Telling Our Own Stories

Photo is of an abstract mix of different vertical lines and colors.
Photo by L. Laguna

This morning I recorded the podcast episode Dancing on My Own. (You can also find the stream of my latest episodes on the newly added Podcast webpage for Unfiltered Snapshot.) What started off as a conversation about dancing transitioned to one about women and the she-cession.

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Neighbors

Photo is of a beach with a blue and cloudy sky with the sun and peach tones in the background.
Photo by L. Laguna

I am no stranger to talking about love. Throughout the years, I have written about it in I Fall in Love, When Love Is Not Enough for Justice, Let People Love You: Community Care Knows No Boundaries, My Anniversary, and more. As you can tell from my posts, I discuss love in a number of contexts.

However, I live in a society where people tend to talk about love through very limited and specific contexts. If I say love, people often think about romance and passion first. If it is not the love of a partner or spouse, they think about love within a family context like the relationship between a parent and child, between siblings, or between a person and any number of people in their extended family.

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Mixed Messages

Photo is the top view of a lit white candle with a black background.
Photo by L. Laguna

This morning, I lit the candle in the photo above. I was hoping it could add warmth to my place. Why? I woke up without heat. As I started typing this sentence, I received word from the maintenance man of my building that the heat turned back on. I should start to feel it soon. That is a relief. If you listened to Something New, the latest episode of my podcast also titled Unfiltered Snapshot, you would know that my first morning of the new year has been heatless. I have layered up so I am fine, but my fingers remain cold as I type this post.

I hope this is not a bad sign of the new year. My hope is that it shows with a bit more perseverance, I too will survive and thrive in 2022. Oh yeah, Happy New Year!

How has the start of your new year been?

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Being The Only One: Acknowledgment and Positionality

Photo is of an orange butterly.
Photo from Flickr

Have you ever been the only one with an identity or group membership that nobody else around you has? If you have, what was your positionality within the settings where you were the only one? If you have not, what factors have contributed to you leading a life where never being the only one is possible?

You might not know what positionality means. As I type this term in this blog post, the gods of WordPress have underlined the word with a red squiggly line. This is what happens when a platform thinks you misspelled a term. The fact that the WordPress gods do not recognize this word in itself demonstrates that more people, including those who design website platforms, need to understand the concept of positionality and that it is in fact a real word. You can learn more about what it means by doing your own independent research, but here is the Postionality and Intersectionality webpage from Indigenous Initiatives at the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology.

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My Anniversary

Photo is of purple flowers.
Photo from Flickr

The following text is a post I shared with friends. Originally, it included a photo of me at the hospital, waiting for my mastectomy. In the photo, I was lying in a bed reclined back at about a 45 degree angle. My body was snugly tucked under white sheets, and my head was propped on a matching pillow. A light blue bouffant cap contained my thick, long dark brown-black hair. I wrote it this morning to reflect on the anniversary of my mastectomy. It goes like this:

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The Consequences of Authenticity

Photo is of a person in a striped, multicolored shirt, hat, pants, multicolored shoes, and bag around the shoulder. The person is posing in front of a stone wall with doors on both sides. The person is posing with the right arm stretched out straight along the wall and the left arm bent so that the hand is touching the face.
Photo from Flickr

Yesterday I was talking to a colleague, and she admitted that she feels like she has felt a “wall” in this pandemic among other crises in the world. She certainly is not the only one.

Recently, I was scrolling through social media and saw a forum from the Harvard Kennedy School titled Three Wednesdays in January: insurrection, impeachment, inauguration. I paused and smiled to myself. As a writer, I was impressed with the combination of alliteration and accuracy in that title. Whoever named that event deserves a raise.

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Letter to the Future: Inauguration Week

Photo is of an American flag hanging in front of a house.
Photo from Flickr

Today is MLK Day. It is two days before Inauguration Day. CBS News is reporting that there are Small protests held at heavily guarded state Capitols as Inauguration Week begins.

The day after the inauguration, I am scheduled to present at a conference.

There is no shortage of excitement this week.

I am writing this post on MLK Day, but I purposely am scheduling to publish it a couple days after Inauguration Day. I want to see if the concerns I have today come to fruition this week.

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A Different Boat

Photo is of a field and the sky, which is partially dark and partially light.
Photo from Flickr

During the summer, I was in a meeting with colleagues across departments at my workplace. We were grappling with how to conceptualize the COVID-19 pandemic. A few people in the virtual meeting wanted to make sure that we were not making blanket statements about these times. One person emphasized that we were all in the same storm, but we were on different boats.

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