# data[].attributes.headline
I know Brene Brown has been getting a lot of traction lately...and I do critique some of her work, but I really appreciated how it helped me to think of my vulnerability as a strength.

# data[].attributes.subject
I know Brene Brown has been getting a lot of traction lately...and I do critique some of her work, but I really appreciated how it helped me to think of my vulnerability as a strength.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_the_power_of_vulnerability?language=en

# data[].attributes.body
For me being vulnerable is about being honest and allowing others to contribute to your growth and healing. It necessitates accepting the fact that you are sharing parts of your being that other's could take advantage of but having faith that they will not.

# data[].attributes.body
Vulnerability is showing what is close to your heart despite the fear of someone or something hurting you in response to what you decided to show or share.

Vulnerability is about letting your light shine bright even when the haters are trying to diminish you.

# data[].attributes.headline
Kevin Quashie, "Poetic Inclination, Black Subjunctivity”

# data[].attributes.subject
Kevin Quashie, "Poetic Inclination, Black Subjunctivity”

# data[].attributes.body
I want to make a case about ethics that requires first that I make a case for aliveness. But just to establish a marker for the ethical—the urgency of the ethical—I want to be clear that there is no question more vital than the question “how to be,” and no doing more vital than to imagine that this question belongs to ones who are black (and to black literature). That is, because the question of the ethical is a question of relation, it seems to elide blackness: in an antiblack imagination, there is no “how to be” since antiblackness presumes to answer or overwhelm or even render inept this query. I want to get to the question “how to be” without reifying it as one of respectability or worthiness that is sutured to behavior; I want to get to the question as if we, black people, are not exempt from its daily reckoning. This thinking through both aliveness and ethics will lean on black poetics.

# data[].attributes.body
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

# data[].attributes.body
“Smallness is subversive, because smallness can creep into smaller places and wreak transformation at the most vulnerable, cellular level. In a time when largeness is threatening to topple us, I wish to remember and praise the beauty of smallness, in order to banish the Goliath of loneliness.”

# data[].attributes.body
Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.

Ruha Benjamin

# data[].attributes.body
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.

This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors brings us closest to that fullness.

The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision—a longed for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.”

# data[].attributes.body
Martha stopped, startled, then sighed. "I see you as female now," she said. "Actually, I think you look a little like me. We look like sisters." She smiled wearily and handed over a glass of cider.

God said, "You really are doing this yourself, you know. But as long as it isn't upsetting you, I suppose it doesn't matter."

"It does bother me. If I'm doing it, why did it take so long for me to see you as a black woman—since that's no more true than seeing you as a white or a black man?"

"As I've told you, you see what your life has prepared you to see." God looked at her, and for a moment, Martha felt that she was looking into a mirror.

Martha looked away. "I believe you. I just thought I had already broken out of the mental cage I was born and raised in—a human God, a white God, a male God …"

"If it were truly a cage," God said, "you would still be in it, and I would still look the way I did when you first saw me."

"There is that," Martha said. "What would you call it then?"

"An old habit," God said. "That's the trouble with habits. They tend to outlive their usefulness."