It’s not that I don’t think I am capable of these things—I know I am—but I don’t want to. Life provides plenty of hardships and trials. I avoid intentionally adding to them.

We can’t fully know ourselves without other people.

I’ve felt both agitated and excited about what might be possible. I’ve felt an energizing desire to be more explicit about the life I’m building. And I want to build that life in deep alignment with my best self’s values, and a vision of the world I want to help create.

James Baldwin wrote, “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”1 We all seek belonging, and for very few of us, even the most hermitic, is that place completely separate from others. That means it’s something we must build together.

For decades, Black families have been described as “broken.”

The quintessential “self-made man” (and it is almost always a man) is self-sufficient, confident, stoic, righteously industrious, performatively heterosexual, and powerful. His success is signified through acquisition—home ownership, marriage, and children—and display of taste and things—craft beer and Courvoisier, Teslas and big trucks, bespoke su

“Just think about the way we talk about relationships now,” she said to me. “Significant others—significant means ‘sex partner.’ What a weirdly narrow notion of significant.”

Creating relationships and connection outside the arrangements that our current culture presents to us can be exciting and liberating. We get to be creative, coming up with new ways to understand our connections to others and new ways of connecting. We get to throw out what we’ve learned to want and discover what we actually want and need. We get t

the places we go to escape the distractions and obligations and stressful busyness of our everyday are not where we build our lives.