2018 Burn Down - and Happy New Year!

It's the third annual.  Well, you didn't think a huge, amazing, life-changing event like having a kid was going to stop me, did you?  Of course you didn't.  You've met me.

As I look back on this year, there are so many things that went disastrously wrong.  Seriously.  Disasters.  Make better choices, Manisha.  Also, trust your gut; it's always right.  Whether it's the way my family is supposed to grow, or the people I'm supposed to date, when to take the babe to the doctor, or what kind of ceiling fan I should put in my kitchen - my gut is probably right.  Maybe in 2019 I can keep that at the front of my mind, and heart too.

I spent the first 45 days of this year prepping for a daughter I don't get to raise.  Leaving North Carolina with harrowingly empty arms, I cursed everything; by everything, I mean people who literally have nothing to do with Kennedy.  Pretty unproductive, but it turns out that's one of the things we do with grief.  I think of Kennedy often, because you can't suddenly replace the person who profoundly shifted who you are.  Max is the child I get to raise, and yet, Kennedy made me a parent.  Only for 36 hours, mind you, but that sort of transformation doesn't simply vanish.

For all the traumatic parts of the year, there were equal and opposite moments of magnitude.  The birth of my son.  THE BIRTH OF MY SON.  To be there, to witness his first breath, his first cry, his first bath, his first bottle, his first everything.  The magnitude of that is something I could never had understood until it was happening.  Then, there was that unbelievable moment when I realized that my son comes with an entire family I love.  I don't have inlaws, but I have my son's family.   A son, and a family that comes with him.  What a world.

There were so many things, so many events, in 2018.  Adoption disruption, a seriously toxic girlfriend when I had no business trying to date anyone anyway, weird reconciliations with an old partner, synchronistic confirmation to stay the course, lost and found rings (I'm still freaking out about the rings, OMG), the birth of the child I get to parent, a pretty traumatic car accident, busting out of my comfort zone only to find 9 AMAZING women who have become my Parent Tribe, the loss of the only stable and consistent living being I've ever known, and the loss of her favorite person, someone I have always loved, missed, and wondered about.  It's a hard thing, you know, to lose a friend you haven't reconciled with.  It is my greatest wish that Mark knew I love him deeply, his odd quirks, his quiet disposition, his haphazard clumsy, and infinitely genuine heart.  I guess I'll never know if he did or not.

Events.  What are they other than just these things that happen to us, because of us, in spite of us, often with no purpose?  Well, if 2017 was my year of active decision-making, 2018 was simply an exercise in leaning in.   It took all my guts, the broken pieces of my heart, a strong core, a metric fuckload of tears, and a hell of a lot of accepting the love that surrounds me.  You know what it did to me?  It humbled me.  The droves of people, people I haven't spoken to in years, I've never known in person, and my best friends, who all found a moment, during any number of tragic events, to wish me well was simply overwhelming.  You will never know what it means to me to receive notes, emails, texts, or voicemails from people asking for absolutely nothing.  Messages to say "I love you and you don't have to respond."  And you know what?  I did not respond.  I couldn't.  I didn't have it in it me, but you did it anyway.  Many of you said "I love you and you don't have to respond" again, and again.  What a gift that you watched me lean in so fiercely, but left me to do it on my own.  The love you've shown me, without expecting anything back, not even an acknowledgment, is something that has profoundly changed me.  Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

As is tradition, I'll build my fire today, and let it burn away all the parts of this year that will not serve me.  I will *attempt* to let go of the toxic, the wavering about Haylie, the concern that Mark didn't know how I felt.  I will make peace with the loss of someone who wasn't mine to begin with, even if she fundamentally changed me.  I will watch the angry words burn away, and ask for the patience and peace to truly forgive the people who said them.  What's left, as we all know, is ashes, and on their foundation, is all the potential for what 2019 could bring.

My profound wish for all of us is the following:

May we find the tenacity inside of us to rise above the hurt, the anger, and The Events;

May we lean into the hard things, and support our people while they do the same;

May we find deep peace in the knowledge that things will change and we should expect to be tested and challenged, and perhaps we don't have to learn anything at all from it;

May we rest when we are weary, but perhaps prioritize it before we have drained ourselves;

No matter how lost, scared, or devastated we are, may we find the guts to be who we are;

Eventually, this too will pass.

Happy New Year, my friends, and best wishes as we move into another year.

Out and proud!

My name is Manisha Antani.  I work in CCAR Retail Risk Analytics, and I’m really excited to be here today.

For me, my coming out story is more of an exploration of self than the first and specific moment of saying it out loud to friends or family.  Both my sexual orientation and gender identities have always been a moving target throughout my life.  Today, and for the last several years, I identify as a pansexual, gender non-conforming woman.  By the way, pansexual is an orientation that may not be very well understood.  It means that I am attracted to people who fall into any or all gender identities.  If you are looking for which letter in LGBTQIA+ to attach it is, then I suppose it belongs to "bisexual", meaning attracted to two or more genders.   Because pansexual, gender non-conforming woman is an awful lot of words, I pretty frequently just say “I am queer.”  I like that word because it marries together all the dimensions of my gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation.

I don’t really have a story of identify that starts out with "I always knew I was different."  I grew up having crushes on boys in grade and middle school, and had a vague idea that maybe I would like women someday.  Since I hadn't really had that experience by the time I was 17-18, I figured that vague idea might be purely hypothetical.  Growing up, I didn't have a lot of exposure to anyone who wasn't cisgender and straight, at least, not anyone who was out.  As an adolescent, the identity dimensions I grappled with were more about gender identify and presentation rather than my sexual orientation.  As an adult, I look back and wish I had access to words like "queer", "genderfluid", and "gender nonconforming" when I was 15, but the best my community could come up with was "tomboy;”  that never felt like the right word to describe me, but as a rough and tumble kid, I rolled with it.

When I went away to college, I had a lot more access to words, people, experiences, and identities, and everything started to shift for me.  I had my first crush on a woman in the theatre company named Jane* and I was completely enamored with her ability to build sets for the theatre company, her hair style, and her voice.  I started to toy with labels like "heteroflexible" or "straight-ish”, but even then, I never worried that much about what label I should pick.  It seemed to me that suddenly the people who were worried about my label were the people who saw something they thought I didn’t see --- my crush on Jane.*   Mostly, they were bystanders and not my family and friends.

There is a lot of time in between college and six years ago, but that’s about when I started to identify, loudly, as something other than straight.  I still didn't have the right label, but one thing I was certain about is that I'm not straight.   To that end, I never really came out, because the label aside, I was never really in.  I shared all the varying dimensions of my identity with my people as I learned them about myself.  I was pretty matter of fact about it, kinda like saying “I like that new restaurant up the street." My family and friends never asked any follow up questions indicating confusion; it seems that they didn't think I was "in" either.

What has been surprising to me is that although I never had to "come out" to family and friends, as I have become more comfortable being myself, I find myself "coming out" to strangers or acquaintances all the time.  Everyone wants to know which box to put me in, and since several aspects of my identify are pretty fluid, people have a hard time reconciling what they think they know versus what is real for me.  One additional complexity is that I've recently become a single parent by choice.  My son is 5 months old.  I have had several people who I see in the community stop to talk to me about my new family, and they are utterly perplexed about how I have a child now.  One particularly interesting experience happened about a month ago.  There is a man at a local coffee shop who I see around often, but we don’t really know each other.  He started a discussion with me by saying "I've seen you with the baby, and I know you're gay so I'm wondering how you had him."  I was rattled by his assertion of a label that doesn’t fit.  It was so much for me to unpack that I decided I simply wasn’t going to spend much time on a conversation with him.  Experiences like that jolt me into remembering that our culture is extremely binary; unfortunately, for those of us who fall into a category defined by fluidity, our erasure is a real thing.

One really important part of my life, however, was my move to Barclays about 3 years ago.   At my previous company, my identity was ever changing as I was learning about myself, and I think many of the people I worked with there still have a view about my identity that, while not inaccurate, is incomplete. However, when I moved to Barclays, I went as a pansexual, gender non-conforming woman.  I never had to explain who I am, because this version of me is the only version people there have ever known. The ability to come into the company as myself has been instrumental in my ability to grow, consistently and confidently, for both my professional and personal life.  I am thankful to Barclays and the Spectrum team for allowing and expecting me to be nothing more or less than myself.

Friends: Several days ago, Reverend Greg from UUSMC asked if I would be interested in participating in today's service.  He explained that last year, to celebrate the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, he wrote him a letter of several things he wanted to say to him, if he could.  His ask: did I want to write to him too, and share it with the congregation?

Yes, I did want to participate, and answered him promptly.  "I do but don't have the faintest idea what I will say."  As quickly as I hit send, I started thinking about my upcoming adoption; interestingly, only a few minutes later, I received a response from Reverend Greg suggesting perhaps I could write about my new daughter.  My response to him, again immediately and off the cuff, became the basis of what I shared today.

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Reverend King,

I write to you with tremendous joy in my heart, but also relentless fear. This cacophony of feelings is related to the news that I have been chosen to adopt an infant.  The quarter sheet of paper provided held only basic information; included information, however, was that my impending child is an African American baby girl.

I wasn’t surprised to be matched with someone who is African American.  You see, Reverend King, upon announcing my pending adoption, I have been asked, with annoying regularity, “what sort of child” I wanted to mother.  I quickly learned that’s code for “what color will they be?”

The agency forms had neatly laid out boxes.  Race, it asked, with random bubbles carefully crafted next to my choices.  I didn’t much care for the question, so I snuffed out the answers and simply wrote - Race: Human.

The state of Pennsylvania asked questions too, though more thoughtfully crafted, about transracial adoptions. I interpreted these sets of questions as checkpoints to ensure I wasn’t planning to “white wash” my child.  I wondered: could I truly provide the environment a child of another race truly deserved, one of openness, real diversity, and love?  I could, I thought, and soon an official letter approved me to adopt “a child of any gender or race.” It felt like victory!

Why then, do I mention this? Because despite my propensity to dismiss such trivial questions during the approval process, I was wholly unprepared for this new surge of fear about raising: 1. A child who is black 2. A confident, strong daughter, and 3. A black daughter --- all three things separate but interrelated.  I’m reminded time and again that world has moved forward in many ways since your life was taken, but not nearly forward enough. I wonder now: 

• How do I help my daughter trust police without ignoring Tamir Rice?   Tatyana Hargrove? Sandra Bland?
• How do I teach her to be safe when young girls are harassed because they simply have female bodies, without requiring her to take ownership of someone else's actions?    
• How will I be sensitive to what lies ahead of her, on account of her body, female and brown, without teaching her to fear or feel ashamed of who she is?  
• How on earth could the magnitude of that responsibility be something I haven't thought about every second of every day that I have known my daughter will be born brown-skinned, in Trump's America?

These are big questions with unclear answers.  I could sit in fear (and I have), but I have  also chosen to remember your legacy, Reverend King; I am committed to studying with fervor and respect.  I will read your letters, sermons, and speeches.  I will follow your guidance, and match your passion, to fight injustice, because as you said “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”  If I am to mother a child of color, it becomes my responsibility to remember your life and your work.    It is only through action like yours that we will transform our country.

Thank you for being an example of who I want, no, who I need to be.

With love and peace,

Manisha