A WORd On Love and Survival

December 2020

How are you doing?

Sometimes—ok, most times when I think about this pandemic and how I survived—I am brought to big, fat, ugly tears. These tears are symbolic of the love I have given and the love I have received this year. 

I am stricken by how, even in such a challenging time, the potency of love is every present. 

I believe that love and truth are inextricably linked. This is why I cultivate radical love and care in my life by speaking truth to power, embracing all that it means to be Black and exist as myself, and fully loving people while knowing there is no guarantee that they will love me back. 

This, my friend, is my rallying cry to you to lean into the radical power of love—starting first with yourself, my guy. I want the love you have for yourself to be unwavering before you move outward. 

Second, pass that love on. How can you love radically when it comes to those directly in your community and those on the fringes of it? How would that kind of love change your relationships and your life?

Here is to being entraptured by love in 2021 and beyond. 

Love, Sinikiwe

Highly Favored

 All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks helped me clearly define the amorphous thing that we call love. It also cleverly dragged me, by making me realize that affection, lust, and care do not equate to love. The former do not guarantee the latter, even if we’ve been socialized to believe they do. 

I also liked this podcast episode of On Being featuring Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which works to grant clemency to folks serving sentences for crimes they did not commit. “I am persuaded that hopelessness is the enemy of justice; that if we allow ourselves to become hopeless, we become part of the problem. I think you’re either hopeful, or you’re the problem. There’s no neutral place.”