On Silence, Withdrawals and Comebacks:  The Archive Speaks

May 8, 2026

I wasn’t looking for it.

I was working on something else and that something else directed me to the #RacismIsASickness archive.  I began digging through old posts, old language, old versions of myself—and then there it was:  October 22, 2015. “10 Lessons #RacismIsASickness Has Taught Me.”

I clicked on the thumbnail, and almost immediately, the words took me back to a place where I forgot how blunt I was willing to be.

Back then, I felt like I had to be on the defensive so my responses had to match energies. That meant no softening, no hedging, no make it land gently so people wouldn’t flinch. I was saying exactly what I meant, the way I meant it, and if it made people uncomfortable… good. That was the point.

Reading it now, it doesn’t feel like reflection. It feels like impact. Like something had been building for a long time and finally broke through in public.

Line after line, I remember the frustration, the exhaustion, the anger, the clarity. All sitting right there on the surface. No buffer.

And what struck me most wasn’t what I said, but how close I was to the edge when I said it.

***

That post didn’t come out of nowhere.  By the time I sat down to write it, I was already worn down. Not in a vague, “this is hard” kind of way—worn down in a very specific, cumulative way that comes from being in it every day with no real relief.

The trolling had been steady. Not just disagreement—targeted, persistent, and exhausting. The kind that makes you not only second-guess the work, but whether you have the capacity to keep absorbing it.

At the same time, I was trying to get the project to where I originally envisioned it. Twenty-five participants was the goal and I couldn’t even get there.  I had to make a decision: keep pushing for something that wasn’t materializing, or move forward with what I had.

I landed at fourteen and of course, I moved forward—but let’s not pretend that adjustment didn’t land somewhere.

Then there was the opportunity to exhibit the work at Philadelphia City Hall. The offer came and then disappeared into thin air.  No warning. No explanation. Just… pulled.

That kind of silence hits different. Not loud, not confrontational—just absence where something was supposed to be. You’re left standing there trying to figure out what shifted, what you missed, what you did, if anything.

And layered on top of all of that were the quieter interactions. The passive-aggressive comments. The defensiveness. The subtle distancing. The sense that people were engaging just enough to say they did, but not enough to actually sit with what the work was asking of them.

And underneath it all, the constant reminder that making this work cost money. Time. Energy. All of it is finite.

So no—that post wasn’t a random burst of honesty:  It was accumulation.  Every conversation. Every setback. Every moment of friction. Stacked up in my mind, heart, spirit and soul, trapped under the surface. 

***

At that point, my body started responding, not metaphorically. Not “I was stressed” in the casual way people say it. I mean actual, physical disruption.

My hearing dropped out.  Temporarily, yes—but long enough to get my attention in a way nothing else had. Long enough to make it clear that whatever I was carrying wasn’t just sitting in my head. It had moved.

My blood pressure went back up. Issues I thought I had under control started circling back. My lower back flared like it had something to say about all of this too.

At a certain point, you run out of ways to intellectualize what’s happening. You can’t “push through” your way out of your body keeping score.

And that’s the part that doesn’t always make it into the conversation about doing this kind of work.

There’s an assumption that if you care enough, you just keep going. That endurance is the proof. That you absorb, translate, respond, repeat—indefinitely.

But there’s a limit:  Not a philosophical one, but a physical one.

And whether I wanted to admit it or not, I had reached mine.

***

So I stopped. There was no announcement or carefully worded post about taking time to rest and reset.  There was no strategy behind it, no clean narrative I could point to and say, “this is part of the plan.”

I just… pulled back.

Because at that point, continuing at the same pace wasn’t discipline—it was damage.

There’s a kind of expectation that once you start this kind of work, you stay visible. You keep speaking. You keep showing up. You keep explaining, even when the explanations are going nowhere. Like consistency is the only measure that matters.

But I didn’t have it in me to keep performing the work publicly while everything else was breaking down privately.

So the posts slowed, the engagement dropped off. The constant online presence people had gotten used to—gone.

And I could feel the shift almost immediately. Not just in me, but around me. When you step out of visibility, even temporarily, people move on. The noise keeps going without you.

At the time, it didn’t feel like a choice I was making from a place of strength. It felt like something I had been pushed into.

But looking at it now, it wasn’t a pause in the work.

It was a refusal to keep taking hits at the same rate and calling it commitment.

***

What I didn’t understand at the time was that not all silence is the same.

I thought I had “gone quiet,” like it was grounded in one decision rooted in a dramatic realization, but it wasn’t. 

There was the obvious part—the external silence. Fewer posts. Less visibility. Not showing up in the same way, at the same frequency. From the outside, it probably looked like I had stepped away from the work altogether.

But internally, it was anything but quiet.  There was a different kind of noise happening there. Processing everything I had just come through—the frustration, the anger, the confusion around how things played out. Trying to make sense of what I had given, what I had expected, and what I actually got in return.

And then there was the silence that wasn’t mine to choose:  The unanswered emails. The opportunities that disappeared without explanation. The people who had been present, engaged, and then suddenly… not. No confrontation. No closure. Just absence.

That kind of silence will have you questioning everything if you let it. Was it the work? Was it me? Did I push too hard? Say too much? Expect too much?

Or was this always the cost?

Sitting in all of that, I started to realize something I hadn’t named before:  Some silence protects you, while other silences isolate you.  And some silence is imposed on you in ways that have nothing to do with your readiness, your clarity, or your worth.

And the hardest part is trying to tell the difference while you’re in it.

*** 

Silence did something for me—but not in a clean, inspirational way.  It protected me first.

Stepping back took me out of the line of fire. Fewer people in my mentions. Fewer conversations that went nowhere but still took everything out of me. My body had a chance to settle, even if it didn’t fully trust the quiet yet. I wasn’t absorbing the same level of impact, day after day, like that was just part of the job description.

It also gave me space to see more clearly…who actually checked in, and sadly, who didn’t. Who needed me to stay visible in order to feel connected to the work—and who understood that the work existed whether or not I was performing it publicly.  That clarity wasn’t always comfortable, but it was precise.

But there was a cost, for sure.  Momentum doesn’t wait for you to get yourself together. Once you step out of the stream, it keeps moving. People move on. Attention shifts. Opportunities don’t sit there patiently until you’re ready to pick them back up.

And there were moments—real moments—where I wasn’t sure if stepping away meant I had quietly disrupted something I wouldn’t be able to get back on track, not because the work didn’t matter anymore, but because I had stepped out of the pace that kept it visible.

That doubt sat there.

And the questions came:  Did I lose something I can’t get back?  Did I let it slip?

I didn’t have an answer for that at the time, but what I did have was a growing understanding that I couldn’t keep operating the way I had been and expect a different outcome.

Silence didn’t fix everything.  It didn’t resolve the tension but it forced a recalibration.

And more questions came:  What am I willing to carry?  What am I no longer available for?  And if the work is going to continue, what does it actually require of me—beyond endurance?

***

It took me a while to understand that stepping away didn’t mean the work stopped, it just stopped being visible.  There’s a difference, and I didn’t have language for it back then. If it wasn’t posted, shared, engaged with—if people couldn’t see it happening—I questioned whether it was still happening at all.

But something was still moving within me, just not in public. The urgency around the constant need to respond, to explain, to stay in the conversation at all costs—shifted and started to fall away. Not all at once, but enough for me to notice that I could think without immediately translating those thoughts into something consumable.

And that changed the relationship I had with the work.

Because I had wrapped the work of documenting the stories and photographing my co-creators, I came to grips with not having to be visible in the same way. But I was still paying attention. Still observing. Still holding the weight of what I had already seen and experienced—just without performing it in real time for an audience.

That distance did something:  It stripped away the idea that the work only mattered if it was being witnessed. That it only counted if it was being validated in the moment.

And when I eventually found my way back to it a few months later with the public phase of #RacismIsASickness kicking off at the Art Church of Philadelphia, I wasn’t the same person who wrote that post in 2015.  By 2016, I wasn’t as quick to react. I wasn’t as willing to absorb everything and call it commitment.  I did become more aware of what it costs to stay in it without any boundaries.

So no—the break wasn’t a disappearance.  Instead, it was a shift in where the work lived within me, to something I carried, whether anyone could see it or not.

***

I keep coming back to one line from that old post: “I’m a human being, not a robot.”

At the time, it was written out of exhaustion, almost like a warning flare. It was a stark reminder—to myself and maybe to everyone else—that there were limits to what I could absorb and still remain intact.

Now it reads differently.  The words hit less like a flare and more like a proclamation about a boundary I was trying to establish before I fully understood how necessary it would become.

Because the pressure of that period wasn’t just about the work itself. It was about what the work demanded from me repeatedly: explanation, exposure, response, resilience on demand. As if clarity alone should be enough to neutralize impact.

It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now, over ten years later.

Stepping away didn’t erase anything. It didn’t resolve the conditions that made the work necessary in the first place. It didn’t undo what I had already seen, experienced, or carried.

But it did interrupt the expectation that I had to keep doing it at the same cost to myself in order for it to be legitimate.

The silence wasn’t absence as much as it was containment.  It was me saying that I’m still here, but not in the way that leaves me unrecognizable to myself.  And maybe that’s what I didn’t know how to say in 2015.

The work didn’t stop when I stepped back: I just stopped letting it consume me in real time.

And that distinction—quiet as it is—changed everything about how I could continue.