The Journey of Vulnerability Ahead of Me - On The Beginnings of Writing My Memoir, "Specimen"

I am planning a book project that will require more truth from me than any advocacy writing I have done up to this point. The personal is political.

Before we get into today’s piece…

A reminder about my upcoming six-week creative workshop series, Writing Resistance beginning Sunday, November 9 and continuing on Sundays through December 14th. If you are a poet, cultural critic, essayist, journalist etc., or if you’re interested in any of these styles of writing from an advocacy/social justice lens, this series is for you! More information can be found here. Would LOVE to have you join me!

---

The Journey of Vulnerability Ahead of Me - On The Beginnings of Writing My Memoir, “Specimen”

Most days
I am a wisecrack away
from cracking up
a clown’s tear
living in seclusion
from all who find joy in
what I have become
a master at masking…
- Excerpt from “Killjoy,” a poem I’m considering including in my memoir-in-the-works, Specimen

A few weeks ago I attended a symposium on healthcare in Louisiana that primarily focused on the devastating impact of the Trump administration’s Big Beautiful Bill. Much of the information presented offered a grim outlook for a state already rife with health inequities, and as I sat in the audience listening as someone working within the realm of community health, I was equally attuned as someone who has to engage with the inequities of the healthcare industry from the patient perspective.

I have lived with the duality of illness for the past 11 years, and though I have not been shy about this reality, I have been cautious about not centering my identity as someone who lives in an immunocompromised body, especially as it pertains to my creative/literary endeavors. I began the long road to an MS diagnosis in 2014, the same year that Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner were all killed by American police. As a veteran poet, and budding advocacy journalist at the time, I was fully immersed in penning words about the social climate of racial animus and police violence that was, to some degree, paralyzing Black America with fear.

While my own body was growing more powerless by the day, I had a deeper vested interest in speaking truth to power about what our community was experiencing during the genesis of the movement for Black lives. I do not regret the things I was writing and articulating at that time, but in hindsight, I do recognize that I was expressing those sentiments both out of a sense of obligation and as a shield to protect me from how vulnerable I felt about my health declining.