2025 broke my heart & my arm… but the whole thing wasn’t so bad because I had extremely beautiful, amazing, smart, funny friends to help me through it & this instagram post is dedicated to them ❤️❤️❤️ I love you, I love you, I love you.
Owen & Matisse & Ruby Joy took me to the ER, Emily found me an amazing surgeon, Danny drove hours to take me to surgery & told my mother “no one is gonna take better care of your daughter than me,” Raz was literally giving me sponge baths and helping me wash my hair, Kelly spent hours on a bus to take me to doctors’ appointments, Sarah buckled my arm into its sling every morning for weeks and held it down at my job when I couldn’t, Arti helped me pack my insane mess & kept me company while I cried, Liam crowdfunded when I couldn’t work…… idk how I got so so lucky but I was never without a hot meal or a shoulder to cry on and I feel so grateful and life is beautiful because I have you.
🗓️I’ve been line dancing for a year and I’m still often not-quite-right, but it sort of changed my life & healed an inner child who was scared to dance in front of other people!! 🌷👣 and I think it might be really beautiful to pick up a new practice as an adult and being one molecule in a big wave, even if your molecule is a little behind everyone else 🌀👀, is really special. I feel really grateful that I got to share this practice with the teens at OTC and watch them get excited about art & communal movement. ✨ 🌷ty to our teachers @tenayakelleher@stud.country 🦋 the last slide is the first dance I ever saw at @stud.country which I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do & the first slide is me doing it 🐣 and the second to last slide is alana at our first class last march when that room had abt 100 less people in it 💘💘💘✨
Today I learned that the word “friend” and “freedom” have the same Latin root. @miabirdsong taught me that pre-1500s, a person who was enslaved was understood to be un-free not just because they were in bondage, but because they had been separated from their people. Freedom required the condition of being interconnected.
I am so grateful to be in community with such smart and loving people and so grateful to be free to be with them. Through actions over the internet and on the ground, I’ve been so lucky to reconnect with Earlham friends, deepen my friendships with my NYC friends, to meet new friends and expand my community. I am so lucky to be connected to these people. I am so lucky that I get to hold my friends’ babies and dance with them and make big meals and sing and hopefully make teenagers believe that community is worth all the heartache and headache that goes into it. I am so lucky to be free.
I hope everyone can see through any “humanitarian plans” to re-locate Gazans as what they are; an attempt to separate them from their people; an attempt to make them un-free. Being “absorbed” by other countries is not freedom. Being a refugee is not freedom.
When I learned this new definition of freedom, I thought of Toni Morrison’s quote, “If you are free, you need to free somebody else.” I now know this definition to mean - if you are lucky enough to be connected to your people, you need to help someone else stay connected to their people. I know it means that I must fight for Palestinian communities to stay as in-tact as possible.
My hope for my Palestinian friends and for everyone is that they get to live in community and help the next generation thrive in a connected community that nourishes each other and their land. ❤️
I hope I get to work with and love these people for the rest of my life ✨💖🪩 we made a big event happen & raised $30,000 for the teens of @odysseyteencamp ✨💖 thank you to everyone who came & made the night so special
