How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone: A Memoir

A friend tells me women don’t remember giving birth very well. Memory is actually much worse when we’re stressed, she says.

Even after working for so long, I am often made to feel I do not belong, that none of me is valued except what I cannot control—my youth, my race, my weight, my skin, my symmetry. I am a guest here, stopping by so long as age and trend allow.

(Dad) whose cooking/cleaning/fixing taught me the deep fulfillment that can come from maintaining the world right around us, and whose labor has always sustained me in more ways than I can know, thank you.

Scientists say suppressing the expression of an emotion can reduce the feeling itself.[23] In a study published in The Journal of Pain, subjects who were told not to frown experienced less pain than those who grimaced when heat was applied to their arm. However: “People who tend to do this regularly might start to see the world in a more negative l

I know I can only be powerful if people are listening, and I must be powerful if I want to survive.

Fred Moten wrote, “What if we could detach repair not only from restoration but also from the very idea of the original—not so that repair comes first but that it comes before. Then making and repair are inseparable, devoted to one another, suspended between and beside themselves.”[7]

It’s just a job. It’s just sitting, waiting, zoning out, and being a piece of a machine, and sometimes I’m too tired and it’s too big and I’m just one piston.

When they introduce me at the UN, it feels more than polite, it feels fictious. The list of compliments. The clapping. I think other people need to believe that I can do good too.

Thank you, Damani Baker, for building a life with me that has space for grief and pleasure, art and children, adventure and peace.

Like Grace Jones said: “I am diplomatic now. I could run for presidency now. I know how to play the game. But it’s tricky for me to be diplomatic—it does not come easy. I find it manipulative and insincere. You have to manipulate your own self to get the results you need without actually expressing how you really feel.”[1]