RAYE’s story is fascinating and absolutely wild to me. The recording industry fumbled the bag with her for years. She signed a four-album deal with Polydor Records in 2014, when she was 17. Seven years later, not a single one of those four albums had been released. The label relegated her to studio demos, features on other people’s dance tracks, and background vocals, and told her she could have her album if her next single performed well enough.

In 2021, Raye was over the bullshit, and she did something about it. She went public, posting about albums’ worth of her music sitting in folders collecting dust. Within weeks, Polydor released her from her contract. She got her freedom. And then she wrote a song about it: “Hard Out Here.”, her very first independent release, is about the executives who tried to quiet her and how she got around them.

I know that’s right.

Now the world gets My 21st Century Blues, and now we get This Music May Contain Hope., which is exactly what it says it is.

I recently watched a video of RAYE describing her creative process on “Where Is My Husband!” I love the pure delight on her face as she talks about it. But beyond the delight, I see a musical genius. Again: it is absolutely wild that a record company had this talent under contract for seven years and did not cultivate it. Fumbled. The. Bag.

RAYE’s treatment makes me think of other women of color in the workplace who are similarly underestimated and undervalued.

I’ve been in rooms where people decide on stretch assignments and promotions. And I’ve watched a pattern play out with women of color, particularly Black women: they get doubted. They are required to over-prove their readiness, while others advance on potential alone. Somebody will say, “I’m just not sure she’s ready yet,” about a woman who has been doing the job for a year, in the same breath that they say, “He’ll grow into it,” about a man who hasn’t started.

The pattern I observed isn’t imagined. Researchers at the Center for WorkLife Law call it “prove-it-again” bias, and in their study of women in science, 77% of Black women reported having to prove themselves over and over, compared to about two-thirds of other women. Women get judged on performance; men get judged on potential. Black women get judged on performance, and then asked to prove it one more time just to be sure.

So, like Polydor, scores of organizations are fumbling the bag with women of color. They are literally giving up on their own success in order to keep undervaluing these women. And they are sending these women a message, even if not consciously: you are not worthy.

The story many leaders tell themselves goes something like: women of color aren’t quite as qualified, and I need a little extra evidence before I can be sure they can do the job.

Where does that story come from? It didn’t appear out of nowhere. These beliefs are granted to us and perpetuated by systemic racism, and by what we’ve all internalized about labor and whose labor is valuable. It shows up in who gets paid what, and in which kinds of work get called skilled.

This story is embedded in our system. When the Fair Labor Standards Act created the federal minimum wage in 1938, it deliberately left out farm work and domestic work. Those were the jobs held overwhelmingly by Black workers, and leaving them out was the price of getting Southern votes. It is still legal to this day to pay some restaurant workers less than the standard minimum wage ($2.13 an hour is CRAZY). The law was written so that it would not cover these people, so that it would stay legal to underpay them.

That is the soil these stories grow in. Those of us in the workplace today didn’t plant it. But we keep watering it, consciously and subconsciously, every time we tell ourselves a story about who is valuable, who is ready, who is a safe bet, and who needs to show us one more thing first.

These stories we tell ourselves about other people get in our way, because they are so often wrong.

They were wrong at Polydor. Imagine how much money that label could have made if they had challenged their own assumptions about who RAYE was and what she was capable of. They made a big mistake. BIG. HUGE!

That’s why it matters so much to notice the assumptions we’re making about other people’s abilities. These stories get in the way of true solidarity with each other. You cannot stand beside someone you’ve already decided isn’t valuable.

Imagine how much more wonderful the world would be if we stopped believing the stories and started believing in each other instead. We have to change the stories to work towards our collective liberation.

So, some questions for you this week:

• What are some of the stories you tell yourself about other people, their abilities, their intentions?

• Do you know for sure that those stories are true?

• How might you find out?

• What might be possible if you learned they weren’t true?

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Leave a comment

Share

I heard this recently. I didn't write down where, but it rang a bell for my attention.

Norms can be incredibly powerful. Most often, they are not articulated. We absorb them from how people behave, and we learn what is acceptable and not acceptable from those behaviors.

For example: I was on a call at a previous employer. A call on an actual telephone. This was before Zoom, y'all, so we actually used the phones on our desks sometimes. Anyway. I was on a training call with other people who were in a similar role. I had just started at the organization. There was pre-work, and because I was new, and I'm a nerd who seeks approval from her teachers, I read the pre-work. Not everyone on the call did. This role was intense. People were regularly working 60 to 80 hours a week, so sometimes people might deprioritize things like pre-work for a training call.

The facilitator called on one of my peers and asked him a question about the pre-work. He sheepishly admitted that he was slammed and didn't get to it. In a stern tone that reminded me of my parents when they're disappointed in me, the facilitator said, "That is unacceptable. It is my expectation that you show up prepared with your pre-work done. Don't let this happen again."

(Tell me you're at an education reform organization without telling me you're at an education reform organization. IYKYK.)

I remember being absolutely stunned by this interaction. I had never worked somewhere where public dressing-down and shaming happened like that. I also remember thinking, Lord, you will never catch me on one of these calls without my pre-work done. I pledged never to be embarrassed like that.

Norms internalized.

I was never unprepared on those calls again. The organization got what it wanted. What it didn't see was the vigilance it took to get there. The extra hours. The fear underneath the preparation. That's the thing about shame as a management tool. It works. It just doesn't work without a cost.

I'm guessing the organization would not want a norm of public shaming to govern their culture. Although, based on what I experienced there, I actually think they would be okay with public shame as a norm. But I digress.

Norms exist whether you articulate them or not.

But you don't have to let norms just happen to your team. You can shape norms by intentionally creating them, to foster the behaviors you want to see and experience. This is especially important when there's been any type of relational rupture or loss of trust. The intentional norms you create scaffold how you want to shift behavior and move forward together.

Norms are agreements you make with other people, even when you don't articulate them. No one told me we had an agreement that shame was part of our organizational culture. But on that call, I picked up on the implicit agreement: you will be shamed for your mistakes and for centering rest.

What if the organization had explicitly stated norms about pre-work? Or that we don't publicly shame each other, and that mistakes are okay? What if, instead of a facilitator completely obliterating someone on a call with over 100 people, someone had stepped up and said, "Hey, we don't talk to each other like that here"? That would have sent a message to me and everyone on the call about the behaviors we wanted at the organization.

I know that's a lot to ask of someone on a call with 100 people and a facilitator holding all the power. Which is exactly why the norm has to exist before the moment arrives. That way, the person who speaks up is upholding an agreement, not picking a fight.

Norms are one way to create the culture you want to see, either from scratch when you're building a new team or after a relational rupture. I think sometimes people underestimate the power of articulating these norms and agreements.

If you want to try this with your team, keep it small. Pick one meeting. Ask: "What do we need from each other to do our best thinking here?" Write down what people say, in their words. Then, and this is the part most teams skip, name what happens when someone slips. Not punishment. A way back. "If one of us doesn't get to the pre-work, we say so, and we keep going." The agreement about repair makes it safer to call each other back to our agreement.

Be careful which groups you join. And if you're the one building the group, be careful which norms you let take hold.

So I'm curious: what unarticulated norms have shown up in your workplaces that surprised you?

Leave a comment

Share

I don't know about you, but when I hear that, I think of controversial hot takes. The ones that feel almost sacrilegious to say out loud. And if I'm honest, I haven't really heeded the advice. Sure, I share spicier takes about work under capitalism and how we might relate to each other better at work. I share ideas about employer care that seem a little novel. But I haven't gone there.

So I've been thinking about what holds me back. And this morning, when I pulled cards, I got reminded of the thing I never say.

The card said to be grateful for the journey. Not that spicy. But it also said to do it for the joy of just being with the folks you vibe with. In essence: do it for the plot. Do it for the ride we get to take together in this one life.

I think we are so caught up in performance and winning. And what even is winning? Winning at what? For what? Does winning connect us to ourselves? To each other?

What if (and stay with me now) instead of fixating on winning and growth and scale and all the things, we treated work as an opportunity to be with each other and our people, and we got to make some cool ish together?

What if that was enough?

And what if, in that enoughness, we had more room for play and joy and being together?

That feels scary to say out loud. Which is probably the sign that it should be said out loud.

I have been in the game of "winning" my whole career. I went to the right schools. I worked at the right places. I worked my way to the top of the hierarchy. I'm known for performance and excellence, and my network is full of people who are known for performance and excellence. My feed is full of people who believe the point of working is to perform so you can make an impact on the world.

And honestly? I'm not sure that actually saves the world.

I wonder if taking the intensity down several notches is how we save the world. What if that's the portal to seeing the abundance available to us when we're more generous with each other?

It feels risky to say, because when I say I'm not as focused on winning, I worry about what people will think of me. I don't want people to think I'm less than. That I don't care about impact. That I'm lazy, or wrong-headed, or a distraction. It feels especially scary when getting chosen to work with clients depends on me being really good at my job.

But I'm realizing that's a false binary.

This idea that being good at your job only goes hand in hand with intensity. That to care about impact, you have to drive hard, humans be damned.

What is the point of impact if you're crushing and harming the humans working alongside you? You might actually be doing more harm than good. Because when we break people, when we drive them so hard that they doubt themselves, feel inadequate, and fear for their own safety and their ability to take care of themselves, we send them into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Being in threat mode like that over some arbitrary goal makes no sense. When we drive each other to break and burn out, we've made the world a harsher place to be, no matter what the impact report says.

I don't think you have to crush people to make an impact on the world. Performance is not antithetical to joy and care.

In theater, performance is an opportunity to create and play with other people. I think it would be pretty liberating to think about it that way in our other workspaces. That work is an opportunity to create and play together. To delight in each other's company. As we take these trips around the sun, maybe that's the whole point.

So even if saying this makes someone hesitant to work with me, that's okay.

Because I'll get to work with the people who understand that being with each other, being gentle with each other, is impact. It is changing the world. I'll get to work with the people who are willing to create and play together. For the plot.

Now it's your turn. When someone says "say the most sacrilegious thing," what pops into your head? What's the hot take about work that you've never said out loud? And what do you think holds you back from saying it?

I'd love to hear it in the comments. I'll go first, since I just did.

Leave a comment

(I said what I said. If you’re feeling some kind of way about this, all I have to say is: a hit dog will holler. #CheckYourselfBeforeYouWreckYourself)

People often walk away from psychological safety training thinking that it means they should be free from discomfort or fear. Now, most people get that you’re not going to be free from discomfort when it comes to psychological safety. But fear?

I can hear y’all saying, “What are you talking about, Alli?”

Psychological safety will not stop you from feeling fear. I would argue that it’s unreasonable to make it someone else’s responsibility that you never feel fear. We all feel fear for different reasons, and sometimes we are the only ones who can manage that.

For example, I’m thinking of people who fear me because of the color of my skin. That’s not on me to try and eliminate that fear. Similarly, I don’t think it’s on people in the workplace to eliminate all sources of fear, because some of these fears are about that person’s lens: how they view the world, their experiences, and what they’re carrying into the room.

So what is it?

Psychological safety is about the belief that you can take an interpersonal risk and you won’t be shunned or punished. The research says that organizations with higher psychological safety perform better, and it’s because people can name mistakes. They’re able to learn more and have a learning orientation, which improves the work.

Now, one of the key words in what psychological safety is: risk. The risk is still there, and risks are not void of fear. Risk can be scary.

The zip line

When I was a kid, I was on a camping trip, and we did a ropes course. I remember part of the ropes course was a zip line. Now, I’m a little bit afraid of heights, so when I was standing on the platform to step off, I remember being terrified. But eventually, I did step off the platform, because I had a harness and had been convinced that it would make me safe.

Psychological safety is kind of like that. The risk you’re taking (to point out a mistake, to admit a mistake, to ask questions when you’re learning, to push back on power, things like that) can still feel a little nerve-wracking. You will still have those feelings of fear. But you do it anyway, because you know you have a harness.

Psychological safety is that harness.

Psychological safety allows you to say the thing, even though it’s scary. And when a team has psychological safety, folks know they can take the leap. The safety harness catches them, and the team is better because they leaped.

I’m curious: what are some risks you’ve taken even though they felt scary? What did you learn from that experience?

Leave a comment

She told the story of enslaved Africans who leapt off a slave ship and ran into the hills toward freedom.

The story absolutely fascinated me, especially the moment right before they jumped. They knew what slavery would mean: horrific harm, the stripping away of their names, their languages, their cultural practices. Total dehumanization. What they didn't know was what waited in those hills. Would there be safety? Food? Shelter? Anyone at all?

They didn't know. And they leapt anyway.

Then they built something. Communities of protection and sustenance. Communities where families stayed together. Communities that passed down cultural practices and guarded their own dignity.

Down the rabbit hole

This story really affected me, so I went down the rabbit hole as one does (hyper-fixation, anyone?) to learn more. I read about Maroon communities across the Americas, including here in the United States. Some lived high in the hills. Some used the land itself as protection, settling in swamps and other places enslavers couldn't easily reach. Some waged war, defeating their would-be enslavers, carving a place in the world that allowed them to defend their right to exist.

The more I read, the more I wondered: were there other examples of freedom communities in other places around the globe, throughout time?

We're often told that hierarchy is just human nature. That oppressive hierarchy is the only way humans know how to live together. I've never believed that. And once I started looking for examples, I found stories across centuries and continents of people living in ways that challenged oppressive systems.

Take the Beguines, women in medieval Europe who refused the idea that a woman had to be governed by a man, whether a husband or the men in the Church. Instead of getting married or becoming nuns, these women built communities of their own, where women could simply be. They found ways to support and protect themselves. They even pooled their resources so more women could get free, too.

Ancestral blueprints

The more I learned, the more stories like these started to feel like blueprints. Ancestral blueprints for finding our freedom, and protecting it, together.

So I started Subversive Dreams, a series of conversations to share the stories I was finding and ask what these ancestors can teach us about our own quest for collective liberation.

Exploring these stories has shifted my own liberatory practice. They gave me a way to think about that first step, the terrifying leap off the ship, and what it looks like in my own work. I learned that boundaries can be a form of solidarity. These stories showed me how to move through conflict without destroying relationships.

Subscribe

Walking in their footsteps

They're also why I'm creating Subversive Sojourns.

The Sojourns are a six-month embodied journey to learn from these blueprints and find our own paths to freedom. Together, we'll:

• Explore our own sovereignty, and how sovereignty is the first step toward solidarity with others

• Look at what scares us about life "in the hills," about living in alternative ways of being

• Untangle ourselves from the oppressive systems that keep us from leaping

• Get more grounded in our own worthiness, so that whatever system we're in, we know we are divine

And we'll do it in real life, in community, walking in the footsteps of the people who came before us and asking what their lessons mean for our lives now.

A little weird, and very aligned

At first, it felt a little weird to put these ideas out into the world. It feels less weird now.

My work has always been about helping people learn how to be in solidarity with each other. I help people examine the stories they tell themselves, the ones that keep them stuck in conflict and unable to move forward together at work. Exploring ancestral stories of solidarity feels like the same work. It gives people stories from our ancestors to replace the stories in their heads, reminding us that third ways are possible.

These stories give me hope. I believe these stories can help us remember that operating in oppressive hierarchy is NOT the only way of being. We have reimagined the world before, and we can reimagine it again. These stories remind us what's possible if we're willing to take that first leap off the ship, and run for the hills together toward our collective liberation.

So I'm curious: what ancestral stories inspire you? Which ones remind you that there are other ways to live?

Comment

So I try to start any new process with my own intentions. When I begin managing a new team, for example, I first ask what I want people to feel and experience when I manage them. Then I build the systems and structures that match that intention.

My intentions direct me. They show me which actions to take and which ones not to take. When I remember them while I’m creating, I get more discerning. They ground me and move me toward my vision and desires. Then I create, and what I create aligns with my intentions.

Like magic.

But so is attention.

Intentions are like magic… and so is our attention. Our brains work overtime to find whatever we’re looking for. We see more of what we already believe is true. And we can choose where to point our attention, so that what we’re looking for shows up.

I learned this during a 30-day yoga challenge. I wanted more love in my life, so I asked the universe to show me examples of love all around me. And that’s what I saw. Everywhere.

Attention can reinforce what we believe. It can also help us believe something new.

The weird thing I’m making

I’ve been shifting my work toward things that feel more creative, joyful, and beautiful: things connected to travel, to luxury, and to learning from ancestral blueprints. And honestly, I’ve been worried about whether I can make a living doing something that feels this weird.

The Subversive Sojourns feel especially weird to put into the world. A sojourn is a six-month embodied journey to learn from ancestral stories so we can create the world we want to see.

I created them after hearing the story of the Maroons: enslaved Africans who fled plantations and ran into the hills.

I am absolutely fascinated by that choice. Imagine choosing to run into the hills. You don’t know what’s up there. You don’t know if there’s food, or water, or shelter, or community. You don’t know if you’ll be safe.

They ran anyway. And they built the communities they wanted to see.

Slavery meant losing power, being subjugated and harmed, and being stripped of cultural practices. The communities the Maroons built let them share power, establish their own sovereignty, protect and care for one another, and keep their cultural practices alive. They created the opposite of the oppression they had escaped.

For me, this story is proof. Proof that we can create liberatory communities and ways of being, even in a world that tells us the only option is oppressive hierarchy. And stories like this exist all over the world, throughout history.

The sojourns exist to help us remember that third ways are possible, and that our ancestors have done this before and left us blueprints.

Asking to be shown

Still, working with ancestral blueprints in embodied ways, where people travel to places and witness liberatory stories, feels weird and a huge departure from the work I’m known for. And that feeling makes it hard to see how I could become a living doing my dream (albeit weird) work.

So I did what I did on that yoga mat. I asked the universe to show me examples of people making a living doing really weird things. I was basically asking my brain to pay attention.

Y’all. They were everywhere. They still are.

Seeing them has given me the courage to keep going. I’m still scared, and that’s true too. I don’t know what’s in the hills.

But my intentions and my attention are helping me create the world I want to see.

Like magic.

A small practice for today: What intention do you want to set for something you’re starting? And what would you ask to be shown?

Leave a comment

I don’t know about you, but my life doesn’t have a whole lot of frolic. So Keynes got this wrong. As technology advanced, we worked more.

The New York Times recently fed his writing into an AI model and interviewed the resulting avatar. (Part of me is giving the NYT the side eye because they put a dead man’s whole body of work into a machine without his consent? But I digress.) They asked what he thought of AI. He said this might not go well for people. The reason wasn’t the economics or the changing jobs. It was that our self-worth is so tied to work and to what we produce that a world where that labor isn’t required could send us into an existential crisis.

That idea resonates a lot. Untangling my worth from my labor, and from the outcomes of my labor, is a big part of my own liberatory practice. It’s hard. Those beliefs are deeply ingrained.

I think it’s ingrained on purpose. Capitalism needs us to over-labor, so that when technology makes us more efficient, we don’t rest. We just produce more, and there’s more to extract. For that to work, we have to believe in the system. Many of us were taught that if you don’t work, you don’t eat, and that productive people are good people and those who don't work hard aren’t worthy. Idle hands are the devil's workshop, after all.

I think the coming technological changes will reshape the labor market, which makes now the time to start disentangling. Some of that is personal work. Some of it is collective work for teams.

At work, we attach people’s value to their output. Our standards for being “the best” require over-laboring. We use coercive tools that create fear and push people to overproduce. Our evaluations come down to someone’s perception of your work, which is prone to bias, but that’s a whole other post.

I often think: y’all are doing too much. The grand scheme of life isn’t about most of what we measure at work. What if, instead of trying to be the best, we were just making cool stuff together because we get to? And we found delight in being together and creating? What if we had more sense of play in our labor? What if we stopped over-evaluating each other?

To enter this new world well, we’ll need to do the personal disentangling. We’ll also need to change how we relate to each other and how our systems treat people at work.

So I’m curious. How are you preparing for this transition? And what if we embraced mediocrity? Constant growth and excellence are harming us and the planet. What would it look like to be enough?

Comment

Then I pulled oracle cards, which I also do every morning. Today I pulled from my Oshun deck. I've been studying the Black Madonna in the Black Madonna Freedom School, hosted by the great Dr. Christena Cleveland, and one of the things I keep learning is how many examples there are of the Divine Feminine as a Black woman EVERYWHERE. Oshun is one of them.

The cards I pulled were the exact same message I had just received. Same message. Same order.

I was so overwhelmed by it that all I could feel was this sense of being cherished and loved by the Divine. And then I got a little nudge: you should share this on Substack. And I said, oh my God, no. That is the most woo I could possibly go.

Subscribe

And then I realized that's exactly why I needed to share it.

So I'm sharing it with you, in case it's helpful at all. I pulled four cards, and the picture is here: the Magi, the Voice Chakra, Healing Sage, and Overflows. That was, literally, the message I received.

I'm just feeling really held by the Divine today. And I hope you have a spiritual practice, whatever it may be, that supports you feel that same connection.

Comment

Share

Practicing being seen. Practicing being vulnerable. Taking those little tiny steps to try every day. And something came up for me that I hadn't put words to before.

Some of the root of my fear comes from how six-year-old me was treated while she was learning in school. I had a teacher who was not kind to me. When I made a mistake, she would berate me in front of everyone. I think that's the moment six-year-old me learned the lesson: taking baby steps and making mistakes in public makes you unsafe.

Fifty-one-year-old me is still carrying that.

What I'm realizing now is that what six-year-old me needed wasn't to be told to be braver. Or that sticks and stones will break her bones but names will never hurt her. She needed to learn that she is precious. That her mistakes are beautiful, too. That she is someone to be protected, treasured, delighted in.

Subscribe now

Think about what it's like to watch a baby take their first steps. When you see those videos of parents watching it happen, they are absolutely over the moon. It's one of the most joyful things in the world to see that little person try. Sometimes she falls down. She gets back up. She keeps going. And every tiny, wobbly step is progress, and every single step is celebrated.

That's the gaze I want to practice under. I want to center the gaze of an adoring parent. I want to center the gaze of people who think all of me is delightful. I don't have to center the gaze of people who don’t delight in me anymore. I will be safe decentering them.

So today I'm reminding six-year-old me: you are a delight. You can take the steps. You can learn. You can make mistakes. And some people will still delight in you. And some won’t. But I want her to know that I find her delightful. And that’s probably the most important delight for me to witness.

I'm curious about you. What comes up when you read this? And where did you learn that making mistakes made you unsafe?

Leave a comment

Befriend the word polarize.

That word, befriend, is unexpected. It's almost like an embrace. It's more than just acceptance. It's about being bold enough to say something polarizing. To say something consequential.

When I think about my own liberatory practice, and my desire to be more firm in my sovereignty, befriending the word polarize seems like an important step.

So here's a question: what haven't you said because you didn't want to polarize?

Subscribe

For me, the polarizing statement is this. I think all of this striving for growth, all of this striving to be the best, is the root of so much harm. It's rooted in trying to get external validation. And I think trying to make our companies or our teams "the best" contributes to our disconnection.

My big question is why?

I don't think growth and perfectionism are why our souls decided to incarnate on this planet.

What would it be like to focus on play, and on creating together, without the striving?

Maybe we strive for collective joy.

That's my controversial, polarizing idea. What do you think?

Comment

The people building AI just asked the government to help them slow down.

Over the weekend, the CEO of Anthropic published a long essay saying the industry is moving too fast and needs to pace itself. Within hours, the heads of OpenAI and xAI said they agreed. And then, almost in the same breath, came the caveat: to actually do it, they'd need government support.

This is truly nuts. These are the people with their hands on the accelerator. Nobody is forcing the pedal down. They set the pace. They could slow down tomorrow morning before their first meeting. And yet the message is: we want to slow down, and woe is me, we can't do it without government intervention.

I've heard people say this is really about antitrust waivers, so the companies can coordinate without getting sued. Which is probably true. My own read is that it's about money, that they want public financing so slowing down doesn't cost them their edge or their margins. Either way, the story underneath is the same one. They've named a value out loud and then explained why they can't act on it without help.

Its completely infuriating. These people are saying they're building Skynet IRL and they can't stop themselves. It's also a fascinating lesson about competing commitments.

Two commitments, one in the front seat, the other in the back in the blindspot controlling the steering wheel.

There's a real, stated commitment: build AI that doesn't harm humanity. And sitting right next to that commitment is an unstated one: win the race, keep growing, stay ahead, hit their financial goals and maximize shareholder wealth.

No one explicitly says the second commitment takes precedence. In fact, many would deny that prioritization.

But the thing about that the second commitment; it doesn't have to be.

When the two collide, the stated commitment loses. Every time. Then everyone stands around wondering why the thing they said they wanted keeps not happening, and they reach for an outside force to break the tie.

We all have a version of this.

The rest we say we need, and the calendar that never reflects it.

The conversation with a team member that we keep rehearsing and keep not having.

The boundary we announce in January and quietly abandon by March.

The delegation we swear we'll do right but we have to wait until this one project ships.

Like most of us, you probably have a whole list. And if you're anything like me, you've spent real energy being frustrated with yourself about it.

Why willpower keeps failing you

I learned about competing commitments through the Immunity to Change framework, and it reorganized how I understand my own stuck places.

Before that, my default explanation for the gap between what I said I wanted and what I actually did was some flavor of I'm not disciplined enough. Try harder. Wake up earlier. Make a better system. That's the story a lot of us were handed, and it's the story that keeps us on the hamster wheel.

The framework offers a different explanation. The gap is protection.

The second commitment, the hidden one, is guarding something. It's usually guarding you from a fear so old and so familiar that you've stopped noticing it as fear. Being seen as unreliable. Being replaced. Being the one who let people down. Losing your place. Losing control. Being ordinary.

So when I don't take the rest I say I need, my unstated commitment might be: never let anyone think I'm not carrying my weight. When I don't have the hard conversation, the hidden commitment might be: stay the person everyone finds easy to work with. Those commitments have kept me safe in rooms where safety wasn't guaranteed. They deserve some respect. Think of them as a bodyguard who never got the memo that the danger has passed.

The thing standing between you and what you want has been protecting you the whole time.

And until you name what it's protecting, the first commitment doesn't stand a chance. You can't out-discipline a bodyguard. You have to have a conversation with it.

Doing the work on myself

I use this framework on myself whenever I feel like I'm feeling stuck and can't seem to change my behavior. Here's a peek into a live one I'm working on myself.

My stated commitment: I want to be more visible with my new work. I want to launch joyful nourishing events that support people learn to be in solidarity with their community and themselves.

I've built something I believe in, and I want it in front of the people it's for. I say this out loud, often, to anyone who asks.

What I actually do: I sit on posts. I soften the bold claim before it goes out. I tell myself I need one more week to get the framing right. I share the safe version and keep the real version in a draft folder. If you looked only at my behavior, you'd have a hard time believing the commitment was real.

The uncomfortable part is asking what I'm afraid would happen if I did the opposite. If I put the boldest version of this work into the world, unhedged, I'm afraid people will think I'm not good enough to pull this work off. That they won't think I'm not worth giving money to.

What I'm afraid of is some sort of identity collapse.

If people read about my ideas and don't want to flow money energy to me. And if that's true then it would prove I'm not capable, and the version of myself I've built comes apart.

So there it is. My hidden commitment: I am committed to prevent challenging what I believe about my self. And that commitment has been steering the car. Every softened post, every extra week, every draft that never left the folder was that commitment doing its job, protecting me from a collapse I've decided I can't survive.

Underneath it sits the big assumption: if I let the outside world react to the real thing, I won't be able to hold myself together. Written out like that, I can see it for what it is. A belief. An assumption. Something I can test.

So I will test it. Small experiments, low stakes. I post the unsoftened line and notice I'm still here the next morning. I let a piece go out with the claim I was afraid of and sit with whatever comes back, and I watch my nervous system discover that it can hold more than it thought. Every experiment gives the bodyguard a little more evidence that it can stand down.

Every time I do this work, I find that the thing I was calling a discipline problem was actually a loyalty problem. I was being loyal to an old fear. Naming it doesn't make it vanish, but it does put me back in the driver's seat.

Back to the Broligarchs

Which brings me back to the AI companies, and why I don't think government support is going to fix this for them.

Their hidden commitment is guarding something enormous: the fear of being second, of being obsolete, of pouring billions into a race and watching someone else cross the line. As long as that fear goes unnamed, they will keep saying they want to slow down and keep finding reasons they can't. An outside rule might slow the pedal for a while. It won't change what's driving.

The same is true for you. No calendar app, no accountability partner, no productivity system is going to override a commitment you haven't admitted you're keeping. Those tools work beautifully once you know what you're actually protecting. Before that, they're just another thing to feel bad about not doing.

So here's your permission, if you need it: you're allowed to stop calling it a discipline problem. You're allowed to get curious instead of ashamed. The gap between what you say you want and what you do is information, and it's some of the most useful information you have.

What's yours? What's the thing you keep saying you want that keeps not happening?

And if you want company while you dig for it, I'm running my Competing Commitments session again soon. It's an hour of guided work to surface the hidden commitment and the assumption underneath it, so you leave knowing what you're actually up against.

Put your name here and I'll send you the details as soon as the date is set: https://form.typeform.com/to/SRKLVFn8

With you in it,

Alli

The date itself always hits me in the gut. But this year feels different. Maybe it’s because of the number 25 associated with something that feels (and will probably always feel) like recent memory. There are people in the workplace now whose memories of that day were made entirely out of other people’s memories, other people’s stories, other people’s pictures. They weren’t born yet.

I’ll never forget how blue the sky was. It made it all feel so surreal.

I’ll never forget what I felt as we found out, as we watched the towers come down. I’ll never forget how I got home that day, and how scared I was.

And I’ll never forget the message I got before any of it happened.

I was walking to work, looking up at that blue, blue sky. I think I was listening to music. I was just happy, because the morning was so beautiful. And a voice came out of nowhere and said:

You’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna be safe. You’re gonna be all right.

It shocked me. I stopped in my tracks. I hadn’t been thinking about anything at all, and there it was. I was so confused.

Once it started, I understood what that voice had been talking about. I remember wondering (and still wonder) why everyone didn’t get to be safe.

I will never forget the people who died that day. 2,977 people, lost to hatred and domination. Twenty-five years later, I still grieve them. I grieve the lives lost. I grieve the innocence lost. I grieve what we are still learning about the dust in the air and what it did to people’s bodies in ways no one could have imagined then. Lives changed forever, especially for the people who were right there.

I don’t have anything profound to say today. I just wanted to say that I remember. And I promise never to forget.

It’s the least I can do to honor the people we lost on September 11, 2001.

Leave a comment

Then it began.

T-Pain remixed it. So did the house producer Kerri Chandler. T-Pain opened his set at Red Rocks with his version this past June. Musicians from all over started adding their own instruments, their own covers, their own layers to a minute of music a guy made in his room and posted before he had decided whether it was any good. Ethan seemed genuinely stunned by all of it. He said the song doesn’t even feel like his anymore, that the internet owns it now.

Last week he released the extended version. Y’all. It is a masterpiece.

All that beauty came from an unvarnished idea. The song exists because he committed to a daily act of creation that he would share with the world before it was ready. Perfectionism be damned.

Fear has held me back from writing and sharing my ideas. I learned young, from teachers, that perfectionism was the price of safety, the thing that kept harm away from me. Care was never on the table. I did not receive much care from my teachers. I received an understanding that falling short of it would cost me.

That script is still running. And the thing is, I have lived 50+ years now, and the evidence against it has been piling up the whole time. I have put ideas into rooms and lived through it. I have been wrong in public and lived through it. I am safe here. I have been safe here for a long while. And still I hold onto the story that I am not. So it is time to challenge it.

One way I am practicing my own liberation is to rewrite that internal story, with a somewhat daily practice of my own.

Subscribe now

I can’t promise I’ll be perfect. I can’t promise I’ll always have something to say, or that what I say will be deeply profound. I can’t promise I’ll do it every day, or that a day 56 will come out of it.

What I can promise is to put my ideas into the world. The half-baked ones, the brilliant ones, and the ones that land with a thud.

Because who knows. This practice might produce my own reckless and arranged.

Leave a comment

In college, I sat on a board. I was responsible for one of those roles where things either get done, or they visibly don’t. I remember asking questions in a meeting, gathering what I needed, and someone laughed warmly and said some version of: don’t worry about it, Alli can make it happen.

I glowed. Of course I did. It was praise.

It was also a contract. People knowing that if a thing was handed to me, it would get done, on time, no matter what. Over time, this contract became about more than my reputation. It became a fundamental part of my identity. If I say I’m going to do something, I do it. By hook or by crook.

And underneath the identity, if I’m honest, was a quieter arithmetic I absorbed long before college: if I do exceptional work, on time, then I am exceptional. And if I am exceptional, I am seen as valuable, and therefore, I’ll be safe.

Stay in the room. Stay in the institution. Stay safe. Even when it costs you.

Subscribe now

Astrology friends will know what I mean when I say this is my Chiron return story. Chiron is the wounded healer, and when it circles back around, it brings you face to face with the oldest wound so you can finally tend it instead of performing around it. My wound has a name, and its name is prove your worth to earn your place. So much of this season has been unlearning the message that my value lives in my output, that safety must be earned and re-earned by the deadline, every deadline, forever.

This month, life handed me a pop quiz on all of it.

The ta-da that didn’t come

Every month my newsletter has a theme, and I usually don’t pick my monthly theme so much as listen for it. It shows up in the music I’m playing, in my spiritual practice, in what I witness day to day. Early in July I knew August would be It’s Time, and it felt right, because my colleague, Stephanie Zhong and I were about to launch the very first Subversive Sojourn, a full-day experience in Philadelphia I’d been gestating for more than a year. It’s Time felt like the heralding of the big ta-da. Look what we made.

How does the saying go? Make plans, and God laughs.

Well, late last month, Stephanie found out she has cancer. She’s going on medical leave, and together we decided to reschedule the Sojourn for a future date. The pace of the ta-da no longer served us. Our needs shifted. We slowed down.

I was glad we put care and humans first. I was proud of how Stephanie and I showed up for each other in a really scary moment. I wouldn’t choose anything else.

And still. Underneath the clarity, I felt embarrassed.

This thing I’ve been talking about FOREVER was delayed again. Would people think I don’t have what it takes? Would they see us as flaky? Would they still come when we reschedule? What does it mean that we didn’t deliver on time?

Sit with that phrase for a second. Deliver on time. Like a package. Like a factory order.

That’s when I recognized the shame for what it was. It was the old contract flaring up, the one that says my worth is proven by what I produce inside the hour. The college kid who glowed at “Alli can make it happen” was terrified that the spell had broken.

And you want to know the part that humbles me most? The date itself. We picked August 28 because I was already going to be in Philadelphia that week and didn’t want to buy two plane tickets. That’s it. That’s the origin of the sacred deadline I was ashamed of missing. A date chosen out of scarcity and travel logistics, which my nervous system then treated like a verdict.

I tell leaders this all the time. Most deadlines are dates somebody picked out of their behinds, under some constraint everyone has since forgotten. Then we fuse with them. Moving the date starts to feel like an assessment of us, proof of something, when it was never more than a Tuesday somebody randomly circled. If we can’t move things for the humans, we haven’t unlearned the wiring that ties our value to the clock. And that wiring gets in the way of liberatory practice every single time.

So I did what I do. I went looking for where the idea that collapsed time and economic value came from.

Enclosure

Time is the most frequently used noun in the English language. That fact alone should make us suspicious.

Before industrialization, most people worked by task and by season. You planted when the ground was ready. You harvested when the crop was. Time had flow.

Then factory owners needed workers who believed an hour was a thing you could own, and they trained them into it, with bells and fines and timekeepers and time sheets. What enclosure did to land, the factory bell did to time. It fenced time in, stripped out its relational nature, and cut it into priced units.

These beliefs are hard-coded into English. We spend time and save time and waste time and run out of time. Time is money. Productivity, a measure of how labor uses time to produce, gets treated like an economic holy grail.

The machinery goes even deeper than the language. In finance, the foundational method for valuing a company, a project, an entire enterprise, is literally called the time value of money. I learned it in business school and spent years of my career running those models. The core assumption is right in the name: a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow, and everything gets discounted back through time to tell you what it’s worth. We built our whole system of deciding what has value on top of the clock. When I say worth and time got fused, it’s literally in the spreadsheets.

Capitalism reduced time to something that keeps us beholden to a system that ties our worth to how much we make inside a given hour.

Somebody can’t sell you your own hours until you stop believing time is disconnected to our relationship to each other and the planet.

And here is what I want you to notice: the shame I felt about rescheduling wasn’t a personal glitch. It was the system working as designed. A woman prioritizes her friend’s life over a launch date and feels embarrassed. That very fucked up feeling was indoctrinated to keep me connected to an oppressive system of extraction.

And one thing I know about systems of oppression is they need constructs to make us believe ideas are factual laws of the universe. So what if we dismantle the construct of time?

Everywhen

Physics, it turns out, has been having its own trouble with time.

In their best attempts to unify quantum mechanics and gravity, physicists found that time drops out of the equations entirely. Carlo Rovelli, who helped build the theory of loop quantum gravity, argues that time is not fundamental, that reality is a network of events and relations, and that the flow we feel is human and perspectival.

(Now, if you’re a physicist who’s really into quantum theory, don’t at me. I know this is a reductive way of talking about it, because your girl is clearly not a physicist. I still don’t fully get the Schrödinger’s cat thing. That cat sounds dead to me. But I digress. 🙃)

Physicists went looking for language. Rovelli found footing for his relational quantum mechanics in Nāgārjuna, a second-century Buddhist philosopher who taught that nothing exists in itself, independent of everything else. David Bohm got stuck because English couldn’t describe what his work was finding. He tried to invent a new form of English, then learned such languages already existed, and sat down with Blackfoot, Cree, and Mi’kmaq elders whose worldview of everything-in-motion matched his physics better than his own tongue did.

The way we talk about time is not universal. It never was.

The Murrinhpatha people in Australia have the everywhen, the Dreaming, a sacred time that was and is. All that has happened is still happening now.

The Aymara in the Andes place the past in front of you and the future at your back. It shows up in their words and their gestures. The past is known and visible. The future is unseen, so it stands behind you.

In East Africa, the philosopher John Mbiti described sasa and zamani. Sasa is the lived present, holding its own short past and future. Zamani is the deep past, the storehouse where all events flow. Ancestors are contemporaries. The living-dead stay in the sasa as long as the living remember their names.

Your name keeps you here.

In Pormpuraaw, when Kuuk Thaayorre speakers are asked to put events in order, they lay them out east to west with the sun, no matter which way their bodies face. Time belongs to the land and the turning of the planet, not to the self.

The web of connection

One structure keeps repeating across these worldviews. Time is not an empty container that individuals own and spend. Time is made of relationships, and it belongs to a web of connection.

And communities that hold time in relational ways tend to hold power differently, too.

Maslow (the hierarchy-of-needs Maslow) visited the Siksika in the 1930s expecting to confirm that social order required domination and subordination. Instead, he found a community more deeply grounded in care than anything he’d seen at home. Prestige came from giving wealth away. The Blackfoot worldview begins with collective actualization, cultural perpetuity across generations, with individual growth as a means rather than the point.

The Aymara hold land collectively and practice ayni, structured reciprocity, with leadership rotating as an obligation of service. Many Aboriginal communities have radical sharing obligations woven through kinship. In East Africa, the social structure is the time structure. Whole generations move through life stages together, and elders sit in council.

I want to be honest here: relational time does not hand you liberation on its own. Hindu cyclical cosmology lived alongside the caste system for millennia, and that view of time was used to justify brutal hierarchy. Any way of holding time can be bent toward domination.

But commodified, linear time was built for extraction. Relational time keeps the collective’s claims visible: our obligations to ancestors and descendants and land and each other. Which is precisely why extractive systems had to take it apart first.

Ursula K. Le Guin reminded us that capitalism’s power seems inescapable, and so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

These constructs that govern our lives are just that. Constructs. We can build something that serves us better.

The table

Which brings me back to the shame.

I’ve realized this entrepreneurship journey has been one long unfurling of the ways capitalism extracts from me, and the ways I’ve internalized that extraction and kept myself plugged into the machine. The college student who learned that delivering on time was the price of staying? She built a whole life and career on that clock. That clock governed her nervous system.

If I’m serious about collective liberation, I have to stop sifting my value, and the planet’s value, through units of time. I have to release the shackles, including the ones I’ve been polishing and calling a work ethic.

Event time puts relationships first. Things happen because the people are there, not because a clock said so.

That’s how you get to choose each other. And I’m convinced that choosing each other is the whole point of this life.

Things happen when they’re supposed to happen. A dream deferred is not a dream denied. Langston Hughes asked what happens to a dream deferred, and this month I got my own small answer: sometimes it rests. Sometimes it waits for its people.

Sometimes being on time means you don’t start anything until everyone is at the table.

We’re waiting for Stephanie. We’ll wait for you, too.

If this stirred something

Here’s your permission, if you need it: you are allowed to be someone whose worth was never on the clock. You are allowed to reschedule the ta-da. The people who are yours will still come.

The Subversive Sojourn is still coming, just not on the calendar we first drew. Stephanie and I are choosing a new date together, and I want you there when we land on it.

The simplest way to be in this with me is to join the Sojourners Circle, our new free community where we practice these ideas together, more deeply and interactively than a newsletter allows. When you join, you can also raise your hand for the Sojourn, and you’ll be the first to hear when we set the date.

Join the Sojourners Circle here.

Remember, time is abundant. Be in time in a way that connects you with your people.

With time,
Alli

Leave a comment

You feel it when you are holding a team together through something the news keeps making worse. When the ground you were standing on turns out to be sand. When the institutions you were told would be steady as rocks crumble like a house made of straw. You keep showing up. You keep being competent. And underneath the competence, there is a question you do not say out loud: what am I actually supposed to do with this?

I have been sitting with that question too. And lately, I keep finding my way back to a single room in Philadelphia.

In the 1850s, there was a room in this city where a person could walk in free and walk out enslaved.

After the Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850, an enslaver only had to send an affidavit claiming ownership, and a judge decided whether to believe it. The judge earned ten dollars for ruling in the enslaver’s favor and five for ruling in favor of the Black person standing in front of him. You can guess how that math usually resolved. And the Black person, either formerly enslaved or born free, was forbidden from speaking a single word in their own defense.

Those hearings were held in the same room where the Declaration of Independence was signed. The room where a nation declared all men free was used to march free people into shackles, their mouths forced shut.

This is the hypocrisy that moved Frederick Douglass in 1852 to ask a celebrating nation what the Fourth of July meant to the enslaved. His answer was unsparing. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. He called a spade a spade.

And lest we imagine the founders were merely bystanders to this: 41 of the 56 signers enslaved people. That’s 73%. Basically 3 out 4 of the founders thought it was okay to own humans and force them to labor. Thomas Jefferson placed a newspaper ad in 1769 seeking the return of a man who had freed himself, whom Jefferson had enslaved. Seven years later, Jefferson picked up his pen and wrote the most famous sentence about freedom in our history. “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” I suppose all meant something different to him than it does to me.

The truth is this country was built for the right to make money. The colonists’ great grievance was the Crown taking too large a cut of it. Racism and capitalism, held hands at the founding. If you were a Black person, the system was not designed for you to thrive. It was designed to keep you in chains.

Subscribe now

These stories make me angry. Some days they enrage me.

And beside the anger, there is something else. It comes from the people the system was built to crush, who refused the choices they were given and built something else entirely.

The world they built in the shadow

In the same city where those hearings stole people’s freedom, the Black community built a world of its own. Mutual aid. Schools. Churches. Care.

In 1838, the Black community conducted their own census, counting tens of thousands of Black Philadelphians woven into the life of the city. Black people owning their own data, using it to make a case for their own belonging, at the very moment the Pennsylvania legislature was preparing to strip Black men of the vote. The census was an argument. Look at all these people. Look at how we are part of this place.

The legislators disenfranchised Black men anyway.

They lost the vote. And they kept building. The same community fed and clothed and hid freedom seekers and moved them north toward something like safety. Some of that work happened in the shadows. Some of it happened in plain sight.

Henrietta Bowers Duterte became the country's first woman undertaker after her husband died and left her his business. Her funeral processions carried more than the dead. She hid freedom seekers inside coffins, dressed them in Northern fashions, sometimes dressed them as another gender entirely so no one would recognize their faces, and walked them straight through the streets in full view of everyone.

William Still kept records. When freedom seekers reached Philadelphia, he asked their names, where they had come from, who their people were, and he wrote it all down, because he believed those records could one day reunite the families slavery had torn apart. He knew this in his body. He once sat across from a man telling his story and realized he was listening to his own brother. He also knew those same records could be a death sentence in the wrong hands, so he hid them in a Black cemetery, in a barn, and kept them safe. His records would become the source of the book The Underground Railroad.

None of this was possible without an alternative community that was already in place before the crisis arrived.

The coffins, the records, the routes north, the money, the safe houses, the people who knew which doors would open. None of it could be improvised in the emergency. It had to already exist. The refuge was built in the ordinary time, in the quiet years, so that it was standing and ready when the worst day came.

This is what the people in the Maroon Communities understood, too. The communities of people who escaped enslavement and built free, self-governing worlds in the swamps and mountains did not wait for permission or for safety to arrive. They built the world they needed in the places power could not reach, before they needed it, so there was somewhere to run to that was already alive.

Readiness is not something you summon in the emergency. It is something you built, in the quiet, long before it arrived.

Power will fight back. Get ready.

Years ago, when I was a COO, I gave a presentation on our DEI strategy, and one line got picked up and passed around the building: power will fight back, get ready.

I knew this because I was living it. I was building a real, comprehensive, anti-racist DEI strategy, and I was building it quietly on purpose. I told my boss that by the time the powers-that-be understood what we were actually changing, it would be too late, because there would be more of us than there were of them. He laughed. He thought I was joking. I said it with a smile, and I was serious as a heart attack.

Share

As a Black woman in corporate America, I lived as both hyper-visible and invisible. Hyper-visible the moment there was a mistake to be found. Invisible when I was doing excellent work and no one was watching closely. I knew the invisibility would not last. Eventually, the pet becomes the threat. So, while I had invisibility, I used it like a superpower and got to work.

I was not wrong about power. Once it noticed the change, it did everything it could to shut the work down.

This is why I often tell people doing social change work not to tell all their business. Subversion gives you the superpower of invisibility, whether the work is hidden in the shadows or disguised in plain sight. It is the spiritual that carried a map. The capoeira that taught people to fight while it looked like dance. The compliance worn as a mask over refusal: the slowed labor, the misplaced thing, the careful performance of exactly what power wanted to see.

You do not have to do big, splashy things to be revolutionary. It can be the quiet things, hidden in the shadows and hidden in plain sight, that protect us and let us build worlds that actually hold.

Which brings me to a Christmas story

I was around nine. My brother was around seven. We had both quietly stopped believing in Santa, though our parents did not know that yet. One day they left us home alone, because it was the eighties and kids roamed the world solo like we were feral, and we did what any two Santa-doubters would do. We searched the house for evidence. We found it in my mother’s closet.

I peeked into the bag, saw a few of the gifts, felt that hot little thrill of being right, and walked away satisfied.

My brother stayed.

When I heard the garage door open, I ran back and found him sitting on the closet floor, having pulled a toy all the way out of the bag to play with it. “You have to put it back! Mommy’s home, put it back!”

Now, you already know a seven-year-old is not getting that toy back in the bag with any kind of care. So when my mother opened that closet, she knew what was up immediately. She told us, with great seriousness, that since we did not believe in Santa, we would not be getting any presents. At all.

I was bereft.

Lesson learned. (Don’t worry. The gifts were under the tree on the 25th, same as always. My parents just knew how to teach a hard lesson to their gullible children.)

My brother and I were clearly not ready for anybody’s subversion. We had no plan for getting in, getting out, or covering our tracks. We were children, so of course we didn’t. But the lesson is still true. The quiet work only works when you have prepared for it. Subversion falls apart without readiness. You have to be ready to hide before you ever need to.

So as this country marks its 250th birthday, with all its contradictions, I hope we prepare. To protect each other. To harbor the ones who need hiding. To give aid to the ones seeking freedom. Both in the shadows and in plain sight.

As the rapper Suga Free put it: if you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready.

You were never meant to face the hard season alone, scrambling to build a refuge in the middle of the storm. The work right now, in the ordinary days, is to build the world we will need before we need it. To find your people before the emergency. To know which doors will open. To make something quiet and real and strong enough to hold.

Stay ready, y’all.

Come witness these stories with me.

If these stories stirred something in you, here are a few ways we can continue to witness together.

On Friday, August 28th, I am hosting a Subversive Sojourn in Philadelphia. A full day of walking the streets where this history actually lived, with deep conversation, art, and a long, abundant dinner to close it out. We stand inside the story together, and we ask what it means to build the world we need, now, before we need it. If your spirit is saying yes, I truly hope you will join us.

And if you would rather start smaller, join us for Freedom Fridays, a series of conversations with my Sojourn cohost, Stephanie Zhong, exploring aspects of the theme Sovereignty and Solidarity.

We build the world we’ll need before we need it. Together.

With solidarity,
Alli

Leave a comment

I got up there and froze.

It was probably not even that high. I know that now. But with my toes hanging off the edge, it may as well have been the rim of the world. I was crying, like UGLY crying. The kind of crying where your whole body shakes. And the thing about a platform like that is there is no climbing back down. The only way down is to go down the zip line or to wait for someone to come up and carry you.

Everyone on the ground was cheering. My dad, the other dads, my friends, all of them calling up, “You can do it.” And I wanted to. I wanted so badly to be as brave as everyone looked. So I stood there and stared at my feet for five minutes that stretched out like thirty.

Then I let go.

The air came rushing over my face and through my hair, and I was laughing before I knew I’d started. I was flying. And I only got to fly because I let go of the platform.

I’m standing on a platform again. I’m grown now, and the fear is wearing a more sophisticated outfit, but it lives in the same place. I need to leave the platform, and I’m TERRIFIED.

The story I swallowed

For most of my career, the platform under my feet has been my competence.

I’ve been the strategic one. The one who’s good at math. The ops person, the HR person, the DEI person, the one who can get a whole room moving in the same direction. Some of that work I have genuinely loved. And some of it, especially the parts the market prizes most, the strategy decks and the operating plans, has never once made me feel alive. It pays. It earns respect. It has kept me safe. It has also quietly stolen my joy.

Somewhere along the way, I swallowed a story whole without chewing it: that the work which earns respect is the work that makes me worth something and able to put food on my table. And if I’m not the strategic one, I’m not valuable.

That is capitalism’s oldest sleight of hand, convincing you that your worth and your usefulness are the same thing. They were never the same thing. But the story goes down so early and so smooth that most of us spend years mistaking the platform for the ground.

Subscribe now

The platform was never as solid as I thought

The fear of leaving isn’t mostly about ego. I mean, there is absolutely some of that. I’ve often felt driven to prove to the people who underestimate me wrong. But that’s not the core of my fear. The fear underneath the fear is older and more primal than that. If I let go of this work, will I be able to provide for myself? Will I be able to take care of the people I love?

That is the real edge of the platform. Survival in capitalism.

When I think about Maroon Community stories about the enslaved people who leaped off the ship and ran into the hills, that is the part that stops my breath. They didn’t know what was up there. No guarantee of food, of shelter, of safety, of welcome. They only knew what they were not going to abide. To leap anyway, into hills you cannot see into, with your actual survival in the balance, is a kind of courage I’m only beginning to understand from my own experience.

A coach named something for me recently that I can’t stop turning over. She pointed out that the platform I’m so afraid to leave has already started to rot. The market for the work I’m supposed to do has shifted. For a Black woman, especially, in an economy bending the way this one is bending, with racism and misogynoir doing their steady work underneath it all, the so-called safe path is no longer providing the safety it promised.

So I might as well leap.

That reframe cracked something open in me. The choice was never really between safe and risky. The platform was never as solid as I let myself believe. Staying was never safe. It was just familiar. And familiar has a way of dressing up as safe until you mistake the two for the same thing.

Who moved my cheese

Early in my career, when I was tangled up in some work mess, my dad handed me a slim little book called Who Moved My Cheese. My dad doesn’t give advice. He hands you a book and lets you find your own way to the lesson. It took me until I was grown to catch what he was doing. (I see you, Daddy!)

The book is about mice in a maze. Every morning, the cheese is waiting in the same spot, and every morning, the mice trot through, find the cheese, and eat happily. Until one day, the cheese is gone. At first, the mice both return to the spot where the cheese is supposed to be. They discuss whether the cheese will come back. They console each other until one mouse wonders if the cheese has moved on. The other mouse plants himself in the corner to wait, certain it will come back, because this is where the cheese lives. The mouse that began to question its reality goes looking. You can guess which one finds the new cheese.

I used to read the waiting mouse as foolish. I don’t anymore. He isn’t foolish. He’s loyal. Loyal to a map that used to be true. Loyal to a promise adults told him when the mouse was little. And that kind of loyalty to something that no longer serves you is one of the most expensive things a person can carry into a changing world.

My platform is shaky. The cheese has moved. I want to be the mouse who goes looking when something no longer serves me.

Share Practicing Liberation

The hills

My ancestors left me a map for finding new cheese.

I’ve been sitting for a while now with the idea that the people who came before us left blueprints for building entire new worlds. It started with a story I heard from Tricia Hersey of the Nap Ministry, about the Maroon communities of the Americas. A slave ship reaches the shore. Some of the enslaved leap off, run into the hills, and build a community of their own. One where their culture is protected. Where their bodies are protected. Where there is care and belonging and rest. The exact opposite of everything the people on the slave ship intended to do.

The leap is the part I keep returning to. You decide, somewhere down in your body, I am running into those hills. You don’t know what’s waiting. You only know what you’re running from, and you know, bone deep, that something else has to be possible. Free or die, the way Harriet Tubman put it. This ain’t it, and I know there’s more.

That is audacious.

And that audacity is the inheritance nobody wrote into a will or anything formal. That audacity is waiting in our blood for us to remember who we are and who we are meant to be.

Audacity

We don’t usually say audacious as a compliment. We save it for the person who’s too big for their britches. The little fish carrying on like a big fish in a pond too large for it.

But consider the koi.

A koi grows only as big as the water it lives in. Born into a small pond, it stays small. Move it into a bigger pond, and it grows, though not all at once, and not on its own. The koi grows only when its body recognizes the bigger water around it. And that recognition comes only because the fish is already swimming in the new pond like it belongs there.

It has to do the work of being big before it gets to be big.

You have to do the work of being big before you ever get to be big.

That is the whole thing. It’s audacious to run into the hills. It’s audacious to build alternative economies the way free Black folks did in the 1800s, because the system they were handed was built for nothing but their harm. It’s audacious to gather hundreds of thousands of people on a Mall in Washington to speak about a freedom they did not yet have but knew, in their bones, was their birthright.

Audacity asks for a faith that looks a little delusional from the outside. Faith that if you do the work, the big thing you’re working toward is already on its way to meet you. You have to be the little fish who swims like a big fish, trusting the water will rise to meet the size you’re already living.

I’m choosing that kind of audacity. I’m stepping off the platform and trusting that I’ll fly.

You can fly, you can fly, you can fly!

You are allowed to stop confusing the familiar with the safe. You’re allowed to notice the platform has gone shaky under you and to say so out loud. You’re allowed to want work that makes you feel alive, and to treat that wanting not as a luxury but as information. You were not put here to spend your one life loyal to a map that isn’t really working out for you.

Run into the hills with me

In August, I’m doing something I’ve never done before, and it scares me in a good way.

I’m launching Subversive Sojourns, mini-retreats for recovering our ancestral blueprints. There is medicine in the past, and most of us were taught to walk right by it. A Sojourn is a full day spent gathering it back up. We go to a city where a freedom community built a third way, and we walk in their footsteps. We move into art making, where we process together what we’ve witnessed. The day stretches all the way to a long, slow dinner where the conversation turns toward what we want to build now. By the end, history isn’t behind glass anymore. It’s in your hands. Something you can use to make a new world.

The first one is in Philadelphia on August 28, co-hosted with the wonderful Stephanie Zhong. Philadelphia is the first place I lived as an adult after college, and it feels right to launch this chapter of my life in the city where I first practiced being a grown-up.

It feels tender to put this into the world. I’m not known for it. I’m a little scared of what people will think. That they’ll think I’m too big for my britches. For years I let external approval keep me safe and keep the platform steady. But you never find out if you can fly while you’re still gripping the platform.

If your body said yes while you were reading this, come leap with me. Subversive Sojourn, Philadelphia, August 28: details and registration

And if you’re not ready for a whole day, I still want to hear from you. What platform are you standing on that’s gone shaky under your feet?

Leave a comment

What might open up if you let yourself believe you could leap, and build an alternative timeline all your own?

You can. Your ancestors left blueprints too. All you have to do is believe you can fly.

We are all a reflection of the Divine. Move accordingly.

Go be audacious, y’all.

SXSW is one of my favorite events to attend each year. I love being around creators who are bringing their visions and dreams to life. I leave every year with sparks, connections, and new ideas about what I want to dream into the world. I go to feel for what innovations are being birthed into our world.

This year, almost every session had something to do with AI. Even the sessions that, on the surface, weren’t about AI were about AI. That makes sense when you think about it. Since GPT-3.5 debuted to the public in November 2022, it has been clear that AI will reshape the future of work. And as I listened to speaker after speaker describe their vision for how the world would transition, a picture started forming for me, underneath the words being said. Here’s what I heard in between the lines.

The robots are coming, y’all.

When you couple the vision for how large language models will change knowledge work with the anticipation of how robotics will affect physical jobs, the picture gets very clear. The people who benefit from extractive relationships between employers and employees have an intention, and that intention is to eliminate the need to pay for labor.

This is not a new move. Much of the wealth in the United States was created because property owners extracted as much as they could from labor that was, “free.” (Free labor from people that were not free is truly wild). Through stealing land from Indigenous people and stealing labor from enslaved Africans, property owners drove revenue straight to the bottom line. The love of money is a wicked root. The oligarchs of today are trying to replicate that model, and the intention I see now is a shift from extraction to abandonment.

Karen Hao, whose book Empire of AI went deep inside Sam Altman’s OpenAI, has argued that the CEOs of these AI companies are overpromising what AI will actually be able to do. At a SXSW 2026 panel called “Reclaiming our Humanity in the Age of AI”, she made this case alongside Timnit Gebru and John Palfrey, arguing that the utopia-and-apocalypse narratives about AI are “strategic distractions that serve to concentrate wealth and power.” She may be right. The timelines they’re selling may be more ambitious than what is possible. I’m less concerned about whether AI’s promises play out exactly as the companies claim. What I’m paying attention to is what they intend to do. And intentions are like magic. They set the shape of anything we create, even slowly, even imperfectly. And the intention I heard in Austin was unmistakable. The capital class intends to bounce.

The oligarchs have no plan to save us. Peter Thiel has been actively encouraging billionaires to abandon the Giving Pledge, and the broligarchs are doing just that. Even if the robots could usher in a utopia where none of us had to labor, and we could all share the bounty of the earth, the oligarchs would not be using their power to build that. Why else do you think they’re building bunkers and rocket ships to other planets? They intend for the rest of us to be the left behinds.

You might think there is a plan for a universal basic income. There isn’t. The government isn’t planning for that, and neither are these oligarchs. When you ask them about this, both sides give a Kanye shrug and change the subject. The structures most of us rely on to access resources are going to stop working the way we’re used to. Survival is no longer going to be paid for through the exchange of money for labor for most of us.

So the question I left Austin with was not, “Will AI take my job?” The question was, when the system for distributing resources stops working, what replaces it? And who gets to decide?

Subscribe now

People ask me this a lot when I talk with them about AI. What will replace it? What does it look like? I don’t have the full answer to that. I don’t know exactly what comes next. No one does.

What I know is that it is really easy to cling to what we know. When I talk with people about this, the response I hear most often is some version of, “There’s nothing else that works.” But what if that’s not true?

What if we release the constructs of capitalism and create something in abundance instead?

Capitalism is a way to share resources. That’s what we’ve been told is why it exists. Right now, the way we share those resources isn’t actually working for most of us. We do not have to replicate that. We do not have to carry forward the inequities it produced. We can build something completely new.

The oligarchs and the governments they control are not coming to save us. What if we are the ones we’ve been waiting for?

As our systems crumble, the easy answer, and the dangerous one, is that we rebuild the same thing. New technology at the center, same hierarchy around it. Same triangle, different apex. Humans are very good at this. We replicate the shapes we know.

Audre Lorde saw this coming. “The master’s tools,” she wrote in her 1979 address at the Second Sex Conference at NYU, “will never dismantle the master’s house.” You cannot build your way to liberation using the architecture of the thing you’re trying to leave. You just end up with a new version of the same house.

What if this moment, disorienting and formless and genuinely frightening, is actually an invitation to build something with a different skeleton entirely? What if instead of trying to reform what we know, we create something structurally new.

That question has been answered before. By people who had far less than we have and were up against far more. I want to tell you about them.

But first, I need to tell you about caterpillars.

We Are Not the Caterpillar Anymore

I am obsessed with caterpillars.

You probably remember learning in school that a caterpillar enters a chrysalis and comes out as a butterfly. But did you know that to get there, it has to melt into goo? Everything about it has to dissolve. Into what biologists describe as a protein-rich soup of dissolved tissue. Goo.

Can you imagine how terrifying that must be? The caterpillar is out there, crawling around, inching around, eating all the leaves, living its absolute best caterpillar life. It knows how its body works, it knows its role, it pretty much knows what tomorrow looks like. And then one day, BAM something shifts. Its body builds a shell around it. It is encased. It cannot move the way it used to move. And then it starts to dissolve.

Did its caterpillar parents warn it about this? Did anyone sit it down and say, “One day, everything you know is going to liquefy, and that will be completely normal?” Or does it just happen, mid-leaf, no warning, no roadmap? Kind of like perimenopause (IYKYK). Imagine if perimenopause had a surprise goo phase. Y’all. I would absolutely lose my proverbial shit.

I think about what it must feel like to be the caterpillar in that moment. The former self becoming unrecognizable. No map for what’s next. The complete loss of the only form you’ve ever known. I would be terrified. I know I would be.

And then something else starts happening inside the goo. Imaginal cells, which were dormant the entire time the caterpillar was being a caterpillar, activate. They find each other. The caterpillar’s own immune system attacks them at first, because they seem foreign, wrong, like a threat to what remains. But there are too many of them. They organize. Not into a better caterpillar.

Into something that has never existed in that form before.

We are in the goo.

That chapter of being the caterpillar is closing. We are the goo now. And I want you to hear this clearly, because I know how it feels right now. It’s giving the sky is falling. But what if to get to something better, we have to go through a process. The goo is that process.

Look around. People may be joking about empires falling on social media, but I think that’s in response to the feeling that the goo is rising. There’s a pervasive sense, across political lines, across industries, across generations, that the structures we assumed were permanent are crumbling. The hierarchies and practices that maintained themselves for decades, whether they served us or not, we knew how to navigate them. We had developed whole skill sets for surviving inside them, even when they hurt us. And now they’re dissolving. The ground that felt solid is turning to goo beneath us.

That disorientation is kicking my butt.

Most of what I see happening in organizations, institutions, and the public conversation is people trying to stabilize the caterpillar. Trying to get back to something recognizable. Trying to shore up the old form.

The caterpillar is gone. That option isn’t available. As empire crumbles and the goo rises, we have a window to organize ourselves into something completely new.

The Blueprints Already Exist

There are people who came before us, who faced systems specifically designed to crush them and refused all the options they were given. They did not wait for permission to build an alternative. They just built what they needed. And what they created are like blueprints.

When I look across the historical freedom communities, the ones who opted out of the dominant system and built their own, four architectures show up every single time. Across centuries. Across continents. Independent of each other, without coordination, often without any knowledge of each other’s existence. These four architectures are meaning-making, governance, an economy of sustenance, and adaptive resistance.

I think it is more than just a coincidence that these structures show up throughout history. This architecture is what liberation actually requires. And our ancestors proved it, over and over, in mountains and rainforests, in town squares and city streets.

Meaning-Making: The Suriname Maroons

Being in a liberatory community is not easy. You are doing something countercultural. You are standing against a system that is heavily invested in your compliance. You need something greater than your fear to keep moving forward. That something is what I mean by ‘meaning-making.’

Starting in the late 1600s, enslaved Africans escaped Dutch plantations in Suriname and disappeared into the rainforest interior. Over the next century, they built six distinct nations along the rivers, the Saramaka and the Ndyuka, the Aluku and the Paramaka, the Matawai and the Kwinti. Today they number around a quarter million people, roughly a fifth of Suriname’s population. They negotiated peace treaties with the Dutch in 1760 and 1762, a full century before the Netherlands abolished slavery.

And the women who escaped did something that was subversively magical.

When enslaved African women escaped, they braided rice seeds into their hair. They knew that wherever they ended up, they would need to eat, and they would need to feed their children, and they would need to feed their children’s children. So they carried the future in their hair. Those rice varieties are still cultivated today in Maroon communities, and many of them still carry the names of the women who carried them. Seei. Yaya. Paanza.

That is what meaning-making looks like when it is woven into daily life. The Suriname Maroons did not separate the spiritual from the practical. Major decisions, where to clear a garden, how to resolve a conflict, when to undertake a journey, are made in consultation with ancestors and forest spirits through divination. Religion is not a thing you do on Sunday. It is the operating system of the community. The story of who they are, where they came from, and what is owed to those who come after them is alive in the seeds, in the songs, in the matrilineal clans that trace descent through the women who escaped. Meaning-making is about knowing what that makes the resistance worth it.

That is the first architecture. Without meaning-making, governance is just bureaucracy, and economy is just survival. With it, a quarter million people in the Surinamese rainforest become a civilization with something worth defending. A reason worth more than the cost of standing.

Governance: The Jamaican Maroons, Who Called Themselves Yenkunkun

The Maroons in Jamaica, who called themselves Yenkunkun, an Akan word meaning “an independent people”, did not just run into the hills to escape slavery. They built a nation.

Starting in the 1600s, enslaved people escaped British plantation systems and disappeared into the limestone labyrinth of Cockpit Country and the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. There, drawing on Akan traditions from West Africa, they built a community that the British Empire, the most powerful empire on earth at the time, could not defeat. And what the Yenkunkun people created was governed in ways that intentionally shared and distributed power. Elected councils. Rotating leadership. Community accountability structures rooted in collective decision-making. Power distributed so widely that it could not be concentrated in any single person or seized in any single blow.

The British fought for more than eighty years of war to defeat the Yenkunkun before, in 1739, they sued for peace. The treaty granted the Maroons 1,500 acres, self-governance, and freedom from taxation. This was before the American Revolution. Before the French Revolution. Before Haitian independence.

And that treaty has never been revoked.

The Yenkunkun answered the question every community in formless transition eventually has to answer. How do we hold power so it cannot be hoarded? We cannot rely on charismatic leaders or a hierarchy that just replicates the one we fled. The Yenkunkun knew they had to create something with structured governance distributed across the whole. That is the second architecture.

An Economy of Sustenance: Black Wall Street and the Free Black Towns of Oklahoma

After Emancipation, Black communities did something extraordinary in Oklahoma. They built towns. Whole towns.

Between 1865 and 1920, more than fifty all-Black towns rose across what was then Indian Territory and later became Oklahoma. Boley. Langston. Rentiesville. Clearview. Incorporated municipalities with Black mayors, Black judges, and Black police. Boley alone had two banks, two colleges, an electric company, and a population over four thousand by 1911. The sign at the town limits read, “White man, don’t let the sun set on you here.” A direct subversion of the sundown towns that had terrorized Black travelers across the country.

By 1905, Black Oklahomans owned roughly 1.5 million acres of land.

And in Tulsa, in a Black district called Greenwood that the country came to know as Black Wall Street, a dollar circulated nineteen times before it left the community. One hundred and eight Black-owned businesses. Two newspapers. Two movie theaters. A fifty-four-room luxury hotel that was the largest Black-owned hotel in the country. Fifteen doctors. A hospital. A savings and loan. A transportation network that included chartered planes. By 1920, Greenwood was home to roughly eleven thousand Black residents, and the wealth they had built in a community born of segregation was the talk of the nation.

That is an economy of sustenance. Resources circulating through the community, building the community, making sure the next generation had more than the last. Every dollar spent at a Black-owned barbershop became wages for a Black-owned grocer became tuition for a Black-owned school became loans for the next Black-owned business. Nineteen times. The dollar remembered where it was loved.

White Tulsa noticed. On May 31 and June 1, 1921, white mobs, some of them deputized by the city, burned thirty-five blocks of Greenwood to the ground. Estimates of the dead range from seventy-five to three hundred, mostly Black. Fourteen hundred homes destroyed. Ten thousand people left homeless. No insurance claims honored. The National Guard detained Black residents, not the white attackers.

And then, this is the part that matters, Greenwood rebuilt. Without outside help. Despite city ordinances designed to prevent reconstruction. By the end of 1922, eighty businesses had reopened. By the 1940s, the district was larger than it had been before the massacre.

Eventually, Jim Crow and integration without protection and the dust bowl and the Depression eroded what white violence could not destroy in a single night. Boley declared bankruptcy in 1939. Greenwood declined through the 1960s and 70s. But thirteen of those Free Black Towns in Oklahoma survive. Langston University remains Oklahoma’s only HBCU. The architecture they built was not a building. It was a circulation. It was a conviction. It was a way of holding wealth that refused the logic of extraction.

The question they were answering was not how do we get rich? The question was how do we make sure what we gather allows us all to be free?

That is the third architecture.

Adaptive Resistance: The Black Panthers

The Black Panther Party did not pick one strategy to resist oppressive systems and commit to it forever.

They focused on deep care. They fed children breakfast, free, every morning, because hungry children cannot learn, and a government that will not feed its own children has forfeited its moral authority. They ran free health clinics. They also believed in armed resistance. They carried firearms legally and organized community patrols to document police violence before anyone had a phone in their pocket. They published newspapers. They ran candidates for office. They built legal defense networks.

All at the same time. Because the threat kept shifting, and so did they.

J. Edgar Hoover called the Free Breakfast Program “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the Black Panther Party and destroy what it stands for.” He didn’t name the guns or the patrols to watch the police. Hoover was most concerned about the free breakfast. Because a community that takes care of its own, that does not need the state’s permission or resources to survive, is a community that cannot be controlled through deprivation.

That is adaptive resistance. Not one tactic worked forever, but a whole repertoire of care, confrontation, documentation, nourishment, and organizing, deployed and recalibrated as conditions demand. The question they were answering was not what do we do? The question was what does this moment require? And they stayed ready to answer that question differently every time. That is the fourth architecture.

Four architectures. Showing up independently across centuries and continents, in communities that never spoke to each other and faced wildly different forms of oppression. The call to be free inspired them to create something that gave life rather than oppression. When people decide they will not live inside a system that crushes them, they tend to build in similar ways. And we can use what they created as blueprints for what comes next.

The Questions the Blueprints Ask Us

The architectures are not a finished answer. They are a set of questions our ancestors have handed forward. As we stand in the goo, these are the questions worth carrying into whatever we build next.

What is the why worth overcoming our fear? What is the story about who we are and why we matter that is big enough to hold us when the old form dissolves? Meaning-making is the thing that makes the risk worth taking.

How will we share power? How do we govern ourselves so that power cannot be hoarded, so that the next triangle cannot quietly assemble itself out of the goo while we are distracted?

How will we share resources? Capitalism is one way to distribute resources. It is the way we have been told about. It is not working for most of us, and we are not obligated to replicate its inequities in the next form. How do we make sure no one starves, no one is left behind, no one has to return to oppressive systems to survive?

What will be our tools for resistance? What is the repertoire, the set of practices, we are ready to deploy and recalibrate as conditions shift? Not one tactic. Many. And the wisdom to know which moment calls for which.

These questions are ours to answer now, together. This is the work of the goo.

The Seduction of the Devil We Know

I often think about the enslaved Africans who fled to the hills and built the Maroon communities. Can you imagine what it must have been like to make that decision? You have no idea what is in the hills. You don’t know if there is going to be food, or other people, or shelter that will ensure you survive. What is in the hills is completely unknown. And yet, they fled anyway.

Oppressive systems can be incredibly seductive. It is easier to stick with the devil you know than take a risk on the devil you don’t know. So much of resistance and liberatory practice is about fighting off the pull of the devil we know.

Part of what we will have to do is unlearn the things our oppressive systems have taught us about our own worth. These systems work, in part, because we have internalized ideas about ourselves that are tied to making ourselves available to be extracted from. We are valuable because we produce. We are worthy because we earn. We matter because we labor. If the system is moving toward no longer needing our labor, and we have built our entire sense of worth on being labor, we are in trouble on a spiritual level, not just an economic one.

The muscle we have to build, individually and in community, is the muscle of letting go of what we know and moving into the wilderness together. We won’t have a map, nor will we have a guarantee. But we will have each other, and the blueprints our ancestors left us, and we can trust that something abundant and new can be built on the other side.

The DNA of Butterflies

And so now we come back to the goo and the imaginal cells.

Imaginal cells, the blueprint for becoming butterflies, are not created during transformation. They do not appear when the caterpillar enters the chrysalis, and things around them get hard. They were always there, encoded in the caterpillar’s DNA from the very beginning, dormant while the caterpillar was busy being a caterpillar, waiting for exactly this moment to activate. The caterpillar had no idea these cells existed. But they were there. Ancient. Inherited. Ready.

We have something like this.

I’m not just talking about metaphors. In actual history, in actual communities, in actual people who built communities that shared power in the shape of a circle when everyone around them insisted the top-down triangle was the only option. The Suriname Maroons and the Yenkunkun, the Free Black Towns and the Panthers, were not anomalies. They were proof-of-concept, over and over, across centuries. Greenwood rebuilt within a year. The Suriname Maroons are still there, in the rainforest, three hundred years after their first treaty. And those stories, that knowledge, live in us whether we have been formally introduced to them or not.

The longing you might feel when you hear about a community that governed itself without hoarding power, or willed its resources forward so others could be free, or fed its children and called it revolution, that feeling of yes, that, that’s what I’ve been trying to name, that is not nostalgia. It is recognition of the blueprint that is encoded and waiting.

We are in the goo, y’all. We will not go back to being caterpillars. That form is closed, and no amount of effort or wishing will reopen it. The question is not whether we become something new. The biology is already in motion. The question is whether we are paying attention to what is being built. Whether we are finding each other, the other imaginal cells, the ones who also feel the pull toward something different, who also sense there is an architecture waiting to be remembered and remixed. Whether we are letting the old form dissolve, as frightening as that is, so the new one can emerge.

We have everything we need to move into the next phase. We will make it through the goo.

The blueprints exist. They have always existed.

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

We are the imaginal cells.

Leave a comment

Alli Myatt is a Cultural Architect and Alternative Timeline Douls, building the remixed blueprints for what comes after extraction culture. She is the founder of The Equity Practice. This essay is the first in a series called Subversive Dreams. Subscribe to follow along.

I’ve been surprised by how much I’ve been paying attention to NASA’s first return to the moon since before I was born. It reminds me of watching the space shuttle when I was a kid. Seeing the pictures roll in has filled me with wonder.

And I’ve loved hearing from the humans on that ship.

​And yet.

It is truly bizarre to experience this type of wonder whilst Empire is crumbling. The president seems to be truly losing his mind. (Y’all… I truly cannot. Where is Olivia Pope and B-6-13 when you need them?)

2026 is giving 1968, y’all.

Subscribe now

1968 is often cited as one of the most tumultuous times in modern American history. Assassinations. Government violence towards the people. A war in Vietnam. Civil upheaval. I asked my dad if what’s happening now is like 1968, and he assures me 1968 was worse. Which is hard to imagine.

But chaos and bloodshed weren’t the only thing happening that year. In 1968, on Winter Solstice, Apollo 8 was the first ship to carry humans out of Earth’s gravity and circle the moon.

Seven months later, Neil Armstrong would take that fateful first step on the moon’s surface. One small step and whatnot.

1968 teaches that wonder and creation can happen in a world full of despair. Despair is never the only thing present.

In 1962, when President Kennedy announced the literal first moonshot, he said, “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Kennedy set a goal that the US would land on the moon before 1970, and that happened.

Travel to the moon has led to innovations that have improved life on Earth. But space travel brings us something greater than Dustbusters, Velcro, and Tang citrus drinks.

Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who was the first human to reach space, said, “Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it.”

NASA astronaut Mike Massimino thought he was like Indiana Jones in The Lost Arc. He saif he shouldn’t even gaze on earth. He said, “It just seemed so beautiful. How can something so beautiful be tolerated by human eyes?”

The first Malaysian man in space, Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, said, “You feel that you’re close to the creator.”

It seems Astronaut, Chris Hadfield, who famously serenaded us from the International Space Station with his version of Bowie’s Space Oddity captured the awe well when he said, “And for me up here, I found part way through the flight, I just feel like I just refer to everybody as just “us.” It’s all of us, together, in this and so I think it’s a perspective that some people get naturally and that some people will never get, but I know it’s a perspective that having the chance to see the world the way that I’ve been trying to show it in the pictures I’ve been sending back, it’s a perspective that you definitely get when you live on board a space station.”

What these skywalkers come to realize is there is cosmic, magical connection between all living things. And when they look at the planet they can see that Earth is this miraculous system that provides collective care for all contained within.

This type of awe can change us. Research has show that awe makes us more altruistic, inclusive, and creative. Awe can even improve our health.

I believe awe is required for collective liberation. It helps us remember the majesty of everything around us. One of my favorite poems is The Sun Never Says by Hafiz, a Persian poet who lived in the 1300s, says:

I cried the first time I read that. Imagine how everything in the universe is connected. We are abundantly provided for. The systems of oppression condition us to believe in scarcity and lack, and fear of that keeps us complicit with the system. When we remember what the sun never says, the illusion of the system can fall away.

That’s what 1968 can teach us. In a year where the country felt divided and like it was falling apart, men, women, and children looked to the sky to witness humans fly around the moon. With wonder.

Don’t forget to wonder. It’s how we stay free. Together.

Leave a comment

I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic. I’m sure you feel it too.

This year, this month, has been a whole lot. For me, there’s a kind of low-grade, ever-present grief that makes it hard to know what to do with ordinary moments, with blueberries and playlists and Sunday mornings. Like joy is something we should set down until things get better.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that. About what we do with the beautiful things when everything feels heavy.

And then Bad Bunny helped me figure it out.

I loved Bad Bunny’s Superbowl performance. I don’t speak more than rudimentary Spanish, so I had no idea what he was saying. I just knew it look like a party.

I decided to look up the translation of the songs in English and was not surprised that the songs were layered with meaning.

The song that closed the show is called DtMF — Debí Tirar Más Fotos — “I should have taken more photos.” It’s a song about the quiet kind of griefthat arrives when you realize you’ve seen something or someone for what might have been the last time. That warm, full ache of I wish I had paid more attention.

I know that feeling in my body.

Unless I’m traveling, I rarely think to take photos. Which means I don’t have many pictures of myself with the people I love most. And as I get older, as some of those people are no longer here, I feel the weight of that differently than I used to. Less like forgetfulness. More like a small loss I keep discovering.

The song hit me the way songs do when they’ve named something you didn’t have words for.

What I didn’t know until I went deeper is that DtMF isn’t just a song about personal longing. It’s a political document.

The album is a love letter to Puerto Rico and a lament for what colonization and over-tourism are slowly stamping out. The people who’ve had to leave. The culture seeping away. Bad Bunny’s insistence on singing entirely in Spanish, on the biggest stage in American sports, was itself resistance. A deliberate centering of Boricua culture precisely because he knows it’s under threat.

Joy was the container. The bops were the delivery system.

Joy can carry what resistance cannot always speak plainly.

And once I saw that, I started seeing it everywhere.

Think about the spirituals. Wade in the Water. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Go Down, Moses. To enslavers, these sounded like hymns. Like prayer. What they didn’t see was they were actually maps. Routes to freedom, encoded in melody, passed between people who could not safely say what they meant out loud. Hidden in plain sight.

Or capoeira. Brazil received more enslaved Africans than anywhere else in the Americas, and it was illegal for enslaved people to practice combat. So they created a “dance” — combat training disguised as recreation, passed from body to body, generation to generation, right under the noses of the people trying to stop them.

This is ancient knowledge. When the world wants to take something from us, we hide it in the things that bring us alive.

Joy isn’t an escape from hard times. It’s how we carry what we love through them.

So this is what I’m practicing this spring: savoring.

My therapist taught me something that sounds simple and is actually hard — how to really taste food. How to slow down and pay attention to every part of it. The skin of a blueberry. The slight grit before the sweetness hits. The texture as it gives way.

Subscribe now

That’s what savoring is, applied to everything. Paying deep attention to the ordinary. Not waiting for the extraordinary to warrant your presence. The people you see every week. The coffee that’s the same every morning. The light through a particular window at a particular hour.

The beauty of the mundane is everywhere, if you slow down enough to catch it.

I’m calling this month’s practice Gather Beauty because beauty isn’t just waiting to be stumbled into. It requires intention. A decision to pay the kind of attention that turns the ordinary into something worth remembering. Learning to appreciate something before it slips away from us.

And in a season like this one, that practice is not frivolous. It’s fortifying.

What I know about liberatory communities (the Maroon communities, the mutual aid networks, the movements that actually lasted) is that they organized around what they were against, AND they organized around what they loved. Around what they were building and protecting and savoring together. These communities have consistent architectures.

Governance, collective sufficiency, meaning-making, resistance repertoire. Those are the four architectures I’ll be exploring in Subversive Dreams starting April 9. And threaded through all of them is this: the communities that survived and created something new knew how to tend to beauty. Knew that joy was not a reward for getting free. It was part of how they got there.

We’re exploring this together in Subversive Dreams, and I’d love for you to be in the room. If something in this post is speaking to something you’re sitting with, about how you lead, how you sustain yourself, how you build community in a moment that wants to exhaust you, then come join us.

And regardless of whether you join us: please, gather beauty.

Take the photos. Eat the blueberry slowly. Look at the people you love while they’re in front of you.

If you’ve been playing with the Glimmer Bingo Card, this is that practice, taken deeper. If you haven’t grabbed it yet, now is a good time.

And if you want to share, I’d love to hear what you’re gathering. Hit reply (or leave a comment here) and tell me: what’s one ordinary thing you’ve been savoring lately?

That’s the practice. That’s the resistance.

Gather beauty everywhere you can.

I’ll tell you what I used to believe about safety.

I believed that being smart would save me. That if I could outthink, outstrategy, and outperform, I would earn my way into spaces where I could breathe. And for a long time, it worked. Teachers who were cold and dismissive would flip once they realized I was smart. Suddenly, I was worth investing in. The message was clear: your intelligence is your ticket. Don’t lose it.

So I built my career on that ticket. Quantitative skills. Strategic thinking. The kind of work that gets you into Wharton, gets you the COO title, gets you the seat at the table. And I was good at it. I am good at it.

But it wasn’t everything.

There has always been a longing underneath all of that. A pull toward care, toward community, toward the kind of work that I’d been led to believe doesn’t look impressive on a resume but changes the texture of how people experience each other. I even changed my undergrad major from finance to a combination of human development, communication, and law because I felt that pull. And then I spent years resisting it, because care work wasn’t coded as smart. And if it wasn’t coded as smart, it wasn’t coded for safety.

Five decades of conditioning told me that the shoulds get you access. That the analytical, strategic, buttoned-up version of you is the one who survives.

I’m releasing that story. Not because it was wrong, exactly. It kept me alive. But because I’m entering a season where survival isn’t enough, and the work that lights me up is asking to be let in.

Subscribe now

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last few weeks because, y’all, the first two months of 2026 were coo coo kachoo.

I’ve felt everything. Sadness. Fear. Rage. A deep desire to numb out and pretend none of this is happening. And I’ve come to realize that what I’m experiencing is grief. Not grief for something that was, but grief for what the world could be.

Because when I look past the constructs we’ve layered over everything, past racism and capitalism and all the systems that insist scarcity is real, and domination is natural, I see something breathtaking. This planet is so abundant. Everything on it, every human, every creature, every body of water, is connected and provided for. The abundance is right there. It has always been right there.

But all the systems of oppression put a patina over everything. And we keep choosing the false veneer instead.

So I grieve the distance between what is and what’s possible.

And yet. Even sitting inside that grief, glimmers keep finding me. Little ones at first, and then ones too big to ignore. Joy. Love. Solidarity. Three forces that are giving me a real, deep sense that we gonna be alright.

Let me tell you what I’ve been seeing.

Alysa Liu won gold at the Olympics last month, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

Liu is twenty years old. She was a figure skating prodigy who won two U.S. titles by the age of fourteen. She competed at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, won a bronze at Worlds, and then she walked away. Retired. Done. The sport had become constricting, and she chose herself over the grind.

Two years later, she came back. But she came back different. She came back on her own terms, with full creative control over her programs, her music, her costumes. She told reporters she sees herself as an artist, not an athlete. She called her programs a “portfolio.” When asked about Olympic pressure, she said medals don’t validate her.

And then she went out on that ice in Milan and skated with so much joy that even Aly Raisman, watching from the stands, said she looked “so free.” Like a kid who just loves the sport. Liu won gold, the first American woman to do so in twenty-four years, and she did it by releasing the shackles of the shoulds and skating for the pure love of it.

I keep returning to her story because I see myself in the arc. Not the Olympics part. Obvi. The walking-away-and-coming-back-different part.

For years, I built the version of my career that the world rewarded. And the world rewarded it well. But there was always this other current running underneath, this longing to build community rooted in care, to create spaces where leaders could be fully human, to do work that prioritizes beauty and belonging. The kind of work the Maroon communities modeled centuries ago, when people who freed themselves from enslavement built self-governing societies rooted not in domination but in mutual care, collective wisdom, and shared abundance.

The Maroons didn’t escape one system and replicate it. They imagined something entirely new. Something rooted in the belief that we are meant to provide for each other. That care is the strategy.

That’s the work I’m leaning into now, and I won’t pretend it’s simple. Five decades of conditioning don’t dissolve because you’ve had an insight. Some mornings the old voice still whispers: this isn’t serious enough, this won’t be valued, go back to the thing that keeps you safe. But I’m learning that the shoulds were always someone else’s architecture. They kept me alive, yes. And they also kept me from the work I was actually made for.

Alysa Liu didn’t win gold by going back to the old way. She won by releasing it and creating something that was fully, unapologetically hers.

What if the thing you’ve been calling your edge is actually your cage?

I want to sit with that question for a minute, because I think a lot of you are in a similar place. You’re leading teams, holding organizations together, navigating this political moment with everything you’ve got. And the way you’ve been doing it, the strategic, analytical, always-on version of leadership, has gotten you far. But it’s also exhausting you. And underneath the exhaustion, there’s a whisper: there’s another way to do this. A way that includes more of who I actually am.

Joy is the foundation of personal resilience. When you’re grounded in what genuinely lights you up, when you’re regulated enough to choose delight over dread, your calm becomes contagious. Your freedom gives others permission to find theirs. This isn’t softness. This is what power looks like when it’s no longer performing.

And joy isn’t the only glimmer that’s been finding me.

There’s a baby Japanese macaque named Punch at a zoo in Japan who was abandoned by his mother at birth. The zookeepers gave him a stuffed orangutan toy from IKEA, this big orange plushy almost bigger than he is, and Punch latched on. When they tried to integrate him into the troop, it was brutal. He was chased, shoved, dragged. The internet wanted to fight the mean monkeys on his behalf.

But the zoo said something that stopped me: Don’t feel sad for Punch. Applaud his efforts. They asked people to support his resilience rather than pity his struggle.

And Punch kept reaching for the troop. He kept showing up. And slowly, other monkeys began grooming him. An adult named Onsing started sitting near him like a bodyguard. Punch started playing with other babies. Sometimes he even leaves the plushy behind.

His story reminds me of what I know to be true from my work with teams: exclusion is not the end of the story. We can love each other back into belonging, even after we’ve been divided. It’s not easy. It’s not quick. But we can always come back together. That is relational resilience. Love as a practice of return.

And then there’s the Singing Resistance. In Minneapolis, after ICE and CBP actions escalated this winter, people started gathering to sing. Not chant. Not scream. Sing. Protest songs from the Civil Rights Movement. Spirituals that enslaved Africans sang as coded communication. Songs from the South African anti-apartheid movement, from Estonia’s Singing Revolution. Within weeks, the gatherings grew to two thousand people. The movement has spread to cities across the country.

What moves me most is the song they sing directly to ICE agents: an invitation. It’s okay to change your mind. You can join us.

They are calling people in. And so many of the people showing up to sing have never done anything like this before. They probably don’t think of themselves as activists. They might not even think they can sing. But they’re standing in the cold, in the dark, creating something breathtakingly beautiful together.

This is what the Maroons understood. Liberation isn’t just an escape from something. It’s the building of something new. Something rooted, collective, and alive. The Singing Resistance is a living example of organizational rootedness: the collective decision to show up, to build something together, to root down into shared purpose. When one person sings, it’s brave. When two thousand people sing, it’s transformative.

Joy. Love. Solidarity.

These three glimmers map onto the three levels of resilience I work with every day.

Personal resilience is the joy piece. Alysa Liu teaches us that when we release the shoulds and ground ourselves in what actually brings us alive, we don’t just feel better. We create something phenomenal.

Relational resilience is the love piece. Punch teaches us that coming together is not a single moment. It’s ongoing work, the willingness to keep reaching, to stay in circle, to love each other back into belonging even after division.

Organizational rootedness is the solidarity piece. The Singing Resistance teaches us that beauty and art are not decorative. They are transformative. They create the awe that strips away the false veneer and reminds us of the abundance that was always there.

When all three levels are present, when joy and love and solidarity move together, we don’t just survive hard seasons. We bend the arc.

So here’s your permission, if you need it.

You are allowed to choose the work that lights you up, even if it doesn’t look like what you’ve been told is serious or strategic or safe. You are allowed to release the shoulds, even the ones that served you well for a long time. You are allowed to grieve what the world could be and let the glimmers in.

You are allowed to sing, even if you don’t think you can.

If you want help noticing more glimmers, I made something for you: a Glimmer Bingo Card. Print it, stick it on your fridge, bring it to your next team meeting. It’s a practice of paying attention to the joy, love, and solidarity that are already around you, waiting to be seen. And if you want a little nudge, sign up on the page for seven days of daily glimmer prompts to help you practice all month long.

We gonna be alright, y’all.

With joy, love, and solidarity,
Alli

Share

Leave a comment