It is not easy.

There are going to be moments when you are so homesick that you find yourself regretting studying abroad. You question spending so much money on an experience that you just aren’t feeling anymore. Maybe you made a mistake?

Unlike past transformations, the unignorable pull to change isn’t being fueled by shame and self-disgust this time. As potent as they may be, they don’t align with how my healing journey has invited me to be in company with myself. Shame is not an adequate or sustainable persuasive tool. Compassion is.

If you are Black, you are Black. You are family and that’s that.

All I can do is take it day by day and not repeat the wrongs of my past. So, without further ado:

It wasn’t long before a wave of gratitude and joy settled over me. I must have looked like a crazy person to the Shanghainese people around me, smiling over nothing. But I wasn’t smiling over nothing.

If we feel most whole when we do for others, why do we choose to live splintered apart?

The issue comes when our country chooses to remain ignorant of its wrongs. Its behavior, in regard to education, profiteers patriotism. It distorts the truth to cultivate a false chronicle of American prowess; admitting defeat only when it led to ultimate victory. Dissent made against this model is deemed unpatriotic and, therefore, against what it means to be American. I ask, though, if what it means to be an American is to hide the truth and develop a fallacy so complex and weave it into the curricula from which our children are taught, then does that not point to an enormous vulnerability in our country’s ego?

We know what we FEEL. We know what we WANT. But, we have not NAMED it. What does a transformed policing system look like? Posts on social media all seem to be rooted in emotion, but an appeal to pathos without a goal for a logical solution leaves us without something to act on.

There is no single way to offer service; it is not always about actually feeding or clothing those in need. Instead, it can also be about inspiring others through our thoughts and actions-- it is a service to spark imagination and incite ambition.