Hello.
It’s been a minute. Damn near 4 years since the last time I wrote a blog post.
A lot has happened in that time. More than I want to get into right now. But I’ll provide a greatest hits, for some context:
My career as a TV writer was going incredibly well — until a profound illness in 2022 and 2023’s double strikes forced me to pause.
I used the pause to focus on my health and well-being. Doing so allowed me to find greater joy and purpose in my life. I traveled. I wrote. I got weight-loss surgery. I got some tattoos. I joined a church and became a Unitarian Universalist, finally finding a spiritual community that aligned with my beliefs and questions, many of them conflicting. And it helped me deal with the pain and stress that was still unavoidable, which included losing 3 people close to me.
But recently, a combination of tragic and traumatizing events have forced me to once again be more intentional about my healing. These events include another death, being verbally and emotionally abused for over two months by an employer, my hometown erupting in devastating wildfires, and my country of origin deciding to embrace a fascist regime.
My faith and my healing journey have expanded my capacity to be like, “I don’t know what the fuck is happening. And I don’t know if it’s going to get better anytime soon. But I guess I’ll ride it out and see what happens.”
This is really fucking hard. Personally, I have never felt more alone and less sure of where I’m going. Professionally, I have had to accept that while I deeply believe writing and telling stories is my divine calling, I chose an industry that enables and empowers individuals to behave in ways that I find disgusting and deplorable. I also chose an industry that suffers from a “poverty of imagination,” in every arena, as one of my colleagues put it a few years ago. Politically, I am scared every single day — by the death, destruction, and dehumanization this fascist neo-coup promises to bring. But also, demoralized and discouraged by the seeming lack of organized and purposeful mass resistance, especially by the people and institutions who have the influence and resources to do something.
Some days, it feels impossible to maintain hope. So much of who I am is bound together by a sincere and deeply-rooted belief in goodness and justice. I was raised by Black public school educators with radical politics and radical faith, who themselves are descendants of enslaved Africans (and a few Indigenous folks) who survived genocide, the Middle Passage, chattel slavery, and the Jim Crow South to give me life. And while my primary profession is a TV writer who has mostly written on family dramas and coming-of-age shows during the Peak TV Boom, I became a writer because I was inspired and shaped by fearless and prescient writers, singers, poets, and filmmakers who have worked across time, genre, medium, canon, and culture like Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Laurie Halse Anderson, Rachel McKibbens, Ava DuVernay, Nina Simone, Amy Winehouse, Beyoncé, and so many more — including my beloveds, Tonya Ingram and Aziza Barnes, who are no longer with us. And I was also inspired and shaped by so many other writers and artists whose names are not well-known, but whose impact on my life and my creative work is undeniable. They have been colleagues, mentors, collaborators, and co-conspirators. They know who they are.
Hope is my birthright and my inheritance.
And right now, in this current era of confusion and despair: Hope is a radical act. Hope is the only true defense any of us have right now. Because hope lives deep inside us. It cannot be stripped away. It cannot be killed, massacred, or destroyed. It cannot be imprisoned. It cannot be criminalized or legislated out of existence. Hope lives everywhere and with everyone. It even lives with those who try to harm us. Because hope requires a commitment that we will not dehumanize and violate those who do the same to us. Otherwise, that is not hope. That is revenge. Hope dictates that on the other side of these crises, there is right action, redemption, and reconciliation. Hope is the balm, the prayer, the spell, the promise that we can survive the worst and create something better and more beautiful from the wreckage.
But this is also true: Writing is also a radical act. I did not become a writer to pitch to studio mandates and survive one toxic writers’ room after another. I became a writer to celebrate and honor the incredible people, histories, and lineages I come from. To imagine new ways of being and connecting. To document that I was a Fat Queer Neurodivergent Black Woman who lived. Period. To document that there were many of us who did not endorse or succumb to Trump, fascism, and the final desperate and devastating roar of capitalism and white supremacy. To remind myself and those who have tried to harm, abuse, silence, and erase me that I am still here and my pen game is still so much better than theirs will ever be. To rediscover the wild joy, beautiful labor, and divine magic that writing has always brought to my life.
And so, for as long as it feels generative, productive, and necessary, I will be posting on this little forgotten blog in my little invisible corner of the Internet. I don’t know if it will be daily or weekly. I’ll see what feels good and natural. I don’t know what the content will be — probably some random combination of essays, poems, short stories, lists, liturgies, and musings. I do not plan to promote or announce these blog posts on other social media platforms right now. So if they reach others, I am so grateful. I genuinely hope these words do find and reach others. But it’s not the requirement.
So much of my professional creative writing is always for others or to achieve other means: For producers and showrunners and studio/network executives. For audiences and streaming platform subscribers. For a paycheck and health insurance. For recognition and prestige.
But here, I am not writing for anyone other than myself, God, and my Ancestors. Asé. Amen. See ya next time.
Onward,
Michelle