Sometimes I write about topics that are unpopular, or take an unpopular stance because I’m working through my feelings and because I know that other people are working through theirs. As an artist, I believe part of my job is to ignite opinions and discussion on purpose.

All of a sudden, he lifts his left butt cheek into the air, throws the leg attached to it over his right hip and flips himself from back to belly like some kind of gymnast. Then perfecting the routine, he lifts his right arm over his head in one magnificent reach, grabs the wiper warmer, and sends everything around it crashing to the floor.

So I do what any mother with a half open, poopy diaper does while her child holds onto the edge of the change table with a grip so intentional in its glee that it’s impossible to roll him back: I learn to change him upside down.

If you’ve ever worked with me you know that one of the ways I approach visibility is according to one of its underused definitions: available. As in, what are you available for?

It seems as if overnight, what I am personally available for has shifted dramatically. Having done this work a while now, I know that there is no overnight success, transformation or change. The moments of change are swift but the circumstances and seeds planted are usually a long time coming. Regardless, I feel radically different.

It was a Sunday afternoon, February 26, 2012 and a 17-year-old African-American high school student went out for a walk in his gated community. He was wearing a hoodie and he had a package of skittles in his pocket. He never came home.

A while back while she was in the midst of her yoga certification, my young cousin reached out to ask me a question and about her grandfather and her grandmother, who by that time had divorced. Without much thought, I answered her according to the truth as I knew it—

It never fails to amaze me that a mother is always able to lift the weight of her baby, no matter how heavy.

That’s something my mentor’s 90-year-old sister said to me when I met them for a visit a few months back. She had watched me gingerly lift my baby in his car seat onto the table after she struggled to lift his load from the chair. I hadn’t thought of it like that before, but the truth of this necessary, if unconscious, lesson struck me.

I don’t know why I’m asking this because it’s really none of my business but is that KC person, a relative of yours?

This was a private message I sent to a FB acquaintance on Friday night when the riots over the death of George Floyd were beginning to escalate.

Friday, my acquaintance posted the Jimmy Kimmel commentary on the story and KC went off on a rant about how racism was an excuse, reverse racism and something else I don’t remember, because I snapped.

I was flying back from Arizona and #ICONICwithAliBrown when I noticed. Among the people sitting in the nine, first-class seats, I was the only woman.

It’s not the first time I’ve noticed the disparity between men and women in the front half of the plane but today it was particularly meaningful. I had just seen Cindy Eckert speak about founding a pharmaceutical company, selling that company for one billion dollars and then suing the buyer to get it back when they failed to bring the product she fought so hard to create to market, Addyi.

It’s an interesting thing, the heart.

It remembers.

Transplant patients, given new life after surgery, often report having acquired some of the preferences of the donor, especially when it comes to favorite foods.
Strange but true.