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.