Hey y’all. God damn, right? It’s happening. It always has been. We knew it, but we didn’t want to know it. Nothing can change if not faced. Lots of facing going on! You ok? No? Good. It’s not ok right now. I’m right there with you. Call me!
I write this unedited mess to you from my couch where I’m toggling between trying to work, deleting and reloading Instagram because Minnesota is all I can think about, and blowing my nose since I don’t know how to be sick but I have the flu again after taking Seylah and her friends to the National Western Stock Show on Friday in zero windy degrees, where—
I was so nervous our Latino community members would be targeted by ICE and worried someone would get shot (I always worry about this, I am a person-parent in America) and secretly worried about human trafficking since I read an article (or let’s be honest, a post online I can’t find now) that said the Stock Show was a hot bed for human trafficking given the big containers for big animals and I was like oh hell no, so I went as a field trip chaperone to be on high alert and walk around with kids wanting to buy things and eat sugar and complain about walking a lot, but we had fun I think! Anyways!
I am living a lot of questions and wondering if you are too?:
How can I be a woman here, an activist, a mother, a lover, and a healthy person? Is it possible? How can I sleep without waking up at 3am? Is 3am just when I should write now and take a nap at noon like my elders because I am basically now an elder as I wonder when or if I will ever grow up and secretly hope I never do? How can I make art under this financial stress? How can we help each other? How do I raise children here?
Will I ever win Just Dance - my kids are so good!? How do I relax? Does my comfort matter? Am I going to finish this draft by Jan 31st? How do I believe what I’m doing is even slightly important in the midst of all of this? How can we make plans to take our art on the road around the world when nowhere is safe and dear family members are ill and declining here in this country? How do I stay in touch with my friends?
Will I ever like winter? Will I ever not cry when I hear songs my mom loved? (I hope not.) How do I offer real support to my cousin and auntie going through hell? How does anyone do all of this? How does everyone respond to emails and texts in a timely manner? (What the fuck y’all! It’s just too much. Let’s reschedule its winter time and the world is on fire under snow!)
Do we stay and fight or leave and fight? Will we be able to get out if we wait until the summer? Do I watch? Do I not? Do I prepare or escape? How long can I keep the truth from my kids and/or what can they handle and when? Should we do karate more than twice a week to prepare them? When will the swim lesson scholarship people respond? Should we get a gun or it won’t matter, better get a drone, but wait, too late, just get a nuclear bunker and keep the gas tank full?
Where will Nya be safe internationally as a they? Will I ever be able to grow my hair out? When will I stop comparing myself to other artists? How can I even think about anything but Minnesota right now? How will I get breast exams in Thailand? Who is going to take care of our cat? Should we sell one or both cars? How do I forgive and let love win knowing that people who love me - and people I love - voted for white supremacy and the annihilation of my family and community members?
What is living here doing to our stress levels? Perhaps killing us slowly so we have to go to their hospitals? Is there value in comparison here - say between my pain and the pain of a child in Gaza? Or just a critical remembering and re-remembering that none of us are free until we’re all free?
When did being cruel, dishonest and tacky become presidential material? What happened to the Epstein files? Venezuela? Can we move to Greenland? Am I finally old enough to hurt people’s feelings to tell my truth? How do I protect my family? Was Jesus “legal?” Isn’t this why people don’t like abortion? The valuing of human life? How did we get here - better question - how do we build a new world?
Will this country ever be safe for my children? My husband? Will he ever be able to drop the kids off without imagining a school shooter? Who is flying those planes full of terrified people ripped apart from their families and homes from one state to another? What do they dream about? How can I watch these little baby children in Minnesota detention centers (cages and camps) call out “Let us out, let us out!’ and just sit here on this fucking couch eating baby carrots writing made up stories and singing and crying and reading poems to my kids? What matters right now? Everything? Nothing?
Meanwhile….BULLIES
How do I tell my child over and over not to listen to the bully when she calls her a “big back” and “chunky” while my child is working so so hard on reducing her sugar and increasing her exercise since her pre-diabetes diagnosis - plus entering puberty - plus all the attacks on female bodies and body shaming already so very ever present everywhere?
How do I ensure my child knows she is perfect just the way she is no matter what anyone says? I say it constantly, of course. But I know what sinks in and stays in deep. I know she feels so deeply but rarely cries, just like her daddy. It gets stuck in there. My sweet child, minding her business, reading her books, being kind, and being hurt. (She still sleeps next to me, it’s the only time she wants cuddles).
I know she covers her body up now at home, when she used to feel free to be naked. I know all too well that feeling of tight, physical restriction, that needing to become smaller, that needing to be seen and invisible at the same time, that shame for caring about what others think…and it breaks my heart.
I know from experience that being self-conscious is irreversible. Right? I know I walk around naked more than ever. She says, “Mommy you’re skinny and fat at the same time,” as she watches me brush my teeth naked on the toilet, feeling the places my tight sports bra was after a sweaty workout class. “Your boobs used to be up here high and now they’re down here.” Thank you! Change is normal and beautiful! I let her touch me. I laugh. I eat a lot. I fart. Bodies are beautiful. All of them. I love my body. It’s taken me so long to get here, and I’m still not all the way here. And now, here she is.
BODY BODY BODY
I used to not eat and work out too much. I used to teach Tae Bo in my UCSB dorm meeting room. I used to do Cindy Crawford workouts on VHS when everyone else went to eat at the commissary. I’d ask Lynn to bring me back a banana and apple, doing sit ups alone in my dorm room as they all went down the hallway together.
The RA had an intervention for me about eating disorders and I was so deep in I didn’t realize it was for me. I seriously almost didn’t study abroad in Italy because I was worried about where the gym would be, worried about the pasta.
And then…I fell in love with food in Italy. Ahhh. Full fat cappuccinos! Pasta! Wine! I was so happy. I gained so much weight. So free, bold, beautiful. Bartending in Rome. No plans to return. Dreaming in Italian. Fighting in Italian with boys/men. Then my college friend came to visit and said, “Wow you gained a lot of weight, especially in your tummy!”
And the very next day I started running along the river. All the way to the Vatican and back. Miserable. Alone. Starving. Dreading going home. And then made a plan to move south to Bari, and then the twin towers fell and then my parents made me come home. That is another story.
The story here and now is that I am 146 pounds and I was 106 when I met Saxon and then 196 when I was pregnant with Seylah and the next number - who knows! Who cares. I really will say I love my boobs, my ass, my strength, my desires, my cravings, my body going through so much - childbirth, losing my mother, abortion, my hair.
I miss plucking my mom’s chin hairs. I remember when she stopped having hairs to pluck, her earring holes in her little ear lobes closed up. I sent her earrings to wear to Kev’s wedding. I hate that I didn’t know she couldn’t wear them. She didn’t tell me. She wore clip ons and a wig and in the pictures she was beautiful and I hate that she’s not alive. And. Messy bodies mean we are alive! Periods, puberty, frozen shoulder, weird skin rash from the cold, and now, on this couch - the flu. I’m alive.
And we’re back.
We have a bully at school and a bully in the White House. Folks are just feeling so free to let their ugly cruelty out, loud and proud. I get the fear, the needing to hoard your money, the believing all the propaganda, the needing to believe what your family believes so you belong to something.
But the cruelty? I know hurt people hurt, but god damn. Do the work to break the cycle y’all! It’s all mommy or daddy issues at the root, right? Therapy is important! Get you some!
Moving on…
We gathered with friends a while back for dinner. Our kids all played downstairs while the grown ups talked about how we’d love to move to another place together and build a commune - we asked what each person would contribute. Someone said they would cook. Someone said they’d handle the kids. Someone said they’d secure the perimeter. I was like, I’ll do the feelings!!
But for real. Organizing and making art is a necessity during these times. I have to trust this. It’s so easy to think making art doesn’t matter right now! Don’t believe it.
I’m not protesting in the streets but I am showing up by creating safe spaces for us to be human and share our stories. Helping people be brave and trust that we will love them even though we know their darkness. And recording and documenting and listening to people in person. I am inspired deeply by Zora Neale Hurston who warned us, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
We cannot help each other if we do not know each other. Let us know each other. Let yourself be known. In the dark and the light.
With AI, algorithms and criminals leading the country, there is a lot we cannot trust. But what is indisputable - what is undeniable - is the power of organizing, gathering together, and sharing our stories. That is real power. Not gold toilets.
Who is his mother?
Last week, I had a call with a lovely friend helping me think about fundraising and mapping out our tour of Unsent and our 3rd act life review project around the world. She was crying when she answered. She didn’t want to tell me what was wrong at first, she wanted to just get on with the call, but I’m like girl no we can reschedule. She said no. I said well then I am not going to sit here and pitch you my “amazing ideas” while you’re crying so let me listen. I’m listening.
She said that morning, parked at a red light, a white man rolled his truck window down and pointed a gun at her nanny in the car next to him - a sweet tiny 70 year old Venezuelan woman. She was driving to work. Sitting at a red light. She is a mother, a grandmother. Can you imagine this happening to your grandmother? She has been with their family for 6 years. They practice Spanish together. They cook together. Will she ever feel safe again?
The man who pointed a gun in her face at 7am will not be punished. He felt good doing that to her. No one got the license plate. That man has friends who act like him, who also have guns. Friends who can’t wait to use their guns.
How do I talk to men like that? Who is his mother? What would it feel like to live in a country without guns?
My friend and I talk and cry and lament and listen. We let there be long pauses and breaths of silence where we know we are both wiping tears, and then, we talk about the work. We laugh hysterically, as one does after a good cry, about the absurdity.
The obscene oscillation between the deeper unbearable frightening assault on our freedoms and lives - and the simultaneous deep need to keep going, keep working, keep creating, keep healing, keep writing, keep creating, keep loving, keep moving, keep breathing, keep asking for help, keep listening, keep crying, keep screaming, keep creating spaces for us to remember we are human, just like our neighbors.
Turn it off. Go outside. Look a loved one in the eyes for more than one second. Keep hugging the kids if you have their consent. Eat fruit. Wash it first. Read James Baldwin.
Bring cookies to your neighbor. Give them your phone number and full name on a piece of paper and tell them to call if they need anything. Even if their car alarm goes off every night. Even if their dog barks all night. Even if they have drug parties all night. No one deserves to be killed. No one deserves to be kidnapped. No one is illegal on stolen land. It’s literally impossible.
The origin of this country is so profoundly cruel and shameful that they have to bury the facts, changing the story to make them the heroes over and over. They’re afraid of books, artists, writers for a reason.
Keep writing. Keep telling your story. Keep witnessing, recording and documenting.
Their Nuremberg will come.
Also. Make a will. Get your shit in order. Update the advance directive. And buy some gold (thanks to Jadah for that suggestion).
We all know a lot of assholes who wear “Be A Good Person” T-shirts. You don’t have to be friends with people you don’t like anymore. We’re too old for that. Your energy and attention is sacred. Be discerning.
As Jane Fonda says, it’s not about right or left, it’s about right or wrong. They want machines to think for us, communicate for us, watch us, and keep us hooked to everything that hurts us so we need them. Just say no!
Lastly, this is from Autumn Meghan Brown (she has a good list of places/ways to support Minnesotans:
“We have to care for one another, which means we have to know one another. This moment is not about ideas: it is about meeting the material needs of community.
I cannot stress this enough: Hold on to one another.
Stay safe, stay courageous, and be bold in imagining what comes next.
Wake up.”
What she said!
Come to Unsent Sex Edition in Denver Sat Feb 7th. Be with us in body - in person!
Listen to our Unsent Show Podcast featuring recordings of live readings from our shows.
Save the date of Sat, May 16th for our big fun Unsent fundraiser in Denver, and stay tuned for our upcoming shows this spring and early summer in Oakland, LA and Oregon.
Listen to our Unsent radio program on KGNU.
Support taking Unsent on the road from Summer 2026-Jan 2028. We need your support in any ways that feel right for you. Are you able to donate? Do you know a patron of the arts who can support us financially? Know someone in Europe we should connect with? Know of a place we could stay? Know of any fellowships or sponsors? Know of a venue in Uruguay, Berlin, Sydney? Know someone who world schooled their kids? We are info gathering to make the best plans we can with the resources we have. Please be our partner!
Reach out to me here or email babyluckproductions@gmail.com and let me know how you are.
Listen to my StoryCorps One Small Step Conversation with Arland.
Watch this little clip of me sharing my story of motherhood and the holidays at Listen To Your Mother - what a beautiful experience! You should apply to read at their May show here:
An Open Letter To My Sister by James Baldwin
Toni Morrison on the important role of artists today.
The Optimism of Uncertainty Howard Zinn - See below for our very old, loved and worn reminder on our fridge:
I am here and I hope you are too.
Love, hugs and 808 basslines,
Britt
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