a summer syllabus
or, a failure to launch*
my curls in the grass under the last of the june roses. petals scattered, eyes closed.I am resting. photograph by Cody Sells.
Last week, I promised myself (and y’all) a launch of the people’s health and a new episode of intimate practice.
I drafted the outline, wrote the script, built out the website — did the behind-the-scenes work that the public isn’t “supposed” to see. (No wizard behind the curtain here!)
But then I spent two days in the New York Supreme Court, fulfilling civic duty on a cold hard juror’s bench. I walked through the metal detectors three times a day, set them off each time, and made friends with the security guards — an occupational hazard of titanium bones. I assumed the courtroom would take one look at me and send me straight home, but instead I was funneled through — meeting the judge and lawyers from the district attorney’s office and the defendant’s interpreters, hearing the allegations in a criminal domestic violence case, and being questioned alongside fellow New Yorkers.
A microcosm of justice work, on a cold hard juror’s bench.
And then, I came home and crashed. It took me three days of quiet mostly horizontal time to recover. The rest demanded its price, and the price was a launch and a new episode. I paid it guiltily.
I’ve said it before, and I need the reminder still — rest isn’t always gentle.
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In the corporate world, in the before times, I would have pushed through to launch anyway. I did, once, the last big launch before I left that world, or before that world left me.
I pushed through, I was pushed through, I got covid, I took three days off to recover (“just like the flu”), I kept pushing, I was pushed some more. The launch was brilliant, a success, the client sung our praises.
And then my brain stopped working. My body collapsed in on itself.
I spent a month mostly horizontal, occasionally trying to walk to the end of my block, the next if I was lucky. My brain clunked around, a half hour, an hour, never more than a few in a day. “A bland brain diet,” my doctor prescribed.
A few months later, I was written up for the “crunches and slipping details” of the launch. My brain and body collapsed again, and this time, I rested willingly.
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So you see, I am still learning, and I suppose I am not yet sure what a launch looks like now. In the online business world, there is a formula for these things — a process of introducing the offer, solving the problem, opening the cart.
But we build worlds, here.
I am still learning how to adapt the formula to a practice that does not always work in formulas, a brain that needs three hours each morning to build itself into vitality, a body that needs three days to recover from a few days in court.
How do disabled and chronically ill people build our worlds? I think we might be figuring it out together, you and I. The People’s Health will come, soon. You’ll be the first to know.
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Thank you for joining me in a more BTS version of this newsletter. Ismatu said, “be so unserious right now,” and I think they might be speaking directly to my fatigue-ridden little brain. They said, “I am deeply invested in excellence,” and so here are my rough drafts. Here is my practice out loud, in a container that can hold the “failure” — as we do in a community of practice, as we will do in our community of practice.
In the meantime, I made you a free summer reading list, because it’s the end of the school year and that means melting ice cream cones and languid afternoons by the ocean and the fresh promise of a stack of books.
You can find some of my favorites here, as well as the ones I'll be newly exploring this summer. These are the books that have most shaped my politic and my praxis, the books that have most invited me or challenged me. They are the books that have helped me bear witness, taught me grief and grit, and lent me hope and resilience.
* alt title “failure to launch” borrowed from Cody Cook-Parrott’s recent newsletter.