I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Detroit. I wandered in for a couple of reasons:
- I love walking. Said coffee shop is a great walk from home.
- I thought this place might provide a short relief from my imposter syndrome.
To be honest, I am struggling to make sense of what it means to be a white girl from the suburbs – a girl who wants to be a member of the Detroit community. When I think about the relationships I’ve already been able to build, I get excited and rejuvenated in a way that I never imagined.
It’s only been a month of Challenge Detroit in the city, or The City, as Kennie would say. In a way, I already feel that this fellowship will enable us to contemplate our own identities, among a myriad of other ideas. My personal goal in this year with the other fellows, as well as the broader community, is to begin to dismiss those overwhelming feelings of imposition, trust my actions reflect my intentions, and try my best to realize how we’re all connected to Detroit.
I stumbled upon this Joan Didion quote the other day, “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” I had to use the dictionary to really take it all in.
Point being, life is a beautiful chaos and it can have as many or little stories as we choose it to have. It doesn’t have to make any sense or show a linear progression.
I realized I’ve been trying desperately to justify every choice I’ve made. To try to fit it into some narrative of what it means to be the white girl from the suburbs that picked Detroit as her next destination.
Every voice I’ve listened to so far, expression of art I’ve seen, and every business I’ve visited are all just stories in this changing web of the Detroit experience and I’m grateful to be one of them.