Getting through September felt like a huge breath of fresh air for me. August has always been chaotic. Historically, September meant I had a plan, a routine, and 3 months to get side-tracked through the semester. This year, the first weeks of September kept me full to overflowing. BUTTER was everything. Labor Day brought reminders of loss and love and all that endures, all I hold dear. Four hours of sleep later, I was on the road by 5 the next morning.
The week took me to the Stax Museum in Memphis, where I stood in the same rooms Isaac Hayes once did. I don’t know why he was the one to stick out to me so prominently, but I’ve noticed this is a thing that happens for me sometimes. There’s an awe-filled mix of humility and certainty, that comes—either in the spaces themselves, or when reflecting on my time there.
I have shared the same space and time as those who came before me. I am capable of impacting others just as deeply, just as powerfully—and I must do it as myself, heeding my own calling.
It is inspiring and encouraging, yes, to be in such spaces and realize those things. For me, it is also ancestral. It is holy. It is sacred and mighty. It is human. It is bloody. It is history. It is agony. It is eternity. It is glory. As I wove through exhibits in my power chair at the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville, I moved in echo after echo of all these things.
Alongside this collective tradition was a very direct and personal occurrence. In March of 2020, I was in Nashville presenting at a conference with a research team. A tornado ripped through the city, first categorized as an EF-4 and later reclassified to an EF-3. The difference is meaningless, when you’re screeched out of sleep by sirens and you realize you’re on the 23rd story and the building is swaying and the lights are flickering and you’re sure as shit not taking the elevator.
I did not realize until later how disabling it was for my already failing body to sprint to the ground floor. There was only instinct: seeking shelter in the most interior room I could find, which happened to be the accessible bathroom stall—because pipes go deep, right? Head down in case there was a sudden spray of mirror shards. Half hugging a toilet, half checking my dying phone for radar updates, extended warnings, and the eventual all-clear.
The next morning I had 4 missed calls and a dozen or more texts from my dad. In the years since, I’ve often wondered what it was like for him to wake up to the news. To sip his morning coffee, scroll through the usual headlines on CNN and USA Today, and realize where I had been.
Alone.
I’ve never asked him about it, but as he walked beside me and I nudged my chair along with my thumb, winding through the boot-clad and bar-hopping crowds of Honky Tonk Central, I elbowed him at a crosswalk and pointed up.
“That’s the hotel I was at, when I was in Nashville and that tornado hit. I was on the 23rd floor.”
We stood, looking up at it: square-shouldered, many-windowed, without a hint of damage. My dad and I, on the other hand, are both very different people from who we were in 2020. I don’t know what it means for him, to walk the streets of a city he might’ve thought I died in. For me, I know the importance of sharing that moment with him. The sun on our shoulders, the silence between us, and perhaps the one instance where I had something tangible to point to.
I thought this would destroy me, but I lived.
We’re both glad that I did.
That moment on a sidewalk corner came like a pause in a whirlwind. There was BUTTER and Stax on the front end. There was sorting through what he’d brought from his mother’s house with my brother.
In the middle, a fledgling museum established only a year after a devastating storm. A museum we visited on the milestone anniversary of a national tragedy.
And afterwards—favorite desserts, cracking jokes over French toast, easing back into errands, adjusting to appointments, resuming the rhythms of what our lives are, now.
I’ve come to the fall with my usual to-do list. I’ve laid a lot of groundwork in the last year. Now it’s time to adjust the framework and keep going—but I’m also ready for the quiet. I’m ready to listen. My monthly newsletter is officially on hiatus for the season. I’m satisfied with what I accomplished this year. In between all the admin things and to-do lists and brainstorming, I’m savoring reflective pauses like moments on a sidewalk.
Navigating my capacity is a never-ending bounce-house maze. Some months I had to delay my newsletters, some months I skipped it entirely—and I was still able to share my art and writing. I’ve met new people, I’ve had moving conversations, I’ve made meaningful connections, and it hasn’t been at the expense of my well-being. That is the real dream, and I often find myself humbled to (re)discover that it’s the life I’m living.
More importantly, I discover over and over again that I am who I want to be. Someone who treasures themselves, who cherishes their friends, who commits to compassion, who moves with kindness. Someone perfectly complete, and still growing. Someone both fallible and forgiving. Someone who didn’t know this was who they are, and were, and could be, until recent years.
October is halfway over, but the season of it leaves room for beginnings. Projects-in-progress and behind-the-scenes tinkering, sure. But I’m also carrying sidewalk memories and summer discoveries into who I am, how I live, and what I hope to leave.
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