did you miss me?

cuz shit... i missed me.

i've transitioned back to full-time teaching and every month has been feeling like a year. everything feels exhausting, even the things i love.

there have been so many things i have wanted to write about. there still are so many things i want to write, but i haven't been able to sit down and write any of them.

i've been thinking a lot about this quote from Michaela Coel...

it's October of 2021. we are still in a pandemic. i'm still disabled. it's only been a month and some change since hurricane ida.

and yet somehow we (shout out to many of you on this email thread) raised and redistributed $8,896 in hurricane relief in a single week. our abolitionist deck raised $3,035 in six weeks. in the last twenty-four hours we finished redistributing that money to abolitionist organizations, a translator, and the artists involved in the creation of the deck. now a plan is in motion for this newsletter to become a source of direct reparations.

and still i feel like i am failing.

how ridiculous. in typing this all out and looking at it formatted in these untidy paragraphs, i can see how absolutely absurd it is to think of this as not enough or even as something that can be sustained, instead of as a burst of cyclical work.

this is how the systems of our white supremacist, capitalist society work. they all conspire to make us believe in scarcity, in lack.

we watch currated videos and images of the lives of others scroll endlessly on with advertisement after targeted advertisement strategically placed in between to make us feel wants that have nothing to do with need. we fill our homes with things we are then responsible for cleaning and organizing ad nauseum. we're force fed stories of urgency, constancy, and individualism that contradict the mechanics of nature. we feel emotionally and physically at odds with all of it and think this means that there is something wrong with us, instead of with all of it.

recently during one of her weekly righteous hour conversations on instagram live Charm Taylor spoke about "patience and persistence." this is the wisdom i am working on hearing despite all the noise. i am giving in to the retrograde review of everything.

i hope that this week you are able to carve out some space and time for yourself away from the noise. i hope that you take time to appreciate all the surviving you're doing. i hope you are okay.

as always, i hope this was useful.

if it was and you want to support, click here.

with hope,

katie wills evans