Experiments In Liberation, Part Two

Sunset on Blue Monday

by Maegan Scott

In September of 2020, when the then-POTUS issued an executive order banning DEI trainings—like the one that my company was becoming known for delivering—I remember exactly how I responded. I saw the headline, and read the first few paragraphs of the order. I closed my laptop, walked upstairs, and went straight back to bed. 

I remember the email we were forwarded, not even an hour later, from a federally funded client—a whistle blown—saying Wayfinding Partners “deals in anti-American propaganda,” that we “promote the illegal and dangerous ideas of White Supremacy Culture and critical race theory,” that we would no longer be an “appropriate” vendor. I prepared for more of such emails to come in. 

It was still morning. I hadn’t yet had my first meeting, but I was already done with the day. I pulled the covers over my head, stayed in bed until it was over. 

So much has changed since that day, in my own life and everywhere I look. But in other very real ways, that day hasn’t actually ended. 

Morning stretched into afternoon, evening, and into the summer of 2022—Roe v. Wade was overturned, and the toll was instantly broad and devastating—especially for LGBTQ+ and Black and brown people and any already vulnerable group. But the day went on, and then it was the summer of 2023—and with another 6-3 vote, six decades of precedent were reversed, rejecting the category of race as one of the many factors that inform college admissions decisions. 

I don’t remember what I did when I heard about these decisions, which felt only hours apart from each other. I was likely already numb, or whiplashed, from the recent years of racial re-reckoning (and then the racial re-reckoning-recoil) to have a visceral response. 

Plus by the time UNC and Harvard happened, my life was already unrecognizable to me. 

My divorce was entering a particularly painful stage. I’d just moved back into my old home—the one I first knew with my ex-husband—after months of couch-surfing and temporary living spaces. Uprooted. Newly planted. So very many boxes.

I was also just about to begin the first cycle of my fertility journey, and was preparing myself for what that would require—daily injections, daily monitoring appointments, surgery, repeat. Wondering when the Supreme Court might come for my frozen eggs. 

And before I could actually contemplate the latest news cycle, or summon the energy to have something profound to say about what was happening to us—Black Women, Americans, workers, humans, or any other “us” I am a part of—there was something else to look at. Another development in my separation, another 10-week menstrual cycle, another fiscal challenge at work. I went on with my day, or it went on with me.

*

If that three-year day had a name, it would have to be Blue Monday.

There’s a reason why Annie Lee’s famous painting seemed to make a resurgence in online spaces, throughout the pandemic and America’s latest racial reckoning. And why everything about that piece (the hue, the droop, the posture, the determination, the woman herself—the way you can almost feel the pain in her upper back and shoulders, the way her head seems suspended by the sheer force of will, hovering above despair and yet never giving into it) spoke directly to the sense of living through that years-long day. 

That painting is an inheritance Black women pass down and around to each other. It communicates the un-communicate-able. It’s the nod Black people give to each other across a room full of white people. And so it’s no surprise we were sharing it left and right on social media. Seeking the solace that only comes from being seen.    

*

I understand something about cycles. About seasons. About the past, and how it is never done with us. About return—and how insight can lead us back to where we are called, but of course we never quite come home again. And about possibility, and the future. 

I knew that I’d lived this Blue Monday before, as did my ancestors. And I knew that this time around, despite its familiarity, the day was different than it was before. And that freedom lives in those spaces of difference.

*

Remember how, in 2020, we drew from our history to find the phrase that captured the moment? “Bone-tired.” 

I was exhausted. Black women were exhausted. Bone-tired. Blue Monday was here again (or, maybe, still). And in response to that deep, hollow sense of depletion, I did what so many others did—what the woman in Lee’s painting had clearly done, many times before, and was about to do again. I got up. (And went back to bed. And got up, again and again and again and. . .)

I spent so much of the next part of that Blue Monday talking to white people (and, let’s be honest, some Black and brown people, too) about what this exhaustion meant. Always one too many times—what it felt like, the 400-year history of why it feels like that. Stopping myself when it started to feel like I was justifying my pain, and then giving them the solution to the problem that they benefit from—what was required of them to become true “allies” (no, “accomplices”; no again, co-conspirators) so that we might collectively move ourselves out of such extractive and dehumanizing systems. 

As I write this, it is 2024. We’ve had more political developments, more Supreme Court decisions (presidential “immunity”, the criminalization of people experiencing homelessness, the end of Chevron deference…). It’s summer again. Another election season is ramping up and winding down. It is the first anniversary of moving back into my home—starting over again. 

* 

Blue Monday doesn’t seem to be done with me yet. But there is movement in the sky, and I’m no longer feeling “bone-tired.” 

I’m tired, yes. Exhausted. But mostly I am fed up. I’m done. I’m ready for something else. 

I’m listening to an inner voice these days that can’t be anything other than that of my grandparents. The voice is telling me, among other things, to lift my head again–-tilt it, and shift my gaze at my off-kilter world. To notice what is, and has always been, available to me—to change and be changed, despite the relentlessness of the day. To recall my power and my magic. Because no court’s decision (neither family nor “Supreme”), no executive order, no policy change—no external force—will pull the sun down on Blue Monday, grant me the chance to rest, and wake up feeling new. 

*

At the time she painted Blue Monday, Annie Lee was working as chief clerk at a railroad. The job granted her stability, but like most steady jobs, it demanded much of her. Blue Monday is about Lee herself, getting up in the dark morning, summoning the energy to leave the comfort of bed, and preparing herself to enter the winter cold and catch the early bus that would take her to her job—just so that she might do it all over again the next day. 

And so the narrative of Blue Monday is of a familiar relentlessness. Black women facing the same shit over and over again—because, of course, we have to. Because, of course, we pray and hope and work for something better. Because, of course, we (unfortunately?) can. 

But the lesson of Blue Monday is also the story of Lee’s success as an artist. Somehow, she was able to let go, and the perpetual Blue Mondays as she knew them came to an end. She left her job at the railroad, and embraced the risk of building a new life as a painter. One day, she stood up, moved on, and that day ended. There was pain, I’m sure. Struggle, which I refuse to romanticize. But there was also more art, and more joy, and more freedom. The word “resilience” comes to mind—how it’s been used against us, how we need to reclaim it as our own.

*

I am feeling, similarly, ready to let go and begin again. And as I do, I’m noticing that I am not alone in feeling—still, so very often—mired, stuck. Blue. The day still goes on. 

And again, as ever—if any of this resonates with you, I hope we find community with each other, so that we can sunset these relentless days and find something new together.

This day is ending. Not without pain, or even without (sometimes) hovering just above despair. But this Monday is not eternal, and we have more power than we know.

Experiments in Liberation

Notes on Mourning and Metamorphosis

by Maegan Scott

There’s nothing quite like going through a divorce to force you to get up close and personal, really intimate, with concepts like “equity,” “justice,” and “liberation” . . . kind of in that order. (Really, there’s really nothing quite like going through a divorce. Period. Full stop. End of sentence. But that’s not what this post is about.) 

For the past year and a half, I have been getting divorced.

Flashback to Fall 2022: I am struggling. Hard. And it didn’t feel like the kind of struggle we talk about as Black women. Wayfinding Partners, the consulting firm I founded and lead, is hitting a peak stride. The team is becoming the strongest it has ever been. But I was unwell. This time, it didn’t feel like my on-again, off-again house guest, Depression. I was ungrounded, stuck, spiritually disconnected, sad. 

Like my parents’ divorce 25 years before, the fact of it came out of the blue, violent, sudden like a sucker punch: I was lost. And I had been for some time. In my 13-year marriage to my best friend, my soul mate, I lost sight of who I was and where I was going. In service of my marriage, I dissociated from critical parts of myself—parts that were getting restless and waving for my attention, trying to tell me they couldn’t breathe. Once you realize you’re suffocating, the need to breathe is so pronounced, so desperate in its urgency, it’s the only thing you can focus on. It was the most unmooring and destabilizing moment of my life.    

For the past year and a half, I (me, the Maegan Scott who always has it together) have been getting divorced.

Time has a funny way of dilating—cycling, quickly and slowly—when the Universe is trying to teach you something that hurts. So much of the last 18 months has been big hurting. Several of those months were spent living in Airbnbs and hotels, with family on air mattresses, taking meetings from my car. I came apart. I put myself together. Came apart again. In the midst of a marriage ending, I dared myself to dream about and pursue motherhood. I froze 22 eggs over three hormone cycles, had a myomectomy, spent cumulative days in the ER because the bleeding wouldn’t stop. I hired some staff, fired some staff, continued to run a company defined by its self-experimentation in workplace liberation. 

Somewhere in there I turned 40. 

I trust Divine timing and in my better moments I believe the Universe unfolds as it should.  But the truth is, the phrase that has been ringing in my head for the past year and a half is: I’m not sure I can do this. 

*

When your calling is the pursuit of equity, justice, and liberation for your fellow Black people—and your bills get paid when that pursuit is well received—you can sometimes forget that these things are for you, too. You can forget that you also are worthy of freedom. 

(The facilitator in me is admonishing: “I statements.” So, yes. I forget that liberation is for me, too.)   

Sometimes I forget that I started Wayfinding Partners because I wanted to be free. It’s startling how easy it’s been to lose sight of that. How smoothly my focus shifted to the liberation of those around me. In the years I spent building a container big enough for people like me to detox White Supremacy Culture, for others to experiment and explore their liberation, I neglected to figure out how to set that container down. I can’t easily step inside the container, experience the exploration, if I’m also the one holding it [all together].  

One day, during a tense staff meeting, I went to grab hold of my passion for this mission and pulled back a fist full of air. The room started to spin and the corners of my vision narrowed and darkened. My Apple Watch told me my heart rate was spiking to 120bpm, as I was realizing, oh wow, I don’t have anything to give to this room of folks expecting me to lead. 

Somewhere over the last five years, I lost myself in my work and my reason for starting. I lost sight of who I was, where I wanted to go, and what I wanted for myself. I couldn’t breathe in the very thing I created to bring me (back to) life. 

I’m not sure I can do this. 

*

When your calling is the pursuit of equity, justice, and liberation, the wisdom of mourning is required. But that wisdom is hard earned. (The only way through is through.)

The pursuit of liberation forces questions—deep, life-changing, life-unraveling ones. Not leading questions, not questions cloaked as platitudes about letting go of control. But truly open questions. Thrilling and terrifying at times in their openness. 

Questions that have forced me to hold at a distance: the company I founded and have poured so much into; my vision for myself as a leader, as a woman; my sense of self in my marriage; my (truly loving) marriage itself; the honor and burden of carrying forth a lineage; the calling I know my ancestors gave me, a calling I feel in my womb . . . and then confront the fear—at times, the fact—of it all failing. To face who I am when, not if, it all dies.

Because before you can transform—which is another thing liberation requires—some things have to die. 

*

You hardly ever hear anyone talk about how violent and terrifying being in a cocoon must be. About what the caterpillar must endure to transform. The courage of metamorphosis. And it occurs to me that may be because it isn’t either of those things. A caterpillar is meant to become a butterfly. She probably doesn’t spend too much time clinging to the world as it used to be. 

Does the caterpillar mourn? Let’s say she does. But let’s also say there is joy in it. She is just working towards becoming what she was always meant to be—free.

May I have grace and patience enough to become what I was always meant to be. 

All of this is really to say—hello, hi, I’m here, it’s been a minute. And if you asked me how I’ve been and I’ve given you some variation of “okay/managing/still standing,” know that I’ve been (am still) deep in the being-torn-apart stage of metamorphosis. And I’m sitting inside the echoes of these experiments in liberation, both personal and professional (if such a distinction exists in this line of work I’ve chosen), trying to grab hold of the reverberations, to make sense of it. 

Writing helps. You’ll see more from me. 

I’m not sure I can do this. But I know this doesn't happen alone. 

So, hi, hello, I’m here. I need you. And if any of this resonated with you, then I think you need me, too.