 4 years, two posts. And then today's. As the world has been worlding, I've been focused on so many other aspects of living and grieving and surviving and loving and healing. What I thought this space would become, and what it has been, couldn't be more different. Truthfully, that's the narrative about a lot of things, which is why I present to you the first page of something I've been working on. Grieving more than just those who are no longer earthside, on this Grief Awareness Day. - 🩷 N
If you open the closet door, you’ll find the wardrobe of a person who doesn’t exist anymore. You’ll find stacks of loungewear, spotted with oil stains from food that refused to stay on a fork, and random bathing suit tops and bottoms in fabric cube bins on the floor. On the hangers, which spread across the short side walls rather than across the width of the closet, you’ll find a few items collected over the last five years that haven’t been worn. Mostly dresses, or clothes for the one insanely hot week of the year in San Francisco. The tags are still on some of them, and they do not yet have the smell of laundry detergent, perfume, or lotion from being worn. You’ll find wool and velvet blazers - classics but in fun colors, and a few trendy ones that were always tight in the arms, made of itchy poly blends that have started to feel like plastic when you rub a sleeve between your fingers, and one or two might lightly smell worn, lived in, like the smell of a person, not dirty, not clean, but human. With them are a few button-downs in varying quality, from both high and low-end retailers - striped, patterned, and some plain - many with safety pins to prevent an unfortunate boob gap when worn. Among the shirts are a few blouses saved for “facilitation.” On the other side, the hangers are full of dresses, slacks, and a few other items held tightly “just in case.” The closet is full of just-in-cases. Pants just in case there is dramatic weight gain or loss, as if either happens overnight. Shirts, just in case a room suddenly needs to be painted, or if peplum tops and bib necklaces ever come back in style, and should have been donated a long time ago. Clothes, jackets, and scarves, just in case ethnic pride or San Francisco pride is called for - stretchy athletic fabrics, some smooth, some soft, some the texture of fleece that drags on dry hands or paper cuts. But, mostly, what is left on those hangers is just in cases that need to be let go of, because these clothes belong to an old version of myself, not the current me who is still being born. Thanks for reading, stay tuned for more... maybe.
0 Comments
 I guess we all, and by we I mean me really, thought there'd be more to work out - publicly at least, because there was certainly a lot going on behind the scenes. To be clear, I did spend a lot of the Fall doing this, just not through this blog. I committed to healing out loud - while also working here and there, and really just taking time to be human.
Things switched up however, as my grandmother (my mother's mother) who had been focused on getting her affairs in order ended up getting sick in January and my sister and I began full time caretaking for her before she passed at the end of that month. She was 94, she lived a full ass life, so as much as we wanted her to be able to live in a post-pandemic world, I'm grateful to have had the last few years to be as closer with her. That said, whatever I had in my mind about where I was going with my professional life in the Fall and early January had been centered on making sure I could incorporate her care into my time. When she passed that was thrown out the window and a new layer was added to my healing process. We know healing isn’t linear and we also know there is no singular formula for how it should work. Prior to grandma's passing and in the immediate weeks after, I felt I needed to be honest about my healing but was often conflating it with the "out loud" part. Not everything I was going through needed to be shared publicly, as I was also negotiating how to continue disconnecting my professional and personal selves from each other, giving each one its own breathing room, even planting them in separate parts of my garden. They had been so dangerously intertwined that I hadn’t seen how I no longer wanted to be the person I thought I wanted to be at the beginning of 2020 until then. (Aside: raise your hand if you didn't think 2020 was going to be your year. Yeah, I thought so.) At some point - maybe late Spring - I decided I needed to continue to be honest about where I was with my journey, but I didn't need to share every detail. Something happened after grandma passed that clicked me into holding parts of the journey closer to my chest - not that anything of note was happening. Moreover it was that as the two year maker of the pandemic arrived - and I saw people I am close to hit their COVID walls and begin to return to their old lives while I was retreating again into my new layer of grief. I saw people begin to do their own public meaning making about our collective grief, about having to pivot in their own professional and personal dreams. Not a single person was asking me to perform my grief - but as I watched everyone else processing out loud - or in some cases jump out into the world I couldn’t help but feel like my continued sharing could be read that way - as a performance of some kind. Who was saying this? No one. Did I care? Enough for that thought to occur to me. It was - however - good for me to just be with it again. I also think that I subconsciously had a script I thought I needed to create for what I shared about my journey. It needed to not be frivolous. It needed to not be petty. It needed to be just personal enough, but still somehow universal. I needed to give space to everyone else experiencing this massive collective grief - and for some their first experiences of it at all. Everyone quitting their jobs needed their time too. So I retreated. Besides - I didn’t have it in me, in ways I did before (pre-pandemic even) to share platitudes about how “we can all do it (!)”, how we are all “more than enough”, about all the lessons and learnings I had about grief, about work life-balance, about capitalism and productivity… etc. etc. etc. And while my break - or shift in boundaries more specifically - was needed, and was good, I can’t help but reflect now that it has been a full year, that this Fall has begun, maybe I’d also over corrected, because there were still things I wanted to share. Silly things on Instagram stories, just because I think they are funny or weird or wild. I want to share things I’ve realized about work and life and the concept of work life balance, because I don’t want other people to be taken advantage of the way I felt I was at times, I want folks to feel empowered and able to get themselves out of those situations. I want to let everyone know that grief sucks, and it’s totally a normal part of life. There are things I want to share because I feel like there’s value to the unique experiences my millennial siblings and I are having as we spent our childhood hyped up and told we could be anything we wanted with a college degree and are now buried by never ending student loan debt and a myth about adulthood and the American dream that is not possible but we are overly bought in to while Boomers, Gen X and Gen Z just want to shit on us for our shared anxiety, IBS and coffee addictions. We know it's all a scam y’all, we’re just in too deep. So, as I continue to figure out where I want to be and what I want to be doing - or rather how I can find things to do and places to be that feed both the personal and professional, even maybe allow the personal to be the bigger part of the garden - I’m trying to more organically let myself say and do and be things out loud because it’s authentic to me to do so and less so because of others and what they think, or don’t think or need to hear or don’t need to hear. Here are some of the things that have been brewing and I want to share. The concept of “balance” is a scam. We all have been dreaming about a work-life balance during the pandemic, because we’ve been able to see all the ways we were fooled by capitalism and productivity and put too much weight into the work part of things. But I just don’t think balance as we’ve defined it in popular culture - is possible. Things are never truly balanced, and if they are - its temporal. We need to be working more to cultivate equanimity. It leaves room for the good and bad to coexist, it leaves room for you to honor whichever side of the scale is requiring more of your attention. As a person who LOUD quit, quiet quitting is not actually quitting. It’s setting the boundaries you already should have had, boundaries that capitalism has told us we can’t have. Take your sick days. Eat your lunch, away from your desk. Unless you are in a life saving profession - and sadly while I think education can change lives, for folks working office jobs, or reform spaces like I do - there is no work so urgent that you cannot call out, go to the doctor for a regular check up, or miss a family funeral. If it’s urgent - someone else can do it. And if you really need to quit - do it - don’t be reckless, but the boundary holding that we’re calling quiet quitting can only work as long as the conditions to hold them up are supportive. If “Break Your Soul” was the thing that made you finally say - “I think I'm unhappy with my job” - I’m sorry you needed Beyonce to be your mirror. I generally think her experiences aren’t actually that comparable to us regular degular people. She literally took steps toward her current career when the rest of us were working at Jamba Juice and Foot Locker as teens. It’s also not Beyonce that made you actually realize this - but the fact that the pandemic actually gave folks space to pause, reflect and see people treat others like trash because they were more pressed in isolation and with stay at home orders than they ever had been before. The things I used to use to measure my happiness, success, value, etc. - were mostly made up. I already noted that I realized I didn’t want the things I wanted in early 2020 anymore, but what I also mean is I was measuring my success against things that don’t matter to me anymore. I was seeing peers win accolades, get promotions and new titles. Half of which are either made up or symbolic - not that folks aren’t deserving, these are all people doing important amazing work - because there is no industry standard for folks outside of the classroom. There’s not a national “Ed Policy Analyst” Award, or Guild (though I am now recalling there was an attempt in my district to bring folks who had that same title all together for the sake of feeling collegial and important even though our job duties differed from person to person). But the same goes for dreams of adult rights of passage like homeownership, (IN THIS ECONOMY?) of marriage or partnership (the days I am grateful to be unattached during this pandemic have slightly outweighed the days I have wished I had a partner, given all we’ve been through). Those were based on old frameworks that don’t apply any more (read: the old economy). Student loans, a scam. College, a scam. Not that I don’t value my education, I’m grateful I was able to continue learning, when and where I did, BUT back to my age old adage of school systems saying “college is not for everyone” - is that for us to say? What if it's a “not right now” thing? What if the purpose of college was for folks to just learn what they want to learn? AND what if we didn't charge folks an arm and a leg for it? And things? Stuff? Consumption? I want things, but I also don’t want all the physical things I thought I wanted before, I want less most days to be honest, but maybe that’s just part of my streamlined “I’m just here living and being” mindset right now. There are a million other ways for me to measure and validate all the good in me. I have hope that we can all find other ways too, that work for us, that are true to who we are. So… yeah. Lots of continued rumblings, rewriting myself for a 3rd time in so many years. A member of my chosen family talks a lot about revision, but I don’t think that’s what I’m doing, I think I’m actively throwing things out and having to start from scratch. As hard as it is at times, I’m okay with that right now. Anyway, here’s to more transition. May the next ones be filled with a bit more ease. Maybe this time, I’ll have more to say before another year has passed, till then ✌🏽.  My 1st social media post about maybe leaving In February 2021 I knew it was time. News that the City of San Francisco was suing the school district, because we had not yet reopened during the COVID-19 Pandemic despite promises to do so in January, was what did it.
It seemed unfathomable, like we were getting punked, that in the middle of a fucking global pandemic, this is what it had come to. But that’s San Francisco. Our hyper political 7 mile by 7 mile city - which I cannot leave or turn my back on - is a place where amazing things have originated, but where ultimately only San Franciscan’s actually give a shit about what’s happening. It’s a fact. Native San Franciscans are all born with chips on our shoulders, gigantic nacho flavored chips; and if you live here long enough you might develop your own. My home is a place where we “welcome everyone” so long as they don’t fuck our shit up too much and where it’s impossible to not have lots of different political interests that align, intersect and are in conflict with each other at any given time. But this? This felt like some infighting nonsense at the cost of our young folks and like a sign that it was indeed time for me to walk away. But that was February. I’d already navigated the previously wild 11 months of pandemic life in the world of education which included: figuring out distance learning, department and team reorganization and not even knowing if my job was going to exist in the 2020-21 school year because of pandemic related budget cuts. And to think, I started 2020 thinking it was going to be my year, professionally and personally I was ready to do the damned thing. Instead I just did my best with the bullshit hand of cards I was dealt. I’d been thrown lots of random projects because they knew “I could get it done, and done well.” They ranged from COVID-19 Protocol trainings in the Fall of 2020, to doing professional development for our school security guards, website updates and the actual policy work of my job. I worked with focus, but also blurry eyes and like so many during this pandemic, not having a sense of knowing when this would all end. January and February brought with them other focused work I actually cared about, but when I was able to get enough space or time to see the bigger picture of it all - this was not IT for me. With March approaching, and marking the one year anniversary of my mother’s passing, as well as the one year anniversary of sheltering in place I couldn’t see a future where I could continue to grieve, find joy and do my job - which, absent of ego, I was doing damned well. I had given away my first year of grief entirely to making sure the ship kept sailing. Yes, in some ways, it couldn’t have happened at a better time (is there ever a good time for your mom to die though?) - in that the pandemic gifted me the ability to have space and time to be with my dad, sister and maternal grandmother, but there was no fair exchange rate for the amount of work I was doing and the amount of space or time I would need to grieve, which we know isn’t quantifiable. That first year was almost gone and it managed to be one of the best professional years I had had in my life as far as what I was able to produce and the impact I was able to make (though even wilder shit would come after February). In that year I did my best to let the grief flow. I cried when I needed to. I danced alone in my apartment in the dark after downing a few shots or eating some weed gummies when I needed to (don’t worry, I wasn’t reckless with it). I openly admitted to people when I was only half participating in things when I needed to. But because I had lost control of so many things, as we all did during that year, I just let go and leaned in to the change, perhaps too much at times but I just said fuck it and went with the centrifugal force of all the change. I know you’re thinking that means that I allowed myself to get walked all over when it came to work, but that’s not entirely true either. I took chances, took risks, I didn’t have anything to lose - a stance that became my primary way to get through things - and at times to hold others accountable to our young folks. I also set boundaries. I said no more professionally than I ever had before; though I definitely could have said it more. But I also didn’t take a lot of time off. 2 weeks after my mother first passed. A week and a half in the summer and a few days here and there. A week and a half over winter break. I was juggling too many projects - and our leadership team knew it. I was on too many working groups, more than other colleagues - and though it was a testament of my skill and my value, I had historically grappled with how my skills and interests didn’t always match what folks in the organization valued about me. So the city suing it’s own school district… this was the universe saying “Girl, here is your out, your permission to go.” There couldn’t have been a clearer sign. And my god, my god am I happy I listened when I did. The months that followed my personal decision included formally telling my boss in mid-March, our board of education suing each other, and eventually opening schools in early April. I got assigned to support a school for two weeks while they made that transition, serving as an overpaid lunch lady for that time. I was removed from some projects, added to others and many other things happened not worth mentioning right now. I didn’t formally file until May and agreed on a 6/30 end date after some back and forth about losing 900 hours of sick time (yes, you read that correctly) in exchange for my mental sanity. I worked until the very last possible moment, officially signing out of my district accounts at 5:02pm. One of my teammates threw together a last minute happy hour for that evening and 9 of us played some fun games, shared some laughs, and I was pretty touched considering the all the days leading up to this where I felt conflicted between wanting to fade into the back and disappear without much fuss, and feeling like the 10 years I served that place meant I deserved a fucking parade in my honor (ego is weird huh?). Leaving was like a slow, slow break up - overwrought with complicated feelings and a commitment to finish things I started that was primarily self-imposed but no one would fight me about either. So here I am. A month and a half after my last day, sharing here a bit more publicly how I got here. Not taking a ton of vacation (by force and by choice) in the 10 years within the organization I was there afforded me the padding (financially) to take some time - so fucked right? I’ve got work here and there, and am thinking a lot about why I’ve always felt I had to hold so much. I know I don’t want to work the way I did before and if you know me well, one of the biggest ways I’ve grown is that I know I don’t have to. I’ve always been someone who hasn’t been super afraid of showing my emotions, of working through shit in my life as it's happening, but that’s often kept me from having the space to dream. When so many things in our world are still works in progress I can’t pass up the opportunity to do some intentional work on me and frankly, to live life again. Anyway - more to come. About this journey. About grief in the time of COVID-19. About education, and race, and whatever the fuck I want. Till then ✌🏽, thanks for being here. |
Doing my best, while the world burns.Archives
August 2025
Categories |
RSS Feed