How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community

Even if we intellectually understand the double standards and antiquated values underlying those norms, our heart and gut doesn’…

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reframing our understanding of how we achieve the “good life” and…

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What would it look like if we had more models for articulating our commitment to our friendships? Not just that we are committed, but what that commitment looks like, what they can expect from us and us from them. What spaces for safety and intimacy and care would that open up for us?

If heterosexual, white, middle-class families with kids are America’s gold standard, then poor, unmarried, Black mothers are vilified as its disgrace.

i want a world where when people ask if we are seeing anyone we can list the names of all our best friends and no one will bat an eyelid. i want monuments and holidays and certificates and ceremonies to commemorate friendship.1 —ALOK VAID-MENON

keenly aware of the absence of the world we’d made.

four-day gathering, and applied what she calls a “Wise Fools” structure (no agenda or clear outcomes, but an invitation to embrace a “beginner’s mind”).

family can be built, not just from blood and law, but shared experience and values, from love that looks like a million things.

Nor am I suggesting that everyone who experiences oppression does, or should be expected to, create beautiful, future-facing alternative societies.

These wounds—the specifically personal and the systemically personal—are intertwined.