The Happiness Here
What’s Stopping Us?
At a recent event with Black Lives Matter co-founder and all-around badass Alicia Garza, the organizer and powerhouse spoke tenderly to a room of activists about the idea of self-care.
I have done many a silly thing in the name of self-care. Freshman year, I probably ate dinner at the Panera across the street from my room in Wigglesworth as often as I ate in Annenberg. I was tired, it was cold, the Berg was far away. “Self-care,” I’d say, shuffling through the snow to shove cheese and bread into my sad, sad face.
Hotline Bling
Sometimes I worry about Drake.
I don’t mean like, whether or not he’s eating enough leafy greens. (Judging by how fit he’s looked on Instagram, it seems like he is.)
Meat
My biggest claim to fame is the vegetarian blog I created and ran in middle and high school. At its peak it had about 15,000 followers, and I was spending many of my wild, teenage late nights online, fielding a mailbox full of questions from meat eaters and non-meat eaters alike.
This was my first acquaintance with activism gone wrong. I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but it only took so many death threats from angry vegans before I started to draw conclusions about what it means to be an advocate, how to cope with politics and the self, how to be the best activist.
On Belonging and 'Steven Universe'
The thing about feeling incredibly empowered by an animated children’s television show the summer after your freshman year of college is that you feel like you’ve been waiting forever it to happen. You remember the way you felt in elementary school, identifying with all the quirky young white kids, often white boys who were the main characters of all your favorite shows. Watching “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends,” watching “The Powerpuff Girls,” watching Cartoon Network when you weren’t supposed to, feeling almost there, almost like you’d found the kind of normal you could finally vibe with, then realizing no, maybe almost, but not quite.
Basically, I have a lot of feelings about "Steven Universe." "Steven Universe" is a show about semi-mythical beings (it’s confusing, it’s a children’s show so they spend ten episodes on fluffy filler and one episode explaining the actual science fiction of the show) who derive their powers from gems that are kind of lodged in their physical beings. They’re basically contained in the gems, and from there have the power to create humanoid forms. It’s kind of like “Orange is the New Black,” where the main character is a sort of boring white person and a cast of amazing characters of color branch out from their normalizing center, for the ad-execs, or whatever. There’s a character who is probably non-binary. One character exists as a fusion between two female identified characters who are in a relationship with each other. Anyway, it’s on Cartoon Network.
Traveling While Black
I love traveling the Southeast the way I love fake-deep indie rock music by bands composed entirely of white men.
I love it the way I’ve loved too many hetero-centric rom-coms, the way I love the smell of meat grilling despite being a vegetarian, the way I love the joggers I bought on sale a few weeks ago from Anne Taylor Loft. The way I love things that are not mine. The way I love things that maybe ought to be. Were supposed to be. And it’s hard loving these things that look and feel like home when they insist on being forbidden, alienating, mean: Loving the idea of the thing, often getting nothing in return.