my ghost is my plus-one tonight.
Once you notice something like segregation, or bigotry, or the casual but relentless othering of certain groups, you never really stop.
Sure, you can choose to become less aware - to shake off the knowing, to let it go, to tell yourself it’s just one more thing in a set of endless things and isn’t there enough to think about as it is?
Or you can let yourself be unsettled, embrace the disequilibrium that comes with awareness, interrogate the discomfort, acknowledge how you might be — even if not responsible — accountable.
To me, being alive is being aware and being aware means being open to having to change your mind.
Being alive and having the privilege of options also means having the responsibility of being deliberate about who and what we support, with our money or time or indeed our inertia. What do we allow to happen in the spaces over which we might have influence and even control?
Whose art appears on your walls, whose books on your shelves? What media do you enable with your dollars and your ~engagement~?
And indeed, whose art is missing? Whose books are missing? Whose bylines are unknown to you because you have not sought out what is not dropped into your timelines or your inboxes?
For some of us, every time is the last time we were the only ones like us in the room. For the rest: how are you changing the room?
Attribution
I grieve unearned
exclamations. I grieve saying “you are so funny!” I grieve
saying “you’re killing me!” when I meant to say “you are killing me.” I have died right in front of you so many times; my ghost is my plus-one tonight. I grieve being your Black confidante. I grieve being your best and your only.— from Grief #213 by Saeed Jones