LinkedIn makes me itch, 2018 has that new car smell, and other thoughts

LinkedIn is still a boxy place full of bosses, former ones and prospective bosses, small boxes to check and boxes into which we must shoehorn our skillset and lop off the quirks that may make us incredibly valuable but may not necessarily be valued. I click and scroll and read and my shoulders feel freighted by the imaginary shoulder pads I should be wearing in my little box of a profile picture. I can never look proffy enough for LinkedIn.

Random gents from Nigeria attempt to add me to their LinkedIn networks. I receive invites at least daily from complete strangers from Lagos, people whose titles sound like they ripped them from the Lives of the Saints: God's Hands and Feet, Director. Do I want to add this person to my LinkedIn network? Is it my own hubris that I don't want to add someone with the hubris to place the hands and feet of the Almighty as his professional title?

I click on "ignore request" because it all makes me feel a bit icky. Then I am smacked by my own privilege. What licenses me to ignore? Where do I hop on my First World high horse, so jaunty as I wave away these requests for connection. Because I was born under a certain star? Because I stand on the shoulders of giants? Because I would struggle mightily to imagine what it's like to have queued up a website on an unstable internet connection in a place so desolate of opportunity that the only hope one holds is to make a connection, no matter how superficial, because that feels like progress? What is it like to log on to LinkedIn and not feel bewildered by the boxy bossiness, but rather to find endless sea at nighttime, small boats and buoys bobbing with their sails up, tomorrow replete with possibility albeit unknown?

Whereas I can log off and hope for something to work out.

The very fact that I can write this true sentence about my life is some privilege worth confronting: I took the fall off to help the kids transition. Meaning, I chose not to work for someone else but rather worked for myself. In the pajama pants of work-from-home mythology.I booked hair appointments in the middle of the day like a proper Betty Draper. I went to yoga when I wanted, ate snacks at my desk, picked my kids up from school every blessed day. I've enjoyed the leisure of negotiable deadlines and the thrill of hard deadlines and I've even prettied up my professional website so that if the freelance hustle wants to pick itself up? It can.

It is now time to reemerge and inhale that new car smell of 2018. Ironically it smells like a gritty public bus ride to somewhere, somewhere that I'll have the privilege to serve.

An open letter to the white supremacist

Dear White Supremacist: You are not faceless or voiceless or nameless--but on this last account, you are most certainly wrongly named. Chief among reasons, I am compelled to write you to suggest a better category under which to file yourself.

*** When I was in my early 20s, I worked with young people at a community center.  Timmy was one of the youths who came to the center every day. It's immaterial to discuss Timmy's family, his race, his hopes, the grades he earned in school. What you need to know is that Timmy was an average size for a boy in the ninth grade who had not yet hit his growth spurt. He had noodle arms and walked with a forward tilt to his feet. He was not, at first glance, a fearsome presence. But when he played basketball, he told himself that he was the best. He wouldn't let anyone get inside his head. Timmy could not dunk. He was not the most legendary of ball-handlers. He wasn't in danger of being drafted out of seventh grade to the NBA. But he played as though he were. He would stick one, resolute, pointer finger in the air when he made a basket. He was Number One and could not have been convinced otherwise.

Timmy, delusional or not, inspired me. He threw his whole body into a game and played with all of his soul, and told the haters where to go.

***

The difference between Timmy and you, a so-called white supremacist, is that your delusion is in vain. Where Timmy threw up a pointer finger, you carry a tiki torch aflame. Timmy's torch was more powerful because it sprang forth from a confidence that he was, indeed, supreme at being Timmy on a basketball court. Whereas your torch, carried under darkness of night when it is hard to ascertain your supposed supremacy, is merely the implement of a coward.

I know so little about you, and yet I know what I need to know in order to decide how wrongly you've been categorized, White Supremacist. I don't know if you care for an ailing parent, if you've served in the armed forces, if you are a vegetarian. Given your affiliation, though, I know that you are hellbent on the eradication of any whose skin's melanin exceeds your own.

Given that you are human, I know you didn't enter into the world this way.

Instead, I know you entered into this beautiful, fractured world with all the wholeness and wellness your birth afforded you. You arrived uncloaked and tethered only to a life source. You came not yet having learned the words of hatred and violence; you were not hard-wired to delight in scourge and plunder.

You could show me the topographic map of your life from your innocence to your decision to adorn the proverbial or actual hood of cowardice. There, I might ascertain the peaks and valleys that delivered you to this plateau where you identify as a White Supremacist. But your geography is still disoriented, inscrutable. For your cause, your aim is not, in my view, White Supremacy.

It is rather Bald-Faced Inferiority.

Whereas Timmy with his noodle arms and tilted gait suppressed no one while asserting his own superiority, he became a supreme noodle-armed being dribbling a basketball.

But your animus as a so-called White Supremacists is born of your own inferiority complex. For if you, as a crusader, were truly convinced of you own supremacy, you would recognize your privilege is already guaranteed by the star under which you were born. You are effectively cloaked (no hood required) by the countless privileges afforded your white-skinnedness. You need not be threatened by the perceived encroachment of other populations, of seemingly unmerited opportunities of said populations, of the removal of the so-called emblems of your supremacy. Supreme beings are secure in their supremacy. Supremacy is found within, not in contrast to others. Supremely satisfied within themselves such that they enjoy the good that comes to others who are not just like they. Supremely secure in their position such that they enjoy helping others who are not just alike.

I myself have reached no such supreme nirvana. I am no Timmy on the basketball court. I waver, I doubt, I am a chaotic place. What I am certain about, what I believe to be the supremacy I'm striving for, is recognizing the Imago Dei in all of humanity: the stamp of divinity in each person created by God. In this way, my finger is pointed up in the manner of Timmy. Pointed toward the Truly Supreme who breathed life into each one of us, born whole, innocent, tethered only to a life source.

Sincerely, Kendra

In which I talk about the book

I have not talked much about the book, the book that I wrote, that an agent represents, for which a book deal has been drafted but not signed. Nearly a year has passed since I have seen the draft of the book deal. Since that time, I've been waiting to sign something. I'm dying to John Hancock the heck out of a book deal. But after all these months of uncertainty, I don't know if the book will ever be published because I don't know the terms of the negotiations between publisher and agent.  I worked hard for a long time on the book and I hawked it at every conference and waited for a long time for Very Important Publishing People to notice my book sitting alone at the cafeteria and to invite it over to their table.

When I got the book offer, I finally felt like I had found my table in the cafeteria and that there would be outstanding conversations and mediocre Jell-o on trays for all times.

Then, the VIPPs at my table went over to other tables to have other conversations about the book. I wasn't involved in those conversations which seemed to volley back and forth over weeks that turned into months.

I surrendered my expectations and there was freedom in that.

But then I sort of stopped caring about the book deal and the Jell-o. People stopped dropping by my table in the proverbial cafeteria to ask about the book. I stopped asking about the book. I picked up my backpack and went back to class.

In recent days, I started to feel very convicted about my surrender which had turned into apathy. Langston Hughes was all up in my head with notions of a dream deferred. Would my plump li'l grape of a manuscript start drying out like a raisin in the sun? Why read all this Brene Brown if I'm not going to Dare Greatly or Rise Strong but instead reject vulnerability in favor of taking a nap on this book project, indefinitely.

So much of the joy in writing had been processing of my experiences in marrying cross-culturally. I was filled with hope that the accounts would somehow help other couples walking a similar path. I fought for my marriage and I am still fighting the temptation that is ever-present in marriage to kick back into cruise control. Why was I not fighting for this book?

While writing this post, my agent e-mailed me to let me know that the publisher will be going over the legal beagle notes and other things about which I have no authority or expertise. I shall be too busy slurping Jell-O and dreaming of one day signing a book deal, like for reals, y'all.

***

A little talisman from one of my favorite authors Amber C. Haines whose inscription on her book Wild in the Hollow is much cherished and encourages my heart whenever I happen upon it.