On Being a Loner and a New Way Forward

My friend said this to me over the phone recently: 

“You carry yourself with authority.” 

We are constantly on a similar path of seeking growth and enlightenment together and have been since we’ve known each other. He approached me in middle school gym class one day as we both sat on the bleachers, staring out at everyone else playing. He struck a conversation with me that has never really ended and I’ve appreciated his willingness to be honest and curious with me about the world after all this time. I trust his perspective of me. 

I can’t get those words out of my head. 

I’d been lamenting my struggle with the way my confidence feels it’s perceived sometimes. I can’t quite get a good read on how people are taking my words and I feel very humble on the inside, just earnest and direct about what I do and don’t know, and I’m not afraid to make mistakes if that open and transparent process helps normalize the growth process. 

Yet, sometimes people do seem to feel threatened by my unwavering personality and it stings. It’s where I’ve been manipulated many a time - that darned value system of mine that places the growth of others before my own, confidently. 

My buddy catches me. He sees me. He knows how willing I am to let my greatness go unseen and pushes me to make sure I share it with the world. 

I’m in an uprooting phase in my life. I’ve been here before. Frankly, I think all of life is grief and transition. 

But something feels different this time. Like my entire worldview is turning on its head. More like a world tilting on its axis a full 360 degrees. I have my core and I’m learning to trust it. I have great instincts. I almost said good - they’re great. I don’t trust them enough  

After several - I mean S-E-V-E-R-A-L - hard fucking blows the past few years, I’m finally settling into the reality that maybe I really am a leader. 

I hate it. I hate the idea of leadership, though I understand it’s necessity in a world that’s just not ready for horizontal relationships and equity. I’ve been fighting it since I can remember. 

I’d call my dad a hypocrite in front of his martial arts classes when he’d be - you guessed it - a hypocrite. I’d be reprimanded. I’d gather my youth group friends in one room to get them all talking and learning about each other’s very different lives. I’d be the glue that held them together, it felt like. I’d sit in the lounge of my sophomore floor and as an assigned campus ministry coordinator, intentionally make myself available for friendship and talking about anything, in earnest. I was praised as radical, a leader of leaders. Not just a leader - an example of how to lead. I dropped out. Whenever I hit the stage, I could feel all energy on me. I was told I had an ability to do that that was admirable. I resented it because I felt one dimensional and it burnt me out. In management positions, I’ve sought to even out the power, uplifting and helping people see their capable selves, not at all unlike me. I’ve been praised and then relied on for outputting more leadership and other times, been mistrusted for being a genuine person with no hidden agenda. 

There are more days that I can feel how very not ready the world is for people like me, yet in the quiet moments when no one’s watching, people will engage me.

I never could quite make out what it was I felt people wanted with me. I show up in earnest to the spaces I’m in, I’m awkward but consistently there, I listen as much as I speak, and I care without feeling the need to be showy about it. In fact quite the opposite. I hate when people can see my good deeds. I just want to do a deed out of responsibility and kindness and to motivate others to keep doing the same. I do not desire the attention or Nobel Prize for it, in earnest. I would resent an award, honestly. My reward is in feeling human. 

Nevertheless, when I speak, people listen. Perhaps it’s because I’ve studied leadership and was birthed into an environment in martial arts that built me into the four tenants my father had pinned up on the wall. 

Patience. Respect. Modesty. Honesty. 

I am blatantly offended when people do not exude nor work on these qualities in themselves. They are what makes a good human and a good leader. 

Spend more than 10 minutes with me and you’ll hear me passionately rant about some leader somewhere I resent for sucking at their role. 

I carry myself with authority. I’m starting to know what that means now. 

Because I resent this reality so, yet see it all the same, I’m with the loners in every room I’m in. Occasionally I find myself stumbling into the popular kids table because oops, someone read me incorrectly and liked my vibe, but I cannot count how many “…you saw that, right?” conversations I’ve had with all us weirdos that see everything. We stay quiet because we’re wise and we’re read as too sweet to harm a fly in an infantile way, too ignorant to notice or perhaps too stupid in an ableist way, or too above it all to care, or even worse, too disruptive to the nauseating fog in the room. Everything that’s going wrong that no one wants to talk about? That’s us. 

We’re the weirdos on the bleachers watching everyone else play. Bet that when we do play, it’ll be one hell of a game. An underdog’s game.

These people? They’re my people. 

We don’t have a community. Not really. We’re too disillusioned to stick it out. When you see and albeit live the cycle of ever-changing cool kids and their popularity contests, you kind of get sick of it. I’m sad to report that it doesn’t necessarily change with age either. But, us weirdos and loners? We get more jaded but wise. We know when and where we’re needed, but it’s lonely in the meantime. 

I want to do life next to my people. I’ve been telling y’all how much I want to stick up for you because that shit ain’t right for quite some time. I’m tired of doing it in hiding. 

That is to say, I ain’t fucking with no fake fools. 

I’ll have you if you’ll have me and even if we don’t cross paths, I’ve got your back and I’m speaking up for your need to hold fair space. 

Why I'm Leaving Leftist Communities

If you reference back deep into this blog some 10+ years ago, you'll see my wrestlings with literal God that upon some hindsight perspective, were also wrestlings with capitalism and the conservative values I was being expected to have but kept falling short in being able to produce for my Christian circle of influence. 

Back then, I was 19/20/21 years old and contemplating leaving the Church. My journeys in Worship Leadership school (a made-up degree but one that can, scarily enough, be used) showed me behind-the-scenes into what ministry is actually like. My theology and Bible classes started feeling so very hollow and it was things like "feminist and African American theology" being thrown around like elective/optional pieces of historical literature to pontificate around when considering what we were to believe. It was hypocritical professors that sucked at their jobs, and ones that were good at ministry but felt the loneliness and pressure of big corporate Church to shut up. It was the inherent misogyny I found in my faith and the way it made my trauma responses and mental health worse. 

But most importantly, it was the revelation that I was the arbiter of my own truth and an oh so powerful and lovely human being, capable of anything I set my mind to creating in this world. I began to recognize my obstacles as no longer metaphorical entities to shadowbox, or even my own imperfections as a human. I started to see the system for what it is and started realizing that to fight for the world I wanted to be a part of, I had to dig at roots that existed in realities spoken by real humans. 

I became very passionate about arts and activism and turned my love for music towards a means for representation as a queer person, a sometimes woman-identifying person, a genderfluid person, a trauma survivor, and many other intersections I exist at, as well as a platform for speaking out about injustices occurring to other marginalized folks. I met some cool people and I can confidently say my sense of the world was deeply formed in all those years. 

But then I started going through some real shit (or rather realizing I had been going through it), and the more I dug, the more I realized that surrounding myself with people that claim leftist values does not make me any safer than I was back in my church days. 

I had a pastor once I was quite close to. His whole family was strange. As a 15 year-old, I didn't understand what it meant when his brother, the worship pastor, would speak inappropriately about his daughter, or how absurd it was that his father and mother survived a cheating episode and wanted to be held up as a gold standard of relationship, or how uncomfortable it was for my pastor to speak about "women's bodies" as something he appreciated with a value no 15 year-old AFAB person should have been privy to hearing about. His son assaulted someone several years ago and the family apologized to the victim's family as their means of accountability. I had heard rumors about the son practicing beastiality but my pastor's concerns about my then boyfriend's sexuality was more important. 

I spent time around kids in my teenage years that verbally claimed women as their wives prior to pursuing them. Some of them became domestic ab*sers, some of them became unsafe partners, some of them were horrible friends, and I'm certain there are things I don't even know about to this day. 

On campus, there were reports of assault happening and several people shared their experiences with racism with me. One peer called me out once and we sought resolution together. It was precisely because people felt comfortable holding me accountable and sharing shit with me that I realized we had way bigger fish to fry and multiply. It was way way bigger than my own ignorance. 

But aside from the meaningful experiences I had one-on-one, no one said or did anything. Things have come out about personnel years later. They're in a frenzied PR move to play to visual accountability and pull diversity ploys and I can't help but think about these years in my life as not all that different from the leftist circles I've been spending my time in these last few years. 

Things have come out about community members in so many of these circles. And each time that has happened, I have been absolutely shocked, so often now that I'm not even shocked anymore. Yet, prior to my lack of shock, it was the reality that there was no religious doctrine to expect would be used as an excuse. There was no apparent culture of protecting these kinds of people. It has been abhorrently offensive to me each and every time, and I hope and pray each time that the people surrounding these type of folks do the right accountability work. We rarely, if ever, do. In fact, I've seen more folks in leftist circles consistently make questionable choices even more than I have in my former church circles. I never could quite put my finger on it but now I've started to investigate my sense of neoliberalism. 

I think leftist culture prides itself on a sense of high moral values, so above and beyond, unthinkably incapable of harm. Leftist culture does not practice accountability - it practices posturing. Leftist culture does not invite uncomfortable conversations. It pontificates around the room to the leftist with the highest social clout or loudest voice, considers their wokeness, and builds decisions about future movement around a sense of neoliberal leadership. That is to say, leftist culture enables fascism by playing capitalist leadership games, willing to co-opt the ever living fuck out of the blood, sweat, and tears the rest of us put into our daily fight, all to increase their clout lest they be the next call-out victim. We daily folk are easy targets for neoliberals - we speak incorrectly sometimes, we contain multitudes and embrace our inconsistencies and complexities, we practice accountability as the hard work it actually is and to each other's faces, but we don't hold degrees or doctorates in Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion, Communications, or win the pain Olympics to satisfy the neoliberal gaze in becoming a Savior every time. 

I am leaving leftist spaces because it hurts 50,000 times worse to be spoken over about your own goddamn experience because someone has a degree or non-profit position in your neighborhood or a neoliberal value to prove to god knows who, instead of spoken with about your experiences. I do not fuck with energy that makes assumptions or educated guesses without taking the time to know at a human level. I do not fuck with energy that creates unsafe social environments where psychological warfare is instituted for the purposes of direct or indirect silencing, done in the name of any type of justice. 

It is accountability practice to seek wisdom together as a collective, to make space for individual expression in relation to one another, to dig at the roots of all of our problems, and to free ourselves together in this fucked up world. I am not interested in false safety that cannot even recognize itself, and I am not interested in fighting for the right to be in power over others. 

I've witnessed it before and been victim to it time and time again. Hell, I’ve even espoused that shit myself without even realizing what I was doing because it sounded correct.

In church circles, we (the good ones) at least held an understanding that we are in it together and that all our bullshit can be handled together, too. There's something to be said about the way spiritual communities, when held together in good faith, operate. 

I am only interested in real ass motherfuckers trying to build a real ass world. I am still a leftist and you'll still see me around. My values just don't define me anymore, nor does my community. I do. 

If we can't see each other through the lens of our shared humanity, I'm not interested, no matter how bad you want me to believe. I'm really good at breaking my faith at this point. 

We say real recognize real for a reason. The horizon is ours.