leaving, shedding, and creating
may 2026
I left my job last May.
It will be a year to the date on May 9th. I didn’t just leave a job, I left a career, an industry, and a version of me. I divorced myself from an identity, one I had come to accept as the whole of me.
Since leaving, there’s been a lot of shedding. “A lot” is actually too small of a phrasing to describe just how much of me has broken open, and how much of me feels emotionally naked, and bare. Some of this shedding has been at-will, and some I have been battling.
It’s hard, releasing parts of you. It’s hard coming undone, sometimes harder than releasing, and letting go.
In leaving, shedding and coming undone I have realized how much of the life I’d been building was fractured, and how much I felt like a stranger to myself.
I divorced myself from the version connected to this identity because, while everything looked good on paper, there were pieces of me, slowly eroding, and becoming numb. And I am a feeler. Yes, I also write, but writing is the craft, feeling is the work…the being.
In the time since leaving, and as I am still shedding, I have been nurturing myself and a few seeds planted in me.
For some time now, I have felt the presence of a voice asking, ‘What am I meant for?’. The answer is not singular, or binary, it is multiplicitous but, for right now, I can say that I know I am meant for loving. Loving as an act of care, consideration, respect, attention, practice, and study. I am meant for contemplating and reimagining a world that does not just progress, and develop, but grows, evolves, deepens, and expands. Not just for some, but for all of those willing, ready, and able to live as liberated sentient beings.
One of the seeds, I have been devotedly nurturing, is growing. I have introduced it here before. It’s naming, SITES OF MEMORY, is sacred. It is named after, ‘The Site of Memory’, an essay penned by Toni Morrison in 1987. Click through on the link below and you will find a link to read the essay.
SITES OF MEMORY is a liberatory act and offering, my way of both loving, and menacing in a society created to keep us from each other and ourselves. This offering is me, as an artist, “reflecting the times” (Nina Simone) and meeting these times in care.
Click the images or button below to learn more, and continue to the bottom of the newsletter for one more invitation.
Before I go, I leave you with a piece of prose, from the archives.
If you feel so inclined, please leave a comment. Let me know how you feel about what you read.
How did it land?
What resonates?
Are there any words you’ll hold on to, and carry with you?
Until next month…
Ẹniafẹ Isis, feeler - writer - journey teller