Thoughts

This song still gives me the chills. Last year in August, I got another episode of some of the worst anxiety of my life. It was hot summer, and the heat made it harder to sleep. I laid on the cool kitchen tile, staring up at the ceiling light. It was 2 in the morning. I hadn't slept in three days. My body twitched with awkward convulsions as it tried to sleep but my brain remained drugged on stress hormones from my anxiety.  I tried to think of how that was kind of interesting or neat. But despite attempts to trivialize it, I knew it wasn't neat. It was scary and bewildering. This song played through my head in the background of my scurrying and frantic thoughts. "I'm tired, I've been waiting for you. I'm so tired, and I need to lay down." Anyone who has experienced a chronic episode of anxiety knows the dogged feeling of wanting to sleep so goddamn bad but being so idiotically and paradoxically afraid of sleeping. I listened to that song...

I've wanted to write a blog about Anxiety for a while now. There are so many topics to write about, from the cringe-worthiness of listening to self-help books from authors who clearly haven't had anxiety, to trying to navigate what it means to have gotten anxiety for the 3rd time in my life when I thought it was something I had already 'gotten over'. But identities are constantly in flux. Part of getting better is learning to cope with those stinging words 'mental illness'. It's that shift in identity, that understanding that maybe I'm not the person that is 'over' anxiety, that I most want to write about though. Not because I want to cry about how I want it to be gone (although, at times I certainly do), but because having to deal with anxiety and depression has caused me to learn a lot of things about myself, about people, and about love. Learning to cope with anxiety is a story of acceptance. Accepting the racing feeling in your chest....

I have nervousness posting this blog. The majority of it comes from the intense stigma of 'mental illness'. The fear that future employers would not want to deal with an employee who struggles with anxiety. The fear of people looking at something like this, and not seeing the strength it takes to write it, but rather someone who is weak. Because that's how we deal with disorders of the brain in our society. We see people struggling as just being deficient in dealing with things, whiny even. But here's the truth: people who struggle with mental illness are some of the strongest and most determined people you will ever meet.  I didn't understand what it was like to have your brain betray you until I had my first anxiety episode in high school. It came on like a freight train; I went from feeling normal, to feeling like I was crawling in my own skin in days. It's a feeling of utter dread, terror, hopelessness, and sadness wrapped and boxed with a pretty little bo...

Alright, alright, alright. I should be prepping my curriculum right now, but I couldn't get something off of my mind. The "Bad Blood" video has been circulating the internet lately. Don't get me wrong, I think the video is well done, cheeky, creative, and has a bomb catchy beat. But here's the thought that stubbornly stays in my head the entire time I watch that video. "You're too skinny to be able to realistically do any of that stuff" Let's be real, T-Swift might be borderline anorexic. Now I'm self conscious for this post, because on one hand, I'm not a fan of body shaming. And in no way is being lean, skinny, or etched inherently negative. There is a part of the skinny continuum though, near the anorexic side that becomes problematic. Not because the body type is ugly or wrong, but because the cause is of an underlying personal or societal problem. That being said, I will admit that I feel an emotional reaction when I see ...

All of my citations were footnotes, which did not get transferred over in the blogger format. I promise all of my statements are backed up though.  This essay gives a brief history of Black relationships to the land, and focuses on how two paradigms of relationship to the land have flourished and intertwined throughout American history. One is 'land as commodity' and the other is 'land as community'.  The lens of land as commodity was a very European understanding of land value. Land as community can be seen heavily in West African Customary law (these are very loose assumptions, and should be seen as paradigms rather than historical facts). But the entanglement of these two paradigms is particularly interesting in American history.  It is the commodification of land and labor propagated by the colonists protestant land ethic that was a driver of the Trans Atlantic Slave system. Agrarian virtues that were core to American citizenry and ethic were a key argument...

Yes. I am going to write a piece about a song from a young adult fan fiction remix. But there is a reason it has resonated with so many (including me) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14H8OzTzne4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyYTcMFKFXY From staggering wealth inequality to the grim realization that they are at the wealthy's mercy for climate change mitigation, young people today fully realize the times they are living in and the costs of inaction. Many times we simply distract ourselves from the horrifying possibilities of our futures. We distract ourselves from the reality that water will soon be a scarce resource, that variable weather and climate change will cause our stomachs to growl with hunger we have never yet experienced, and question our ability to have resolution as we tuck in our basements time and time again while storms charge through with increased intensity and severity than ever before. But I think what scares young people most, is the realization...

Our America  is a non-fiction story that chronicles the lives of two inner city Chicago boys, LeAlan and Lloyd. The boys were given a microphone to record their experiences and thoughts growing up in the south side of Chicago in the early to mid nineties. Our America is the transcribed version of these stories. This essay intertwines LeAlan and Lloyd's stories with the stories told by black artists through the decades. _____________________________________________________________________________ Our America: A Look Beyond the Veil Introduction “We want to give you kids in America a message: Don’t look at ghetto kids as different. You might not want to invite us to your parties, you might think well rob you blind when you got your back turned. But don’t look at us like that...We have a hard life, but were sensitive. Ghetto kids are not a different breed--were human” p. 83 Public Enemy: Don’t Believe the Hype “BACK!” Chuck D spits, and it pops like a guns...