Something is moving in you that you have not yet named.
Not the headlines. Not the memos. Not the meetings where the decision had already been made before you arrived. You know what is happening out there. What I want to speak to is what is happening in here — in the place beneath your composure, beneath your competence, beneath the version of you that has learned to absorb what is noxious and keep moving.
Because something is not moving this time.
Black women have always known that our indispensability has never been the same thing as our safety. We have watched it and absorbed it and filed it away in the part of ourselves we do not bring to work. We have been precise and prepared and indispensable. We have over-delivered in rooms that under-valued us. We have made ourselves legible to systems that were never designed to read us accurately.
And we have done it anyway. Because we were taught that excellence was the answer.
This moment is teaching us something different.
Not as news. Not as data. As a felt truth arriving in the body — in the disrupted sleep, the quiet anger, the strange grief of watching something you gave years to reveal its actual design.
That sentence may need a moment to land. We have been trained not to let things land.
Because many of us have spent our entire professional lives — our entire sense of self — organized around a question we didn’t choose: Am I enough by other’s measure?
And the answer was always conditional. Always contingent. Always one performance away from being revised.
What is moving in you right now is not despair. Though it may feel like it.
It is the beginning of a reckoning that is much older than this moment — a reckoning with what you have been measuring yourself against, and who gave you that measuring stick, and what becomes possible when you finally set it down.
Not as performance. Not as proclamation. But as a quiet, interior act of truth.
I was never required to be legible to that system. I was always something it did not have the capacity to name.
— Pamela J. Thomas Fiber of Life LLC