holding onto hope #6: on uncertainty as a pathway to new possibilities
navigating the chaos with Black women at the forefront of resistance, survival, and transformation
I recently had a check-in with Anne Price, a dear friend and mentor whose heart always, always lifts my spirits and whose brilliance makes my mind turn over with generative energy. Our conversation kept circling back to the tension between clarity and openness. How the nonprofit industrial complex, for example, rewards concrete objectives and outcomes at the expense of the experimentation needed to shape impactful social movements. How sometimes the strategy has to be unstrategic, not measured by metrics1 or informed by polling.2 How “success,” especially in a crisis of democracy, can’t always be defined or quantified.
How unexpected discoveries and unimagined futures aren’t possible if we’re already certain of what we’re looking for and where we’re going.
I wouldn’t call myself a storyteller, but I am a narrator — paying attention, documenting, offering language and frameworks for what has happened and is happening, particularly to Black women. I’m also a visionary, forever daydreaming, creating, and writing to abolish the constraints on our collective imagination. That means imagining new worlds: both the ones we carry within us and the one we share 🌍 with all of its political, ecological, and economic realities. The Earth’s ecosystem is more than a biotic, physical environment — it’s our inner lives, our relationships, our values, and our principles that we all, in some way, are trying to understand and even reshape.
Everyone everywhere is trying to ~make sense of the moment~ all at once.3 Because uncertainty is uncomfortable. But discomfort causes fear — and fear demands answers.
Take the climate crisis. Young people are uniquely overwhelmed by climate anxiety and distress: Their future feels fragile, the present stolen, and we’re all living with the weight of environmental collapse that we didn’t create and can’t control.
Dread doesn’t feel good, so we reach for whatever or whoever offers relief. That’s how we end up focused on individual solutions — recycling, switching to paper straws, shrinking our carbon footprints — while the corporations driving the destruction keep polluting and profiting. It’s also why so many people parrot Fox News commentators who downplay climate policy as “politically polarizing” and frame the crisis itself as a “side effect of building the modern world.”4
These “discourses of delay” reach people of all backgrounds. They don’t negate strong public support for climate action, but they do plant the insidious idea that saving the planet is hopeless. And that’s terrifying, so it’s understandable that we each might take on some level of personal responsibility to quiet the panic. But this just creates a false sense of agency in a crisis far bigger than any one of us. Because the only real response to climate disaster is dismantling the power structures that preserve inaction — and that work is largely unfinished and anything but straightforward.
We also see this pattern — of grasping for control, no matter how unnecessary or untrue — in the way humans5 tend to react to identity and self-expression.
Queer communities are persecuted and punished for embodying possibility — for refusing to be scared by boundaries or to stay hidden behind binaries. And that refusal makes weak people wildly uncomfortable. Rather than being curious about complexity, they cling to “certainty”: that there are only two genders. That sexuality cannot be fluid. That identity must be legible and permanent and make sense.
This desperate need for clarity and resolution too often results in cruelty. It’s why we’re swimming in a tidal wave of anti-trans legislation: state lawmakers banning trans kids from sports in the name of “protecting girls” while forcing invasive genital exams on children; opposing gender-neutral restrooms in public places while pretending airplane bathrooms and porta-potties don’t count as shared spaces. It’s all subjugation masked as safety. Brutal superiority in place of self-attunement.
Structural oppression of any kind = prejudice + power. But hatred6 is “an emotion that springs from the individual weakness that is bigotry, and bigotry is fear”; an attempt to impose order where someone else has found freedom. These feelings and belief systems and rules become the “codes for how to be human” that Christine Emba writes about: “And when those aren’t easily found, [people will] take whatever’s offered, no matter what else is attached.”
That’s the story of many of today’s “answers”: inherited, unquestioned, and attached to deep harm.
To dream beyond the bullshit, we have to be okay with the unknown: the world to come, what we’re ignoring or avoiding right now, and everything within and between us that’s alive yet still unfound.
I’m in no way excusing the violence7 weaponized by fear, nor am I pretending that the escalation of authoritarianism, white nationalism, transphobia, xenophobia, and racial capitalism is just a matter of misunderstanding. But I am refusing to let those forces dictate the limits of what *I* can imagine.
“We’re in a time of new suns,” says
. “We have no idea what we could be, but everything that we have been is falling apart. So it’s time to change. And we can be mindful about that. That’s exciting.”
At its core, mindfulness asks us to notice without judgment. To slow down, observe, and resist the impulse to force conclusions.
What if we stopped trying to ~figure it out~ and instead gave whatever “it” is some room to reveal itself? What if discovery isn’t about solving but staying with something long enough for its ethos to emerge? What if we stop trying to call out everything that’s wrong and start being with whatever is true and right and trying to come through? What if we commit to building anew from there?
That kind of presence requires deep listening. To our bodies. To each other. To the earth. To the past. Even as the “capitalist attention economy wants us to surrender to the barbed-wire fences, raids, and psychological warfare that obstruct our path.”
There’s no perfect plan for what’s happening, and I don’t want anyone to turn away from an affirmative vision for what comes next. I’m just wondering what it means to exist inside the questions… To ground ourselves in untold truths, especially while they’re still germinating; to practice letting go as we grow. As Jill Hurst says, “there’s a lot of room to let a thousand flowers bloom.”
But what the fuck do I know?
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Angela Peoples once said to me, “Sometimes the ‘narrative goal’ is to just say the damn thing.”
I always say: The abolition of slavery wasn’t morally popular.
See what I did there? 😉 Jobu Tupaki: ”Every new discovery is just a reminder…” Evelyn Wang: “We're all small and stupid.”
I’m not gonna link to Fox News, but you can Google it.
I wanted to say “small-minded people,” but we all internalize this shit (racism, sexism, etc.) in some way, unfortunately.
Queerphobia, transphobia, and heterosexism are, to me, a unique form of self-hatred.
Both physical and political as well as economic, societal, etc. etc.
“I wouldn’t call myself a storyteller” well I would call you exactly that, so now what