat be live or self-paced? It will be live—but not broadcasted or recorded. I will be there, moving with you through exercises and facilitated conversations in real time.

• Do I need to share with others during the retreat? On some level, yes. This is a participatory space, not one made for passive consumption. This will not be a space for me to preach at you, either. I am here to facilitate and draw out the wisdom that comes from the group as we dig deep.

• Is this retreat faith-based or spiritually open? It can be engaged both ways. While I identify as a Christian, the mystic and contemplative practices I ground myself in can be translated across a variety of faiths and convictions.

• What if I’ve never done anything like this before? I have led online cohorts and facilitated in-person contemplative/spiritual space. But if I am honest, I have never done anything exactly like this. I am working with theory from months of research that has formed the Woven series and my years of experience teaching and learning spaces.3 So this space will be as new for me as it is for you. We will move slowly, at the speed of trust.4

• What if I want an experience like this but I can’t make it? I am considering running at least two more of these this year and possibly going quarterly next year. I am curating this space for reflections we can keep returning to—meaning, you’re welcome to come to one, two, three or all of these.

Landing Tracks (These questions are here for you to process whether you want to attend this retreat)

1. Are you thinking about attending the retreat? No need to commit now—I would love to hear your first impressions on how the details are landing for you.

2. With no barriers in the way of your attendance and participation, how do you think you’d show up in this space? What would help you show up as yourself?

3. Where do you feel most conflicted in your digital life? How do you hold that conflict in your body and mind?

4. What would it mean for you to weave a life that values presence over performance? How can an online space help support you in that goal?

I hope you know your attention is valuable. I write these newsletters hoping to honor and respect your attention as much as I do my own. I grow nervous, sometimes, to share on Wednesdays, especially when I produce long reflections like the one below. But recently some friends shared with me the impact of my reflections in this series has had on them. Their encouragement was not to mind the Substack post editor that taunts me with its message that says “post too long for email.”

Those encouragements helped me to breathe a sigh of relief. I present these words in the spirit of that sigh, with the hope of a gentle landing.

[If you want to share with me how this series is impacting you, feel free to express your thoughts in this survey. I would love to hear from you.]

[Woven: Reflections on the Wonderfully Weird Web is a series that weaves together stories of how I have been shaped by the internet. This series comes with reflective questions to help us think critically about our engagement with digital media and develop better practices of care for ourselves and others we are in community with online. You can explore more in this series here.]

Early 2021, when we were still “bored in the house and in the house bored,” I got loud on the internet. Louder than I have ever been. I thought I had found my voice online, sharing a deeply vulnerable journey of learning to be a soft Black woman on Instagram and Twitter and eventually a podcast. People seemed to be listening, responding to me with likes, comments and shares. Here’s a post reflecting on that journey two years later, in a post now archived on Instagram:

[in the photo:]

“I got loud on the internet bc people kept talking over me irl. I got tired of being the token black girl at the table, on the stage, or in the sermon rotation. It feels good to be building something that I’m not forced to edit for the white gaze.”

[in the captions:]

As I learn more about the Black imagination, the Black interior and Black literature, I wonder why l ever thought centering BIPOC in justice work was not possible. Centering white people cost me a lot and I have only offered the edited and depersonalized version of those stories online.

I'm reading Michaela Coel's "Misfits," and she says " The term 'misfits' takes on dual notions; a misfit is one who looks at life differently. Many however are made into misfits because life looks at them differently..." I am a misfit in so many ways. If you thought I was loud on the internet in the past year, you'll have to brace yourself for what's in store. I'm not self-editing anymore: not for the white gaze, not for the male gaze, not for the gaze of the church I once longed to embrace all of me— You're gonna have to find another token.

—March 15, 20221

This was an intense form of public vulnerability with a tone of defensiveness—a resistance to being silenced and an intimate knowledge of the forces that would wish to silence me. This is the work of translation as survival. It felt like it was me against the world—us against the world when I consider the audience of Black women I was writing for/with. My words held a desperation to be seen—yes they were having an impact on others, but I was reflecting in public. I look back on my words from that time now and I see it: I was over-explaining myself to live. I see it now. Did anyone notice then?

Am I being too hard on myself? After all, it’s just Instagram. This is just the way so many of us talk online, speaking to everyone and no one at the same time. Bearing our souls—or some illusion of it. I was just one among the many, telling the truth “raw and unfiltered.” Some might say I was on fire—and all I wanted to do was point a finger at who started it.

the wound and the scar

I recently came across some advice to write from the scar and not the wound. It was given in the context of publishing books written for the sake of advising others. Let me first say that I find that binary extremely unhelpful. I would prefer a spectrum, where we acknowledge that as soon as we are wounded, we begin the process of scarring. Our journeys of healing are seldom as clean cut as the simple advice conveys. Our work through trauma, hurt, and grief can often be so cyclical that we uncover new wounds all the time.

Some of the best writing on the human condition arises from those who have been wounded. Those who access language as their saving grace to describe their condition in such a way that it opens up the path to healing—for themselves and others. My favorite examples are mystic writers.2

Some of the best writing on the human condition arises from those who would reject this advice because it so squarely centers an individualistic journey of healing, focused on the resources of therapy and time.

Some of the best writing on the human condition arises from those whose embodiment requires they write from the wound to testify to their realities. Let my writing be a witness. Let the writing of so many of my friends and ancestors be a witness.

This advice stirred something in me and it is not because I fully disagree—no, there are some things we can only do well when we have healed enough and gained some distance. But it reminded me that there are those who would reject how I wrote then—and even how I write now—because my healing journey is not linear. Luckily, I have a view of healing, informed by studying disability justice and theology, that rejects the legibly embraced in this advice and honors pain as a way of knowing. My view of healing also rejects the pathologizing of emotion, which I additionally find support for in the journey of going mad without losing my mind,3 which provides generous room for mistakes and asks hard questions about who actually gets to be well.

In my work here, I hope to invite you to witness the ache. What is still aching in me and in the world. It may awaken an awareness to the ways you are still wounded and the ways you are beginning to scar. But know this: it will never ask you to perform a perfect healing journey. You do not have to be well here to say “well, here.”

Am I taking this too personally? After all, it’s just a newsletter post, meant to help writers like you grow. Maybe there is merit to this advice. Maybe you should edit out your processing and only publish your conclusions. Maybe being a bit more polished will help you succeed. Maybe you should turn the wince into a smile.

who look at me?

I have said this series will be lined with confessions. In fact, I don’t consider a piece for this series to be done until I have identified the confession that anchors it. I wrestled with this one for a long time before I felt I was able to write about it with any measure of compassion. Well, here it is:

I muted a friend.

I muted my friend because their displays of public vulnerability held the promise of being unfiltered and unedited. The confessional nature of their posts amplified by a public platform invited a tenderness that filled me with secondary embarrassment. I muted them because it felt like the hidden message of their posts was to disparage any kind of curation. I muted them because I was responding to this feeling of disgust that came up for me whenever I read something like what they posted. Speaking to everyone and no one, they offered unprompted perspectives on their internal reflections and insights about the world around them. I felt the strand of self-defense that ran through their words—I knew they were not defending themselves from me, but it felt like they were confessing something to me in a whisper that was amplified in a room of thousands.

I muted my friend and was left with this feeling that bugged me. I am now realizing that I was muting a version of myself. The me that used to routinely open up social media and share in a similar fashion. The version of me I have let go in the months since changing my relationship with social media and taking increasing amounts of time away from it.

While I explored my Instagram archive, looking back at that version of me, I found a post that spoke to this one:

[the picture]

“Stop shaming people for wanting to be seen. Instead ask why we live in a society that conditions us to devalue, dehumanize and look past each other.”

[the caption]

“We have to decide our attention isn’t cheap. And choose to tend to the things that matter most.”

—Jan 22, 2022

Part of me knows my friend wrote what they wrote because they wanted to be seen. And in some ways the platform that amplifies their voice forces us readers to confront how they have been dehumanized. Their sharing said “Who look at me? Who see me…” and “look close…I am Black, alive and looking back at you.”

What was my response as I saw this plea to be seen amplified by these tools for social connection I am now actively critiquing? I looked away. I descended down into rationalism, knowing the frame and filter spoke to me more loudly than their words did. I clung to an interpretation of their words that offended me, as someone who is growing increasingly conscious of the unrelenting frame and the unfilterable filter that is placed on everything we write online.4 The medium is the message,5 remember?

Look at me look at me looking at me. Seriously, look. All self-reflective and sh*t. I feel proud and you should, too. Some part of me won’t feel okay until I know you do.

look at me look at me looking at me

An early version of this post was going to focus on performative authenticity, context collapse, virtue signaling and meta-narration fatigue. On some level we can also point back to the post on branding and see a connection there with self-disclosure reinforcing a way we want to be seen. All of these I feel would have been good for helping you see the frames and filters that come with public vulnerability online. But an awareness of my own journey and a more generous reading of my muted friend led me to consider how a sense of voicelessness shapes this conversation. The more I explored my ideas, read and let that feeling about muting a friend bother me, the more I realized it mattered where I looked.

Afterall,“We have to decide our attention isn’t cheap. And choose to tend to the things that matter most.”

I have decided these social media platforms don’t matter to me but the well-being of my friends does. And some of my friends more readily share insights into their internal world with people who may or may not care. Some of them have yet to question the impulse that shapes their desire to do so and some are even uncritical about the world that grows cold in the face of their deepest concerns. So I find myself confronting the impulse of others to be vulnerable in posts, at least with my friends, with a measure of care and critique.

Remember my “I could care less” series? If not, just remember this: I recognize I do not have the capacity to carry this empathy for every stranger on my timeline. So I stopped looking at my timeline altogether. Sometimes when I log on, all I see is people responding to questions I didn’t ask—and someone them feel like they are yelling (at me). It doesn’t matter if its not true. What is true usually is that I don’t have enough context to know how to receive so many of these pleas to “look at me look at me looking at me.”

I know they want someone to care. I know some of them are spilling over with their truths about themselves they want the world to read. But my thumb scrolls past their words quickly out of habit and my eyes which dart around the screen, overstimulated. It all feels like too much. It was. It is. I was. I am?

“You were never too much.
Maybe someone told you
You were not worthy of love —

Maybe you believed it.

They could not wrap their minds
Or arms
Around you — as concept or person—

Enough is enough:
There is love
Beyond the collapsed self
you’ve forced into the folds
of weak love.” 

— January 19, 2022

the right to opacity

It is incredibly human for us to want to be seen. There was something inside me that raged through a desire to be seen. It rages still, know that so many find themselves muted in real life as their vulnerabilities are ignored and diminished in the face of peril. These folks find themselves tiring of what Raquel Willis calls “the visibility trap,” the intense contradiction that comes with telling our stories with diminishing returns on the justice and equity our lives demand. Sometimes our increased visibility leads to more violence—we say “look at me (look at me looking at me)” and the response is sometimes a gaze through the crosshairs. We whittle ourselves down to digestible nuggets, forsaking the complexity that is our birthright with the hope that we can squeeze into a narrow definition of love. But as Toni Morrison says “thin love ain’t love at all.”6

I may not have the capacity to respond to every plea to be humanized, but I know the very exhaustion I feel because I can’t is an indictment on cultural and systemic failure. I wish I did not have to X-ray my heart to prove I have one to a certain audience.

I wish so many of us didn’t need to explain or over-explain ourselves to survive. I wish for the expansiveness of our internal worlds. I wish for a hope that encapsulates what Édouard Glissant calls the “right to opacity” which affirms that our ways of being can evade simple definitions and explanations. I wish for that same home towards the peace we find in what Kevin Quashie calls the “sovereignty of quiet,” which calls us into a way of love that “descends into the interior” in a way that embraces the unknowing and forms us in a love that is both “the practice and the prize.”7

Visibility is not the same as kindness. I have been visible but unseen and unmet in the truest form of myself. There is more mystery to me than I can know. I am more un-narratable than I am aware of. There is only so much I can do to guide people’s conclusions about me.

the sound of the genuine

There is in you, something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in your self.

Nobody like you has ever been born. I didn't say, thank goodness. And no one like you would ever be born again. You are the only one. And if you miss the sound of the genuine in you, you will [be hindered]8 all the rest of your life.

…[…]…

Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible then for me to go down in me, and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes, having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me. And the wall that separates and divides will disappear. And we will become one, because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.

—Howard Thurman9

You cannot look someone in the eyes through a screen and I hate it. I hate it because I have formed so many relationships with folks that I sustain through the internet. I hate it because, very often, it is when I meet someone and hold their gaze that I feel met in my truth. But some people, for various reasons, cannot or will not look you in the eye—culture, ability, preference or a sense of shame has made it this way. So in more ways then one, we must figure out how to be woven through a slight disconnect.

I want to acknowledge the limits of the internet. The limits that come with seeking out the kind of connection so many often seek when they share so vulnerably online. But I hope, if the idea of being “woven” means anything to you, let these words from Thurman serve as a guide. For me they are a reminder to show up for those I love with care and tenderness—even when we must “see” each other through an indirect gaze.

These days, I don’t write much to convince anyone of my humanity. I also don’t need as much convincing as I used to that there are those who see my humanity. As I look back on my words from 2022, I see a commitment to be “loud,” and refuse “self-editing,” as a means of creating closeness. I was reaching out with the tools I had at my disposal.

I am still here and still writing. Still finding my way towards more liberative language every day. I do so now knowing when I showed up wanting to be seen, I am. When I show up wanting to be heard someone says “I hear you.” I am no longer speaking to everyone and no one about what is unfolding within me.10 There are days when a new self-revelation dawns and it now has a place to live in my journal and on my journey with those who I trust to hold them.

I feel released, like I can go quiet and I won’t disappear. I can go quiet and I won’t be alone. There is a home within myself and it is safe to live there.

Landing Tracks

1. Have you ever muted someone online for oversharing? How did it make you feel? What does it say about the limits of (y)our capacity to hold other people’s performed vulnerability?

2. Maybe you are wondering if you are sharing too much. Take a step away from the platform and consider who you want to be in conversation with. Find one or two friends who can hold your reflection. Record a voice memo for yourself or journal to process your thoughts. Then decide if you still want to share it publicly.

3. Have you ever had to over-explain yourself to survive? Where do you go to release that sense of duty? Who sees you beyond words? Who shows up to offer you rest?

4. Global majority, queer and disabled folks: What does it look like for you to embrace the sovereignty of quiet? Where do you see yourself operating out of resistance (or saying instead of leaning into aliveness?

5. How are we constantly looking past each other online? What would it take for us to listen to the sound of the genuine within one another? Is that possible on these internet streets?

In case you haven’t heard, I am giving away 75 complimentary subscriptions which means access to the full archive of A Gentle Landing. This offer is for you if you are a Black person seeking affirmations of your softness, someone who works in vocational discernment, a seminary student or a poet. These are all identities that have shaped me vocationally, as I have responded to the call to softness. If any of those identities sound like you or someone you know, please direct them to this post:

[Woven: Reflections on the Wonderfully Weird Web is a series that weaves together stories of how I have been shaped by the internet. This series comes with reflective questions to help us think critically about our engagement with digital media and develop better practices of care for ourselves and others we are in community with online. You can explore more in this series here.]

behind the lines

The summer of 2016, five white fellow students and I traveled in a van together for seven weeks of the summer. We were a team representing our Christian school at various Christian family and teen camps along the East Coast.

If you find it hard to imagine me playing camp games with teenagers, trust me, I struggle to imagine it and I was there. In my interview for the job, I explicitly said I didn’t really like being outside and that I didn’t know how to talk to kids. I felt like an imposter the whole summer except for when I was on stage, which was what I was certainly chosen for.

I also felt like an imposter because most of the places we went that summer were the whitest places I have ever been to this day. I felt like a Black spot on a white sheet.

Back in our training for that summer, we all had to work on our introductions—of ourselves as a team and individually. I had no idea what was in store for me. I didn’t know how to brace myself, but I had a little introduction worked out:

“My name is Rose, and stripes are my favorite color.”

I had no idea that I would want to quit and go home after the first week of intense culture shock. I had no idea that for the third week, when Alton Sterling and Philandro Castile were killed by police, I’d be in a camp where I experienced overt racism. One day, I might tell that story in its fullness here, but for now, I want to fast forward to the end of the summer—because now I can—thank God.

The summer was over, the semester had begun again. In the fishbowl that was my predominantly white school, I made a name for myself playing the Magical Negro.1 I was frequently in conversations about race and racism with white classmates, teachers and staff. Back then, I would have said I was comfortable in white spaces, but I now see how restricted I was as I moved within them. I now see a desire to be seen and loved, masked by the impulse to educate.

I had yet to read Austin Channing Brown’s I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness. That book made me feel like I could wear my blackness more comfortably. “Pre-I’m Still Here Rose” slipped into the mammy role that was carved out for her like she slipped into a striped dress she bought with the money she made that summer. She let the color slowly drain from her wardrobe and let stripes “become her personality.”

“So you’re really going to commit to this caricature of yourself?”

These words came from one of my professors. A Black professor. He was chuckling as he said it. I remember I was walking down the stairs from the cafeteria, one of my many stages. He was on his way up. As we passed each other, I don’t remember what performance I put on for him, but he wasn’t having it.

And I didn’t have a good response. Who could say yes or no to a question like that?

The stripes could not hide me.

branding

I have been growing a little notegarden. The thoughts and ideas I come up with live there, starting as seeds before they sprout roots, stalks and flowers. As a practice of archival devotion, this process helps me come up with ideas for my writing. All it demands is that I am willing to let the notes grow even if I don’t know what I need them for right now. I devote a little bit of time in this process to looking back on old notes. Sometimes, I am looking back on notes from past lives.

Here are some notes I took titled, “how to do well on Instagram”2

1. Create and optimize your profile.

2. Designate a content creator.

3. Follow photography and editing best practices.

4. Set a regular posting schedule.

5. Curate some of your content.

6. Use a consistent, platform-specific brand voice.

7. Write engaging, shareable captions.

8. Optimize posts with relevant hashtags.

Seeing this list made me cringe a little. My notes remind me that there was once a time when I cared about how well I was doing on Instagram. I have to send tender thoughts back to that Rose who had a toxic relationship with growth online.

What stands out to me now in these notes is point #6 —“Use a consistent, platform-specific brand voice.”

This is something those of us who have ever searched the internet for advice on how to grow your social media accounts have come across over and over. Sometimes it comes accompanied by the call to “niche down,” and focus on sharing within one subject area.

There is a direct relationship between what we know as branding in the marketing world and the process of burning a mark on someone or something to signify ownership. The history of branding also points back to the fact that at one time in this country, human beings, enslaved Black people, were branded like livestock. There is also an element of branding that has to do with using language to limit access or expand it: Some of us are branded in, while others are branded out.

the ampersand

While we were in Maine that summer, accompanied by one of my teammates, I got an ampersand tattoo on my left inner forearm. I had no idea what words I wanted around them, but I left space for them. I got the idea for an ampersand tattoo from Pinterest. I had saved many different styles of ampersand tattoos to a board I called “think in ink.” Pinterest was where I went to develop a lot of my style back then. Pinning an idea to a board didn’t make it permanent, but returning to it for a few times after seemed to give it merit.

I was just beginning to fall in love with typography. My calligraphy practice was one of the ways I grounded myself that summer. I liked the meaning of ampersands, so I knew I would be comfortable with one on my arm until the words came. I liked that the ampersand symbolized possibility, something forthcoming. The ongoing development of me, as I pull together various parts of myself to be held.

Plus, there was the promise of more tattoos.

the unknown

“The world of branding calls for clean, simple, and straightforward messages voiced by a caricature of yourself. The call to wholeness often invites the messy, nuanced, and incommunicable within/around you. You're not doing it wrong. You (and your world) are beautifully complex.”

—Rose J Percy, from Twitter, 7/11/22

Imagine I said God is Love and we all agreed this is true of God. Then I said “God is not love because love has limits and God has no limits.”

Imagine I said God is Good and we all agreed this was true of God. Then I said “God is not good, because goodness does not go as far as great, and ‘great’ is also not enough.”

Imagine we went down the list of common names and attributes of God in this way, until we end up finding nothing that could be said of God that can’t be unsaid. There is a stream of mysticism that deals with saying and unsaying in this way. It is often called the via negativa, or the negative way. One of the purposes is to point to the limitation of words, which can draws us into a kind of awe.

Some of us who long to know the divine through the names—and genders—we’ve chosen might wonder, “How can I know God if you keep taking things away that anchor me?” Those who practice the via negativa will say you know God through “unknowing” and the surrender that comes with it.

In other words, you can come to know a God who cannot be branded. For me this is good news, since God has had a branding issue for as long as humans have been on this earth.

There is something for me so deeply beautiful and human about coming to a point where you can say “I don’t know.” There is much too much pretending to know that is so deeply dehumanizing.

At the heart of a brand voice is a knowing that often cannot be unknown. A certainty that must be sold off. If anyone is going to buy what you’re selling, it better come from “a consistent, platform-specific brand voice.” In branding, anything too adaptive and context-responsive must not be authentic. How will we know it’s you?

on brand

I know people who struggle with shifting what they share online because they are afraid of shifting their brand voice. They’ve amassed s following sharing a particular kind of content and are afraid they will lose followers.

It is even possible to grow addicted to the caricatured version of yourself online because of the validation loops and the ease of predictability. You can feel trapped by the expectations that come with maintaining a particular image. You might even edit yourself in real life to reflect the online version of you.

Branding has gone from a form of brutalization, to a marketing term to something we use in casual conversations to say something of someone’s identity: that is so on brand for you. I am fascinated by the journey of this word, but even more fascinated by how so many of us, whether we’re selling something or not, can curate content online that signals something we want others to know about us.

It can feel like we are seen when someone recognizes “our brand” out in the wild unfiltered world. “I thought you might like this,” or “this seems like something you might do or say” is communicated without words, through the sharing of other content.

More and more these days I am questioning what is “on brand” for me, especially if it comes through social media and any place that an algorithm curates. So often these websites give us the experience that they know us better than we know ourselves because of their ability to use probability to suggest what we might consume next. Shoshana Zuboff called this surveillance capitalism, which is shaped by websites collecting information on us as we search the web and interact with its elements—If you feel “seen” it is because you are literally being watched.

Buy Me a Feather

fully known & deeply loved

For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

— 1 Corinthians 13: 12

The girl in the striped dress with the ampersand tattoo was longing to be seen and loved. I know because sometimes, I am still that girl. She was trying to pull herself together—through a summer where she broke down and ugly-cried on stage while singing,

"I surrender
I surrender, 
I want to know you more
I want to know you more
I surrender"

When she lifted her eyes, the entire room of people, mostly teenagers were surrounding her with their hands reaching out in prayer. The group of people she thought she couldn’t speak to were reaching out to her.

And after seven weeks on the road and months into the semester she processed the devastating results of the 2016 presidential election with the some of her teammates. No words were exchanged, they simply saw each other in the same room and came together to hold one another.

The experience I had that summer was mostly off brand, except when I was singing and playing guitar. I could not have imagined either of these events. They were only possible because I leaned into an experience that pushed me to my limits—in some beautiful and painful ways. I do not wish the pain on anyone, but I certainly wish I could multiply the beauty.

I found the words I wanted tattooed around my ampersand a couple years later. It now reads as “fully known and deeply loved.” I would have this as an affirmation as I navigated a world of unknowns, which included the unknown person I was becoming:

I’ve decided not to let my planning and future forecasting keep me from seeing who I am in this second as fully known and deeply loved. Meaning despite not being the fully actualized version of myself that society is pressuring me to be—or the person various communities I am a part of want me to be and even the idealistic version I want to be—God knows who I am and who I will be.

— Rose J Percy, June 2018

I hid my tattoo from my parents for a long time, because a “good Haitian girl” doesn’t have tattoos. So when I was around them, I was restricted, wearing clothes that covered my tattoo, or intentionally angling away from them when it was more exposed. I hid it like this successfully for years. I did not want to shatter the illusion my life created for them—through their eyes, there was a brand identity I wanted to protect.

So was I Rose with tattoos and Rose without tattoos simultaneously? No. I was just Rose with the tattoos, who couldn’t lift her arms in their presence. At the heart of my deceit was a fear: would they love me the same if they knew I had tattoos? If I revealed that some part of going off to college and expanding my worldview had made me into someone who now thought tattoos were an acceptable form of self-expression? How will they know that I am still me?

Behind my questions was another question: Am I allowed to change?

branding tracing lightly

I am conscious now of the ways I move carefully around change in this space. I am habituated in believing I can keep whole worlds behind clean lines. Yes, some of the restrictions that exist are the ones I’ve created because some part of me struggles to release the advice to use “a consistent, platform-specific brand voice.”

So I am going to keep making changes, lifting my restrictions as I see fit. Some of the changes I want to make no one would care to challenge. For now, they have been on the Pinterest board of my mind. But I want to choose the version of me that can move unrestricted by branding norms.

If branding is about visibility, I want to tend to what is often invisible to me, the unmeasurable impact of this work. Instead of selling a product and seeing you all as consumers, I want to build genuine connections that move at the speed of trust.3 Instead of using language that caters to an exclusivity, I want my words to be the roundest invitations possible. Branding tells me to prioritize attraction and engagement, but I want true hospitality that shows you where you can put your feet up. In a world of counting likes, restacks and comments, I want to reject a focus on performance and embrace the slow and quiet impact of this work.

I don’t want a caricature of myself—I want the me I am still getting to know. I don’t want to live behind solid lines I’ve decided not to cross; I want to smudge, erase, and trace them lightly. I don’t want unparalleled stripes marking my distinction—I want them to cross yours, to be woven together.

I want these things because I am weary. If you’re reading this, you might be weary, too.4 Maybe an algorithm brought you here, maybe the brand aesthetics made you pause, but I hope the call to softness is why you stay.

Landing Tracks

1. Trace lightly: In what ways have you traced solid lines around your identity in ways that resist the truth of change? How can you trace those lines more lightly, allowing for the unknown to reflect in how you think about yourself?

2. Embrace inconsistency: Whether you are selling something online or not, there is an algorithm at work, rewarding your repetition. Break up the pattern with small changes. Move on to bigger changes as you grow comfortable. Experiment with change in your day to day life offline.

3. Is this me?: Ask this question in a space where the only one who can respond is you. Ask yourself if your preferences are driven by a need to hold onto a version of yourself that no longer fits. Give yourself permission to choose options that might not be “on brand” but invite curiosity instead of confinement.

4. Get beyond labels: With a companion, practice recognizing qualities in each other that don’t start with content you found online. Instead of using that TikTok video to say “this is you,” tell a story about who you are to each other. List some qualities you can affirm.

5. This isn’t me: With the same companion or a different one, reflect on moments when you felt the need to present yourself in a way that didn’t quite fit. Share a time when you performed an identity—online or offline—that wasn’t fully you. What would it have looked like to show up differently? What parts of yourself did you set aside?

This last week was busier than usual. But somehow, amid the busyness, these words poured out of me after the theme had been sitting with me for weeks. I love how it all came together. It may be my favorite in this series so far.

Content warning: Though I am a little vague on the details, this post does mention surgery and racial trauma.

[Woven: Reflections on the Wonderfully Weird Web is a series that weaves together stories of how I have been shaped by the internet. This series comes with reflective questions to help us think critically about our engagement with digital media and develop better practices of care for ourselves and others we are in community with online. You can explore more in this series here.]

thumb wars

There was something growing in me that recently had to be surgically removed.1 In light of that experience, I have been thinking about growth—the things we want to grow and the things we wish would stop. I’ve been thinking about how natural things grow versus how unnatural things grow.

Social media is a very unnatural thing, preying on natural impulses. Crafting a post can feel like planting a seed, and each like or comment can feel like a root. But what is the fruit? I can’t say it’s all bad, but I know some of it is strange.

It was strange to have your follower count on Instagram grow because a Black man’s life was taken from him by a cop pressing a knee down on his neck. I am speaking, of course, of George Floyd. Say his name.

It was strange to have a hundred new friend requests on Facebook from people who came to “listen and learn” after a Black woman’s life was taken away by cops shooting up her home while she was asleep. I am speaking, of course, of Breonna Taylor. Say her name.

It was strange to take part in IG lives discussing the roots of racial injustice in the U.S., weaving in my vulnerable story as a Haitian woman living in the US to an audience I could not make eye contact with. It was strange to feel like we had to ride that wave while it lasted, educating as many as possible while keeping ourselves alive.

For most of 2020 and part of 2021, I lived as if my vocation was to speak to an audience of people I was trying to convince that my life mattered. It was the burnout that taught me otherwise. But before the burnout, I had my world of tiny squares to manage. I had to grow them. So I wrote poems and lament prayers. I shared videos and reposted anything I thought was emotionally or intellectually stirring. I used Canva like it was a lifeline, crafting pretty little squares with mini sermons for the movement. My thumbs were working hard, but growth felt like a cruel game.

Around that time, I remember an IG live where talked about her book, I’m Still Here, becoming a bestseller. Growth led to her being able to buy a house for her family. She lamented the reason why this was possible. It was hard for us to embrace growth when we knew a truth laced with Black grief.

do nothing

The farmer-philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka popularized the concept of “do-nothing farming,” which is an approach to agriculture that operates in contrast to industrial farming, honoring the rhythms of nature. Gaining inspiration from a vacant lot, Fukuoka embraced the presence of tall grasses and weeds, scattering seeds and allowing the land to do what it does naturally. I came across this farming technique in a book called How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. Odell goes on to describe how Fukouka approached farming in a way that was a removal of design, a way that contrasted the highly cultivated techniques of industrial farming, with its artificial fertilizers and strict timelines.

What is interesting about Fukuoka’s technique is that it is not one of negligence. Fukuoka’s technique was developed over decades. Yes, the seeds were scattered rather than planted in rows, but he was paying close attention. In his admission that “humanity knows nothing at all,”2 Fukuoka yields to nature in a way that those who sought to conquer lands through manifest destiny could not.

Odell offers her concept of manifest dismantling, which challenges endless expansion and perpetual production. In the same way that do-nothing farming honors “the natural intelligence at work in the land,” manifest dismantling seeks to make space so that something more sustainable and humane can have its way. It is honest about not being able to control everything. Fukuoka’s do-nothing farming is a technique that thrives through deep trust in the land. Manifest dismantling also takes trust. And we will need a lot of it to surrender control, embrace undoing, and scatter the seeds of something new.

Buy Me a Feather

work and “work”

Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I intentionally never talk about my main job in this space. While this is partly a decision I made to honor my privacy, it is also a decision I made to honor definitions of vocation I prefer to live into that look at the whole of your life versus just your occupation. Learning these definitions of vocation helped me get off a life-denying path and onto a life-affirming one. But I learned it all with my head before I learned with my body. My body was—is—still catching up.

While I was learning it all in my head, I started a podcast called “Dear Soft Black Woman (DSBW).” I went into it with small confidence, armed with affirmations I was writing on Twitter and IG that replaced the content I was planting before. This new crop felt promising and fresh. I could feel my voice getting clearer the more episodes I recorded and the more I wrote. But between the break that was the end of season one and the beginning of season two, something went wrong.

I was paying attention—very closely—to how DSBW was growing. Her slow and steady growth didn’t bother me while I was in school. But when I graduated from my first master’s program with no employment prospects, I blamed the podcast for two reasons:

1) It didn’t grow fast enough to offer me financial support during my underemployment, and

2) I thought it gave the appearance that I was doing better than I was.3 Funny. I made a podcast where I talked about how Black women are so often viewed as strong, independent, and in need of no help only to be interpreted as such because I had a podcast.

I had produced so much content. I had so many markers of growth:

• I got to interview some of my heroes, women I had looked up to well before I could see myself as a theologian.

• I had a New York Times Bestselling author on as a guest.

• I had several Black women tell me it was saving their lives.

• I got to be interviewed at a conference by the author whose definition of vocation started my journey. Talk about a full circle moment.

After graduating, I went into the summer of 2022 with a deep depression. I started to feel like I had nothing more to say in that format. I lost confidence in my voice and struggled to edit my recordings. I didn’t want to hear myself talk, and I couldn’t absorb the affirmations of others who said they wanted more.

Like I said, my body was still catching up. I took a deep dive into educating online, yet again, from a place of deep vulnerability. My work was once again highly cultivated. Looking back, I could see how rigid I was, how particular. I would also get this weird sinking feeling when I thought about how much of “me” was out there. I felt like an imposter in so many ways.

When you do any kind of work online, you have to face the reality that some people will never take you seriously. You may go around thinking you have to qualify everything you do online by putting it in parentheses because it’s not real. When I went to school, I had colleagues, and online, I have “colleagues.” I wasn’t creating in brick-and-mortar spaces, I was creating in “spaces.” So what I did wasn’t work; it was “work.” So for some, I wasn’t tired; I was “tired.”

And when I say I dismantled one trap for myself and set another, some might scratch their heads at the idea that anyone could feel trapped online.

But my body was catching up, and it was telling me it was all real.

This was really work, no parentheses. It was really work and my heart was broken.

Woven Series Book List

a case for doing nothing

I recently had dinner with a friend who described A Gentle Landing as an oasis. In our conversation, we also talked about how Substack, in a sea of social media platforms, can also feel like an oasis. I certainly felt that way when I joined in 2022.4 There is something so beautiful happening here and very often people who migrate over and leave other social media platforms behind (or let them lay fallow) call themselves “refugees”—may the parentheses hold.

But Substack is not immune to the patterns of growth other social media platforms have taken. More often then not, social media platforms begin with a very simple promise. With Facebook, it was to connect friends. With Instagram, it was to share wholesome photos. These simple promises get replaced by more complicated ideals. Their values slip, as the draw towards making more money leads to more decisions that betray their users' autonomy.5

But, as users, we are not off the hook completely. We are not immune to our patterns of chasing growth on Substack like we were on other platforms. I know I have had to reckon with myself and this series is just one of the ways I am doing that. As I learn with my mind, I am leaning into new embodied6 practices for resisting the attention economy. And I want A Gentle Landing to embrace a method of growth that looks more like do-nothing farming and Jenny Odell’s ideas on doing nothing as an act of refusal to the attention economy:

• I want to resist the pull of overproduction and urgency that often comes with monetization. I believe in taking writing breaks. When people join as paid subscribers, they pay for the archive. All new posts are free.7

• I have let the chat lay fallow because I want to honor our attention. So, I plan to use it only for the most urgent matters. Thus far, nothing has merited the distraction for me.

• I do not write hoping to go viral. I write for my people—the gentle-people. Those two things stand in contrast to me because of what is so often lost with context collapse. But when you write for your people, you have a context.8

• I write with the assumption that my people can engage deeply. I hope that you will. I know that life often does not afford us many moments to luxuriate in the reflection questions, but I leave them there, like a chair, waiting to be sunk into the moment you find the time.9

• I don’t ask for much from you in response. But I do often leave you with questions to ask yourself. It is an honor when you choose to linger here and share your reflections. My favorite aspect of Odell’s do nothing approach is practicing presence. Whenever this happens, for a brief moment, each time, I believe it is possible for us to be present to one another for real.

I got to see a picture of the thing that was taken out of me. Not only did I see it, I took a picture of it and sent it to my best friends. They marveled at its size, as I did when I first saw it. The funny thing is it did not cause me any noticeable pain or discomfort, but as one of my friends said, it was “living rent-free” in my body. It was producing nothing yet siphoning unknown stores of energy from me.

It was a tough decision to have it removed when I did. I was told I might have started to feel some discomfort from it if I had waited. I was told that if it continued to grow, it would lead to a bigger surgery with a longer recovery time. It was so hard saying yes to a surgery to remove something I couldn’t discernibly feel any negative effects from.

But I said yes to elective surgery. I had so many fears to face during the whole process, but I did it. Another friend said, “You did it, it’s done, and now you have a cool scar.” I learned that I am stronger than I previously knew I was. I learned that I want to make the most of my life when I am not in pain. But I also learned that when I am in pain, I am not devoid of life—I am often merely squinting through it.

I have been asked if I notice any changes since the thing has been removed. Not much stands out to me physically, though I do feel a little lighter. I have learned a bit about manifest dismantling through my body in this experience of subtraction. Something was taken out of me, and in its wake, a new confidence has grown. A new hope for possibility.

I recently shared the news that I was cleared to return to my full range of physical activity with a group of Black women friends—friends who prayed with me a few days before surgery. I shared that I was going back to “business as usual.” One friend responded to remind me that this wasn’t true. I was not going back to a life with the “usual business that wasn’t aligned with the softness I deserved.”

She was right—No more funny business. No more strange fruit.

Landing Tracks

1. How do you define growth beyond numbers, output or hustle? Are there ways you are prone to measure growth through external validation? What needs to be dismantled to make space for something new?

2. What do you think of the “do nothing” approach of Fukuoka or Odell? Can you see yourself applying their ideas to any part of your life? What does your “do nothing” resistance look like?

3. What kind of work, relationships, and practices do you want to nourish? What kinds do you need to cut off?

I am writing you as I only have two weeks left of my official recovery time post-surgery. I am feeling pretty good; my doctor says I am recovering well. I am feeling loved and cared for. I am resting. There are still so many times I wish to be productive during this time—I am trying not to let that desire overcome me.

I know we are facing a world of harsh realities, which often makes us reach for our phones to ease a sense of hopelessness—or plunge ourselves into it some more. I write this post in consideration of the care we need as we engage—or intentionally disengage—with the world mediated to us through social media.

I think it’s time for new rules of engagement. Here’s a potential place to begin.

[Woven: Reflections on the Wonderfully Weird Web is a series that weaves together stories of how I have been shaped by the internet. This series comes with reflective questions to help us think critically about our engagement with digital media and develop better practices of care for ourselves and others we are in community with online. You can explore more in this series here.]

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

―Marshall McLuhan

I recently returned to social media after finishing the book Digital Black Feminism by Catherine Knight Steele.1 This was a good book to follow my readings of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, and even How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. Steele’s book did a lot to strengthen my sense of agency as someone who uses these technologies while maintaining an awareness that these technologies use us. Digital Black Feminism is explored through the subversive ways Black feminists have used these technologies in liberative ways.

While I have many takeaways from this book, I am encouraged by the through-line that despite continually being underestimated in the world of technology, Black people continue to create through tech in ways that showcase our collective power. Still, as I navigate an on-and-off relationship with social media, I can’t help but wonder if our retooling is enough. I keep thinking about Audre Lorde, who said, “You can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.” I wonder what she would say about the false sense of democratization cultivated by our content storefronts located on content farms.

These concerns have been shared by a friend of mine, Benjamin Young, who, after reevaluating his relationship with social media, decided to walk away from it entirely. He has been a great conversation partner as I have worked on this series, as he has been reading and sharing his reflections with me on Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World. I got his permission to share some of his thoughts from a recent conversation we had as I shared the woes of returning to social media and my questions about agency.

Buy Me a Feather

treat it like a tool, not a toy

From Benjamin Young:

I don’t have answers. Mostly questions, not unlike the one you asked. And I honestly think asking questions and processing communally is the answer. There is no one set way to navigate the world and era we’re born into. But— finding what works for us to live in harmony with all living presences and in alignment with our values, I think, requires asking hard questions that welcome vulnerability, authenticity, and truthfulness. That foundation supports the likelihood that where we land is a place of awareness, nuance, and sustainability. Ultimately, I think a lot of this, for me, comes down to something I actually grew up hearing from my dad: treat it like a tool, not a toy.2

Meaning: respect the power the tool has and learn to use it, rather than defaulting to being endlessly amused by it. He always encouraged us to figure out what we needed and let the acquisition and use of the tool follow the need, rather than acquiring a piece of tech and justifying its use after the fact.

If you think about tech as a tool, analogously even, then shift to the other side of the analogy and think about tools: we use them when we need them, whether for short or long-term projects; we put them away when we’re done with them; we don’t get rid of them, but we keep them in a place that’s usually out of sight and out of our regular living spaces; we appreciate what they can do, but we recognize that they can be damaging, even deadly, if used incorrectly; and we don’t sensibly get them when we don’t actually have use for them, only to search for justifying use after the fact.

I think the real challenge with social media, distinct from the internet or computer or smartphone, is that misuse has been proven to be coded into its core functions:3 social media tech companies design their products to hook people into unhealthy use to make obscene amounts of money. With that, the previous analogy I think needs modification: social media is a tool that is used despite explicit knowledge of it being designed to do damage.

Like dynamite.

Or liquid nitrogen.

Or bleach.

All three, and derivatives thereof, are used regularly, but because their use comes with the warning that using them incorrectly could kill you, they are often introduced with built-in education about why, when, and how to use them.

This is what social media is missing because including it would drastically reduce use and, subsequently, profits.

So I think they need to be introduced communally, whatever community looks like per person. I don’t think there’s a safe option to use social media without practices of intentional and conscientious resistance.4 So whether that resistance is abstaining, limiting, or curtailing and safeguarding, self-, socially-, and situationally-aware resistance is key if use is to lead to anything but our destruction.

by candelight

(back to Rose)

I remember classmates slowly getting smartphones around the time I was a sophomore in high school. I wouldn’t get my first phone until my first semester of college several years later (it was a simple Nokia with its glorious T9 keyboard by the way). My 10th grade English teacher singled me out in class as someone who would be able to survive in a world without technology. As he bemoaned the changes that he was witnessing in my classmates with their phones, he said something like “While the rest of you will struggle, Rose will be just fine reading a book by candlelight.” I remember frustrated classmates looking my way while I blushed under the attention.

I was “late” when it came to finally getting a smartphone, purchasing a friend’s MyTouch 3G Slide as they upgraded to the latest model. Once I got it into my hands, I started making up for lost time, familiarizing myself with the ever expanding world of apps. The girl who would be “just fine reading a book by candlelight” soon found herself attached to social media apps. Sometime before Twitter shifted to using algorithms, I had a couple thousand followers. I started a Bible study on Skype for nerds like myself who didn’t think four days of the week dedicated to some kind of church activity was enough. I began blogging, sharing my insights on faith and life.

By the time I was into my second semester of college, the girl who would be “just fine reading a book by candlelight” was assimilated into a dependence on screens. She still did some reading, but would likely be more apt to grab her phone to use as a flashlight if the world went dark.

As a budding Christian (at this point still very conservative), I clung to the 1 Corinthians 6:12 which says “‘All things are lawful for me,’ but not all things are beneficial. ‘All things are lawful for me,’ but I will not be dominated by anything.”5 So when I accidentally dropped my phone down three flights of stairs, shattering the screen and rendering it useless,6 I took it as a sign. That was the beginning of my first ever social media fast. I went months without logging into my social media accounts, devoting myself to studying scripture and writing poetry. The girl who would be “just fine reading a book by candlelight” made an appearance in those days, helping me make flashcards so I could memorize verses.

I remember being described as intense during this time. I had a lot of passion and was just beginning to explore my agency as an adult. I directed so much of that passion into actions I hoped glorified my God. I scared a lot of people with the depth of my seriousness. Sometimes I even scared myself. But looking back, I see a young woman who found her voice online; a young woman who knew the power she felt needed to be managed; a young woman who could not find much guidance for how to navigate what she sees now as a calling.

It is because I can name my ability to use digital media to communicate in the ways that I do that I see no conflict between the woman behind the keyboard and the girl who could read by candlelight in a world without technology. I would say one could not exist without the other—If I wasn’t so engrossed in my books and my writing during my youth, would I have developed into the kind of person who spoke boldly and truthfully online in ways that moved people?

As I consider the weight of my friend Benjamin’s words and the ongoing search for equilibrium in my use of digital media and my time away from it, I continue to be in conversation with my multi-passionate self. Over a decade ago, I entered adulthood with the burning desire to be used by God. Risking burnout, I stretched myself thin in person and online for the sake of the Church. As I hear the message to temper my use of digital media, I can’t help but see parallels in the ways I have managed my intensity over the years.

“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are beneficial. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything.”

Throughout this Woven journey, I want us to reckon with what it truly means to be free. I want us to think about what we freely consume; how we feed ourselves. But I also want us to locate that freedom within the recognition that we are also being consumed and fed upon. There will be times when we so strongly desire to temper our engagement as an act of agency only to be reminded that we’ve given so much of ourselves away in ways we cannot take back.

“I will not be dominated by anything.”

I hear these words as both an affirmation and a prayer. They remind me of the strength of my withholding and my refusal. I am free. But the freedom I seek on this path is also one I wish I could pray into existence. I wish I was freer. I may have to live here, in this tension, for the rest of my life. You may have to live here with me. We can be woven together, in this way, by a freedom we choose and a freedom we seek. A chosen freedom to put down our tools alongside one that declares that we are not the tools.

We are not the tools.

We are not the tools.

We. Are. Not. The. Tools.

Landing Tracks

1. Where do you see freedom in operation as you decide how you use social media? Do you find yourself longing to be more free? How so?

2. “I may have to live here, in this tension, for the rest of my life. You may have to live here with me.” How can we hold the tension between declared freedom and freedom hoped for together as we set boundaries around our digital media consumption/social media usage?

3. Using Benjamin’s metaphor of social media as a tool that can be harmful if misused, what is one warning you would write into a manual for social media? If social media came with a guide on how to use it to avoid misuse, what would it say?

4. Are you enjoying this series? Have suggestions on what I should write about? It would be great to hear from you! Help me by filling out this survey.

   Woven Series Survey

I am having surgery this Friday and will be in intense recovery for at least the first two weeks. I may continue to write during this time, but I am allowing myself to hold my posting schedule more loosely in the coming weeks.

If you’d like to support me during this time, I have a MealTrain account for gifts of food and money to put towards necessities. You are also welcome to Venmo me @ “rosejpercy” or Buy Me a Feather. Every little gesture means so much to me, and I deeply appreciate your care and kindness.

Today’s reflection is written with some appeals. It includes a few “did you know?” questions—I couldn’t help it. The issues that led me to the conclusions I have made in this quote felt pressing enough to demand a different tone from me. This post additionally reflects on a lot of research, so it is understandable to feel a bit overwhelmed by it and need to take it in one chunk at a time.

[Woven: Reflections on the Wonderfully Weird Web is a series that weaves together stories of how I have been shaped by the internet. This series comes with reflective questions to help us think critically about our engagement with digital media and develop better practices of care for ourselves and others we are in community with online. You can explore more in this series here.]

Can I have your attention, please?

Undivided attention is a gift. One I feel many of us don’t know how to give. Did you know that having constant interruptions and distractions impacts your ability to think creatively and plan strategically?1 Did you know your mind needs to wander a little, taking a break from constant stimuli in order to access your ability to make connections between ideas?2 These are just a few facts I’ve learned from a book called Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—And How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari. Hari almost has me thinking I should’ve renamed this series “Wired,” instead of “Woven” since he reflected on two of its definitions: we are constantly plugged in, and we are constantly on edge.3 In fact, some are calling us “the anxious generation.”

I watched a video called “We are the anxious generation.” by feminist scholar Alice Chapelle on YouTube.4 Chapelle analyzes a book by Jonathan Haidt called “The Anxious Generation.” Haidt blames social media for the source of young people’s plummeting mental health. However some researchers think it’s more complicated and social media is just one of the many things leading to poor mental health outcomes, citing the climate crisis, mass shootings, and financial instability as some other sources. Chappelle herself lands on social media serving as an amplifier for society’s problems. While I agree with Chappelle, I think there are many ways that social media is designed to do harmful things to our minds and consequentially, our bodies.

Which brings me back to Stolen Focus. Hari names us as being in an “attentional pathogenic culture,” which he describes as “an environment in which sustained and deep focus is extremely hard for all of us, and you have to swim upstream to achieve it.” Hari is not the only one who believes that deep focus is getting harder to achieve. Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy also affirms Hari’s outlook on the privilege of it all. Calling them “gated communities of attention,” she describes an inequality that keeps some of us plugged in while others have the luxury of diversified attention and space for contemplation.5

Our undivided attention is a gift. Our need to wander is a necessary relief. Our agency to access deep focus and choose what we pay attention to is continually disappearing behind a wall of privilege.

So, given all of this: are we woven or wired? Do we even have a choice on which one we get to be?

Buy Me a Feather

woven: network of mutuality

I have another confession to make—As I said, this series will be lined with confessions because I am confronting places where the internet has shaped me and I would prefer to take the route that emphasizes that as an ongoing journey for me.

ChatGPT helped name this series.6 I told it what topics I planned to write on for this series and introduced the concepts of A Gentle Landing to it. I asked it to consider what bird metaphors might be used as a possible title. One of the words that stood out to me in the list it created was “woven.” It sounded good and felt like an affirmation, so I went with it. I haven’t decided yet how I will engage AI in this series, but I know I want to practice transparency when I use it. I know I want to be paying attention to how access to it is changing me and the world around me.

Another thing I do when I write a series is consider the definitions and etymology of the words I use. I am considering the definitions of “woven” and “weave” as I discover what more I could affirm in this series. (And what a pleasant surprise to see “web” mentioned in the etymology!) I will be marinating on these many meanings as I write, but today as I consider our interconnectedness. I am remembering this quote from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

If you want more evidence about what Jenny Odell calls the “gated communities of attention,” look no further then the fact that some Silicon Valley elites don’t let their children use smartphones and/or social media. In fact, many Silicon Valley parents raise their kids tech-free or send them to tech-free schools.7 One of my most eager highlights in Hari’s book comes from chapter six, “The Rise of Technology that Can Track and Manipulate You (Part One)”:

“One day, James Williams—the former Google strategist I met—addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them one simple question: ‘How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?’ There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.”8

It sounds like some of us are wired into a world with those who are unable to affirm we are woven. Rather than be “caught in a garment of mutuality” with us, they have designed products that they themselves are resisting being bound up in. What does it mean for us that the truth of our woven-ness is denied by those whose jobs are to keep us wired while they opt out? What is lost to the world because of this?

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“If we are accountable to and interdependent with our community as an environment, we must also acknowledge that we have the capability to disrupt or harm our eco-system with behaviors that forget or disrespect our interconnection. This means staying, even when it is hard, and transforming our relationships instead of pretending that we can sever them. We cannot.”

— Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “this is what it sounds like (an ecological approach)”9

I have told you all that I am no stranger to a social media break. I used to call it “fasting” to take time away from the apps when I felt like they were beginning to grab hold of me in ways I didn’t like. I remember people laughing at my techniques for disengaging, thinking it was too extreme to delete the apps from my phone or to deactivate accounts when I needed a break. I have been laughed at for signing out on the weekends and letting people know I was going offline. I’ve been told, “all you need is a little self-control” and it’s not “that hard” to resist checking your social media accounts.

I have since learned, from Hari and others, that the struggles I’ve described affect more people than just me.10 I have learned that the engineering that goes into these websites and apps rely on research on human behavior that are highly manipulative. I learned somewhere that the majority of people with cell phones don’t even change their notification settings.11 Most people get a ding for every email that comes to their phones. Each of these little interruptions adds up to “a world of broken time and attention” that lives in the legacy of the telegraph.12 Those of us who try to intentionally counteract the default settings of our phones and apps to minimize their interruptions are in the minority.

But there is too much at stake for this to continue to be true. There is a world of crises longing for our engagement and it’s going to take sustained attention to address them. Attention is the key to a life of fulfillment, satisfaction, and joy. But our ability to access communal expressions of attention is continually being challenged. Perhaps because there is no revolution without consistent communal attending.

But how do we get to sustained communal attention? I am not sure. But I believe a good first step is to affirm that we are woven. A possible second step might be to realize that means our destinies are caught up in the same web—or “network of mutuality.” Thirdly, we could stop looking at our individual abilities to be wired or not and turn our attention to the mediums that seek to bind the majority of us in ways that deny our agency. We could turn, with undivided attention, with an attention formed in unity to pressure the designers of these tools to consider more humane designs that give us back our lives.

attention and agency

Lately, I have been thanking you all for the “gift of your attention,”13 in part because of all this reading I am doing that affirms the value of it. I do not take it lightly that there are people out there who have only a slim margin for rest, who find these words make an impact on them during the time they can spare. I write for what I have called in the past a “whistle of liberation,”14 the most narrow space of relief we can often find. I hold with me the tension that Substack is just one social media platform vying for your attention, and I am just one of its many users. But I hope to be mindful of my well-being and yours when I write here. I hope to bring something of value. I hope to help you find that whistle of libration wherever it appears.

In her book, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, adrienne maree brown affirms the link between training your attention and the emergence of a sense of agency. She arrives here after grief led her on a journey of finally beginning a meditation practice.15 She affirms that cultivating mindfulness can help us break out of patterns of responding to crisis after crisis from a reactionary place. Much like the researchers Hari interviews, brown understands our attention as a necessary part of dreaming up solutions and arriving at new practices.16 Reflecting on how meditation has helped her arrive at a sense of what I would call “woven-ness,” she affirms:17

“This is the path of emergent strategy—the more I listen the more I understand the interconnectedness of the world, and my place in it, in my insignificance, my wholeness, and our collective potential and beauty.”

Obviously, I love this. I love it because it offers an alternative to the individualized approach to solving our attention issues. It embraces our mutuality and interconnectedness. In a world where so many of us feel disempowered by our fractured attention and the realities they form and deform, it is comforting to know there is a path to weaving it back together again—individually and collectively.

🐦‍⬛ Landing Tracks

1. Apps like Insight and Headspace are helpful for starting up a meditation practice if that is something that interests you. And if you can afford to pay their monthly and yearly fees. (Last I checked, Insight is about $60 a year.) If you are looking for a free alternative, I recommend YouTube. There are many good meditation videos but if you want a place to start, I enjoy the meditations on the channel Yoga with Adrienne.

2. I have thought about the fact that online spaces can mediate much of our social lives. Doing a complete digital detox18 and taking months away from social media for some of us can be a privilege when this is the case. Minding your mutuality and need to stay connected with friends and others, you feel a sense of woven-ness, I won’t recommend a digital detox to everyone. But if that is a route you take, consider how you can take your friends along by engaging with them beyond social media apps. Maybe practice writing letters or sending heartfelt text messages to let your people know you love them.

3. Focus on what you can add to your life versus what you are taking away. Do you want to spend more time reading? Writing? Making music? Knitting? Write up a list of practices you’d love to do that require your attention and creativity and consider increasing a few minutes each week with these activities.

4. Practice letting your mind wander. Try going on a walk and taking whatever natural surroundings you can find. If you’re like me and hate being outside in the winter, try morning pages. Julia Cameron, who wrote about morning pages in her book The Artists Way, describes them as stream-of-consciousness thoughts written down without filtering. She recommends writing 3 pages. I say start with the goal of one page a day and see where that takes you.

5. Something missed by many of the books I’ve read thus far is the structural inequality of internet access called “digital redlining.” I read about this in a newsletter written by cyber anthropologist Ravon Ruffin Feliz called “New Terms and Conditions.” The specific post is called “I is for Internet Service Provider.” I highly recommend reading it as its own landing track that might help you reflect on our mutuality and interconnectedness through a literal system of wires and cables.

6. Help me with a Survey! I am collecting responses to help guide and shape the “Woven” series, which you can read more from here. This survey also has some general questions on your relationship to A Gentle Landing and social media in general. There is no reward for taking this survey, but you will have my gratitude!

   Take the Survey

13

I once wrote this post for Substack on being (a) tender. I think of it now as I consider the importance of our attention as permission to linger.

A Gentle Landing

permission to linger

Hello gentle-people…

Read more

2 years ago · 41 likes · 21 comments · Rose J. Percy

I am known for my social media breaks. I have, in the past, thought it was necessary to announce when I was going on a break. That’s because in some ways, I miss the AOL sign in/sign out quality of the internet. Now, we are expected to always be connected on here and disconnected out there.

These days I find that I am craving depth. I find that I want the hours that I am not working to be full of life. So the little black rectangle that pulls my face into circadian-rhythm-disrupting light is getting a lot less attention from me these days. Consider that an announcement.

What will I do about Substack? I will—and want to—continually honor your attention with every word I give and in every word I take away because I am learning just how important (y)our attention is.1 The question is less about what I will do about Substack and more about what we will do. Woven may start with my stories, but I hope it inspires you to reflect on (y)ours.

[Woven: Reflections on the Wonderfully Weird Web is a series that weaves together stories of how I have been shaped by the internet. This series comes with reflective questions to help us think critically about our engagement with digital media and develop better practices of care for ourselves and others we are in community with online. You can explore more in this series here.]

Every once in awhile I go down a productivity rabbit hole. I find myself on the Stoic streets of YouTube, listening to productivity bros talk about the apps that are going to revolutionize my workflow.

This feels like a confession. This series will be lined with confessions.

I confess to wanting a new calendar app, but defaulting to Google Calendar anyways. I confess to having tried the Passion Planner and Bullet Journal—in their simplest and more adorned forms. I confess to having watched hours and hours of videos on Asana, Notion, and Obsidian.

Today I decided to search “Black women productivity” into Youtube to see if I could reset my algorithm. I landed on a video of a Black woman reminding me that we are not built to work 24/7/365.

I lied. I didn’t just land on her video. I scrolled past numerous videos of productivity routines, 5 am morning routines, uni/college routines until I saw the words “permission to pause,” alongside a familiar face. I released a sigh and simply said aloud in my room to no one but myself:

“I know those edges.”

Buy Me a Feather

I used to follow this woman’s natural hair journey,2 back in the day before “co wash” was a term you’d read off a hair conditioner at Target. I used to follow her journey as I started my own. I was 15 when I went natural.3 Up until that point, my mother was the only one who took care of my hair. A few friends from church, along with our youth leader at the time had already gone natural. Inspired by their moves, I watched so many videos of Black women showing their journeys from the big chop to shoulder length, armpit length, bra strap length and even waist length hair. My hair had always been short. These videos showed me that a shift in how I cared for my hair could help me see my hair at lengths I’d never seen it in before.

So I learned how to box braid and put my permed hair in some for a few months. I repeated the process until I had a enough new growth I felt comfortable with. My hair was bouncy and tightly coiled underneath the dying permed ends that I cut off until it was only a liberated short afro.4

My mother was devastated. Just wait and see, I confidently told her. In many ways I was trying to convince both her and myself that my hair would grow long. Truth is, at first, I was a little scared. The friends I had in church on the same journey as me had looser curl patterns. I didn’t see anyone around me with 4c hair like mine that was long.

I made my decisions of the strength of those video journeys alone. I bought products for my hair based on the recommendations I got from videos I watched by women with 4c hair textures. Their videos were the hardest ones to find because even in 2006, the natural hair movement was dominated by the 3a to 4a hair textures.

I pushed on with the content creators—which was not what we called them then—who looked like me and I experimented until I could get beautiful braid outs on my short hair.

I remember sitting in church in front of some boys who laughed at my hair. I sat up confidently because the videos I watched online of Black women affirming their beauty was enough for me. The compliments from my fellow natural sisters was enough for me. The competency I was beginning to feel with doing hair was enough for me.

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I soon started to focus on the second oldest girl in my family who showed interest in learning about how to take care of her hair. When my mother, who had yet to see the length I promised her in my own hair resisted the reasoning behind my new techniques, I pushed back. I was doing things differently, the opposite of everything I learned from her in many ways. Looking back now I see how it could be terrifying.

But over time, my hair grew and it did get long. Once my mother saw my and my sister's length, she soon let me take care of all my sisters’ hair.

These triumphs were a direct result of what I learned from YouTube, hair care forums, a community of Black women going natural that was both in person and virtual, and countless hours of dedicated trial and error.

I know those edges, not just the ones I watched grow back with castor oil online, but I know my own edges, which stayed with me and never departed because I learned how to care for them.

I know those edges, the ones that feel frayed whenever I find myself trying to buy time by wasting it on these productivity videos. I don’t know what it is about watching someone say they feel more productive that helps me somehow feel more productive. But I know I want to pay attention to what that feeling does to me. In part because once I learned how to take care of my hair—hair that was considered ungrowable—from watching tons of YouTube. I grew my hair and my confidence in a journey into the unknown because I watched women with hair like mine displaying more confidence than I had ever had. But these women were not without their flaws and neither was the platform they shared their videos on.

I have recently read a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. I had heard of this book from one of my best friends who studied communications in college and worked for some time as a social media manager. I also heard it mentioned by a professor friend in the field of religious education. I think there may have been a few other mentions of this book, but I knew when I saw it at Goodwill, I had to buy it.

Postman’s book was published in 1985, when the Mac computer was only a year old. While he does prognosticate a bit on what he thinks will come with the increasing usage of the personal computer, he focuses the majority of his book on a medium that had long lost its novelty. Looking at TV as a medium5 and an epistemology, or a way of knowing Postman, looks at TV as a frame that has disappeared into the background. He draws attention to it and names that its consistent function is to entertain—even in its attempts to be taken seriously. He warns that we are getting “sillier by the minute” as he critiques the ways public discourse has changed because of TV.6 Postman makes the point that television has made the claim to offer something culturally significant, seeing itself as a means of access to “important cultural conversations.”7 I am still sitting with what this means and how much “serious television,” I’ve consumed while being entertained into caring about different issues.

As I read, I couldn’t help but wonder—what he would say about the mediums that we have today in 2024? Mediums built off of the foundation of television, like YouTube?

There were many times while I read that I wanted to push back. I wanted to think about examples where learning something through TV or YouTube changed my life, like my story above. There are so many ways that YouTube, which started as a site that allowed anyone to upload 10 minute long videos, democratized the spreading of information—in such a way that it led to me growing hair I could swing around.

But I can’t help but agree with him when he points to a reason for the strange malaise I feel after a productivity video binge. We have access to more information then we know what to do with. Information that is abstracted, often from containers that would enrich its contexts. Information that bogs us down, since we cannot metabolize it at the rate we consume it, meaning: I don’t have enough lifetimes to try all the apps and tools these productivity gurus are suggesting I try.

I have often tried to address the feeling of disempowerment with information overload. But I am learning to step back and look at the frames, as Postman did with television, to ask myself about what agendas these websites and apps have.

“Real time is slower than social media time”

—adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

While I critique, I hope to care—for something—like I did for my hair. They don’t call it “the big chop” for nothing. It can be scary to cut off your permed hair and face a texture you’ve never dealt with yourself. It can be really hard to walk confidently through the world, wearing your hair short and waiting for it to grow long. “Just wait and see” was a long time. Longer than a natural hair journey video. While I held on to so much hope, inspired by women who shared their hair journeys on YouTube, they weren’t with me in the every day…and I wasn’t with them in theirs. Do I really know those edges? Or did the content they curated make me feel like I could know those edges?

I am constantly learning my “edges”—defined here as “limits”—and coming up against new places where, seated in my full humanity,8 I cannot go. But I am reminded by Paulo Freire that my vocation is to be human and to grow increasingly more human. I have edges defined by a way of being human that keeps reaching new limitations, even as I tend to them.

So, I wonder, gentle-people, are you tending to yours?

Landing Tracks

1. Are you tending to your edges? Aware of the limits of your humanity? Where do you see your edges expanding in ways so human they alert you to the pitfalls of overconsumption (of digital media)?

2. How do you practice living in “real time,” as opposed to social media time? Does your day to day reflect a mad rush to keep up with the pace of your timelines?

3. What does learning look like for you? Consider what it takes to metabolize the information you consume. Does it reflect your definition? What practices can you take to slow down your consumption of new information and sit with your own thoughts and feelings?

4. I know those edges: Do you also have moments where someone online feels strangely familiar? What affect/effect does that familiarity have on you? Can you take a step back to look at the frame and consider how entertainment plays a role in developing this sense of familiarity?

5. Name the frame: How are you being entertained?Do you find it difficult to consider this with content you consider “serious” online? How does the frame inform or shape your perspective?

6. Feel free to share any other insights below! I’d love to hear what is coming up for you.

7. Feel like you need some more grounding? Check out this post on the importance of tending, tenderness and attention.

October is greeting me with a vibe that says “chill.” I am still getting used to my new job, where I mostly work from home. This past year was a transition year, as I was finishing up school and working part-time. I worked part time through seminary and took on all kinds of freelance work.

In this season, I am embracing the shape my life is taking while working a full time job. Especially as my role changes and I get to integrate more of my skills, experiences and education from the last 5 years.

I have written in the past about approaching this newsletter leisurely1 and I see a need to lean into that more and release some of the structures I have put around it. At my church, we have a guiding principle of ministering from the overflow and not from depletion. I want to honor that in the work I do here.

So I want to write when I feel like it. I want to publish when I know I am ready to let the words mean something to someone else. I want to greet the community that I find in the comments when I am ready to engage—

That might look like more newsletters or less. But I am intent on building an archive I am proud of nonetheless.

One of my friends. , has a Sacred Stack of books that sits on his desk. Maybe you’ve seen a picture of it on your timeline. These are books he refers to often, finding that they help him come back to the ideas that ground him.

I don’t have a stack on my desk—one, because I know I would have a hard time keeping it modest. But my favorite books to reference can be found on the bookshelf closest to my desk or in my book cart. For the sake of this post, let’s imagine I had them all on a Sacred Shelf. One very special book for me on that Sacred Shelf is called Black Imagination by Natasha Marin.

I reach for this book when I need to remember something about the vastness of the Black experience. When I need to reach for a dream other than my own to keep going. Marin divides the book, which is filled with contributions of prose and poetry, into three questions:

1. What is your origin story?

2. How do you heal yourself?

3. Describe/Imagine a world where you are safe, valued and loved.2

Often, I don’t even delve into the contributions…my heart is called into a space of reckoning just sitting with these words in the front matter of the book, just before the dedication:

“close you eyes— 
make the white 
gaze disappear”

—Natasha Marin, Black Imagination

What is your origin story?

the enemy’s camp

I remember singing this song in Church:

Well, I went to the enemy's camp and
I took back what he stole from me 
I took back what he stole from me 
I took back what he stole from me 

Let me testify—before I could write the way I write now, I was writing for an audience I was hoping could understand me.3 Before I went to seminary, I studied religion in undergrad and felt like I was awakening to a family conflict. Because I was a Christian and Black, there were elements of that conflict that felt personal and exposing.

Still, I was learning about a Eurocentric Christian history. We talked around whiteness without explicitly naming it. So I made it my mission to name it often, I pointed to the tangled webs of Christianity and racism wherever I could find them. I became a verbal dancer, finding ways to talk about the most offensive, life-denying characteristics of the faith—while keeping it friendly and light for white people.

It was seminary that led me to revelations about my deep need to love Blackness. In a place where there was less dancing around the dark history of Western Christianity, I let myself relax from my beautiful4 posture of defense.

But that relaxation turned into shock when I felt betrayed by whiteness, only this time, it wore a progressive spirituality. It knew how to speak my language and even keep up with the lingo. I was introduced to the ugliness of the academy. The tongue that could once loosen into eloquent, nonthreatening sentences was locked behind my teeth.

I had to learn new defenses.

This poem emerged for me the summer after my first semester, and it began with a warning:

Life of the Mind (summer 2019) by Rose J. Percy

Be careful where you take your steps 
In that place
They did not build it with your face in mind.

I did not know that the life of the mind could 
teach me how to dance
But I have learned how to let others lead
To protect my space and yours 
While we appear to be in sync
I am minding my feet
Hoping I don’t step on you
Hoping you don’t step on me
Knowing that with every twist of my wrist 
I am aware that you are telling me with your eyes
Which way I should turn 

I did not know the life of the mind could 
Teach me how to embody apology
I am sorry that I am here now 
And you must deal with me
While I deal with myself
And no one deals with you. 
This is just the way things are—

The metal box that takes me there
Trains me to look down
I hate its screechy sounds
It is never on time but I am always late
Out of breath and 
Out of place. 

The metal doors do not promise safety 
They promise to promise in as many words as one can use to sentence 
Me into a prison of gratefulness.
They are heavy with welcomes 
That close too fast behind someone 
Who has never learned to look over their shoulder

The negroes of the past line the walls across from the elevator
You tell me we are proud of them
The metal box takes us up again
I do not have enough seconds to tell you 
How often I second guess myself

Before I came here
I felt who I was
Now I think too much about her
As I wish I did not know this life of the mind
Would be a life in your mind.

the White imagination

I can list several books that have helped me name what I felt I was trapped in, but none have had more salience to me than Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. This book is on my Sacred Shelf and I have written on it briefly before:

Morrison looks at how the “classic novels” in the American literary canon are full of myths about Blackness that reinforce racial stereotypes, flattening the Black experience. In other words she names that there is a general naiveté (or willful ignorance) in the dominant culture about the inner life and worlds of Black folks.

For more receipts, consider the Lucille Clifton poem, “reply,” which Kevin Quashie references in his book Black Aliveness, Or a Poetics of Being.5 (Oh wow, look—another title on my Sacred Shelf.):

From a Letter Written to Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois by Alvin Borgquest of Clark University in Massachusetts and Dated April 3, 1905.

“We are pursuing an investigation here on the subject of crying as an expression of the emotions, and should like very much to learn about its peculiarities among the colored people. We have been referred to you as a person competent to give us information on the subject. We desire especially to know about the following salient aspects: 1. Whether the Negro sheds tears…”

reply 

he do
she do
they live
they love
they try
they tire
they flee
they fight
they bleed
they break
they moan
they mourn
they weep
they die
they do
they do
they do

they moan

“In the howls and wails of a saxophone solo, we hear the echoes of our stolen lives, the rhythms of our struggle for liberation.”

—Fred Moten, Stolen Life

“When we liberate ourselves from the expectation that we must have all things figured out, we enter the sanctuary of empathy.”

—Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body is Not an Apology

I wish more people knew how much I love jazz. I much it helps me live with a little more mystery in my life.6

Jazz came into my life when I was a brooding teenager. One of my church friends introduced me to a young Black boy who seemed to be steeped in a deeper brooding spirit. He was the definition of “too smart for your own good.” He regularly struggled with depression just like me, but we also had beautiful things in common—things people would tell us kept us from being “Black enough.”

People have told me I have a gift for suspending judgment. It was certainly evident in the conversations I entertained with him. We would connect over Myspace and chat when he was online. As hard as he was on me, he was harder on himself. It came through in writings that highlighted a deeply pessimistic worldview. He was an atheist7 and regularly lectured me on how Christianity was anti-Black. He would speak harsh words, dismissing my faith claims as juvenile and uninformed.

If you’re asking yourself why I let someone talk to me the way he did, here’s your answer: At 14/15, he was a rare friend who didn’t dismiss my deep questions. They were normal for him. He would remind me sometimes that they were beyond him. He wasn’t intimidated, and though he might have sounded annoyed in his messages, he continued to engage my questions and ask some of his own. To put it simply, the more we spoke, the more I found him beautiful, frightening, and confusing.

In my curiosity—and my crush—my internal world found a friend unlike any other for the first time. All he had to do was mention something and I would research it and let it lead me to appreciation. So when he mentioned listening to Charles Mingus—just mentioned it—I did so, too, hoping it would bring us closer. This is how I fell in love with jazz. It was a byproduct of a childhood crush and to this day, it continues to awaken new love in me.

I have never had it in me to share that story publicly until now. But it feels like an origin story that points to so many threads of Black aliveness for me. I have struggled with depression since I was a teenager. I go through some days feeling like my mind is heavy. But I have been growing in my love of my wonderfully weird Blackness since I was 14. All because of a wonderfully weird friendship sustained by connection on the wonderfully weird web.8

Buy Me a Feather

How do you heal yourself?

Translation is something many of us do to reach out and experience being understood. But so much can still get lost in translation, even between people who speak the same language/dialect. I once thought I needed to leave predominantly white spaces in order to get a break from translation. I thought it was possible to be in a space where I wouldn’t have to translate, since mistranslation seemed to be the source of so much pain. And believe me when I say I know this pain through so many of my identities—learning theologically and spiritually only added more layers to it. But what else is one to expect from a journey that begins with “I went to the enemy’s camp”?

So how do I heal myself? I heal by recovering a love for mystery and openness, especially when I am trying to communicate ideas. Or when I am trying to comprehend them from others. I try to remember there is more space in the world for me then I can fathom. I remember my people are out there, and there is just as much space in the world for them, too. A question from Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body is Not an Apology guides me here: “What if we all understood the inherent vastness of our humanity and therefore occupied the world without apology?9

But I won’t pretend holding nuances and remembering the contradictions isn’t hard. On the one end it can inspire wonder, on the other, a heartbreak shaped by intense cynicism lingers. 

On a good day, I’m leaning more on wonder, even if I still feel the pressure under my calluses.10 

On the best days, I’m glad to know what I know and see my agency. I see my imagination pulling me towards freedom and feel sure that this uncertainty hurts because I’ve never been there before; to those new horizons calling themselves “home.”

On the best days I wanna get there and take everybody with me. On the good days it’s enough just to drag myself forward.

I won’t spend too much time on the bad days. But I can tell you I’m done denying their existence. They want to be recognized as remarkably survivable days where there is just enough beauty in the dark to bring me back. 

Describe/Imagine a world where you are safe, valued and loved.

Lately, I’ve been battling a deep depression. I have had one too many days that were just survivable. I have needed to lean on the imaginations of others to help me describe what it means to feel “safe, valued, and loved.”

On my good days, I remember I am lucky enough to experience more than the imagined. I can remember all the ways I have been held in good community. I can remember the affirmations that bring me home. In a world where I am safe, valued and loved, the feeling of home is not so far.

As a teenager, I reached out through my computer screen to regularly engage with someone who was odd in ways that felt familiar. In this newsletter and through social media, I am still reaching and against the odds, I am recognized. Still, there is some translation work involved.

This post exists as the first in a series of writing where I reflect on my journey through digital media, the spirituality it has shaped, and the beautiful connections it has brought close. I hope this post serves as a reminder as I engage in some critique and hard reflection, that online connections have shaped me in deeply beautiful ways.

I went to the enemy’s camp and I…still remember the war. I remember it in a trembling body. I remember it with ears sore from tears. I remember what I used to say “yes” to before I began the journey of coming home to myself. I remember until I make peace with my rememory,11 unfolding like it’s own jazz song. I am invited into an openness to enjoy the song beyond the theory. I went to the enemy’s camp and I…still remember the war. But in a world where I am safe, valued and loved, I have stolen my life back.12

Back from the life of the mind divorced from the body.

Back from a place of centering the white gaze.

Back from the lie that blackness, abjection, and nothingness are one in the same.

Back from the depression and fatigue that drags.

Back from a need to understand everything about jazz so I can ensure the liveliest conversation possible with another malcontent teenager—

No seriously. I wanted to impress that boy so much but nothing I said ever seemed to move him. I kept coming back to our conversations with more and more fascination, seeking to understand him completely. But soon, after months of conversation, he stopped replying. He eventually moved on to a different world: Facebook.13

We lost touch but I still remember him. I remember him in the songs I enjoy beyond understanding. I remember him in the ways I still reach out online, especially with the desire to affirm the vastness of the Black experience.14

In a world where I am safe, valued and loved, I don’t have to have a simple testimony. I can admit I am still running, with my stolen life in hand.15 I can admit I am still looking back and feeling the shadows of these things I named chasing after me. I can admit I still have a hard time with Natasha Marin’s prompt to “close your eyes/make the/white gaze disappear.”

But in a world where I am safe, valued and loved, there is more to life than what is chasing after me, wishing to snuff it out; than what wishes to understand me to death. There is space—like the people in the world of Lucille Clifton’s “reply”—to just be and be found being.

Landing Tracks

1. How do the digital spaces you are a part of affirm or challenge your imagination of what it means to feel “safe, valued, and loved”?

2. Take some time to reflect on the vastness of Black experience and aliveness for you. Do these spaces contribute to your personal sense of care and safety?

3. In what ways do you experience communal spaces that help you take a break from a type of translation? How do these spaces help you build capacity for loving what makes you different or unique when you re-engage other people or spaces?

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For more on the “at your leisure” concept that guides this intentionally playful study, check out these two posts:

A Gentle Landing

at your leisure

Hello gentle-people…

Read more

2 years ago · 24 likes · 10 comments · Rose J. Percy

A Gentle Landing

"At Your Leisure": Moving at the Pace of Flourishing

Hello gentle-people…

Read more

2 years ago · 26 likes · 9 comments · Rose J. Percy and D.L. Mayfield