Books and Executions (Part 1)

Hey all… welcome back to my pink room!

Take a seat, get comfortable… we might be here for a little while. So this post as promised will be about the “why”, which of course I am sure we all are wondering about at this point.

So before we begin a couple disclaimers:

1. So far as I understand there is no hidden meaning behind the use of a “pink room” in this blog. I just have a pink room and well talking to yourself is best done alone (but don’t get me wrong I am totally open to the possibility that there is some hidden meaning that when discovered reveals the secrets of my mind or something) . But for right now…just a girl who talks to herself in a pink room (feel free to tell me any psychoanalytic ideas you have though).
2. Brevity is not my strong suit, which if you know me, is a fact you have long since made your peace with. Once again, what this means in practice is that I don’t know if today or most days, all I want to tell you will actually fit in a single post so bear with me …

Alright … Finally let’s get into the story. As the title of this post suggest it starts with, I guess, books, well not just books, actually reading books. We all know that these are very different things, so no need to pretend. The books-all-over-your-room aesthetic is cute but that is just not quite what we are talking about here.

This summer I rediscovered that beautiful gift called “reading”. I want to just point out here, I call this a gift not as some kind of metaphor or cute word choice but actually because the ability to read is a gift of both my class and ability privilege. And if you have ever curled up with a book on a rainy day or had your mind casually blown snuggled under the covers on a cool night, you know that it is a tragedy that calls out for rectification that many are denied this beautiful gift called reading.

Well anyway, this summer I had to be reminded of that gift because I guess you can say I kind of forgot about it. I was the sort of kid who read a lot of books when I was young but I guess in a weird paradox of privilege, when I got to college, where I was supposed to build my intellect and all, I began to read less and less. In fact, “not reading” had become an essential art I had mastered by the time the spring semester had rolled around.

And then the world ended.

Okay I don’t mean it actually ended… like apocalypse… “end times” kind of thing. Although I am sure someone could likely find some legitimate reasons to believe the world as we know it has actually come to end, you know, with swarms of unknown bugs, a global plague killing hundreds of thousands of people and the West Coast literally up in smoke. But I am talking about my world. The college world. The sheltered world. The world that had always seemed to make sense. Yeah, well. That world ended.

Honestly it literally like imploded.

Within just a few days, I went from the manicured campus of an elite university to living, eating and university zooming from my pink bedroom. To be honest, reading still was not on my to-do list with final papers culminating and some real zoom fatigue. But then May hit.

And somehow the world ended for a second time.

Within weeks of each other, I watched as two human beings were executed.  The first hunted like a dear, shot and killed with no remorse. The second screaming and gasping for both air and his mother, as the one meant to protect him became his executioner. I watched human beings encased in Black bodies lose both their humanity and their life within moments. And well at that point, papers and exams just no longer seemed to be important, not when the world, my world had in the course of five months literally just ended. Twice.

Within 5 months I went from thriving to spiraling. I barely wanted to get out of bed most days. I felt numb. The kind of scary numbness when even tears feel like too much work. I felt like I was both floating and drowning at the same time. I both needed something to ground me and pull me up. Everything I did, screaming, crying, laughing only seemed to be killing me. And it was amidst that murdering numbness that I suddenly remembered the gift…

Oh no…I think we’ve made it to the end of our time together. I refused to be responsible for stealing you way from the kids or those persistent piling papers. Tomorrow we will jump right back into the story about the gift that saved me and is currently killing me(and how hopefully this blog might just stop the bleeding).

Alright see you back here at 11 am ET in the pink room!