June 15th 2020

If you have noticed my silence on social media the past week you weren’t imagining it. I disengaged from the online community for a bit to deal with life stuff, as well as give myself space. I wanted to truly and honestly listen, learn, absorb, to wrap my mind and heart around the Black Lives Matter Movement and the uncomfortable truths about my country, my history and my life that the movement shines light on. 

When my Dad died I saw in a new way the truth that some things can only be fully understood by experience. Brutal first hand experience. I THOUGHT I understood grief and loss and shock - then when I actually lived it myself, I realized that I had NO f-ing clue. Racism is the same type of animal, it’s something as a white girl I will always struggle to understand from a view point other than my own. But I’m listening, I’m learning, I want to hear without the filter of my own baggage obscuring the truth completely. I won’t pretend I won’t make mistakes, becasue I will, but I’m here. 

I’m not going to lie, personally it’s been a rough time lately, on  many levels (nothing happens in a vacuum), but I keep going back to a quote that recently resonated with me, “Uncomfortable problems don’t usually have comfortable solutions.” I’m learning that sometimes it’s the right thing to be uncomfortable, that uncomfortable is valuable. It can be necessary to sit in discomfort for a while in order to grow and change and have more clarity in and about a situation.

For those in the POC community, I see you, I hear you, I support you. Injustice and racism are not okay, they are never okay. My world, my hobby, my life is better because you are a part of it. I can only see the world through my own eyes, but the more time I spend with all of you, and drink in the truths you have experienced, the better my vision becomes to see things as they are, how they should be and how they can be.