In her poem, “won’t you celebrate with me,” Lucille Clifton writes,
come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
I first read these words when I was in college in the spring of 2012. Trayvon Martin had been killed, and I was sitting in a theology course on Genesis and Exodus, grappling with the fact that being a Black woman often meant not feeling safe in this world, in classrooms, and even in our bodies. At the time, the words made me deeply sad and, as my big cousin used to say when I was growing up, they “made my nerves bad.”
I didn’t truly embody these words or know their real impact until 2020. While everyone in the world was weathering the pandemic—during which over 300,000 people died in the United States alone—I was simultaneously struggling with challenges in my own body and navigating higher education as I held space for students whose stories were like mine. At that time, it felt almost impossible to support Black students exhausted from racial battle fatigue at a predominantly white institution. So much uncertainty and doubt played in my mind.
Continue reading “What’s Your Purpose, When You Can’t Get out of Bed?”