How to Create Your Life of Choice
No Matter the Cost
I could see sweat stains running along the crack of his pants. A steady, soft applause became mute as the door clicked shut behind him.
“How did it go?” I paced outside, enduring the tender silence of the hallway.
Inside the classroom were around fifty people, second- and third-year Law Review students, unartfully scattered in chunks of cliques. I was running for Editor-in-Chief of our law review. The students were gathered to hear each candidate’s promise.
“It was fine, it went well.” Benjamin looked at me with a feigned bashfulness.
Earlier in that week, Benjamin warned me that he and his friends had all agreed to run for editor positions on our school’s two law review publications. They intended to win each open leadership position and work together in the coming year.
The casual way he expressed confidence that all of him and his friends would win against me was breathtaking. (They were each white, wealthy, male, and cis-gendered.) They believed the positions of power were theirs, as if their triumph was the natural order. They did not see me as viable competition. I was astounded, amused.
I was also jealous. Law school was the first time I ever seriously wondered what it must be like to be in the mask of a white man. What does the unshakable confidence in your place in positions of power and our society feel like in your body? Would I ever know that? And why didn’t I have friends who wanted to take over entire institutions with me? Just so we could hang out in positions of power together? It was as enviable as it was ridiculous, because I knew my skills and I believed I had a chance to win.
“Tifanei, we’re ready for you…”
I entered the room and saw my peers decorating the lecture hall’s seats. Adrenaline took hold of my tongue, sucked it dry and caressed my fingers, shuttering them into a gentle shiver. I knew I looked nervous. And it was important to me that I did not.
I reminded my body that we were safe. I took a deep breath. I visualized the adrenaline in my torso and moved the energy downward; away from my hands, heart, and stomach. When the anxious pulse reached my feet, I tapped my right big toe in place, slowly, methodically, asking my toe to hold us down (a subtle exercise I accidentally learned during some speech I had given on some occasion somewhere). When I felt calm, I opened my eyes, smiled at the eyes gazing toward me, and began.
I recited my speech just as my undergraduate debate coach taught me to do: move to different positions on stage for each new point you make, make eye contact with each student—not lingering on a single person for too long, and use a personable tone, connect. I even quoted some of my peers’ concerns or desires, so that they knew I intended to be a committed leader for them.
When I won, it was just about as anticlimactic as this sentence transition. Later people would tell me it “wasn’t even close,” and it was “so obvious you were the right choice.” But in the moment after the vote, I felt only an uneasiness in the room. Though there were many eyes looking toward me, no one said anything to me. Not even a congratulations. I felt hostility, and an acute loneliness as people gathered their belongings and began to shuffle out of the room.
It was a sign of what was to come…
Why am I telling this story? It’s because I was listening to an audiobook about creativity and magic this weekend. And it occurred to me that even my professional life and development was art.
I used to recollect the above story with self-pity and grief:
No one should have to endure what I endured during this time of my life. One day I will write about it all.
The students who elected me would undermine me. Some banded together to petition the dean to expel me for leading a Black Lives Matter initiative.
The professors who were paid to mentor me, did not. My predecessor who was supposed to guide and train me, also did not.
When I complained of the lack of diversity on our legal publications, law school staff had secret meetings about how problematic I was for the school. One well-regarded professor even sat me down to warn me not to “dilute the quality of the publication” by recruiting more people of color.
The school pulled my scholarship without warning or reason and closed the publication before the end of the year.
It was traumatic. And a tale of immense grief, torment really. I was not okay. And I did not deserve what I experienced and to lose what I lost.
But today, I view this story with a different lens, one of marvel:
There are so many moments in my professional life where I was told “you do not belong here,” “you cannot do that this way,” “you are not going to succeed.” And yet, I was there. And yet, I did it that way. And yet, I succeeded.
In rooms where all my privileged colleagues had inarguably more resources, better connections, more intentional training, and belonged by nature of their proximity to whiteness, I was there for no other reason than I wanted to be.
Against the odds, I created a world for myself where I was included, even heard—albeit with wild hostility, where my presence created cosmic shifts for whole institutions. My career was art—one of the most difficult creations I have made to date— and I was the artist.
Was it worth it? I mean, stay tuned for the final life review. But for now, more aware of my creative power, my art is writing about all that happened during the last decade of being a civil rights lawyer. Learning to spin my tales into lessons for myself, and maybe, if I’m lucky, for others, too.
Guided Meditation:
Each story we create, share, and consume has the power to change each of us at any time; allow them to, but do so responsibly. This guided meditation was created by me to support your integration.
Thought Prompt:
If your life is art, what are you creating in this era of yours?
“ There are so many moments in my professional life where I was told “you do not belong here,” “you cannot do that this way,” “you are not going to succeed.” And yet, I was there. And yet, I did it that way. And yet, I succeeded.” phew!!!!!
“The school pulled my scholarship without warning or reason and closed the publication before the end of the year.”
that part was probably the most brutal of the all.