Title

The first person I told “I’m a writer” was a White police officer who had put me in the back seat of his car with my hands cuffed behind my back. It didn’t frighten me. I had been in that predicament before but this time I was angry. Livid that a neighbor called the police because I had pulled over to eat my lunch, read, write, and be Black. Quiet neighborhood, hardly any traffic, about 2-3 minutes from home.

Accused of doing PCP,

“Do you know what PCP is?” The officer asked after going back and forth for a while about whether I was doing it. He was already sensing that I wasn’t doing what they were accusing me of, but that didn’t matter anymore. They were too deep in it, had to save face because my face is brown. Turns out there is a thing people do where they dip cigarettes in PCP (I refuse even to this day to look up what that stands for) and smoke it, I assume in an undetectable way. I had never heard that this was thing.

“No. What is it?” My face scrunched. I didn’t know what it was so I didn’t have to act it, but I wanted to say more than just “I don’t know.” I wanted to say this is incredulous; Or, in not so big a word, fuck the fuck off. (Don’t wince at my words. Wince at the scene taking place). It was likely the only moment I could raise my voice and cut my syllables in sharp blades of pronunciation.

When he decided to search my car, I told the officer kindly, tenderly, with a voice in flight dangling softly in the air, no knife slicing away in my words of defense. It wasn’t the time for it. This is when Black people enduring illegality from the police know they shouldn’t fight for their rights with fighting words, demeanors, or physicalities.

“Officer…you don’t have a warrant to search my car.” I shouldn’t have said anything, but I wasn’t talking to him. I was talking to his body camera.

“Ok put your hands behind your back.”

No problem. I know this part. The intention to scare me. With handcuffs on, sitting in back of the car, this is when people get nervous and sometimes have a little bit of a breakdown as I did in the past. There wasn’t that; I did not satisfy.

I had my hands slightly in the air, kept them visible the entire time. The two of them took turns telling me to put my hands down and I’d feign doing so, lowering them just a little bit before gradually raising them back in the air. I moved Tai chi slowly, fully straightening my arms and shifting them through the air, my hands remaining far from my body until my shoulders were low enough to position my hands behind me. I incrementally turned my body as they fell—my hands were never out of their sight. That wasn’t for the body camera. That was for them. Staying okay at that time in the present was more important than being compliant on video.

And I had my own video. I started recording the very moment the police told me that they smelled PCP. I laughed at first. I thought the very idea of me doing PCP was hilarious. I naively thought it was a joke. At that point I was still sitting in my car and they were still in theirs. They had stopped already and asked me if I had seen anyone suspicious. I said no, but I should have said yes. Saying no alerted them that I was the suspicious person someone had called the cops on. They drove away; I felt odd, I felt off. It was done.

I’ll never make that mistake again.

I watched them drive down the street until they reached the next intersection. I watched them make a U-turn. I watched them drive back in my direction. I watched them as they passed me until getting to the other intersection. I watched them make another U-turn. I watched them drive back in my direction. I was watching because even though I didn’t know that it was me, I knew that it is always me.

It’s a nice neighborhood, the same one I lived in because I also lived in a nice neighborhood. A drive further down the road and there was the house. I only had to turn to go up the driveway, but I effectively lived on the same street, Woodbine Avenue, that my neighbors deemed me suspicious. When they stopped again at my car, I knew what I didn’t know but truly never stopped knowing: it was me.

The officer cuffed me, put me in the police car, left me to soak in fear. It was the turning point for the Latino officer who spoke to me first, cussed me out before I ever got out of the car. “Cut the bullshit,” he said with a colored accent. If I started to speak to him in Spanish, we could have had a no-bullshit conversation. One where I could hide from the White officer and tell him that he should be ashamed, that his brother, his mother, his sister, his child always had to tell the cops that their family member was a police officer so they could stop being criminalized for being brown.

It was the turning point for him because he knew that his White partner was going all the way, then even further. From that point on, he was quiet. He’d stand behind his partner and give me you’re going to be okay nods while putting his hand up slightly at waist length and barely discernibly shaking his head to clue me when to stop talking—and I did. I’d stop talking when he cued and kept talking when he’d stay motionless. Confusion. Conflicting emotion for do I feel gratitude?

While cuffed in the police car, the White officer started his illegal search. I had an open wine bottle in the back seat. Before they stopped the second time, I put it on the floor behind the passenger seat and covered it with trash-looking scraps—the plastic bag and the paper bag my food was in. (I could tell that story, but it’s not the story that matters. Don’t be distracted by it). He didn’t thoroughly search the car because he knew I wasn’t doing drugs.

And that was something that came up. The White officer asked me if I’d ever done drugs at all. Yes. Six years ago (nine years ago now) I did cocaine before my last emergency stay in the hospital for mental health reasons. “It’s all documented,” I told him.” He paused and his eyes grew wide, maybe because the answer was too true. Why tell on myself if I were trying to prove my innocence?

Then came the strangest part. He came back to the police car, opened the door and bended over from his waist to meet me at eye level.

“You’re smart? You go to school?”

In the passenger seat my computer was open with the essay I was writing. I wish I could remember which one. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace was on the dashboard. In my book bag was more books and documents from Columbia University. It was the first thing he’d said with a tone that wasn’t authoritative. My skin wasn’t so brown to him anymore. I had become less Black to him. I was doing things that he thought only White people do.

This is when it happened—the first time I said, I’m a writer. I hadn’t yet published anything. I hadn’t yet done anything that said so except the jotting down of meandering thoughts on this here blog. It was angered out of me, frightened out of me, saying it for the first time, claiming it as a title. Even then, I used it to topple his easiness at harassing me. If I’m a writer, I can do you damage. You won’t get away with this.

He won’t. It’s been three years since that happened in the city of brotherly love—Philadelphia— and this is the first I’ve been able to write about it. I’ve tried a few times. Even tried to submit it for an assignment at Columbia. I couldn’t. My brain wouldn’t. I’ve had nightmares, emotional flare-ups I didn’t see coming. I look down and hold my head every couple of minutes writing it now.

It wasn’t just them as police officers. It was me as a woman with two tall, very well-built men standing over me planking both sides on my left and on my right with intimidating tones and a violent physical presence. I had the injustice of being Black before police officers and the trepidation of being a woman before two threatening men. It’s a different kind of double consciousness that W.E.B Dubois could never write about no matter how hard and intelligently he might have tried. It’s the ever-shifting intersections that Audre Lord embodied, Kimberlé Crenshaw defined.

~

A month later I saw those two police officers in a 7-eleven while buying cigarettes. The cigarettes that weren’t only damaging my lungs but that they had used to psychologically damage my mind. I locked eyes with both of them individually. I followed their movements throughout, staying still, catching their glance whenever they dared look up at me. The White officer put down whatever few things he went in there to buy and hurried back out to the police car. He never checked out at the register. The Latino officer made intentional eye contact with me while looking around the store. When he went to the check-out counter, I finally got in line to purchase my PCP-dripped cigarettes.

“You guys harassed me a couple of months ago,” I said to him, no daintiness in my voice. It was the low voice I slip into when I’m in deep discussion contemplating an intricate topic. The deep voice I subconsciously slip into to let people know that “I’m smart. I go to school.”

“No we weren’t harassing you.” he said with a soft smile, his voice now dangling in fragile air. A sympathetic voice. A guilty voice. Cut the bullshit, I wanted to say.

“I remember you,” he continued. I knew what he was doing. I didn’t care about him being apologetic about the system while being a part of the system. I knew that had I not followed his cues, everything might have turned out differently. I knew—and I cared—but I didn’t excuse. I had already worked through my conflicting emotions of gratitude. I wasn’t grateful.

“Yes. You did,” I said.

He bought his merchandise and slowly made his way to the door. Seeing them again, saying something, and using the accusatory voice I wasn’t able to use a month prior told me that I would one day write about it and when that day came, it would be only the first writing of many.

One thing, only one thing came from it all, made me stronger than I had ever been before and that was claiming a title.

I’m a writer.

Late at Night

Late at night I’m listening to music. I’m not writing. I’m not reading. I’m not searching authors and literary awards. I’m not thinking about how to approach my next story—what story should be told, what it means to me, why it matters.

I’m listening to music. The oldest of the music that changed me forever, made me want to cling for dear life to whatever I knew, whatever I had at the time to understand why the life I live would mean something to myself and others who would share my oxygen.

I went two years without listening to music. The sound of it, the sound—sound—hurt too much. That thing that I had learned for decades how to channel. Sound being more than what ears hear, but what minds crave. When my mind, because of music, escaped me, sound began to destroy me. Not music, but sound all by itself begging to be organized into something that could speak.

And now that I write, sound is all I can form into sentences. Words have started to escape me yet hold me hostage. I wanted words to free me and now all I can write is harmony. What does it sound like, is all I can ask when I write a sentence. What does it sound like?

I remember when sound eviscerated me, scraped my insides down to only blood vessels, no organs to pump my blood. Sound made me weak—more than weak: skeletal. I was defeated, humiliated, dehumanized by what I had for years waged war against and conquered.

Now—right now—and also the now of so many nights past, I yearn, sacrifice on the altar for my ability to hear the words that form in my skeletal psyche. I gain all control then lose it over and over again when a sound sizzles and steams above my consciousness. It doesn’t need me anymore; it waits for me to come to it, slows down for me to catch it, reach for it, slam it down under my palms and stomp it under my feet.

And I do. I do trample it. I shatter it into shards reflecting slices of myself sharp on every edge, prickling my skin at the touch of them with barely visible sprinkles of blood where the callouses on my hands once formed.

Words are for speaking. I’m tired of hearing my own voice. Late at night, I want to sit still. I want to listen.

Writ(h)ing at Columbia University

It’s getting harder to write. The pressure continues to mount and as it turns out, every time I turn in something well-liked, it has to be even better the next time. It’s the first semester. I have things going into school that I was already working on and need more guidance. I bring them in, it goes well, I start wondering if my best writing was before I arrived and has left me when it starts to count in a different way.

I still get air when I write in my journal. I’ve noticed a dramatic change in my writing there, but only there. A week ago, I sank my flesh into it, the first time writing in it since moving to NY. All the beautiful words I couldn’t figure out how to get on the page flowed without shame. I could admit to everything. I could stop lying. In fact, I could admit that I was lying all the time. I reveal only slivers of me to everyone, depending on how they look at me, depending on when they dig deep into my eyes as we talk and when not. It tells me so much. Where are their thoughts, I ask myself. When in class, I find myself staring at the quietest students in the room. I have physical joy in my body when they speak.

There are different people. When one Jewish person discusses the work they are doing to archive the Holocaust and memorialize those stories as a way of understanding a Palestinian whose family line is likely stopped and their anxiousness to preserve it, there is a neglect of acknowledging that the Holocaust preceded Palestinians being forced off their land and now, occupied, have lost generations of family lines. It can’t be discussed. So much of what we implore of the world in our writing is too sensitive to do. It is. It really is. I don’t want to sit in a class, the only Black person among 19, discussing a poem where the author writes about Susan Smith, a white woman who killed her kids and then told the police it was a Black man. I don’t want to sit in that class where there is an uproar over the difference in the terms “cop” and “police”, everyone wailing back and forth because the energy has built into a freneticism, but then they are dead I mean in the grave when discussing this poem. No one has thoughts on what the Black man wrote about the Black man imagined. They do about Gertrude Stein writing about nouns being boring, adjectives hideous, commas, questions marks, and exclamation points ridiculous, verbs and adverbs glorious, periods as gods. But not about what the Black man wrote about the Black man imagined.

I just don’t want to. But I’ve done it before. In orchestra. In the LDS church. At school. I went to church, the LDS church, my first Sunday in NY. They can help me. With food and clothes. Finding a place to stay when I have to move out of housing. I had fun. Every moment of it–until–While leaving, there were three men in master’s programs. Business, dentistry, something else. They were locked in. I stopped to say goodbye, I called them Columbia as a group. They didn’t much turn. They didn’t hear me. I walk up to the group, “Bye…” I ask again their names and repeat them. They half, weird, quietly respond to the farewell. Everything was perfect and in the last tiny moment before leaving, I remembered what this would really be. Not intentionally, but by default. I know it so well.

I’m trying to move around. International friends, Black friends, BIPOC group, LGBTQ group, Columbia Journal–I’m doing it, I really am.

Struggle Truth

Social media is social media. Sometimes the pictures and announcements portray the truth of our happiness, joy, and hope. Other times, the pictures and announcements are to create what we wish the truth to be. It’s not always a malicious endeavor. We hope. We hope for…

Part of my writing journey is to share the truth that I would certainly want to hide. It’s scary. Downright terrifying. But it’s also liberating. I don’t need anyone to read any of what I have shared, but I know—and am released because of it—that I’ve said a truth. Any truth. Because every time I post good news, great news, I feel the importance of also saying, “This isn’t all of it. There’s more.” It doesn’t mean I’m wallowing in pain. Maybe I am, but maybe I’m just showing that pain and joy can coexist.

I’ve had this blog for over a decade. I’ve shared during my worst of human experience thus far. And my hope, my hope is…that it remains the worst, that it will only get better from here. Or there. The “there” that was mental illness, substance abuse, unemployment, isolation, and abandonment.

Yet it is better. I just got hired by the New York Times. They got in touch to say they’ve read my writing and want to know if I’m NY. I’m not. Yet I’m moving there in August to start a writing degree at Columbia University. And my honest truth: I may not finish it. The way I struggle, it may be one more unfinished ventures that I have too many of to count.

It is no coincidence. I’ve agonized in prayer for five years over getting into a graduate school program with money to pay for it. I’ve already turned down offers that came with no scholarship. Over the years that I prayed, I acknowledged that if I got into a graduate school program without any money to finance it, it didn’t come from God. I withdrew from offers in agony to honor that it wasn’t from God. It wouldn’t be an answer to the prayers I’ve cried out of my mouth and out of my heart after years of a broken career path punctuated by struggle.

Now that it comes, now that I have a scholarship, now that the NYT has hired me with the question of “do I live in NY?” I can rejoice. Yet my rejoicing doesn’t change the heartbreak and turmoil that I face with the very diagnosis that stalled my life, made it into a dry dust swirling through the desert with nowhere to go and no origin to identify where it came from.

It still hurts. I still hurt. And I write this to say:

No matter what social media tells you, people are still hurting. Some people are hurting so much that they lie on social media just to envision what life could be if only they had the ability to live it.

The truth of the matter is that truth often becomes what people want the truth to be—not what it really is.

Day 1 (again)

I wasn’t afraid to log on. I’ve been here before, done this already, but on this Day 1, unlike the others, I logged on knowing that there is a problem. This time I actually fear myself. This time, I feel the trembling nerves dancing in my psyche rather than just in my body. My life then had become unmanageable. I wasn’t living it at all, just breathing from one day into the next. Everything had stopped, I hardly left home for two years, watching hours of TV, binge eating non-stop, gorging pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and Pillsbury cinnamon rolls.

My life now is being managed although what is within me still becomes unmanageable. I’m only at home because I am working, writing remotely away from others who if they could see me at an office everyday would notice my broken patterns. I feign the management of my life, but when I turn in an assignment, my checks come in. Real money that I can buy real things even though the exchange of goods–the exchange of myself–was false.

The meeting starts with a “Hey Donna.” The song in the sound of her voice is like the “ding-dong” of a doorbell, but a slide down rather than two distinct notes. I love it. I’m only supposed to have my first name displayed, but Zoom is betraying me, automatically showing my last name because when I set it that way, I didn’t realize it was an ironclad contractual agreement. I have to change it. They already know it, but I have to change it. Maybe they will forget.

The kind-hearted, nurturing white woman introduces her husband and then herself, “I have to admit, I hate my name. My name is Karen.” She pauses with light-hearted laughter. “I hate my name.”

I understand the gesture, but I’m a little bit frustrated because it starts the meeting with a focus on the identity I have no control over having, rather than the identity I logged on to work on changing–an identity marked with a pain so internal that the external things can’t comprehend it. I didn’t want to think about both tonight. I never want to think about either, or both at the same time, but I’ll work on them individually, carefully, quietly, mostly secretly.

But she is acknowledging something so fretful to admit out loud. That she is white, I am black, and white people–white women–have done despicable things to me and to us. I have more love and appreciation for what she is trying to do than frustration for how it is provoking the thoughts I put away for a little while to focus on the inner things.

I knew I didn’t want to say anything beyond what there was to be said. We take turns reading material that is read at the beginning of each meeting. I almost get all the way to the end when my voice cracks and my eyes drown in saltwater. I can’t see the words anymore on the screen.

It said, but I felt like I was saying, “We pretended we were fine, full of bravado and excuses, but somewhere deep inside we knew…we knew we were sliding down a slippery slope toward greater and greater sorrow.”

The words found me out and made me resent how I have used words myself to find out everything. These are words that I would have written myself and certainly already have in another form in my journal. I push through the last three sentences and make a vow with myself to not speak again.

When it’s over so quickly because I did not share and there was only one other person, Jason, who chose to, my voice wavers out a last question.

“So this is every week? It’s happening next Wednesday?”

After an affirmative response, I log off the meeting and burst, erupt, explode into tears as my body crumples over my desk.

Mean Eugene

I went to a Philly Pops concert at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia on May 15, 2022, a beautiful, sun-streaked Sunday. It had been dreadful all weekend, the weekend I went up to New York to cover a concert at the Jazz Gallery on Saturday night, staying in New Jersey the Friday night before, each city connected by the same cloudy, dark sky. NY lulled with an overhanging fog that was so thick, buildings lining 9th Avenue disappeared into the sky, no tops to prove that they ever stopped climbing—towers of Babel. But that Sunday was beautiful while still among us lay a pandemic, a tightening, possibly global—and nearly so—war, and an irreparable division over pregnancy and abortion. No one was tuned into the news of a racist shooting in Buffalo the day before so that Sunday, still, was beautiful.

I was a speck standing in the lobby with the audience before the show started. I couldn’t see where the black people were. I walked the floor, from the front entrance on Broad St. to the central sky-light dome above the middle of the lobby. Then I walked all the way to the back of the building.

I couldn’t find the Black people. I took selfies to unfocus myself and scan slowly through the audience behind me because maybe I missed someone and I just needed to zoom in to take a closer look.

Growing up in Atlanta, I was at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s (ASO) concert hall at the Woodruff Arts Center every weekend. The ASO raised me, groomed me, painfully trained me for the profession of classical percussion. The Talent Development Program (TDP) under the ASO provided lessons, assisted with buying instruments, and prepared the funneling of Black students into summer music camps. TDP gave all the students tickets for every ASO concert in the classical season, and I never once considered how expensive a habit like that was, impossible for Black kids not sponsored and made evident by the $110.00 ticket I thought to buy at the beginning of the concert. Two of my brothers and I were in TDP and studied with Tom Sherwood, Chris Martin, and Ralph Jones—the principal chairs of their sections. We took lessons every week, practiced for hours every day, were in all the top orchestras and wind ensembles across the city, state, southeast region, and country. We sold incredible recitals to the public, then at the Interlochen Arts Camp, we were internationally recognized by playing in and soloing with the World Youth Symphony Orchestra, which I did as a winner of its international concerto competition.

But while that sounds good, there was a lot of bad for us as well. We weren’t treated all that well in our own sections, sometimes by our own conductors and faculty professors. And it came from different directions: even when attending the concerts, not all, but many of the ushers made us feel like we didn’t belong. The worst one challenged us every weekend about whether we had tickets to the concert despite us being there every weekend with our tickets. His name was Eugene. Now that I think about it, we should have called him “Mean Eugene,” but the very truth of the matter was that we cared more about the music than how we were being treated. That’s why we went all the way to conservatories, won orchestra positions, played around the world, but eventually became public school teachers, non-profit founders, and teaching artists for those non-profits around the country. We wanted to see more Black students coming after us that could go just as far, and further.

I haven’t played in any orchestra with another Black percussionist, man or woman. All along the way, I’ve had incidents where white, male percussionists said demeaning things to me, one yelling out into a room full of percussionists about my inadequacy to defend the layout we had for a percussion ensemble piece. We had already vigorously rehearsed it that way and the concert was in a couple of days, but he wanted to change our placement and I said, “No. it’s too late.” Or another percussionist putting his mouth to my ear to whisper a chant about how “I’ll never be able to make it. I’ll never be any good.”

They know who they are. Then there are the percussionists who never treated me harshly. All those percussionists were around when things like that happened. But no one spoke up to stop the humiliation and disrespect being dealt me. They got quiet. They breathed very slowly and momentarily froze because they knew what they were seeing was wrong even though they did nothing to stop it. Those percussionists know who they are, too.

I didn’t go in to see the Philly POPS concert that Sunday. I didn’t want even one more performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in my life. Instead, I stayed in the lobby and kept an eye on the audience when they first poured in, then poured out for intermission, and then once again after the concert was over.

While washing my hands in the bathroom during intermission, an older, sophisticated, and slender Black lady wearing a flawless cream-colored suit leaned into me with one shoulder, her front facing the direction of my back, and said, “Are we the…only?”

While she yet spoke, I turned to her and snapped my neck nodding my head.

“Yep,” I responded while she continued her slow-moving question.

“Are we the only in the…”

“Yep.”

“…in the audience?”

“Yup,” I said again.

This never happened to me before. The 25 years I graced these concert halls, the one, two, possibly three other Black people have never leaned into me to say, “What’s going on here?” I never asked what was going on myself because I was there for the music, the training of my ears to hear rather than my eyes to see who was on the stage.

There are more Black musicians on stage now because of the efforts we put in to change it, but also because George Floyd was murdered. Yet the audience still looks the same. And the percussion sections do, too.

Sound Reflection

All the music I have ever played sounded like rock bottom. The hollow reverberations against windowless walls. There was no spread; the sound didn’t scatter into a million decibels. Just lifeless, not even squirming.

This is what it felt like to lock myself away in a practice room in the basement at Emory University–the rock bottom of the building. Emory had the instruments I couldn’t afford so that’s where I practiced. And at the time, it was fine. Because I didn’t know that sunlight mattered. No one told me about Vitamin D. I didn’t know that being down there, seeing no one for 4-5 hours every day would be a defining definition of myself.

But it didn’t matter. My goal was to relate to my instruments, my practicing, not people. And to be (too) honest, it still is. I still process time with people as a waste of time not spent with my instruments. And I was sorrowful about this for quite a while. I’m not anymore. It molded my brain. It was what my psyche and emotions developed throughout childhood.

Like social media. Just like social media.

Growing up with the anticipation of getting home from school to chat with friends on AOL instant messenger. Then facebook getting blocked by administrators in high school because we were all logging on during school to stare at non-engaging pages. It’s when there was no timeline. No chat features. All we could do was stare at our profiles, then at others, and mull over the mystery of a relationship status classified as “It’s complicated.”

I’ve watched the movie telling the story of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard screwing all his friends and associates to create something that became what it is today. Then a dropout of Harvard screwing all his friends and associates to create something that became what it is today. And at the end of that day, it wasn’t much different than what I was doing in the practice room: disengaging myself from people to bond myself with myself. Instead of angling to be around and have fluffy interactions with our objects of affection, we simply lurked online instead, gazing into their photos and creating love affairs in our minds.

I had a love affair with my instruments. I didn’t just gaze at them online. Everyday I attuned myself to making flirtatious advances towards them, incrementally bringing myself closer to their inner parts. Studying the sound when I played them. Studying the physics of their rebound–the relationship of a stick or mallet to a plane that I had to manipulate my body to get a return on the gravity I’d use to strike them.

And always–always–I practiced in front of a mirror. There were things about my body that I’d have to observe, things that I wouldn’t be able to see myself just looking down. But not my head. Not my face. Not my eyes. Because I didn’t play an instrument using my mouth. I always had a disembodied relationship to what I had to look at in the mirror. Even if my face was visible, I never looked at it. It was my back, my hands, my arms, my fingers that needed attention. Still so. When I practice today, I see the body I’m using, not the face that it sits on.

In the mirror I search for the reflection of my sound. Not myself.

Figurative Warmth

Being warm and dry is such a blessing. Literally and mentally. All those times caught in the rain on public transportation. Like clockwork, rain would pour down on the way to or on the way from a Monday morning therapy appointment, sometimes both. I started to believe the rain was just for me, just for my therapy appointments so I could be degraded in the process of finding out why my life had become so empty and static.

Once my therapist offered to drop me at the train station after an appointment when the rain was so heavy that only a nanosecond under it soaked me to the bone. I thanked her, but refused, knowing I didn’t want to travel with the one person who knew my insides. When she immediately said okay without a moment of hesitation, I was glad I didn’t say yes and take her up on an offer that seemed, when she quickly responded, more an act of courtesy rather than an intentional act of providing solace. And she was already doing enough. I was paying her, yes, but she and any therapist should be allowed to walk out the door unencumbered after sifting through a mess that probably projects more of their own lives than they’d be willing to admit.

It’s like my quest to leave the practice room in the practice room–her ability to leave garbage in the trash can. Not my garbage, not me as garbage, but the muck and mud of life itself.

When I step voluntarily in the rain now to smoke a cigarette, the few and far between moments of coping, I also sense my voluntary exposure to what broke me in the process of trying to put my shards back together. Those moments remind me of how I can self-sabotage, erecting a memory that in actuality is a normal part of existence–being caught in the rain–but reeks of a time so low for me. It’s the feeling of being discarded and left not for dead, but for a life of deadness encompassing a breath of fresh pollution rather than air.

And the mental warmth, the mental dryness of being alive nurtured by the rainwater of a shower rather than a flooding of rainwater that drowns me: it isn’t so figurative after all. Being warm and dry in my physical body mirrors, recently unbeknownst to me, a dry warmth in my mind.

Being warm and dry is such a blessing.

Trapped in a Snare

Trap

Practicing is like brushing my teeth after a long day of coffee, almond butter, yogurt, and kale. The foods that stain, get stuck on my gumbs, lodged between my teeth; the nut butter that builds into clumps in the back of my mouth. I spend ten minutes after I eat poking at it with my tongue until I’ve broken it down enough to finally swallow. Yogurt coating my teeth with a thin film–the feeling I know after 20 years of playing music. The same film that coats my psyche, only scrubbed clean until I practice. I know what it sounds like to be right. To play the right notes, to have the right technique, and to execute the right rhythm. I know what it feels like to floss, pulling loose the kale that is healthy going down, but harmful when it stays. I know the Vitamin K of practicing, but the rot that stays behind.

Improving the tiniest of feats, eliminating a soft accent on the first note of a double stroke using my arms to lift the stick while letting gravity take control of my arms’ descent. Yet, even having let gravity take control, the first stroke is still under control. Somehow I have made an alliance with the forces of nature, no longer an amateur. It’s the practice of every artist of every medium: defying nature, gravity, evolution; making the body do what can’t actually be done. Then focusing on that impossibility until it disrupts nature itself. Like climate change. Practicing, musicianship, is climate change.

Double strokes, triple strokes, quadruple strokes and multiple bounces are all a negotiation between my physiology and the physics written in natural stone. I can’t change those laws, but I have to train my body to manipulate them. While I’ve been taught how to dominate the equations, I can’t be taught how to dominate my body. It’s what every musician, every artist, spends a lifetime learning. The domination of their own body, defying its natural state of being, as every orchestral percussionist has had to learn.

I’ve never had a panic attack while brushing my teeth. Not yet anyway. But today, practicing my drum, my snare drum, my drum named so aptly as to make it clear that I am trapped, chained and in bondage–I had a panic attack. When I think about it, the attack happened before I knew it had started. I moved through exercises faster than my body could register how to improve upon them.

The dumbbells I might use to exercise, the way in which doing two or three sets allows my muscles to first break down before they can rebuild even stronger. All I did with my snare drum exercises was break down. There was no rebuilding, no repetitive motions at predetermined intervals to ensure that my muscles got stronger. Just a breaking. Just a spiral downward.

I called a number of percussionists, New York Philharmonic here, Cleveland Orchestra there, past teachers and former colleagues, asking them all the same question: has this happened to you? What did you do? What do you do?

And yet I know the answer is the same. That teaching my body to defy gravity is only found in me knowing my own body. The weight on my arm, and in my head, will never be the same as the white men I have learned from and talk to about my panic attack. What they had to learn about the movement of their bodies was in a world of privilege, absent racism and sexism. They were bred to defy gravity. They were taught their physics lessons knowing that those laws were made by people like them, and also that those laws didn’t contain them.

But I panic. I panic knowing that the title “snare drum” is merely a name to them, but a state of being for me.

Shelter

The birds were confused and so was I. I had watched them just one day before, perched in branches, singing extravagant operas, digging for worms, switching places as though playing musical chairs—living. Now they move back and forth across an empty yard, not sure where their nests and young have gone, buffa operas now turned into negro spirituals. They had homes, they had conference centers, maybe churches, restaurants and recreational facilities all wiped away in less than a day.

I watched as they cut the trees down, not envisioning how open the space would be afterwards. I was shocked when I finally realized that cutting down the trees would mean there would be no trees. Yet the process was exhilarating watching huge branches fall to the ground and, of course, tree trunks—one even being forced with three men pulling a cable attached to the top half of a tree while another man who had climbed the tree to cut off smaller branches remained attached to its lower half seemingly undaunted by the prospect of going down with it.

The three trees that stood tall, wild, and overgrown—indigenous and free—were a forest of their own making. They didn’t fit in an urban city, despite their size and maturity hinting that they might have been here first and that the city might be what doesn’t fit. But as I stood in the back of the house, this historical, Philadelphia house that is said to have once been the slave quarters for the enormous next-door plantation home no longer with any trees in its backyard, it was easy to forget the main road only two blocks over with cars and buses and fumes and people.

The shelter the trees provided, I thought, were for the birds. I had watched them every day from morning until they all seemingly evaporated in the early evening before materializing again for the next and new morning. But now, I watched them walk on ground where trunks had been. I watched them flying through air where they once landed on branches. As I stood there smoking a cigarette in view of my next door neighbors and strangers passing alongside the street on the other side of their house, I understood. I lamented my own shelter—not theirs.

My smoking provided isolated moments, strung together to convince me that I was present for them. It’s when and sometimes why I’m not seen, and how I can step outside of myself without ever really leaving myself in some sort of abusive way. Being in public view leaves me in the strange and nonsensical reality that all I’m really doing is smoking a cigarette. Without shelter, I’m merely exposed, a vulnerability of weakness and addiction, and maybe everything that goes beyond that—all of it on display because the trees were cut down.

I didn’t need them for oxygen. I didn’t need them to watch the birds. I just needed me, all of me, to myself. I needed to not be seen and the trees were giving that without me knowing to ask for it.

Just last night the shelter that I thought I had while on zoom with my video turned off was challenged when I asked a question of the panel Columbia University chose for the evening. I sat and twisted my hair, my natural hair which, beautiful to me, only looks wild and untamed to others. In asking the question, I was exposing myself mentally, psychologically, maybe even spiritually because of the nature of my question: “What would you write about if this pandemic turned into the end of the world—if it just decided one day that it was going to end everything. What would you write about? What topics would you feel we need as the last way to see ourselves?”

I was glad to participate, glad that I wasn’t consumed by the fear of speaking, of saying something when everyone else remained quiet, as smart people, unlike me, do. The moderator asked me to show myself, saying it was much more valuable an exchange for those who I addressed to see my face, to look at me as if meeting physically in a room and present with one another.

She was right. In the moment, I didn’t consider the shelter I had to give up, what I had to reveal—the vulnerability of any black woman being seen with her natural hair untamed, hardly meeting a standard of beauty for public exposure. I started my video after quickly wiping my face with a paper towel to remove splotches of oil on my face that might give me an unnatural shine reflecting the dim light in awkward places on my face. But I didn’t cover my hair (I didn’t have time) and I didn’t speak up to say I’m not in a state of showing myself. I simply turned on my video and said with my hair unruly, “I’m in the middle of twisting my hair which is why I don’t have my video on.”

And so I revealed myself to the authors, the moderator, all the students that I have not yet met in person, all the students that I have not yet had the opportunity to dazzle with my beauty, my face manipulated, make-up in its rightful place, my hair done in a way so it doesn’t reveal what it really looks like. Just enough to keep hidden what so many black women try their best to do, technology taking the place of what the trees had been providing for me.

With the trees gone, I could now be seen by strangers walking by, cars, and now maybe even family who are turning the corner to pull into the driveway. My in-laws, the people who although they are my family, I still don’t want to see me as I really am.

At the time I felt confident. At the time I even felt excited that I had the confidence, the strength to show my face, my hair half-twisted, half out, the kinks sticking straight out after a day of humidity that shrank my hair from passing my shoulders to only inches from my scalp. It was after spending a day confronting nature, the natural state of the condensation colliding with the natural hair on my head, that I took this experience, this collaboration between my body and the earth, that I felt empowered, my vanity stripped away, no longer captive to altering what is natural within me and outside of me to fit an unnatural and altered reality of what beauty is—and what black is.

The next day I woke up horrified, recoiling at how bold I felt revealing my face and my hair, splotches of oil on my forehead. What was natural yesterday felt unnatural today.

“Why would I do that?” I asked myself. “I’ll have to make sure that I look extraordinary every time I log on so that people think I’m beautiful, so that people know I’m beautiful.”

Now that I see the birds circling around where those trees once were, I understand the natural exposure, the taking away of their shelter and my (un)natural exposure with the click of a button.

The open backyard of my neighbor’s house piles up with cinder blocks and bricks. Surely something is to be constructed in the place of those trees, something, hopefully, that will shelter me once again from the public. Something, I hope, I can hide behind as I smoke a cigarette.