We are not who we think we are

I was asked to give a talk by a London-based company for Black History Month in October 2022. Initially, I was going to title my talk Your Silence Will Not Protect You after the eponymous collection of essays by Audre Lorde and to honour the many silences I have nursed over the years and the vast silences I know countless Black people are forced into in their professional lives. It took a bout of illness in the last days of 2020 to nudge me out of silence. I developed mild brain inflammation after a severe infection. Losing the full capacity to think and speak made me realise just how badly I wanted to. I watched Brene Brown’s The Call to Courage on Netflix in the first week of January 2021 and it moved me so profoundly that it got me out of bed. I journalled and took notes. I confronted my difficult relationship with vulnerability and delved into some discomfiting questions. I resisted pulling away from the long and uneasy gap between asking the questions and receiving answers. <a href="https://medium.com/@rumbimak/we-are-not-who-we-think-we-are-359f3dbac462">Website</a>