Who’d a thought…

That life would place me here? Here where I am now. Here where mentally, I will need to learn so much and grow as a person in order to better serve myself as well as others. In the limited amount of time I allow myself, mostly in the hushed hours of early morning, l will search to find out more about the human psyche, what helps and what hinders our paths forward to eventual contentment with who exactly we are.  I will try to analize all the steps that we go through to get to the place that we eventually get to, and see if there would have been a way to get there any faster. Was there wasted time, or did life lessons just have to play out to get us to where we are at any given moment? Does an individual who is in their thirties today, see themselves in the same ways we did at that stage? I think a lot of it depends still in a large part on how the outside influences that surround an individual support or impede choices and lifestyle decisions that the youth of today make for themselves. 

As we march towards more equality, we are seeing more variety of persons in lead roles. I strive for the day that I can write about how I truly feel inside, yet at the same time, I am always mindful that how I choose to say something will inevitably not land the way I so hope for it to. Case in point, yesterday I was stuck in traffic. There is a building that I pass that has a glass boardroom. In said boardroom there was a tall strikingly dressed woman preparing for a meeting. I looked at her admiringly, for both her clothing style choice, but much more for her presence, a confidence that exuded from her so much so that I felt it all the way into my car. Now I could stop right there, or I could add the color of this woman’s skin. Would that make any difference in the image you had in your head while reading this depending on the color of your own skin? When we conjure up an image in our head, do we naturally paint our picture of someone with similarities to us. There are books written today with intentionally leaving out physical traits so that anyone reading can picture the character to look like someone they can relate to or better still see themselves in the story. Gone are the days of the one size fits all descriptions. I think when my generation is gone, that question and similar ones will also fade away, because the more blended the world becomes, the better it will be. When we all see each other’s value and stop looking at what separates us. When I was thirty, it was unlikely to see a woman hosting a meeting in a boardroom, even more rare a woman of color.  But that part of my mind that still becomes alert when I am faced with something that stands out, like when being introduced to the cosmetics manager when he comes over to introduce himself and ask if there is anything we need to complete the job, well I recognized that and it’s those kind of biases that I will try my best not to pass on to the generation coming behind me. Being terrified to offend others, sometimes we never start the conversations. I have been learning about ‘the race card project’ in the form of an audiobook, as part of my winter reading. It makes me cry, laugh, and feel all kinds of stuff, quite a bit of it uncomfortable, yet what I am absorbing from it will hopefully help me to just be more aware in general of how much words can affect us in all sorts of situations. There were stories about adoption that made me evaluate my own history, never realizing how easy my life has been in relation to what others have endured. I hope I am given the tools needed to do some more good in this world, that would be awesome. For now I will keep trying to just be me to the best of my ability and keep learning as I go along. Hope this leaves you something to think about.