I haven’t written for a few days. I was travelling – physically to Detroit, emotionally and archivally much further back. Returning to Detroit after 5-6 years Detroit has changed so much. If I felt shock at the Q line and the stores and restaurants along Cass, I can only imagine what it feels like to people who live there.

The people I was with for two days felt, seemed so young to me, not just in age but also experience and I had to muster kindness and gentleness at times, reminding myself how little I knew and how much I thought I knew as a young organizer of 20, of 30 even. How hard it is to balance trying to become “professional” with your values. Not that I have that figured out. In therapy today I wondered aloud how Richie (Perez) did it. How did he work in a big non-profit while fighting so many institutions that in many ways bolstered his place of work and vice versa. I was reminded at how impossible it is really to compartmentalize ourselves when we are driven by values. For example I was surprised to see at this meeting someone I know through my professional life and I had to consciously let go of the worry that I would seem less ED like because of my life as a media maker was exposed.

As I went back – including looking back at what my connection was to Detroit – a collection of women of color some of whom I have shared almost half of my life with virtually and actually it became obvious how much we are one another’s survival. I mean this metaphorically, as I have been blessed to witness how some of these women have evolved into authors, educators, artists. Nothing makes me happier than walking into a bookstore and seeing some of their names on the spines of books but I also mean this literally. Thinking back to how I blogged, texted, and cried into computer keyboards and in some of these women’s arms when I was physically abused by one of my partners, when my gas was shut off and I was going to be evicted. They gave me pep talks as I sobbed into my phone on my way to blogger meetups and they sent me their life’s savings so that my kids and I wouldn’t be homeless. All while they too were struggling to live in a world that told us and still tells us that we don’t matter, that our stories don’t matter. We remind(ed) one another that we do matter and that together we are powerful and real.

On my last night in Detroit, three of us women of color sat in a car in the parking lot of a kabob place in Hamtramck. It was maybe six degrees outside but the inside of the car was warm and warm tears fell from my closed eyes as I listened to a dear friend of mine pray in Arabic. This is a friend of mine who has stayed with me and my kids in my tiny ass apartment in Corona, Queens and in my current home in Los Angeles. I may not know exactly what her words meant but I know they felt like our survival. They felt like our power. We all breathed differently after that prayer and I’m still breathing differently now.