I hope this letter finds you feeling yourself. As for me, just yesterday, I buried a decades-long relationship, an experience that was at once devastating and no great loss. It was the friendship equivalent of a withered old robber baron stealing shares of life via black market organ transplants – obstinate, abiding, arguably inspirational on the surface, but disgusting underneath. We’d been playing a game of friendship pretend with panache, making believe we couldn’t hear its death rattles over the sound of misapplied loyalty and dusty nostalgia.
But this is a time of loss, and the last year or two has forced me to prepare to lose a fair amount of folks in the next however long. Undoubtedly the reasons will range from trite to grave, e.g.,
“How dare you say my dream of a sustainable fashion line requires that I learn literally anything about textiles.”
“You keep saying the same things as other Black people about oppression and, honestly, I expect more original content from you.”
“I know Texas used to be Mexico but I don’t wanna give up my property! I vote blue and I unironically bought a Stacy Abrams prayer candle!”
Change is the only constant, and surviving this recent (and ongoing, if we’re being real – it’s gonna be wild for MINUTE, kids) period of massive change has confirmed that even the lengthiest, most entrenched relationships – with people, concepts, and ways of being – can be rendered irrevocably altered in a matter of seconds. And since I’m a staunch advocate of free will, I’m taking all this as training. If and when it comes time for me and an entity I once loved to part, I pray that I can release it in peace and permanence, wishing it receives all that it deserves.
So: I say all this to say that the human who lives in the vessel alongside T.I.P is metamorphosing alongside the rest of the world, and our collective understanding of that world. If you, dear Reader, choose to continue engaging, please be informed that our work will inevitably involve reckonings. T.I.P’s mission centers on identifying and dismantling internal and external systems of oppression as they pertain to achieving safety, abundance, and peaceful life for everyone, as opposed to the chosen few that psychopathic systems would have us believe are the only ones who deserve it.
