May notes

A sidenote as we begin: Weird Al Yankovich unlocked what I am finally willing to call one of my special gifts. I have been writing song parodies since I was 11. This is the latest ditty.

🎼 Now this is a story all about how
When you quit a shitty job and your body breaks down
And I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there
I’ll tell you how I got a rash and was gasping for air 🎶

Picture it. Not Sicily. Late May 2026.

My mental?

Driftin’ between 2 and 4 on a sliding scale of 5.

My body?

-2.

I was minding my own business, waking up leisurely in my fifth week of what I’ve since taken to calling my funemployment era. I stared at the ceiling and remembered, as I’d remembered for the past 30 days, that I ain’t had nowhere to be. The starfish stretch felt good; the extra time in bed felt even better.

Slow mornings every morning. A new normal.

There I was, beginning to wonder if I might be eligible to become a Deaconess of Rest in the Nap Ministry. Or at least an usher. I rose into my awakened state, setting my feet on the floor and doing those first lip smacks that start my morning practice: a deep breath of gratitude, a sip of water, a little qi gong mashup. And like a record scratches, I felt a catch in my throat. Something like an itch and a bit of a lumpy swallow.

Instantly, I was despondent. You gotta be kiddin’ me. The one time I have consistently taken all my vitamins, every day, and my ass still caught that ick?!

But things were seemingly getting worse. A few days before, I woke up, yawned, and noticed a hot, burning feeling, like the skin between my nose and upper lip had been blasted by sandpaper. My fingertips grazed my perimenopause- and hereditary-sponsored mustache and I felt an archipelago of bumps.

In the bathroom mirror I stared in dismay at what was, in fact, a smattering of tiny red isles curving around my lips. The topography startled me before it pissed me off. And there I was, arguing with a faceless god in the mirror; hissing silent yells as I splashed my face. I felt like David or Moses or the good fella Habakkuk.

Was it not enough to already contend with the peri-induced acne? Did I really need another gyachtdamn thing to stress about on top of adjusting to paying bills without a steady, predictable income stream? Is this how it’s gonna be in this in-between? Do I get to experience live action manifestations of failure in my body, outside of the ones running amok inside my head?

I’d heard tales and read articles about people retiring and then immediately being struck with an illness or dying suddenly. I wasn’t prepared to look at my own body through a similar lens— largely because society has told me I still have at least 20-30 more years to go before I could even dare to retire.

But then I thought about how much work has changed for us non-boomers, and how living through the COVID-19 pandemic loosened working conditions only for good ol’ patriarchy and capitalism to tighten us back up. I believe the experience of that pendulum swing has, in many ways, baptized us in a more concentrated version of the toxicity. We got to glimpse and even bask in the reality that work could be simpler and oh so different, but just like a nasty cold, woeful workplace pathogens have a way of seeping in and upending everything.

For a week and a half, I nursed myself with sleep, OTC cold meds, hot toddies, and prescribed ointments. My body wanted to rest and I let it. I told Gertrude, my loud ass inner critic, that we had earned the right to rest without her constantly listing all the things we should be doing. My therapist wryly reminded me that my original exit date was 2/22/22. I reminded her that according to my mama, if I don’t do nothing else, I’m gonna move in my own time. She didn’t have to verbalize the work I knew I needed to do FOUR YEARS LATER (her eyebrows screamed), but she did encourage me to acknowledge and reckon with what tradeoffs and deferred dreams can do to one’s body.

There are many articles about caring for oneself after leaving a toxic job. Most of them read like an assembly of IG carousels—short, TL;DR snippets about practicing self-care and rebuilding your emotional and mental well-being to heal your nervous system. But, like my dermatologist’s prescription, the advice is largely topical.

And I have always been interested and invested in what’s at the root.

June notes

Before I quit my job I took FMLA leave from February through early April. I used that time to make some sense of the anger and exhaustion I was feeling, and one of the first things I realized is that I wasn’t having enough fun. So I did some girl math and booked a trip to Kythira, Greece for my very first writer’s retreat.

Shoutout to Lisa, Jamia, Brette and the Porto Delfino crew for hosting the Birth of Creation Narrative Healing Retreat.

You can ask me about writing if you want to, but instead I’m just gonna tell you about all the chillin’, chattin’, and bein’ I did because apparently that’s what I really went all the way over there to do.

It was a glorious time and a confounding one, too. Us 9-5 Americans really be over here thinkin’ we’re doing something with all our circling back and touching of the bases. But it only took one view of Kapsali Bay and a 3-hour lunch with disappearing waitstaff for me to remember there are so many other ways to be.

My body relished the rhythm of life on that slow Grecian isle. It was also the first time in a long time I went somewhere and I didn’t really know anybody else. I’d only met Lisa virtually in the weekly Narrative Healing Labs she hosts. Those 45-minute Friday sessions became a balm during the pandemic; then they morphed into little beacons during work weeks where back-to-back meetings crashed my calendar in waves. I suspected a week full of slow, intentional focus in a dreamy, far-away place would do me some kind of good.

And I was right, but not in any of the ways I originally thought I’d be.

By the time I got to Kythira, I was 7 weeks removed from quitting. I’d already experienced some of the acute physical side effects—the crazy facial rash, the immune system collapse, and the kind of exhaustion that sleep had yet to cure. I wasn’t fully aware then, but the serene setting and newfound friends would hold me as the mental and emotional effects started to release.

In the meantime, God has a wonderful sense of timing and humor.

Turns out, my time in Greece coincided with what therapist Ashley Kreze refers to as the “Crash” phase in the “four stages of post-toxic-job recovery.” In the article “How to Recover After Leaving a Toxic Job: A Therapist’s Guide,” Kreze talks about how, during weeks 4-16, you stop all the emotional suppressing you were doing to survive your raggedy surroundings (my word, not hers). This can give way to feelings of grief, anxiety, anger, depression, or my personal, unlisted favorite: unbridled sarcasm.

‘Cause I don’t know about you, but I absolutely love dropping thousands of dollars and traveling halfway ‘cross the world to go on the age-old adventure of “wherever you go, there you are!”

It is my process and, alas, as an adopted Philadelphian, I must trust it.

Because of the weekly work I’d been putting in with my therapist for years, I was thankfully not dealing with depression. And before I left the U.S., I’d taken a vow of delulu while packing, blasting J. Lo’s “Get Right” to alleviate myself of any worrisome feelings. ‘Cause if fly girl can self-declare as a bonafide belter of showtunes, then who am I to be anxious?

I figured that if my recollections of 10th grade Greek mythology studies were correct, the gods could contend with my anger, and my soul has always known what ways water—salt water especially—can tend to my grief.

So I went, telling myself I would try to write but that I mostly wanted to just be.

So that’s what I did.

I’m still processing everything that the retreat gave me. There was just as much happening within me as around me. But perhaps its greatest gift was meeting a bevy of women who blew me away with their candor, humility, brilliance, style, and verve. We came in a range of colors and creeds and I was surprised and grateful to be reminded how everybody got their somethin’. In these times, it’s so important to put ourselves in new situations every now and again to experience that.

Every day, in big and small ways, I was surrounded by Black, Latine, and white women who affirmed and taught me lessons about accountability and vulnerability as praxis; speaking truth to power; going your own way; and how I must always make some kind of way to honor the full expanse of my humanity. I remain convinced that the ways these women modeled and required care for themselves and each other, in the fullest and sometimes messiest embodiments of love, will free us all. My fervent wish for the matriarchy’s rise was and remains enlivened.

But what I’m most grateful for is that some part of me felt brave and carefree enough to push through all the what-I-should-and-should-not-dos to answer Lisa’s invitation. That some part of me remembered how much I love to travel and the youngest parts of me that still hold the widest wonder about this world and all the people and sights (and food!) in it. That some part of me could rediscover that I still know how to make and have fun.

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For further reading and further loving (aka resources and acknowledgements)

• Get to know a few of the amazing lovelies I met on this trip:

  • Leseliey—the ultimate gatherer, writer of LOVE notes in Substack-land, and one of my new favorite poets who stitched all our words into this sweet community poem to commemorate our time together.

  • Emily—mighta been born a Yankee but is forever a fellow Southerner with whom I was instantly able to live out my favorite pasttime—talkin’, belly laughin’, and tearin’ up about any and every ol’ thang. She co-wrote a salve for these times: Nonviolent — A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation, and Love, in collaboration with Rev. James Lawson Jr., who mentored MLK.

  • Yodit—she who got the vivrant thing Q-Tip told us about; the warmth and righteous, joyful kind of self-possession whose mere presence inevitably reminds you that you are your own best thing.

  • Laura—whose calm allure totally gathered my wild-eyed, deer-who-couldn’t-figure-out-how-to-tag-her-damn-bag self in the Athens airport. Lifter of heavy things with a steadfast writing practice that teaches me as much as it inspires.

  • And last but certainly not least, Lisa, the steward and author of Narrative Healing (a book and a practice!), whose gifts have helped me anchor in the wisdom of my breath and body and to trust that the words will always somehow come.

• If you’ve recently quit an awful job, I highly recommend reading this article, How to Recover After Leaving a Toxic Job: A Therapist’s Guide. I return to it frequently—mostly to re-check which stage I’m in … yep, still crashing, lol—but it captures the most honest and realest parts of my journey these past few months. In addition to defining the four stages of recovering from a yucky workplace, I appreciate how the author talks about things like allostatic load and the compensatory tax, two things I sensed but couldn’t readily name. Based on my experience, both readily align with the signs of weathering that Jodi-Ann Burey deftly covers in her book, Authentic, which I raved about in a previous post.

Three weeks ago, I quit my job. I was leading a team that proved government could design services with residents and staff instead of for them. A team that showed equity work requires intentionality, effort, and time. A team that earned trust by sharing power, not hoarding it.

This essay is for the people who’ve built something inside institutions designed to resist them—especially for the Black women and equity practitioners who carry these stories most often and tell them the least.

The ‘what had happened was’: a bureaucratic death by a thousand cuts

It didn’t happen all at once, this decision to quit. There was no dramatic firing or a budget cut that ended everything cleanly. It was smaller than that. More surgical. A perfectly bureaucratic death by a thousand cuts.

Ace of Base saw the signs, but it took me a little longer.

First, you step into a role for which you’ve been trained. On the Monday after the founding director has left, everyone looks to you. For at least two weeks prior, you’ve been receiving congratulations and “you’re gonna be so great” assurances. Everyone seems certain; the promotion must be imminent.

You are in the midst of caring for your aging parents, which requires frequent travel across states. You are exhausted, specifically because of this and in general, but you push through because everyone you know is exhausted. This is just what work is these days; what life is in the 2020s. You press on because this is America and we work here.

You’re a founding member of this team and you’re proud of that, so in that first team meeting on Tuesday morning when you’re at the helm, you tearfully promise the team you’ll do your best. You give them the speech you’d wanted to hear when you’d sat in similar seats uncertain about an unfolding transition. You want to be embarrassed about crying at work, but you really meant it. You are also in perimenopause, but let’s not digress.

You are a Black woman in your early 40s, an alleged prime; peak money earnin’ Mount Vernon years. So in those early interim days, you tell yourself, Girl, you better take this role, or otherwise, you’re gonna wind up training someone else to do it. Or worse, you’re gonna wind up reporting to someone who has no idea how to do what y’all do. You’ve been mentored by enough wise women—Black and otherwise—to know the dangers of being the kind of team player who willingly trains someone above her to do a job she’s already doing. You’ll make more money, sure, but that’s never been the highlight of public service for you.

In the beginning, Big Boss (also a Black woman) gushes about how great they think you are—so smart—but they also question if you really want the position. They do it in an overly familiar, girl-you-can-really-tell-me way. Despite your asking, they can’t articulate what’s driving this question. But they do get serious with you. They tell you that everyone knows you’re the right person for the role, but suddenly there’s a question about equity when it comes to internal promotions. Suddenly, we have due processes to tend to and appearances of which we need to be mindful. They’re new to their role, they remind you, and it’s important they show people what they’re about. So you are told your position may need to be posted internally and possibly externally to ensure we’re being fair to the department, other colleagues, and team values.

Your left eyebrow hints at it, but you say nothing of the white man who recently transferred into the department to fill a different vacancy you don’t recall seeing posted internally or externally. Instead, you agree—partly because you’ve spent the past three years co-leading a project about equitable practices, and partly because you ain’t never been scared of competition. (You are a Capricorn sun, Virgo moon, and Aries rising after all.)

A couple of weeks later, it’s decided with Maury-like factuality that you, in fact, are the director, and your promotion paperwork shouldn’t take long. A couple of days after that, Big Boss slides into the office they forced you to take (”because leaders have offices,” silly) to ask what your salary requirements are. You think this is an odd question, because municipal government has paybands and Big Boss had already verbally confirmed your promotion, but you’re prepared and give them a number you know fits within the budget.

More weeks go by. You are still waiting for an offer letter while very much doing the work the role requires. Your mentors’ wisdom starts whispering: you replay stories about being made to prove yourself while the thing you’ve already earned is withheld. Your Virgo stellium ahems you and points out that you’re (once again) doing the work your predecessor did—and actually more, because your team is in the midst of hiring while launching new projects for a new initiative you’ve also played a major role in. Turns out, you’re about to be leading a team bigger than the one your predecessor led. You silently activate Cedric the Entertainer’s “wish factor” for the next time salary comes up.

You notice, too, the uptick in meetings. Half of them are anticipated; the other half surprise you. People you don’t supervise start requesting 1:1s. They need advice, project and moral support, a reason to laugh, to be seen. The white man who recently joined the department is their boss now. A number of people will tell you that despite being in his role for months, he hasn’t asked them about their work or their skill sets. Their meeting requests get bumped or ignored. When they do meet, he makes small talk or complains about the department he absconded from. He takes no deep interest in them and makes no attempt to understand what they do. At first they’re worried. As the weeks go by, they become exasperated. Fearful. Almost all of them will take turns asking, jokingly and otherwise, if they can join your team.

Meanwhile, Big Boss has taken to darting their hands up as if you’re a cop holding them at gunpoint whenever you ask about your offer letter. “HR is working on it,” they say.

During one check-in they catch you off guard mid-update: “Hey! Would you like to be my chief of staff?” They think you’d be really great at it. You assure them you would be, but that you’re not interested. You flatly remind them that you’re already doing a new, bigger job, one you’re still waiting to be promoted into and paid for. They yes, yes, of course laugh it all off.

Then one day they waltz into your office with good news: your salary request has been approved. Your eyebrows squinch at the word “request.” They furrow deeper when Big Boss tries to say they “moved heaven and ea—” as if they’ve done you a great favor. All the Westerns you grew up watching with your parents have given you a mean Clint Eastwood. The nose-and-up part of your face stares at them as if to daringly ask: are they really trying to tell you they secured something that was already in the budget? But as your lips part, suddenly Big Boss has somewhere else to be. You’ll receive your offer letter within the next week, they say.

But you don’t. By the time you do, it’s been nearly four months of placating conversations and stonewalling. Your benefits of the doubt are overdrawn, so you pull your own levers. Within 24 hours, the head of HR sends you a very mindful, very demure email explaining that somehow there were errors that should never have occurred, which led to a processing delay, which they have personally rectified with haste. “Congratulations,” they say.

By the time you sign your offer letter and update your email signature and LinkedIn, you’ve found there are aspects of this new gig you really enjoy. Despite the rigamarole, you tell yourself this is where it’s at. It will be another year before the grief surfaces. For now, you’ve navigated testy waters with shapeshifting colleagues, halted timelines, work that had to be rescoped, and new hires that had to be coached.

You tell yourself this, too, is the work.

The system, the Man, and the grind: all will have you down bad

Sometimes you have check-ins with Big Boss when they haven’t triple-booked themselves. The meetings feel more like performances. You’re getting the requisite face time those leadership articles say are important, but Big Boss rarely acknowledges the agendas you prepare ahead of time, preferring instead to “just chat,” or gush about being in meetings with other, more senior leaders. You constantly remind yourself that they are new to their role, too. It shows in more ways than you feel comfortable counting.

Any attempts to show work in progress or request feedback are ignored. But you do get critiques about your team and the pace of your work. Because there’s nothing specific or constructive offered, this input strikes you as vague enough to pass for personal preferences. Big Boss wants fast transformation; the flashier and snazzier, the better. You wonder if you’re both working in the same place, and file it away. You remind yourself about giving grace and how everyone’s got a learning curve.

In the midst of all this, the structure itself starts to move beneath you.

You try to fulfill your so-called leadership duties, which consist of meetings that would also be the worst kind of emails. When asked, you give feedback that says as much, and you’re relieved and maybe even a bit bemused when you stop getting invited to them. By the time you realize they’ve been repurposed without you, you discover you’re also officially reporting to someone else: the same white man who had recently transferred to your department; the same white man whose new team wanted to join your team. Now he’s your New Boss. Your apparent lack of stature has earned you a place in a hierarchy of disparate disciplines under a man whose work no one can describe. All your coaching and mentoring are effectively neutralized—suddenly everyone is in the same boat in a tideless sea.

This is where you will begin to see more signs more clearly. Your absence from the meetings where decisions get made becomes the new normal. You’re still a leader on the org chart, and definitely still accountable for outcomes and in-office whereabouts, but the so-called strategy conversations happen without you.

The budget you’re supposed to weigh in on becomes information you’re no longer allowed to see. When one of your team members resigns, New Boss shrugs when he tells you the position won’t be backfilled. You’re not privy to any justifications.

You’ll start to ask yourself, “What is a title without power?” more frequently than you like.

You set up 1:1s with New Boss. Your observations and your gut tell you this will likely be a waste of time, but you decide to let logic run its course. New Boss does this thing where he waves at your agendas while asserting that you don’t really need to go over things; he’s quite familiar with your predecessor and the team’s work. He’ll assure you he’s not one to interfere; that he sees himself mostly as a champion and advocate, and that he prefers conversations where we can just chat. You hate this kind of small talk.

He spends the majority of your time doing what other team members complained to you about: recalling the messiness and hostility of his previous department. It’s not long before he starts to complain about Big Boss—how he doesn’t get or like how she operates. He wants to know your opinion and you share things that you have already said to everyone; you are candid and direct, but you also aren’t saying anything that isn’t already widely felt and known. In another meeting, they’ll ask you, in a between friends kind of way, how much longer do you think Big Boss will last. They seem certain it can’t possibly be for much longer. They once again mention how close they are to retirement; how they thought coming to this department was going to be an easier, less chaotic time.

As with Big Boss, your interludes with New Boss quickly become tedious, uncomfortable performances. It doesn’t take long until you decline setting up any more 1:1s because you’re running out of reasons to feel hopeful about your work, and the notion of spending any time talking to someone who regularly, openly admits to knowing only a little about “what you guys do” grates the one withering nerve you’ve got left. You know this goes against “managing up” best practices, but like Tina Turner in “Proud Mary,” you never do nothin’ nice and easy; you are hardwired to trod the road less traveled.

You decide instead to focus on taking care of your team and supporting their work. You field growing concerns from them about the department’s overall strategy and direction. Like your predecessor, you channel those concerns into reminders and prompts to focus on what the team and individuals can control. You are transparent about the shortfalls of the new leadership. You listen and you also commiserate because you’re human, because you too are wondering WTF is going on.

A few times New Boss and Big Boss come to you about assignments they want you and the team to take on. They don’t align with anything because there’s no strategy. In fact, none of the people who get paid more than you do are interested in things like providing direction, knowing what anyone’s skills are, or understanding what people actually do. They are just people who are closer to retirement than you and apparently there is more for them to lose.

You defer these mostly asinine requests for solid reasons—capacity, fit, capability, timing. New Boss reminds you that he never says no to requests, even when he knows he can’t or won’t do them. With an air of Shere Khan, he strongly encourages you to take a similar tack. He would have you believe that this is the only way you will ever get to do the kind of work you came to do in city government. And it’s not that you doubt someone who has nearly 30 years of experience weaving through the halls of power, because it’s clearly worked to some regard, but it’s very hard for you to hide your disgust that this is what his version of championing and advocating look like. You’re annoyed and troubled that this is how taxpayer dollars get spent; that despite being good at your job and caring about your team and some really interesting, compelling work, you are under a thumb such as this.

The Tower card: when life decides what work cannot

Somewhere in the midst of trying to lead this team, your dad dies. You are home with your parents when it happens. His head is in your hands when you realize he is gone, and “in the blink of an eye” takes on a new meaning. You are leveled so you take some extended time to reckon with the loss. You haven’t even begun to grieve him when your mom gets diagnosed with a third form of cancer. Although you’ve just returned to work, you leave for another break. It is there, in the tremulous teetering between life and death where you begin to see that all things must have an end.

You come back to find your team doing good work despite navigating challenging circumstances and competing priorities with project partners. You rebuff assertions from New Boss via Big Boss that the work takes too long and that it’s not compelling enough by sharing deliverables and feedback from partners who express glowing appreciation. You even start a monthly update email to him to track all the happenings; to make his reporting to Big Boss a little easier.

And then comes a season when the city is asked to choose sides. Your colleagues on the front lines are asking for what they need. City leadership is asking them to reconsider. You think about how your team was founded on the premise of centering the people most disenfranchised by government actions—people like frontline staff who deliver services every single day.

Leadership tells you what to do; which side you’re supposed to be on.

You are dismayed and deeply concerned. Despite everyone knowing for weeks that this event was happening, leadership communicates nothing to help you or your colleagues prepare. There’s no plan, no backup option, no consideration of the ethical weight of what’s being asked. Just the directive: report to the office.

When the moment arrives, it’s chaos. People are left to fend for themselves. Physically, they’re present, but emotionally they’re elsewhere. They worry about how they’ll get home; about what happens the next day and the days after that; about their colleagues. They’ll carry the angst and strain in their bodies for weeks after. Many of them are at odds with their sense of themselves.

No one above you accounted for the human cost of what they were demanding. No one planned for safety, dignity, or ethical reckoning. The directive came down and the expectation was obedience. The performance was for optics, allegiance.

You and your team refuse. You don’t do it loudly and you don’t make a scene. You make a decision quietly, together, after you ask each of them where they stand and listen without flinching. You’re all aligned, committed to embodying one of the team’s core values: solidarity. You lead them through the moment like you promised, but you also know this is a point of no return.

Privately, New Boss and other colleagues will tell you how deeply they admire your nerve and your leadership, respectively. People will talk about how your team always does the right thing. “Y’all be ten toes down,” they’ll say.

Others will express disappointment that you didn’t include them in your plans; that in the chaos, you failed to account for them too. You’ll think about the support you never receive and the weight of everyone’s automatic expectation of your care.

You are damned when you do and doubly damned when you don’t.

Publicly, you become the face of an undesirable resistance; a separatist; rogue. People who once regularly sought your counsel begin to keep their distance. And for the first time in your professional life, you are not a team player.

You decide that this is okay because what kind of team is this, anyway?

You keep tending to your team and the work. You still don’t receive any concrete feedback from your leaders and you have stopped asking, until one day, a year into your role, you get a meeting request out of nowhere from Big Boss to meet with New Boss to talk about “operational alignment” and “communication.” Oh, and HR will also be in attendance, too.

Bet.

This will be the meeting where you realize you’re already gone.

The meeting is an airing of Big Boss’s grievances—a few will be 50 Cent levels of petty, but most will be misdirected. You’ll leave the meeting realizing you’ve been embroiled in one big game of Telephone. In this version of the game, you’ll find that Big Boss’s greatest ill is that New Boss carries a phone, acts like he’s using it, but it actually doesn’t even have a signal. So the messages never reach you or her, but the static gets blamed on you, and you sit in a room being asked to fix a connection problem you didn’t create.

In this meeting, you’ll also discover that Big Boss has been keeping a ledger. Your team’s refusals sit at the top of it. You’ll be told, in the language of HR-friendly grievance, that these refusals are failures of “communication.” You’ll be accused of segregation. Conveniently, they will not acknowledge that the purpose and nature of your team’s work is different by design.

You will understand, in the language of what was actually happening, that this was about a Black woman in power demanding immediate, unquestioned loyalty from another Black woman who refused to perform the kind of loyalty that only serves one person instead of the people.

You walk out of that meeting and the math has finally cleared. The promise you’d made to yourself a little over a year ago—not to tarry too long in this role—tells you that it’s time.

Share Leading Through It

The lie I had to stop believing.

I thought if I just stayed open and kept showing up with honesty and transparency, hell, authentically, that it’d be enough. I thought competence—from anyone, in any form—would eventually be undeniable. I thought the results of the work would speak for itself as had been the case in the years before.

But I was wrong.

None of this was ever about my competence, effort, or gifts. It was about control. It was about operating in an institution that had decided to value obedience more than transformation; allegiance over integrity; power over instead of power with.

“The institution cannot love you.” – Tressie McMillan Cottom

I never wanted the acceptance or favor of the institution; that was not my purpose for entering into it. I committed to being a public servant because, from the start, our mandate was clear. It was built on an ethical design foundation: that equitable processes are required for equitable outcomes; that residents and staff with lived expertise deserve to shape and design the things that impact them; that government services—and government itself—must be redesigned to stop reproducing harm. This was not abstract. It was embedded in project scopes, partnerships, hiring decisions, and our entire body of work.

But to witness so much incompetence, undermining, and self-preservation … to be so disrespected has been painful. To experience this kind of mistreatment from another Black woman in a position of considerable power, and to be stifled and dismissed by a white man whose connections overshadowed his expertise has been (and is) infuriating.

The lie I had to stop believing was that staying was an act of commitment to the mission of the thing I’d helped build; to the people I’d built alongside, and ultimately, to the people we sought to serve. The truth is that staying had become an act of complicity with my own diminishment.

Before I quit, I took leave. I needed space to accept that some systems aren’t designed to be transformed from within; that most are designed to grind down the people who try. I needed time to reflect on the conditions that allowed me and my team’s work to seed and flourish. I needed time to make sense of all the betrayals—the ones that happened to me and the ones I inflicted on myself. I needed time to feel, fully, that sometimes the most radical thing you can do is refuse.

What I’m taking with me.

Leaving is requiring me to grieve something that still exists. The team is still there. The projects are still happening. The residents we serve and the staff we support still need what we were building. I’m sitting with how walking away feels like abandonment—of the work, of the people, of the proof of concept I created with people I genuinely care about, who also cared about me and our work.

But I had to ask myself: What am I actually protecting by staying?

Not the mission. That’s already being dismantled by people who were never truly invested in it.

Not the team. Some of them were watching me tolerate conditions I’d never accept for them. How could I be the kind of person who couldn’t teach them about their own worth?

Not my integrity. Sometimes we encounter leaders who value the performance over the practice. I’m not the kind of person who wants to perform leadership theater while being systematically undermined. That’s not integrity. That’s survival, and there’s so much we’re already trying to survive in the year of my-god-today 2026.

So I packed up what was mine.

I’m carrying the proof that the way we worked works. We founded and grew a team doing equity-centered participatory design in municipal government. We built trust with residents and staff who had every reason not to trust government processes. We demonstrated that participatory design isn’t a workshop technique—it’s a redistribution of power. We showed that plain language, trauma-informed approaches, and centering lived expertise produce better outcomes than top-down bureaucratic assumptions ever could. That proof exists. It’s documented. It’s replicable. It travels.

I’m holding the knowledge of what I’m capable of when I’m actually supported. My founding teammates and I built this team in an institution designed to ensure failure, which means I can build something even better under conditions designed for success.

And I have hard-earned (and hard headed) clarity about what I won’t tolerate anymore. I won’t perform competence for people determined to question it because they’re intimidated by it. I won’t shrink myself to make mediocre leadership comfortable. I won’t sacrifice my wellbeing to prop up systems that were never designed to value the work I do.

If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself, take this in.

Maybe you’re also in a place that’s slowly dismantling the work you care about. Maybe your role is also being eroded while some might suggest it’s your fault. Maybe you’re also wondering if you’re being too sensitive, too rigid, too unwilling to adapt.

Well, let me tell you what I needed to hear: You’re not imagining it. The patterns you’re seeing are real. Your competence is not the question, but the system’s commitment to your work is.

Also, staying is not always as safe as you think it is. Sometimes leaving is the most courageous thing you can do.

You don’t owe your diminishment to anyone. Not to the mission, not to the team, not to the people you serve. You cannot pour from an empty cup, and you cannot lead from a position you’re being structurally prevented from occupying.

If you’re in the swirl, ask yourself: What am I tolerating that’s incompatible with who I need to be? What would it mean to choose myself?

You deserve conditions where your work can thrive, and if you’re not in them, you’re allowed to go find them.

I don’t fully know what’s next. But I know it won’t involve shrinking myself to fit someone else’s limited vision of what this work could be. I know it won’t involve performing for people who were never going to see me clearly. I know it will involve building, again, with people who understand and desire what we say we want to be about.

And that feels like the beginning of something, not the end.

For further reading and further loving (aka resources and acknowledgements)

• The title of this piece is a direct quote from Tressie McMillan Cottom, for whom I have endless love, admiration, and respect. I’m so grateful and fortunate to be a Black woman who benefits, learns, and grows from the wisdom, fortitude, and care so many other Black women like Tressie have given us.
  

  

  Big gratitude to Vivianne Castillo whose podcast, Choose Courage Inc, features a number of episodes that’ll help you unpack “the cost of staying.” For me, Vivianne is a living embodiment of James Baldwin’s quote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” I highly recommend the podcast in general, but episodes 36 (shout-out to Nyam Adodoadji too!), 42, 55, and 56 definitely pollinated this post.

• Ginny Clarke is another brilliant Black woman you need to watch and/or listen to (if you already don’t). She delivers an absolute set of truths in a 20-minute Youtube clinic about “The Corporate Playbook on Office Politics.” Go ‘head and set aside 30-45 minutes so you can answer her questions about what kind of environment you’ve been in, so you can gather yourself accordingly. My takeaway? Chile, the way she cold clocked the toxicity of my work environment washed me clean! You should definitely watch the video in full, but if you already know you’re in a toxic dump, cue the video up at the 17:10 mark and set yourself free!

• In every lifetime, I would choose to be a Black woman. Our wisdom, divinity, and grace under all the pressures of this weird ass world reveal an expansiveness that continually astounds, affirms, and teaches me. What a blessing, a gift, and a wondrous responsibility to hold.

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Yo. Authentic arrived at the right moment, which is to say, it arrived when I was already in the middle of living its central argument.

Sidenote: One of the sub-stories of my life is being in the thick of something that feels so vast and new that I have trouble naming or explaining it. For instance, I spent years doing site visits, desk-side interviews, and just following people around before someone excused the fuck out of me by sharing that these things were distinct activities, disciplines, and jobs (!) that went by the names of ethnography and qualitative research. The euphoria I always feel at that moment of realization is my version of knowing I’m not alone in this world. It’s always a genuine delight.

Anyway, Jodi-Ann Burey’s book has gifted me with my most recent revelatory experience. In Authentic, she lays out a rigorous and deeply personal interrogation of a word that gets weaponized in our 9-5s: authentic. Bring your full self to work, they say. But Jodi-Ann, with precision and the kind of verve I like, is basically like: Chile, for what? For who?

With some levity and a whole lot of discernment, she had me really excavating who benefits from so-called authenticity; the stealing of our consent, our time, and our individual and collective brilliance. And she really had me reckoning with what operating in this myth of authenticity does to our bodies.

There’s the myth of authenticity. From the jump, I love how she just says what too many of us just know: that authenticity within these institutions is not an invitation but a trap. (And you know this already because you rolled your eyes five times before you even got to this paragraph because that’s how irksome the word has become.) The language coaxing us to “show up as our full selves” asks marginalized people, and Black women in particular, to pour themselves into structures designed against our survival. I appreciate how she calls this out not as cynicism but as a public health argument: racism, overwork, and institutional hostility are social determinants of health. Our bodies are clocking every code-switch, silenced question, and time we’ve made our pain palatable, small, or invisible so someone else could stay comfortable, so the institution could carry on.

There are frameworks. One thing a woman gone do—and a Black woman gone excel at—is giving thee and thine a framework. What makes Authentic invaluable to me is that Burey didn’t stop at diagnosis. She introduces frameworks that immediately mapped on to grievances and patterns I’d been taking note of, but me and my notes were like this:

She covers concepts like weathering1, symbolic structures2, organizational sabotage, the pet-to-threat phenomenon3; the hypocrisy of the nonprofit industrial complex, employee resource groups (ERGs), and organizations that use their mission to shield the deeply problematic, structural harms they inflict on humans they pretend to center. She also deepened my knowledge of crip time while introducing me to a li’l sumpin’ new in the term, “access thievery.”

There’s her pen game. Her writing is so, so deft. The way she explains concepts and draws connections is sharp, clear, and honest, and the storytelling she weaves in—both from her own reflections and other people’s—grounds you in the real heartache, fury, and confusion so many of us have felt.

Then there’s the part that put me on Bernie Mac pause. But chile, when I read about quiet termination (aka “quiet cutting,” or the slow, deliberate siloing of a worker who dared to push back), I wasn’t reading theory or a random person’s experience. I was reading a case file. And that is what great writing does: it gives you language for something you already survived.

Throughout, there’s the beauty of the simplest realizations. About how institutions do not need to know as much about us as they claim they do—especially since they don’t love us like we’ve been conditioned to believe they will. The demand for disclosure of our identities, our pain, and our difference is basically surveillance dressed up as inclusion. Again, this wasn’t new to me; I’d been smelling some smoke, but Jodi-Ann’s words thankfully came through and said, “Babe, the fire is here.”

There are ways to care for yourself. Jodi-Ann’s answer to the institutional foolishness? Good trouble, aka representational disobedience: the practice of choosing when, whether, and how to show up on your own terms. I love how this is less about being a tactical retreat and solely about being an assertion of personhood. And the way she reframed resistance for me as something not for its own sake, but to consider the practice of refusal as a form of wholeness?

:::insert ancestral Black lady rocks and hums here:::

There’s community and shared practice. The passages I keep returning to aren’t the ones that surprised me. They’re the ones that feel like company; like I’ve got new girlfriends and we’re in a group chat pages long. Stuff like how we be outchea screenshottin’ emails, bcc-ing employment lawyers, and always keeping receipts resonated deeply. Those acts serve as the antidote to claims of paranoia and overreactions.

I’m grateful for the recognition throughout that community, not the institution, is what actually holds us. There are so many examples of what that looks like in action.

There are some perfectly placed, mighty, and uplifting quotes. All these messages and guideposts from our luminaries are woven throughout. Toni reminding us that sometimes we don’t survive whole, “[b]ut the grandeur in life is about that attempt.” Or how Hannah Nikole Jones talks about not being pressed to enter a door that was never designed to fully open for her when she realized: “I do not want to win someone else’s game.”

It’s clear this book was written by someone who has both studied and survived situations many, many of us are studying and surviving. And that feels comforting right now and less daunting on my own. Authentic is a text on solidarity. It’s a guide that meets us in this disillusioned moment and illuminates how we can effectively divest from the systems and institutions that are not working for us and design ones that do.

And as someone who found this book mid-surviving, mid-grief, mid-becoming, it’s evidence and affirmation. A reason to keep finding, and sometimes leading (😉), my way through.

Some resources from this read and some acknowledgements

• Buy the book (and one for a friend who needs it, if you can) or request and check it out from your local library/Libby.

• Learn more about the author on her website, or in this great interview, or in this article where I first learned about the book.

• 💎 Read the footnotes for more gems.

  Leading Through It is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

We’d just moved to “the country” (aka Dacusville, South Carolina) and he did it partly out of defiance (the man loved to challenge “the law”), partly out of whimsy, and partly out of necessity. That last part crystallized for me the summer afternoon he mowed over a yellow jackets nest and I watched him drop. The whir of panic. Someone (I’m guessing my mom and sister?) speeding him to the ER in a blur of urgency that somehow also looked like grace under pressure. From that day forward, he wanted to make sure I also knew how to get us out of there if something went wrong again.

But it was also the beginning of a beautiful, unhurried practice between us. My dad was the first to recognize my love of driving—the way I shadowed him from the passengers seat (yo, it was the 80s); hummed along with the RPMs; the way I lit up when he’d put me on his lap and let me drive down the street. He indulged me in a way that adult-me now recognizes as an intoxicating blend of recklessness and verve. But little-me internalized it as confidence and affirmation. He believed in my capabilities and nourished my enthusiasm.

He taught me that using all my mirrors and lifting my foot from the gas could help me anticipate other drivers’ behaviors and mistakes early enough to avoid accidents. That if I was really paying attention I could often move in ways where I wouldn’t even need to press the brakes at all.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately.

I came across the Therapy for Black Girls article Brake Before Breakdown: Interrupting the Cycle of Burnout during a slow morning recently, sipping tea from my favorite mug with nowhere to be. I read it the way you read something when you’ve been waiting for the words without knowing you were waiting.

The piece names what most of us already know in our bodies before we’re willing to name it with our mouths: burnout rarely announces itself. It accumulates. It’s the mornings your body feels heavier than it has any right to be. It’s the resentment that creeps into work you used to love. It’s the way your mind starts to quietly exit meetings while your body stays in the chair.

I knew (and know) all of this. I had felt (and still feel) all of this. The body heaviness. The emotional numbness dressed up as professionalism. The mental dissociating during calls and check-ins and all-hands. The resentment that I had tried, for so long, to chase away with lists and systems and forward motion.

The article identifies what so many of us miss: we don’t brake early because we’ve been taught by generations before us, by institutions that reward our overextension, by survival patterns forged in childhoods that didn’t offer us the option to slow down. Too many of us internalize that slowing down is a luxury we haven’t yet earned; that rest is what you get when everything else is handled, or Lord help, when we get to Heaven.

For me, “everything else” was always full. It always stayed full. I’m a reliable one. A fixer. Someone with umpteen-plus years of institutional knowledge who absorbed the extra work, the extra worrying, the extra care—not because I was asked to, but because that’s what you do when you’re the one who can and the stakes are people. The way the article puts it: “our plates stay full because we’re the reliable ones.” This wasn’t just a work pattern. This was a survival adaptation coded in me long before I ever set foot in city government. Growing up in financial precarity, you learn early that responsibility isn’t assigned, it’s inherited. You don’t wait to be asked. You just do.

And for years, I called that strength.

Remembering to use my mirrors.

When I think about driving adventures with my dad, I think about being attentive, prepared, and proactive. He didn’t use the phrase “defensive driving” but he talked a lot about not waiting to let other folk get you into something you couldn’t get out of. (I realize now that a lot of what he was saying had many brilliant layers.) He was big on the fact that driving wasn’t reactive but anticipatory. You don’t wait until you need to slam the brakes. You’re always scanning, always reading the conditions around you, giving yourself enough room to respond before a collision becomes unavoidable.

While I became very good at doing this on the road, I did not do this well at work.

For a long time, I worked like a fast and trusting driver. Even when I could feel the conditions shifting, when the leadership around me curdled, when trust and camaraderie dissolved under the weight of inept, laissez-faire management. Even when the quiet cutting began, I kept my foot on the gas. I told myself I was resilient; that pushing through was just part of the job.

‘Cause I mean, pushing through does have its use cases. Bingeing past my bedtime on a show I’m genuinely obsessed with? Yeah, I’m still watching, I’mma push through. Gritting out those last reps on an upper body workout when my arms are screaming? Absolutely.

But what about when the work environment has demonstrated, repeatedly, that your humanity is negotiable? It’s taken some time and a whole lotta feels to realize that’s not a situation designed for endurance. That’s a situation that calls for a different kind of driving altogether.

As the Therapy for Black Girls piece names it, slowing down, or braking, is an act of resistance. To the quiet diminishments. To the years of conditioning that told me to wait until something snapped before I gave myself permission to stop.

What slowing down is teaching me.

I’m a 2/4 Generator. For those unfamiliar with Human Design: my profile indicates a bajillion fascinating things, but one shining beam among those is that I’m literally meant to luxuriate in life. Not merely in a materialistic sense, but to follow my energy and let it lead, rather than forcing myself through a predetermined schedule of productivity. I knew this intellectually but I’ve never fully inhabited it until now. (The 40s continue to provide the realest, rawest, most revelatory of unveilings.)

But I’m learning that being my ancestors’ wildest dreams, as the kids say, isn’t just about what I achieve. It’s about what I get to experience. And I’m learning what that feels like in my body—slowly, gratefully, and with some wonder at how novel it all feels.

For me, these wild dreams look like slow mornings where I follow my energy to gentle hip-opening movements, lying in bed daydreaming while music and affirmations wash over me, and writing for as long as my hand will manage. It looks like steeping my morning tea with actual intention and sipping it slowly from my favorite mug instead of splashing it into my travel mug. It looks like reading until I’ve completely lost track of time and then not rushing to make up for it.

Some days it looks like not setting an alarm and waking up at 10am and deciding by 12:45 that I need a nap. It looks like taking that nap and discovering that the double sleep did my body very real good. It looks like combing through the hundreds of recipes I’ve saved on Instagram and TikTok and actually cooking them, riffing and tasting my way to satisfaction like my grannies used to do. It looks like lighting candles all around my room at sunset and reading by candlelight. Getting acquainted with my new yoga bolster. Lying in supported shapes and letting the yin reach places I had been clenching for months.

It looks like letting myself weep inconsolably when I reach for my phone to call my dad about something and then remember I can’t anymore.

That’s rest too. The Therapy for Black Girls piece reminds us that rest is multi-dimensional: physical, emotional, mental, social, sensory, creative. I had been running a deficit in almost all of them for so long that I had started to mistake deficit for baseline. The depletion had become so familiar it felt like just me.

But it wasn’t. It was overuse. Burnout.

Braking as practice, not event.

The piece closes with a permission slip: “Brake now. Brake early. Brake often.”

I’ve been grateful to be braking more lately. I’m already scheming and planning for how I can continue to do it, not as a crisis response, but as a practice. As infrastructure 🤓. As the thing I build into the rhythm of whatever comes next.

My dad taught me that a skilled driver isn’t someone who never encounters danger. It’s someone who stays alert enough to make small adjustments early, consistently, so that the big emergency rarely has to come.

I’m learning to apply that same care to myself.

Resources & Acknowledgements

• Therapy for Black Girls — therapyforblackgirls.com is a beloved space for Black women and girls dedicated to mental wellness. It’s where I found the article that inspired this piece: Brake Before Breakdown: Interrupting the Cycle of Burnout by Kamron (Taylor) Melton.
  

• Tricia Hersey / The Nap Ministry — Get yourself The Nap Ministry’s Rest Deck. The Nap Bishop’s work has been foundational to my understanding of rest as a political and spiritual act, not a productivity strategy. thenapministry.com
  

• Jazreena Harlow gave me the Human Design reading of my life! It’s legit been a couple of years now, and I am still regularly pouring over the pluriverse of insight and wisdom she shared in a way that was so loving and thorough and thoughtful that my Virgo stellium is still buzzin’. She helped me understand my 2/4 Generator profile and why luxuriating in life isn’t a detour from my purpose—it actually is the purpose. jazreenaharlow.com
  

  Thanks for reading! Leading Through It is a newsletter about what it takes to lead and be led—work, circuitous careers, and the care we give and require. If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear what it stirred. And if you know someone who needs permission to brake, please share it with them.

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Once upon a time, I had a blog just for haiku senryu that chronicled how much I disliked my job. I’ve written them as homework assignments, in homemade greeting cards (link to allo lovely squarespace page), and my favorite application: the Outlook out of office message.

I can’t remember at which job or when I started writing them in out of office messages, but I know it was born out of boredom and a desire to have some kind of container to capture the random bursts of creativity that would fly through my brain.

I drafted them, always curious to see who’d notice, or better, who would reply. Over time, they’ve become little Boo Radley nuggets. In an attempt to stay close-ish to the original intent to be about nature (at least that’s how my 7th grade English teacher, Mrs. Sorrenti explained it), they’re usually inspired by the seasons or time of year. They are almost always a reflection of what I’m observing, sensing, or feeling. And sometimes, they’ve been quite comical.

Of late, I’ve noticed that they’re centered around care. Little IYKYK reminders for regular correspondents to pause or center themselves in some way. They feel like tiny spells I’m casting out—hoping that it gives the reader a moment to remember they don’t have to do or be everything in a day.

I love when people reply and express their delight or gratitude. It tickles me when people wait until I’m back to tell me they bought some lotion because they didn’t want to be ashy anymore.

I appreciate how this tiny practice has helped the people who notice gather a better sense of who I am and how I show up. I see the ways it shifts how people show up with and for me, too. It’s been especially helpful for people I don’t work with consistently. Now our intermittent greetings carry more warmth and ease.

I’m curious: do you have any small, just-for-you practices you do at work? What are they?

Below is a smattering of out-of-office senryu I’ve sent over the years.

A Thanksgiving reminder | November 24 - December 2, 2024

Elasticity
is required at this time
for bellies and work.

Because I listened to Leonard Cohen and Gwendolyn Brooks’s words live in my head rent-free | November 15-16, 2024

Here’s a double OOO haiku just for you:

1. Stay soft, stay open.
   Remember to search for cracks
   and shine your light through.

2. Love on your people.
   Tend to their care. Nourish them.
   Be each other’s bond.

Send a friend some cheer today. They just might need it.

Wellness check | September 4-6, 2024

Hey there!

Of course I have an OOO haiku for you :)

Adulting check-in:
Schedule your health appointments.
There’s only one you.

In the meantime, relish the sweet, cool crispness in the air,

Sweet baby James always inspires | August 2024

An OOO haiku for you:

In James Taylor’s mind
he went to Carolina,
but I’m there for real.

I’ll respond to your email when I’m back in the saddle on Tuesday. Until then, where are you traveling in your mind?

Enjoy the daydream,

Jury duty 👩🏾‍⚖️ | June 21, 2024

When the gavel calls
One must report for duty
To judge as one’s peer.

I’m out of the office, but still serving the residents of Philadelphia as Juror #😬. Presuming I don’t get selected, I’ll reply to your email when I return to the office on Monday, June 24th.

In the meantime, please stay hydrated, wear your sunscreen and reapply as needed, and continue to be the cool person you already are.

In (seemingly perpetual) service,

Time won’t give me time | May 20 - 31, 2024

Hello! For you, I have an OOO haiku:

The time is flying
quickly. Don’t get dragged, take pause.
Claim some space for you.

Be easy,

Use your sick time | Aug 7, 2023

Sometimes you feel bad.
So why not give yourself rest?!
Don’t just “power through.”

I’m not feeling my best today, so I’ll be back to try again–and respond to this message–tomorrow.

Take good care in the meantime,

Instead of new year resolutions… | Jan 2-16, 2022

Happy New Year, friend!

Well whaddya know? Another year brings another haiku for you. This one comes with a question I hope you’ll answer for yourself. May it be the guiding light you need throughout this year.

What’s your word this year?
May it uplift, remind, and
delight your spirit.

I’m out of the office until Tuesday, January 17 because one of my 2023 words is REST. I’ll respond to this lovely message when I return to the office.

Until then, I hope you’re getting the respite and restoration you deserve.

Mixed feelings about Thanksgiving | Nov 22-28, 2022

I’m grateful, yet I wonder … in double haiku:

How do we heal this
fractured memory of folks
and land we have harmed?

What is gratitude?
If not a chance to reflect
on what we might change?

Giving thanks for you and this email (yes, it’s finding me well and away, lol). I’ll be out of office until Tuesday, 11/29. I’ll respond to your email at that time. In the meantime, may the holiday break give you rest to restore and replenish you. Love on your people and let yourself be loved on, too.

Peace and light,

Because you knew I was gonna sneak some astrology in here somewhere | Sept 9, 2022

Hey, hey!

I’m out of the office today, but here’s a haiku for the weekend!

🌚 A full moon rises
bringing energy along.
Take your time and breathe. 🖖

Be easy,

Get your annual check-ups | Sept 7, 2022

Hello there.

I’m out of the office. Here’s a haiku to get you through.

🩺 Check up to check in
with your body and your doc.
Because health is wealth. 📿

Take care of yourself,

Danita

Diggin’ through my “rest is resistance” bag | Sept 2-5, 2022

Allo!

I’m out of the office, but, as usual, I’ve left you a haiku.

✨ What if we took rest
As seriously as we
Take money and work? ✨

May rest find you and nourish you all weekend long,

A provocation of care | August 15, 2022

Hey there!

I’m out of the office today. We shall celebrate this with a haiku just for you :)

🌱 what’s it mean, to care
for each other, for ourselves?
Take the time you need. ✨

Heed the ‘ku. In the meantime, get into some good fun and/or good trouble.

The choice is yours,

Rest and also dance | DECEMBER 2021

🎊 Happy New Year to you! And for you, a haiku: 🎊

To new beginnings
in tired times. Take your time.
Rest. Play. Eat. Explore.
😴 🤸🏾‍♀️ 🍽 🧭

Cheers to a new year, dear emailer! I’m off and out of the office, doing the very things the haiku has instructed.

Remember to treat yourself—whatever that means to you, however you see fit. Do it often. We’re in challenging times and you’re the best you that ever you’d, so treat yourself in ways that replenish and uplift.

Until I reply somewhere on or abouts January 12, I hope you are keeping well.

Take a dance break today. Tina, Whitney, Chaka, and Aretha do not disappoint.

Truly evergreen holiday content here | No date

Hello you, here’s a holiday-inspired haiku:

A wise woman asked,
“Where are my backup singers?”
But no one answered.

I’m taking a few days off—not to find Ms. Patti’s backup singers (although that’d be a worthy quest).

(Here’s some context on a true Philadelphia legend:

At any rate, I’ll respond to your email on Monday when I return. In the meantime, I wish you a safe, healthy, joyful, and restful holiday season.

May the coming days be merry and bright for you and the ones you love,

Training day

Hello you, here’s a training-inspired haiku:

🛠Recalibrating
the mind to learn something new.
Good for my heart, too.
🍃

I’m attending a day-long mental health first aid training today. My email responses will be delayed a bit, but I’ll get back to you soon.

In the meantime, tell me something good that’s happening in your life.

Thanksgiving | NOVEMBER 2021

Hello you, here’s a holiday-inspired haiku:

🍽 Tradition simmers
in pots, handed down with love,
fueling us onward.
✨

I’m giving thanks for another year of loving my family, chosen and blood. I’m giving thanks for this email, too. It will eventually find me as well as I can be on Tuesday.

In the meantime, wishing you pants that stretch, food to savor, and naps that nourish,

Fall back | Autumn 2021

Dear you, here’s a haiku:

Happy Autumn, friend.
May this “fall back” season grant
you respite and rest.

In the meantime, wishing you pockets of quiet, reflective joy and some delicious snacks,

Danita

“Red line.”

At one time, those were two of the most dreaded words to hear as a volleyball player at Pickens Senior High in the 1990s. They meant that you were about to have to run. Hard. And for what would always feel like an impossible length of time.

Those words also meant that something had gone wrong; that, as players, we’d failed to execute or listen to the instructions we’d been given. Instructions that were intended to make us the best at our respective positions, the best team. The kind of team that looked like the ones that lined the rafters of the gym we lived in everyday from August until November.

Champions.

With a flick of her hair and a crossing of the arms, Coach Peggy Anthony would turn to watch us assemble at that line. Her lipstick: impeccable. Her gaze: discerning and sharp. We knew the rules. Whether it was a whistle or her saying “go,” we were to sprint to the first 10-foot or “spike” line, bend down, and touch it with our hands before sprinting back to the starting line and bending and touching that one, too. Then onward to the line under the net that divided the court and back again. Then under the net to the other 10-foot line and back. Then all the way to the opposite end of the court and back. You just kept sprinting until you heard that double whistle that released you. A mercy.

Jogging could attract a consternation that brought the words “fire and brimstone” to life. Talking or muttering under one’s breath could add the kind of time that caused you to send prayers to your lungs. Not touching the line would result in a verbal warning or worse, an announcement that now there would be more running because someone was slacking.

Coach didn’t want your best, she expected it. Every day. In practice, individual games, and whole matches. Your best sounded like good communication—cheering for your teammates and calling the ball before you touched it. Your best looked like good footwork, form, and follow through. It tasted like sweat, Gatorade, and victory. But above all, what seemed to matter to her the most was when your best felt like heart: all-out effort, a relentlessness, and a giving of oneself to a greater, collective good.

When I was younger, winning seemed like the only good that mattered. Invitationals, divisionals, regionals, state. I couldn’t have told you then what I was learning beyond “bump, set, spike” and playing defense (I’m a mighty 5’4”, lol). But, thankfully, nearly thirty years later, I understand what we were running and playing for. The conditioning was foundational.

Somewhere between the gym and now, I’ve learned that the conditioning wasn’t punishment; it was preparation for a life that would require stamina. The muscles Coach built in me weren’t just physical. She helped condition me for a life that would demand my whole self.

The insistence on calling the ball before touching it became the foundation for speaking up clearly in rooms where my voice mattered. The expectation that we’d cheer for our teammates even when exhausted taught me that solidarity requires showing up especially when it’s hard. The effort you put in will always turn up and out in ways you cannot possibly imagine when you’re seventeen and just trying to make it through another set of red line sprints.

As someone who now leads a team in my own right, I find myself channeling Coach Anthony in ways both subtle and profound: when I’m cultivating conditions for people to do their best work, when I’m holding a standard that feels impossibly high because I know what a team is capable of, when I’m insisting on both rigor and care—that’s her legacy working through me.

I think about those red line sprints differently now. Yes, they were hard. Yes, we dreaded them. But what Coach was actually teaching us was that accountability and high expectations are acts of love. She never asked us to be perfect; she asked us to be present, committed, and willing to push past what we thought were our limits. She taught us that excellence isn’t about never failing; it’s about what you do when you fall short. You line up. You run. You try again.

The impeccable lipstick, the crossed arms, and that discerning gaze weren’t about intimidation. They were about someone showing up fully, demanding that we do the same, and refusing to accept anything less than our whole selves. In a world that often asks people, especially young women, to make themselves smaller, Coach Anthony taught us to take up space, to be loud, to be fierce, to be proud.

I carry her with me in the work I do now, leading teams through complex challenges in public service. When I advocate for accountability in systems that resist it, when I refuse to go along to get along, and when I choose character over comfort, I’m honoring the heart she cultivated in me. The same heart that made us better teammates makes me a better leader, daughter, sister, friend, neighbor, mentor, and community member.

Coach Peggy Anthony didn’t just teach us how to play volleyball. She taught us how to show up for ourselves and each other. She taught us that pride isn’t arrogance. It’s the self-respect that comes from knowing you gave everything you had. She taught us that caring enough to demand someone’s best is one of the most generous things you can do.

Those championship banners in the rafters represent wins that are well recorded in history. But Coach’s real legacy is in the thousands of moments she chose to see potential in hundreds of us and refused to let us settle for less. It’s in every time one of her former players shows up with heart, communicates clearly, follows through, and gives ourselves to something greater.

Thank you, Coach, for the red lines. For the standards. For believing that we were capable of more than we knew. For teaching me that rigor and care aren’t opposites—they’re partners. And for showing me what it looks like to lead with both lipstick and grit.

Listening to Rachael Dietkus (yes, I’m still processing that podcast) talk about “small acts of resistance” (e.g., no meetings before 10am, discernment about urgency, supervision as a professional strength), I felt a jolt of recognition. Not because her ideas were new, but because of how she spoke about her work in a way that made it all visible.

Many of us—and by us, I mean womxn folk—have been doing this work instinctively for eons.

Not as policy. Not as strategy. But as survival … and care.

Invisible care is the work beneath the work. It’s the constant sensing, anticipating, translating, buffering, and holding that allows everything else to function. It’s labor. And too often for my taste, invisible work gets couched under the kinds of skills that have been branded as “soft skills.”

😒

I’ve been keeping a list. In no particular order, invisible work looks like:

• Practicing emotional intelligence

• Knowing what emotional intelligence is

• Reading a room and adjusting facilitation in real time so people can stay engaged

• Noticing who hasn’t spoken and offering them a way in

• Slowing things down to allow people time to catch up and absorb information

• Knowing people process things differently and accounting for and anticipating all those needs

• Carrying the emotional weight of uncertainty so others can stay focused

• Creating psychological agency and safety without being asked, credited, or resourced

• Naming the thing (i.e., the elephant in the room)

• Giving feedback (outside of scheduled performance review processes)

• Processing feedback and making the necessary adjustments to be better

• Active listening (or listening to over/under/inner-stand versus respond)

• Managing conflict head-on

• Evaluating power dynamics and office politics

• Being intentional, proactive, and transparent about communication (stealth status to those of us practicing nonviolent communication)

• Team building (especially things like acknowledging and coordinating activities to honor things like birthdays, work anniversaries, retreats, and other personal achievements)

• Translating and facilitating across functions, organizations, and hierarchies (aka “You’re a math person, so you can talk to the Finance people.” Or, “You know how to speak tech so we’ll let you work with IT to determine how the website should look.”)

• Code-switching

• What else? (Lemme know in the comments and I’ll update this list + credit you if you’d like.)

This labor rarely appears in job descriptions. It doesn’t map neatly to deliverables.

You’ll know you’re doing it when people will urgently call on you to “do that thing you do.” In annual reviews, you’ll hear about all the ways you’re “the glue,” the wind beneath everyone else’s wings; you’ll learn how those gifts that make you you are so unique that they’re invaluable and can’t be quantified (and thus also, conveniently, can’t be compensated).

Mmmhm.

Invisible labor is quiet and competent. It’s Kate Bush-y.

It’s also easy to miss. Or worse, it’s assumed as effortless.

Here’s a truth many of us learn too late (after the effects of burnout have singed our cortisol and sleep patterns): the better you are at invisible work, the more likely it is you’ll be taken for granted.

I’ve seen care enable extraordinary outcomes: rallying people in emergencies to deliver impromptu support, navigating fragile partnerships through temper flares and fissures, keeping teams intact during organizational transitions and restructurings, mentoring colleagues who have ambivalent, negligent bosses.

But oh, the cost of this invisible, vital care.

I’ve seen and felt the cost of carrying that kind of care alone.

I’ve learned the hard way (I really took the latter part of Tina’s “Proud Mary” instructions to heart) that burnout doesn’t usually come from too much work. It comes from unseen work.

When care remains invisible, it becomes extractive. Our current systems and our institutions assume this care will keep showing up: free, limitless, and replenishing itself.

It doesn’t.

Making care visible isn’t about asking for praise. It’s about telling the truth: that this kind of labor is real, skilled, and finite.

I wanna talk about patterns of extraction, or why invisible care work falls where it does (and what happens when it breaks).

Zooming out a little bit, we can see that care work, while often invisible, it isn’t random. It follows patterns.

It’s disproportionately carried by:

• Women/womxn

• People in caregiving roles (like healthcare or direct care; education and child development; social services; domestic workers; librarians; public defenders; emergency and crisis response operators; flight attendants; customer service reps; hairstylists and barbers)

• Facilitators, good managers1, and organizational “glue people” (like your co-workers who always have stashes of napkins, ibuprofen, chocolate, hot sauce in their bags, safety pins, and birthdays and dietary preferences committed to memory or a color-coded spreadsheet)

• Those with less formal power but high relational responsibility (like your executive assistants and admin staff, or the person who’s been there for 10-20-30 years who knows all the tea)

These are often the same people praised for being “supportive,” “calming,” or “good with people.” A common thing we all share is that our strategic impact goes unnamed.

Organizations frequently benefit from this labor without recognizing it as labor at all. The system runs smoothly, so no one asks why, or who is making that smoothness possible.

Until people withdraw or leave.

Then suddenly:

• Knowledge disappears

• Relationships fray

• Culture and morale become buzzwords and the priority

• Leaders scramble to buy pizza and doughnuts and advertise “open door” policies, all to recreate something they never documented or valued

These are but some of the costs of treating care as a personality trait instead of infrastructure.

What Rachael surfaced so clearly is that many so-called “small” practices—setting boundaries on your availability, making time for spaciousness—disrupt the patterns of extraction. They slow the quiet drain of invisible labor by insisting it deserves structure.

This is my favorite kind of work as a designer because it’s where the resistance lives.

Not in grand gestures and custard-y last stands, but in refusing to let care remain unpaid, unnamed, and endlessly available. In refusing to remain quiet about it.

In moments of austerity and “do more with less,” leaders within organizations will often double down on efficiency while leaning harder on the very people doing the emotional and relational work of holding things together.

This is not sustainable. It is not neutral. And it ain’t accidental.

When care collapses, systems lose coherence. They neglect the very people who comprise it, and our workplaces abandon and lose their humanity.

If we want resilient organizations that provide humane services and meaningful, lasting impact, then we have to stop pretending this work is “soft,” or extra and honor the resilient people who provide it. We have to name it, design for it, compensate it, uplift it, and protect it.

Care work is not invisible because it’s unimportant. It’s invisible because we’ve benefited from not seeing it.

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