A Space For Our Thoughts

It was a Sunday, after a week of late nights, stomach aches, and tears that I hid from everyone. The instructions I had learned without being taught them swelled in my mind: don't burden anyone, carry it, be strong. I had absorbed them so completely I didn't even recognize it as a choice anymore. It was just who I was. A Black woman who handles things. I had three client calls ahead of me. All three needed to hear that timelines were shifting. That I couldn't deliver what I s

It started in a client meeting. We were deep into a culture assessment with an HR director at a mid-sized nonprofit. Smart team, mission-driven organization, the kind of client we love working with. Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, she paused, looked slightly uncomfortable, and said something I have not stopped thinking about since. "I think our team has been using AI for months. I just have not asked." She was not embarrassed about the tools. She was embarrassed

There's a photo of me on a lake. Orange life vest. Sunglasses. Both hands on the oars, looking like I have somewhere to go. I look confident in that photo. Certain. Like a guy who knows which direction he's rowing. I think about that image sometimes when I reflect on the work of hiring, because I've learned that confidence and clarity are not the same thing. And there have been moments in my career — moments I'm not proud of — where I was rowing hard in completely the wrong d

I earned a master's degree from Columbia University. I was doing the same work as the people getting promoted around me. I had the highest degree in my department. And when I finally asked why I kept getting passed over, I was told I should be grateful to have the position I had. That sentence lived in my chest for years. Not because it was the cruelest thing anyone ever said to me — but because of what it confirmed. That the goalposts were never real. That no credential, no

When organizations normalize harmful patterns, people inside them often begin repeating the same behavior — not out of malice, but out of conditioning. Breaking that cycle takes more than good intentions. It takes a different kind of courage.

Let me set the scene. It's February 8th. You're on the couch with your chips, your team just fumbled, and then — halftime. A Puerto Rican kid from Vega Baja walks out of a sugarcane field in an all-white jersey, performing almost entirely in Spanish to the most-watched television audience in the country. Lady Gaga shows up in a tropical dress. Ricky Martin is there being Ricky Martin . And then — and I cannot stress this enough — somebody got married on the 50-yard line. Six

Earlier this year, I found myself rewatching The Office —that mockumentary about a paper company that somehow still feels uncomfortably relevant in 2026. In one episode, a "leadership moment" goes completely off the rails: there's a big announcement, a half-baked plan, and a room full of people trying to look engaged while clearly bracing for impact. It's played for comedy, but if you've ever worked on a real team, the jokes land because they're familiar. You see work dumped

I still remember those Monday mornings when I'd walk into our Manhattan office near Grand Central Station and immediately feel it—that heaviness in the air that tells you something's wrong before anyone says a word. For the first couple of years, it had been an amazing place to work. This was before COVID-19, back when we all came into the office every day. As a designer at this large international publishing and events company serving specialized business markets, I loved th

Kenya was beautiful. The energy of the place makes you believe in fresh starts and second chances. The food, the people, the character—everything felt alive in a way that made me remember why Samira and I dream of relocating there with our kids. For three weeks, I walked through Nairobi and Mombasa with my family, breathing in possibility and exhaling the stress of a challenging year. But it was in a stairwell in Mombasa where I learned the most important lesson of the trip.

If there's one truth that 2025 has reinforced, it's this: we don't control nearly as much as we think we do. And perhaps that's exactly the lesson we needed. I remember the day in October 2024 when I learned about my layoff. I was sitting in my home office in Atlanta, staring at my screen as the virtual meeting ended—the same space where I'd logged countless hours of work, where I'd built relationships with clients and teammates, where I'd convinced myself that stability was