lonely

I’ve been sort of a recluse as of late.  At least, from the parts of my life that existed prior to the great awakening aka full-blown, existential identity crisis that I experienced last year.

The crisis that left me raw and open and desperate for hope, for salvation, for anything that I could grasp on to as the “next right thing” that God wanted me to do with my life.

That thing turned out to be learning and unlearning whiteness.  It turned out to be having the veil slowly lifted about my own complicitness with our racist society. It turned out to be that the shutting down I had experienced was all about, as Resmaa Menakem puts it, my own “pathological apathy” that I had the privilege of as a white woman.

Fuckity fuck fuck fuck.

When that veil was lifted, I saw how I sat in the middle of this web of lies, of social constructs that supported the racist, brutal system.  I began to see how I benefited from all of it and feel the tension of wanting to make a difference and not wanting to give up any of my white creature comforts.

Most painfully, I felt this play out in my existing friendships. Relationships that I had relied on for years to help me navigate through seas of trauma that rocked my world for years. Years, y’all.

And now, I found myself unable to share this part of myself that was raw and unfolding because my friends did not want to listen.

I know that for sure some of this was me. I was (am) still scared to speak up about whiteness and call folx out in real-time for their racism. (Note: I can see right now that feeling like I need to “call folx out” is one way I am making this practice too hard. More on this in the future.)

AND.  My white women friends - most of my closest friends - didn't want to listen. They weren’t ready. I get that. But their responses still felt like rejection. The terror in their eyes and sudden tension in their bodies - I felt. And I knew that I had to stop talking about it, stop asking them to read White Women because they weren’t going to do it. No one wanted to hear the words “white supremacy” as many times as I found myself saying it.

This story is not new.  I have heard this same narrative many times among the new friends that I have made in the White Women, Race 2 Dinner and Here 4 The Kids community.  In their stories, they kept pushing and they lost their friends. 

I have chosen to stop short of that. I have silenced myself but what I have really done is isolate myself from my dear friends because I don’t want to lose them. And in trying to save my friendships, I have stopped reaching out as much. And I’ve lost them anyway.

I’ve turned inward.  I’ve relied more on Jeff.  And I’ve leaned hard into my new community where I know this new, more complex, more tentatively awake version of myself feels safe expressing the fullest version of me.  

Thank god for this new sisterhood that I have stumbled my way into. I have loved these women from the moment I first saw their faces. To be seen and cherished for who you are by sisters who are engaged alongside you in the same Purpose-filled work - there is no greater high. I now have access to a new kind of “happy.” I have never felt so loved and alive. 

I pray that I will continue to be brave enough to stay here.  I also pray that I will have the courage and compassion to circle back to the place on the path where my “old” friends live because assuming they don’t want to leave there is unfair. I’m abandoning them instead of gently calling them forward into what my new friends have shown me is the “business of making people whole.”