Where's Blair?

Hi friends! I’m taking a little break. My organization offers a sabbatical after eight years (a benefit which I may have been lobbying for since … about eight years ago) and I just hit that milestone.

TBH, I am really ready for a break. 

I love my job and feel so lucky to be surrounded by so many brilliant hard working, principled colleagues. Also, burnout comes for us all and it’s gotta be addressed before it burns you all the way down. My last few years have had some real highlights – I’ve got an amazing team and we’ve grown our program and organization into a national force for fighting felony disenfranchisement and promoting access to the ballot for incarcerated folks. But also we’ve hit some low lows – like our battle with Tennessee where the state used every underhanded tactic in the book to avoid making easy changes that would give 400,000+ people a fair shot at restoring their right to vote. They did some real cowardly Art of War larping there.

But you literally did not come here to read about work and I am not here to write about it – that’s like the whole point. Oh but also speaking of burn out – our house lowkey burned down in February. Burned down is not exactly the right phrase; like on a scale of pile of smouldering rubble to toaster fire, I would say it was just smouldering rubble of center. But the process of trying to rebuild it has also been exhausting and – get this – eight months later we still don’t even have the permit to rebuild. Definitely not for lack of trying either. Annie has been an admin hero, pushing our contractors and the city along. Not to mention that she heroically Heisman-trophied both our porky little beagladors out of the house to safety the night of the fire. But yeah, we had just bought that house a year before the fire and I would really like to go home. Literal burn out, people.

Not to mention the f*&$ing fascism!!!!

Okay but this blog isn’t about complaining either. And lots and lots of people have it way worse than me. I want health, safety, and healing for us all. So that’s what this blog and journey is about for me.

I have long had a passion for travel. I am energized by visiting new places, meeting people living in different ways. I am also humbled by living out of a stinky suitcase, making embarrasing linguistic errors, and having my plans constantly and consistently thwarted. Honestly, that really cleanses my anxiety pallete.

So I’m hitting the road for two months. My plans include a boat tour of the Greek Islands, hopping around agriturismos in Italy, a night at a desert camp in Morocco, floating up the Nile, hiking in the Drakensburg Mountains in South Africa, a pre-scheduled mental breakdown on the beach in Oman (don’t worry about it, it’s good for us), and biking into cloud forest in Southern India.

An important part of this for me is breaking out of the attention economy. I also love that traveling makes us focus on the things right in front of us, like not getting on the wrong bus. For me, it also includes a lot of doing nothing, just sitting in places and watching. But that doesn’t work if I just reach for my phone and go on Instagram every time I have one free second. My social media and news addiction is out of control right now, TBH. And it’s a real hellscape out there. And it’s a real dystopian nightmare that these techbro wannabe overlord dorks have cooked up for us where we barely have the attention to focus on or respond to these horrors because we need to keep scrolling until there’s a dog singing Bad Bunny please! I want out … or at least to regain control over my own focus and downtime. (Yes, I know one of those jabroneys owns WordPress – our options are so limited!!!)

So anyway, I’m off the social meeds and am coming to you live from the crappiest, tiniest used tablet very little money can buy because I want it to be so slow and annoying that I am not tempted to use it much – except for doing this.

Other stuff I might write about: my feelings about traveling at all right now. Yes, I want this but I also feel like maybe I should just stay and spend three months helping organize to get the Gestapo off our streets. Or try to get on the next Flotilla. Or just keep doing my job to try to make sure we have a legit election next fall. Or even stay here and help fix my house.

One thing I will be doing with this time, and may write about here, is working on my familial reparations project to support Bowie State University. The work of repair could not feel more urgent, with the musty, necrotic people in power doing everything they can to bury truth and history, while the gangrenous zombie of white supremacy continues to tear us apart.

Or, TBH, I may not write much at all. Maybe I’ll just post pretty pictures. Or maybe I’ll just see you beautiful people in January. Whatever happens, love you lots – send me screenshots of funny memes!