The Undercover Introvert

On Losing and Hope

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I’m a pessimist. Just ask anyone who has known me longer than 15 minutes. All can attest to my penchant for envisioning the worst in an effort to stave off disappointment, which I invariably end up suffering regardless. I’m a glass half empty kind of gal, a negative Nancy, a real downer at parties, a perpetual storm cloud in a world of annoyingly sunny days.

Or am I?

Since the devastating results of the 2016 election, I’ve found an odd source of power that keeps on chugging along no matter how low chances seem for success. When the world sucker punches me in the stomach, inviting me to curl up in the fetal position and stay there, that power orders me to walk it off and keep going. The worse things get, the brighter it shines. If I had to name this power, I’d call it hope. And that motherfucker really does spring eternal.

What the hell do I have to feel hopeful about, you might ask? Good question, because the last 2 years have been a doozy.

I watched a quarter of my country embrace the racist, sexist, POS candidate in 2016, propelling him to victory. I’ve seen Republicans in Congress attack every facet of what it means to be an American in their single-minded frenzy to bolster the 1% by lining their pockets with tax cuts that would cripple the dwindling middle class and further victimize those living in poverty. I’ve witnessed the rising tide of overt bigotry in all its forms. I’ve worked for months for a candidate I truly believed could lead my state in a positive direction for the first time in 20 years, only to watch him lose his bid for office. I feel the country moving under my feet, teetering on an edge beneath which lies utter destruction for people who look like me, for immigrants, for those who identify as LGBTQ. The country is on fire, and yet I’m sitting at a table in the middle of all of it, drinking coffee and thinking: this is fine.

But it really is fine.

Or, at least, it’s going to be. That’s something I firmly believe, and that belief is locked safely away in a place where no logic can penetrate, spreading its pessimistic blackness.

If we work hard, if we keep on keeping on, if we create change with every exhaled breath, with every ounce of blood, sweat, and tears we have to spare, I really think we can hold the encroaching chaos at bay. We can win big in November. We can make this country into a place that also works for people of color, for women, for the LGBTQ, for immigrants, for the disabled, for the working class, for all those struggling to make ends meet.

This kernel of positivity is an unexpected gift, born of utter despair and powerlessness. It’s the hope Barack Obama called so audacious. And it took disaster for me to understand the kind of enduring strength that can truly create change. I see it in the hardworking people around me in the trenches — the ones who are closer to me than folks I’ve known for over a decade. I see it in candidates running for office. I look in the mirror and see it — that flicker; that flame — and I know we’re really going to change things.

One loss is nothing. One setback. One punch to the gut that hurts but teaches us how to avoid the next blow.

We’re going to change things. It’s our time.

I believe it. And so I keep fighting. I hope you believe it too.

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Depression: Let’s Call the Beast by its Name

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I’m not a happy person.

Don’t get me wrong, I can be happy, but the feeling tends to wane more than it waxes. As long as I’m not actively unhappy, I count the day as a win. But there are days that definitely aren’t winners. There are days when it’s hard to find a reason to get out of bed.

As an introvert, I have a rich inner life that doesn’t often mirror the outer one. Before the craziness that was the late fall of 2016, my outer life was whisper quiet. In contrast, my inner life is akin to ordered chaos. And while chaos lends itself to fantastic bursts of creativity, it is also exhausting emotionally and physically.

But here’s the kicker: you would never guess it.

From the outside, I appear to be mild mannered Clark Kent. But, on the inside, I am leaping tall buildings in a single bound and screaming at the top of my lungs.

For me, adulthood has been a mostly bleak landscape interspersed with the occasional soaring peak of exquisite joy. And while I cherish those joyful times immensely, I also wonder why they are so few and far between. I came to the conclusion many years ago that adults aren’t meant to be happy. That we expect otherwise is a childish misconception born of the fairy tales we were force fed as children, complete with smarmy soulmates and happily ever afters. Real life is different, longer, and packed full of humdrum, yawn inducing moments that can still, oddly, be fraught with anxiety.

So, I set a low bar, and settle on the goal of contentment, which I label the absence of active unhappiness. This mostly tolerable state isn’t created out of thin air. I set the conditions in which I can stand to sit comfortably inside of my own head, that loud, tumultuous place where dread so often seeps in through the cracks and crevasses. Contentment is less a state of being and more a destination, reached through hard work and constant diligence.

Exercise helps a great deal. The longer I run, the better I feel, because that anxiety washes away on a river of sweat. But I can easily overdo it if I’m not careful.

Spending time with a handful of the right people can also bolster my weather beaten spirits. But if you add too many people, my spirits tatter at the edges even more rapidly, and I unravel.

Food helps too, momentarily. And why wouldn’t it? Food is delicious.

There are times when I stop short and think:

I am happy, right now, in this moment.

And the feeling disappears like smoke in the wind.

But the residue remains, and I cleave to it on mornings when I can’t find another reason to peel myself from the mattress and face another day. Because there will be more such moments, if only I soldier on. Right?

Why am I even bothering to say all this? Because we should name the beast whenever we see it. Whenever we feel it. Whenever it starts to creep over us, spreading sticky black anxiety…

Depression.

The more we speak its name, the more we know it. This might not loosen its hold, but there’s relief in the telling, isn’t there? And, sometimes, that’s all there is.

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Losing My Job was the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me

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A year ago today, I got up early, went running, reported to work, and was fired.

I packed my things and left, feeling set adrift, lost, unsure of what I would do to pay my bills. A local group I helped to run was hosting its first big Town Hall event that evening, which we’d started planning many weeks earlier. I threw myself into that, letting the nervous excitement wash away the dread I felt at being untethered from a source of income.

Our event was an overwhelming success, and it far surpassed our wildest expectations. As I was walking around that evening, gobsmacked by how well things had come together, I knew that this was what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be a change-maker, a community organizer, a person to whom others looked for ideas. But how would I make a living doing that?

I like to plan eight steps ahead, and at that moment I couldn’t even plan the following day.

A day later, at the advice of a friend, I signed up for a freelancing website in an attempt to scrape together a few hundred dollars to tide me over while I tweaked my resume and blasted it out all over town. I booked my first freelancing job the following day, then another, and another. The rest is history.

Over the last twelve months, I’ve worked with several clients, written hundreds of thousands of words, started my own blog, and found a way to get paid to do what I was already doing for free in my community. If someone had stopped me on the way to the parking lot with my bag full of personal belongings and told me that in 12 short months I would be living my dream, I’d have scoffed derisively and walked on. But it’s true. I’m exactly where I want to be right now, and I can only see good things on the horizon.

Twelve months. 365 days. 8,760 hours.

So little time, and yet it was enough to realign the ground beneath my feet. My world trembled after I was let go from a job I didn’t love, and then it expanded. I walked through an unlocked door without knowing what lay on the other side, and I’m grateful to have been in a position to take that chance. I’m also grateful to all the folks along the way who have encouraged me without even knowing it, and stood by me, and pushed me to be better.

Starting over at this stage in the game is terrifying, but I wouldn’t change a thing about the last year. There are so many unlocked doors on the path ahead of me, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds.

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Hair Hatred is Real When You’re Black and Female

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I’ve hated my hair for years, maybe even forever.

I grew up watching shampoo commercials featuring white women with silky smooth sheets of golden, brunette, and auburn hair, and I had plenty of white friends with hair that looked similar to what I saw on television. They flipped their rippling tresses over their shoulders or giggled as they batted it out of their faces in a high wind. My hair, on the other hand, is a thick and nearly impenetrable afro. Running my hands through it isn’t an option, and in its natural state–the very opposite of silky smooth–even hurricane force winds wouldn’t move it.

As a little kid, I rocked braids. I recall sitting on the ground in front of my mother’s chair every Sunday as she tugged my hair into intricate patterns, the braids so tight, my scalp burned. But they lasted the entire week, and we got to watch the Wonderful World of Disney, which I counted as a win.

For several years in the mid to late 80s, I had a jheri curl, which made my hair manageable, but I hated it. Touching my hair meant coming away with a dripping wet hand that needed to be scrubbed clean with soap. Forget about leaning against a wall or a car window. And it took hours in the salon to achieve the finished product. I still shudder when I see a bottle of curl activator…

When the 80s disaster that was the jheri curl finally went out of fashion, I switched to what us black folks call creamy crack. This product is a tub of white chemicals applied directly to the scalp that literally burns the hair straight. I’m not fucking joking, white readers. You leave it on until your entire scalp is on fire, because the longer you can soldier through, the straighter your hair is at the end, and that is the goal. As you can imagine, this isn’t great for your hair. But I did it anyway because it was easy to take care of, though I hated the 2 to 5 hours spent in the beauty salon every 8 to 12 weeks. This chemical process is expensive, time consuming, and shitty for your hair. It also feeds into the narrative that black hair looks best when it resembles white hair. I bought it, hook, line, sinker…

Then last week, I cut all of my hair off and went natural.

And I absolutely love it.

Okay, maybe this new haircut was born more from laziness and my overall just don’t give a fuck attitude concerning hair and makeup, but I have to admit that I bought into the beauty standards presented to me from cradle to the present day: glossy straight hair that’s manageable and floats on the breeze.

Fuck that.

I can love my hair too, even if society says I’m not supposed to.

The narrative is tilting these days, slowly but surely.

Remember the Sesame Street character Segi singing about how much she loves her hair?

Or every black woman in Black Panther?

Absolutely no hate, judgment, or disrespect to those still using chemicals to make their hair bone straight. I’ve done it myself for decades. But since I already love the skin I was born with, why not love the hair I was given, in all its kinky, dense, non-drifting-on-the-breeze glory? Part of doing better and growing as a person involves accepting myself for who and what I am.

I’m bound to stumble into old ways of thinking about standards of beauty, but I think dealing with my hair hatred is a great place to start…

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23andMe: the Terrifying Prospect of Knowing Absolutely Everything

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I am a mystery.

Not being coy here, just stating a fact. As an adopted kid, I have no idea where I came from. If I look into my history past the point where I ended up on my parents’ doorstep, I find a locked door that I’ve never felt the need to jimmy open. Whatever’s on the other side can stay there, for all I care. I might as well have been born from sea foam, like Aphrodite. There is absolutely no evidence to the contrary…

All that being said, let’s cut to Valentine’s Day, when I received an odd gift from my ex-husband: a 23andMe health and ancestry kit.

Had I asked for this? No.

Was I even considering DNA testing before receiving this kit in the mail? Nope.

Is it weird to get a gift from your ex on V-Day? Maybe, but that’s a topic for another post. And, honestly, this is more of an anti-gift, which seems fitting…

Some adopted folks want to mine as deeply as they can into their pasts, even if it means getting dirty in the process, because they feel an overwhelming need to understand their origins.

I’m not one of those people.

Watching the commercials for 23andMe elicits a string of smartass comments aimed at the smiling dopes happily discovering that instead of coming from one primarily white country, they actually come from another primarily white country. And they sure seem excited about it, don’t they? So excited that they go from attending the German heritage functions of their youth to wearing kilts and shit. Because these results would be definitely enough to make you change longstanding family traditions. As long as you’re still 100% white, amirite?!

It’s ridiculous and anyone who has ever sat through one of the commercials with me has probably heard my profanity laden rants on the subject and are beyond tired of them. I often wonder just how enthusiastically said smiling dopes would react to the discovery that some of their ancestors were actually from Africa instead of Germany, Scotland, or France like they always thought. I wonder how many folks who believed themselves to be white have been shaken to their core by the pretty, color coded, seemingly innocuous results of their DNA tests…

So, I have this kit, and it cost close to $200 bucks (yes, I looked it up). I didn’t buy it, but the thought of wasting that kind of money is abhorrent to my innate thriftiness. Just letting it sit unused is out of the question. But do I really want to know what lies behind the closed door of my history? Do I want some faceless entity to have samples of my DNA readily available in their database? Adopted kids are finding their biological relations through services like these, which is the last thing I’m interested in. I’m fine not knowing where I come from. That has never troubled me. It, instead, sparked my imagination and led to hours of daydreaming from the time I was a child until today.

But, if I’m being absolutely real, I just don’t want to find out information that I’m better off not knowing. That’s truly the long and short of it. Nothing I find out about my ancestry will change my day to day life (if you see me suddenly wearing some form of traditional African dress, feel free to call me out as a boldfaced liar). I won’t be shocked to hear part of my disconnected biological relations came over unwillingly from Africa. That really goes without saying. But the health stuff is troubling. Do I want that kind of stress in my life? I really can’t decide what’s more anxiety inducing: knowing your family medical history or not knowing anything at all.

You might be asking if I’ve sent in the test yet.

Nope.

It’s still sitting here on my desk in plain view, taunting me and serving as a great reminder of why my ex and I are divorced (kidding/not kidding). Who gets this for someone for Valentine’s Day? Chocolate, gents. Or books. Damn, I’m not hard to please.

I like the mystery in my lack of history. Just because we can know everything, does that mean we should? Is knowledge power, or just more fodder for worry?

That being said, I’m going to take the fucking test. Maybe I’ll report back on the findings, maybe I’ll read them once and never look at them again, or maybe I’ll be consumed with crushing dread at the sheer emotional weight of what I discover. Who’s to know? I just hope I don’t end up moon-eyed and ridiculous like the overly excited saps on the commercials…

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