Phlox & Zinnia

The second most insane thing I’ve done on the road was getting up four hours after that harrowing drive and driving 13 hours to Grand Rapids by myself. After a weekend like that and an earlier solo trip to Akron, OH, I’m pretty confident I can drive anywhere.

When I told my housemates that I was planning on leaving at 2 am for Massachusetts this summer, they thought I was bonkers to be a. making the trip in one day and b. starting so dang early. But being a product of my parents, I started to wake up earlier and earlier as the day of reckoning drew close—changing light bulbs at 4 am, reading at 5 am, requesting library books at 7 am. The idea was that I’d force my body to go to bed earlier; I’m unhappy to report this theory doesn’t work when you have fun housemates and a neighborhood that consistently sets off fireworks from 10 pm on.

Nevertheless, with my food packed and podcasts downloaded, I set out at 2:40 am on July 1st. Well, 2:50 am since I had to turn around and grab the masks that I forgot. 

Other than podcasts and working out in rest stop parking lots, there's not much variety in the Michigan-Massachusetts road trip (you spend approximately 8 to 10 hours of your trip on the same freeway—love you I-90). Yes, there are podcasts that made me call my father and say, “I know it’s been on every anti-racism list, but like, Dad, it’s so good! They are talking about the lack of healthcare after slavery and it’s exactly what’s happening today. Exactly!” But most of my trip, I oscillated between two moments.

There’s the moment where all I can see is the road, a blue sky, and a couple of truckers, and I think, “Wow, I feel pretty good! I could do this all day!” And then there’s the other moment when I'm sick of everything: not excited about any podcasts, tired of cruise control, tired of people passing me on the road, sick of trying not to reach over and grab another snack. I play games with yourself, saying, “I’m going to wait until 1:30 to eat another brownie. Then I’ll know I'm actually hungry.” After each of these moments, I look at the clock, sigh, and stretch my legs as far as they could go.

Then there’s another category—the spiritual/weird moment that only comes once or twice a trip. Mine came at 8:30 am, having just finished the last episode of The Scaredy-Cat Horror Show. The music faded, and I paused the audio. I had seen myself earlier in that small corner of the rearview mirror that you can find when you stretch up, sunglasses on my head, and I had that weird premonition, remembering all the times she was cruising down the road, sunglasses on her head. I felt my mom’s presence. That’s weird to say, but I did. And nearly out of nowhere, a stew of anger and sadness boiled over. 

“Everything was going fine, and then you died, and then my life fell apart.” I gritted my teeth while tears rolled down my face and cars sped by.

I let God know how I was feeling as well (as I'm not sure whether I really believe that Mom is disembodied and could actually be listening to me) and my tears subsided. The road came back into focus, and I took a couple of deep breaths. I moved on. Fifteen minutes later, Sarah called me.

When I made the return trip to Michigan two weeks and a half, I didn’t heed the Johnson way. I was too busy seeing people every night to care about going to bed on time, so I decided I would just live with the 2am bleariness and chug some caffeinated water. I fought the weather: I drove with maybe 20 feet of visibility for the first 3 hours thanks to the heaviest fog I’ve ever driven through. The weird moment came when I believed I could see a fire roaring a bit inland from the road around 3:30am but then later thought that streetlights fuzzed by fog were further fires. There were no stand-out podcasts, although I did enjoy The Penumbra Podcast despite the awful audio balancing and Planet Money's Summer School series despite my aversion to learning. I-90 welcomed me back with open arms.

I only felt tired when I stood outside of Nizhoni, fumbling with my keys to get into my other home. My housemates trickled by, welcoming me back as I brought in loads of goodies from home: forgotten kitchen cabinet condiments, old hot chocolate, cast iron pans, books from my childhood room. It would take the next few weeks to learn what I had missed while in Massachusetts—a corn documentary, lapsed workouts, nature movies, frozen coffee creamer snacks, conversations in the kitchen. And yet, I could only grin as I screwed in the porch lights that had been neglected for the past two weeks.

In the age of flying and video chats, it's been easy for me to forget how far away my life as an adult is from my life as a child. I've never been reminded so starkly of this fact as I struggled to transition: the whiplash of going from Nizhoni to Massachusetts and vice versa left me reeling on both ends. The day after each road trip I thought, "Why am I here? Why did I leave the other place?" and then "How could I have left this place?"

It's a gift to have two places that you can call home, but it's hard to live with a heart divided in two. It's marginally easier when you enjoy making the trip between the halves.

                                               

I haven’t been able to find the one that crystallizes these sentiments exactly, but I’ve run across a few tweets and Instagram posts that go something like this: white people won’t be mobilized into anti-racism until they realize that whiteness is hurting them as well.

James Baldwin talks about this when he talks about how white people have invented Black people to make themselves feel better. I’ve heard echoes of it in an abolitionist teaching webinar that I attended where Bettina Love, Gholdy Muhammad, and Dena Simmons all made it exceedingly clear that abolition is a push for everyone’s humanity, and additionally that it’s insulting when white people say, “What should I do with my privilege?” because it shows they don’t want to give up their privilege. It’s present when people, usually Black people, point out that racism is a problem perpetuated by white people—it’s them that make everything about race.

All of the above makes sense to me logically. But it’s taking more time than I expected to come to grips with the fact that whiteness is oppressive to me too.

Bryan Stevenson has an amazing interview with Ezra Klein on Vox—from the abbreviated transcript I could easily pull ten quotes that glued me to the page. He emphasizes the fact that we have to be honest about our history and we haven’t dealt with the ugliness of it— “the ideology that we [white people] created — that Black people are less deserving, less worthy, less human, less evolved.” He urges people to see how they are implicated in that ideology and that history in the communities they love and to start telling the truth.

I want to say that whiteness is toxic to me because it implicates me in this centuries-old power dynamic where the color of my skin makes me more of a person in the eyes of the law, the government, my fellow citizens, etc. than someone with darker skin. That it’s toxic because I have to reconcile that history. I’m not sure that’s it. What whiteness continues to try to take away from me is the ability to see the face of God in other people. It is so desperate to prove that I am better, that I deserve more, that they are being unreasonable and exaggerating situations. I have been conditioned to turn away from justice for Black people because my whiteness and my power hinges on that injustice.

The other piece of the essay that hit me was Stevenson’s recognition of Black American’s commitment to the ideals of equality, freedom, and justice. His statements harkened back to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 podcast (a must-listen. Like, right now. Go. Don’t finish this essay. Go now.) which essentially argues that the major strands of American culture are all based in Black American culture.

Ever since I have begun to understand the history and legacy of slavery and to question how men could write and agree that it is self-evident that “all men are created equal” and then literally own other people, I’ve been pretty disillusioned with American ideals of freedom. I’ve sat for the Pledge of Allegiance, I’ve taken little notice of the Fourth of July celebrations, and I’ve shown open disdain for anything remotely patriotic. I believed it was my wokeness. But in a conversation with a friend, he reminded me that we as white people have not earned the right to be cynical about this country. “After all,” he seemed to say, “we haven’t been the ones wronged in this fight.”

Whiteness has distorted the values of America—love, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—from the very beginning. I’m still not completely convinced those are the ultimate values I want to center my life around, but regardless I should be following behind Black and queer leaders who continue to push this country to put its money where its mouth is—to become the land of the free and the home of the brave.

I can see what white supremacy has taken away from the Black community—lives, communities, wealth, opportunities, dignity, justice. But to only acknowledge that theft is to fall into the trap of performative allyship and woke white person brownie points. For me to keep running this marathon to justice, I need to remember what has been stolen from me and that my liberation is wrapped up in this fight too.

// This is what I wrote on the way to the piece above. It’s entirely unrelated but also something I would share on my blog, so congrats! You get a musing piece and a life update. What a treat.

If you could distill the essence of Elizabeth and I’s conversations over the past 5 years, you’d bottle the oak scent of faith wrestling and the spruce fragrance of accountability. We’ve tried many systems throughout the years of keeping each other accountable with our goals, whether they be faith, health, or school-related.

The latest of these is the accountability chart I made on my house’s shared calendar. I’ve written down 4 goals and how often I want to achieve them (I want to read the Book of Common Prayer every day, but there’s no way I’m working out more than 3 times a week). A week in, it’s gone pretty well. I get a little thrill from writing down a “W” when I don’t spend more than 15 minutes scrolling on my phone after I wake up. Somehow I’ve weaponized my need for a perfect self-image as a tool to prod myself to complete simple goals.

I’m in the middle of Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott’s scattershot of writing advice. She says the thing that I’ve heard since I went on the Writer’s Retreat: writers write every day. I immediately frowned and thought of my goal on the calendar— “journal/blog: 1–2x a week.” Should I write more? What time would I want to set apart for it?

In conversation with Joel, I realized that often when I write, I feel like it must have an external purpose other than just writing practice for me. I write whatever I want on my blog (but it has to be something worth remembering), meticulously thought-out and edited pieces on the post calvin, and major life events/ideas that I’m wrestling through in my journal. In my head, I understand that if I write every day, I cannot be using those spaces, yet those are the spaces that have worked the best for my writing. A part of me understands that writing is communicating, and it seems like an exercise in futility to write in a Google Doc only seen by myself.