a nerdy resistance

ideas on reading the gentle landing way

Hello gentle-people,

Self love for me right now is remembering this mind that causes me so much distress also comes up with creative things that beautify the world.

My mind is aw(e)ful.

My thoughts have been a disorganized mess lately. The systems I created are failing me again. I am lightly thumbing through self-help books again. I am relapsing into restlessness again. I am doubting again. I am regretting my mistakes again and again and again—

But I am still here. A little shaken but trusting gravity.

But I am still here. Making an opening with each new breath again. And again. And again.

Today I hope to share a little bit about my nerdy resistance to lighten my spirits. And hopefully yours, too.

a girl is gonna read

I fell in love with reading when I was in fourth grade. My family had another family of friends living with us and I shared a room with a girl who was in high school. As an eldest daughter, this was one of the few moments of my childhood I remember feeling like I had an older sister. I thought everything she did was cool and she read in her bed more than anything. So I became a reader because she was a reader.

Emulating her, I spent one of my school breaks reading a chapter book from start to finish. I decided to fill out my reading log for weeks worth of reading as well. When I got back to school, instead of applauding me for my enthusiasm for reading, my teacher did something that continues to mark me. She called me up to the front of the class and had me write in front of her so she could compare my handwriting to what was in my reading log.

She didn’t believe I did all that reading and writing. Once she verified it was me, she begrudgingly told me not to do it again and sent me back to my seat. Though that initial moment sucked, it was nice for weeks after to read without thinking about counting it towards a school assignment. I felt untethered.

I continued to nurture my love of reading but kept it for the most part outside of official school things from then on. When I was in high school, I would sit in the back of my English classes and read whatever I wanted while class was going on. I see a thru-line to these practices through every degree I’ve gotten, where I’ve nurtured my love of reading beyond my assigned readings for school.

reading as nerdy resistance

I have struggled with feeling like the more I read and write, the more I grow distant from certain people in my life. I keep wanting to carve out generous space for people who aren’t learning and growing alongside me…and finally I am asking myself why.

I have had to accept these truths:

• Not everyone is meant to grow with you.

• Being shaped by liberative reading comes with sacrifices.

I have decided that getting nerdier is part of my resistance. And part of leaning into that resistance in loving community looks like:

• Journeying with others who welcome growth.

• Translating myself less.

• Allowing confusion and doubt. No more performing certainty.

• Letting tensions metabolize as sites of dialogue rather than fracture.

The kind of nerdy resistance I want to be a part of is curious, humble, and awkward. We will need curiosity to keep us arriving on new shores of awareness ready to connect rather than win. We will need humility to remember we switch between teacher and student depending on the moment. And awkwardness, when we embrace it, keeps us from shutting down when we feel uncomfortable and helps us lean into hard emotions like grief and shame as we learn.

a gentle landing approach to a nerdy resistance

I know I bring a natural intensity to my studies sometimes. What I write in this newsletter helps me come back to the ideas that I’ve gathered that help me take a gentle landing approach to how I live, love and work. Inspired by that, here are some ideas for how we might get nerdier together in the gentle landing way:

Slow down our synthesizing processes. I often feel the most urgency when I think about implementing what I’ve learned. I want to be able to explain it or act on it immediately. But what if instead, those of us who get like this, sat with one word or phrase that moved us for one day and pick another one the next day?

Trade mastery for companionship. If we trade trying to be right with being in right relationship, what might happen? What if we could come to the process of learning by saying “I don’t know yet” more than “here’s what I think”? What if we did not end our thoughts with conclusions but conversation prompts?

Embrace DNFs with pride. I struggle so much with the feeling of guilt for skipping chapters or not finishing a book. I have collected quite a few “did not finish” books as a result. But what if a gentle landing looked like honoring what you’ve digested and seeing it as passing on overconsumption? What if a nugget was truly all you needed?

Let the body set the pace. We read with our whole bodies, not just our eyeballs. Be mindful of how your body feels next time you’re reading. Set up the most comfortable conditions you can. Monitor yourself for where you feel tense. Consider what cues your body gives you when it’s time to stop reading for the day.

fragments, parts work

One of my favorite books of all time is After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging by Willie James Jennings. In it, he writes

Many of us work in fragments, trying to tie together, hold together, the witness of our peoples. Weaving the sounds, songs, and stories that are only fleeting echoes of what was. Call it a cultural fragment if you wish. it is serious business—precious saving work—trying to find it, unearth it, and hold it close.

Here he is talking about the work so many do when they come to theological education, the work of trying to work between memory and loss to recover what our people have always known. On some level, my nerdy resistance is fragment work in this way.

It deserves it’s own place, alongside the poem “why some people be mad at me sometimes” by Lucille Clifton where she says

they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine.

Even as I am coming together in my reading, I am becoming increasingly away of the intensity that comes with recognizing and naming these parts as they appear. Embracing reading the gentle landing way, rising in nerdy resistance allows me to do that work in softness, one page at a time, one day at a time. I am able to hold that integration is not always seamless. Sometimes tensions and differences make more of a beautiful quilt, bold in its patch work.

I see my reading often as a sacred labor that moves along the faultlines of brokenness to do the work of cultural memory, survival and refusal—this is womanist work. I read (and collect books) to gather these fragments, as I move towards becoming whole—but not in a way that diminishes the presents of my parts.

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I needed to sit with these thoughts I had on a nerdy resistance because I have noticed some patterns in my work lately. I have more DNFs than I have in awhile. I started getting wrapped up in mastery, wanting more credentials. I noticed my intensity impacting my body as I read and pushed myself past my limits to meet arbitrary reading goals. One major thing that has changed is I am not in school anymore—reading is no longer something I am doing on the side as I take charge of my own education beyond institutions. There are no institutions to get beyond, in my current intellectual life. So if it is a nerdy resistance, than what am I resisting?

The answer turned out to be all kinds of habits I practiced and mindsets I have adopted that lead me away from the kind of softness I aspire to. I write these words hoping this serves as a guide to ground me when I lose my way. May it serve you, too, if you find yourself needing a gentle landing approach to a nerdy resistance.

landing tracks

• Do you have a journey with fragments in your own nerdy resistance? What shapes can you discern as you bring one fragment alongside another, and another and another?

• Which of the gentle landing approaches to a nerdy resistance stand out to you? Which do you most want to work on? What kind of softness does it call forth in your approach to the work?