"a place for keeping": writing as a practice of care

my writing praxis, part 1 (ft. a poem by Lucille Clifton)

Hello gentle-people,

Next month, my Substack turns two years old. And this past month, I have gained about 80 new subscribers and passed the 500 subscribers mark, and will soon hit 600. This post is a reflection on the metrics that matter more to me, and my hope for the writing I have been doing and wish to keep doing.

Photo by Jernej Graj on Unsplash

untitled 
by Lucille Clifton

listen children
keep this in the place
you have for keeping
always
keep it all ways
we have never hated black
listen
we have been ashamed
hopeless      tired        mad
but always
all ways
we loved us
we have always loved each other
children
all ways
pass it on

I write for/with those who keep me

Substack was never meant to be the main thing. I moved here from Patreon (that I started to support a podcast I no longer produce) where I had maybe 5 people who engaged with the writing I shared there. I wanted to find a place that centered writing in ways that could generate community, and I heard about Substack. I started publishing posts, mostly just duplicates from Patreon. I had no real sense of what this would become. I thought I was writing “paper plane thoughts for the world beyond my purview.” As in “people are listening, but….maybe they don’t really care. So I shouldn’t care too deeply about what I write here.”

But soon, some people were showing they cared through commenting, sharing, and purchasing paid subscriptions. When I look back on what I was writing, though I did not yet have a clear (enough) praxis around who I was writing for and why, a sense of purpose emerged.

It also helped that I wasn’t alone here. Friends and fellow writers like Robert , Camille, Nya S Abernathy , Sharifa, and others would visit my posts and comment on what was connecting for them.¹ Because of them, I may have written my words alone in my room with my thoughts but I have never been abandoned to live with them alone.

I have stopped asking “who cares?” because I can at least count on two hands some people who do. The ways they have shown up for me are the metrics that truly count. The words we write have been places for keeping—keeping each other, keeping ourselves, and preserving truths the world denies too quickly.

I write to pass it on

we have been ashamed

hopeless tired mad

but always

all ways

we have loved us

—Lucille Clifton

Somehow, in these last few years, my writing—and the community of writers I celebrate belonging to—has shaped me to write as a practice of care. I hope my writing is the kind of care work that humanizes those who have been dehumanized, and find themselves in places where their belonging is denied, questioned, or never affirmed.

My studies have taught me to question when something is packaged as an individual phenomenon and is analyzed through a pathologizing lens. For example, “imposter syndrome” sounds like something that could appear in the DSM. But reframing imposter syndrome to look at society through institutions, cultures, and histories points to the walls around this constructed reality that negatively inspire feelings of isolation and alienation.²

Since 2021, when I decided to stop centering white people in my justice work, I have been in a community with folks who have made things real for me through their words. The words of Lucille Clifton, which are sprinkled throughout this post, met me in that season of racial trauma disguised as “imposter syndrome.” I was a mess in that season, but I felt collected by her words as if she had kept hold of certain promises and truths for me to find them.

Vini ban’m pase ou ti pomade sou ou.³

—A Haitian mom somewhere, every morning

I know this feeling from getting ready for school in the morning and being called back in by my mother for an extra little bit of lotion or Vaseline between my fingers, or my lips. It was an act that said, “I need you to go out into the world looking good…because it may just be the only thing that ensures you come back to me unharmed.” or “You need to go out looking like somebody loved you…even if that world does not.”⁴

keep this in the place

you have for keeping

—Lucille Clifton

Perhaps, “passing it on,” looks like a covering of some sort. I think of how, in her reminder that “we have always loved each other,” there is a place to be well-kept. I love how the definition of “well-kept” is “tidy,” and “secret,” or truth that is highly guarded. I think this describes how I write in some ways. The courage I seek to muster through my words isn’t to speak to everyone and boldly declare these truths into cavernously uncaring hearts. I write for those who most need “a place for keeping” the truths that remind us that at least one person in the world cares about us hittin’ the streets looking ashy and uncared for, literally and spiritually.

“Write for a new kind of readership.” —Montague R. Williams

My last published post, “Making It Work: on a Vocation of Softness,” started some wonderful conversations beyond Substack for me. I felt such a heaviness writing it, and it hasn’t left me. Some part of me, the part that is still holding on to the idea that having a set of degrees should lead to more money feels a particular kind of pain making that post free. But I did so for those who need those footnotes. I am someone who has been saved several times by folks who were carefully footnoting their sources of inspiration and hope.

They were passing it on.

I have not always written courageously here—perhaps you’ve sensed me pulling back threads to knit something to protect myself. Perhaps my language may have been inconveniently vague and my stories lacking in details that give away too much. I was writing the way I was to protect myself, the people I love, and the world of ideas I am always collecting and hoping to pour into a book (or 2 or 12) someday. I have been burned by social media experiences of having my words and ideas stolen from me.

You could say I am…protective.⁵

I write to believe (in) myself and to affirm what is real for me, even if I am the only one experiencing it in the places I live and work. But I do not write in isolation, I can write in and into a community of belonging and becoming. These past two years on Substack, I have been creating “a place for keeping,” for myself and others. A place where belonging can be experienced in a way that affirms that we are real and the more equitable world we desire is realizable.

So this is why I have unlocked the paywall on all my old posts.

Let this be “a place for keeping”—reminders, yourself, those well-kept truths worth passing on. In an isolating and alienating world, where the truth of your belovedness could feel like a well-kept secret, let this be a “place for keeping,” that feels like being held in the best version of home.

Landing tracks:

As you take in these words, how do you remember being “well-kept,” in the best version of home you’ve experienced? What affirmations rise up for you when you consider how that care made you feel?

Here are some ways to consider how you might help create gentle landing if you are someone who wants to support this kind of writing as care work, especially if you are someone who holds a privileged identity such as but not limited to being white (or white-passing), male, able-bodied, cis-heterosexual, middle class/rich, and Christian.

1. Solidarity through purchasing a subscription for yourself: I do think there will still be things I want to say and share with paid subscribers (including those with complimentary paid subscriptions).

2. Solidarity through gifting a subscription for someone else: Did you know you could buy a subscription for someone else? Also, I am new to thinking about my writing as a “gift” to anyone other than myself…it feels wrong and I am only believing it because others have told me that it is.

1. I follow a lot of newsletters on here, and I implore you to check them out.

2. Please see this episode of Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead. I loved hearing how Jodi-Ann Burey and Ruchika Tulshyan reframed imposter syndrome in their work.

3. Translation: “Come let me put some pomade on you.”

4. Let us bracket the respectability argument

5. And I still am….one of my favorite things about writing here is the copyright that comes with publishing.