Don’t Set Yourself on Fire to Keep Someone Else Warm: The End of #WereNotinKansasAnymoreIsaac
“I am a care bear, the strong friend, the one who will purposefully go out of their way to make sure someone else is fine while I am dying.”

Hey Y’all,
Have you missed me? I do not know why I spontaneously stopped doing updates… actually, I do. I got busy. I made friends, I got promoted and talking about the ins and outs of my daily life seemed like the energy I could not spare. Almost two weeks later, I am still recovering from the most eye opening six weeks of my life. D.C. was the most exhausting yet fulfilling journey I have ever had in my life and I learned so much about everything. The stories I carry in my eyes, in the way I move, it has shaped me into a new human being, me with a nose piercing. But in all seriousness, I can not tell you how eight weeks ago me would have dealt with what they were going through, everything feels like a far off nostalgic dream. So let’s get into unpacking my growth journey in D.C.
I must preface all of this with the fact that I am a flawed human being. My journey is my own and I reserve the right to make mistakes as a 20 something queer black masculine presenting being.
I’m Liked(?)

I think that the most prevalent cognitive dissonance in my life is that I believed (at the most extreme, was paranoid) that people do not like me. I had convinced myself that the reason bad things happened to me is that I was not liked. You could not convince me that I was likable, attractive, wanted, when I said I was trash I full heartedly believed it. I was undesirable in my own head so therefore I was undesirable in the reality I created around me. It took strangers, now friends, in a city that I had minimal connections in to realize this detrimental lie I had created for myself.
I worked in an office that was mostly queer and mostly young. I was the 4th or 5th oldest person in the office and, coming from my old soul, that was a foreign space for me. I tend to hang out with people who act or are older. I had forgotten what it was like to be carefree and childish or at least hold the space for it. I learned so much from the office as they reaffirmed a new understanding of love for myself. The more people that I met and got to know the more I knew that I should be confident in my personality. I think it is a perfect time to thank my office for giving me the energy to be bold at bars and get hit on every time I went out. I was reassured that I am loved, I am likable and I am one of a kind.
Thank you.
Friendships > Relationships

In the same vein as my earlier revelation, I realized I deserved more when it came to my sexual and romantic partners while in D.C. As some of my close friends know, I am a self-proclaimed ho but would be considered a tease by most of the gays on Grindr in the District. I went on A LOT of dates and met A LOT of guys but nothing seemed to fit. I talked about my dating experiences a tad bit on day 19 and day 26 but I never got to the core of what really went down with the D.C. Gays.
First and foremost, D.C. Gays are a different breed of Gays that I think are very similar to NYC Gays but I only met a couple of them so I do not have a great understanding of that concept. All you really need to know about them is that they are racist if they are white 60% of the time. 30% are fetishizing POCs and the other 10% are POCs or foreign. Those numbers are very skewed but I promise you that is what was going on.
Second, I recognized I had social capital because I am decently attractive. I am not sure what it is about the Midwest but it will have you thinking you are gutter juice ugly just because your melanin be poppin. It was quite the contrary in D.C. I would be drunk for the free off of drinks given to me by strangers. I would have to dance with my back to a wall because I would be scooped up otherwise (also I was not fully safe because being on the wall meant I must have wanted to be twerked on, it was a mess). So being pretty for once in my life gave me a whole new angle to scam.
Third, dating is hard. The dates I went on always ended with me questioning who I was as a person. Being extra would be a problem and then it would be a positive. The one guy who I ended up dating the longest (a week) was the worst choice I ever made. I learned what red flags mean that I need to ask for a check and run to the metro and hope the train is running on time. It was a mess.
Finally, the only saving grace of my dating D.C. life was a girl. She was down to go to museums with me. She was down to listen to me complain about my life. She was down to deal with my wild schedule. She was chill and we only hung out three times. Thank you for being my saving grace.
All I know is, I know what I want now. I know what I will compromise for and what I will not tolerate. I recognize the fluidity in my life and who I am when it comes to platonic, sexual and romantic relationships. D.C. taught me that the Disney love that the world likes to push is not the one that will ever work for me and it is fine. Friend love is fine and then I also get a full bed to myself, bless.
Brunch Culture is the Only Culture I Will Ever Appropriate

If you have bottomless mimosas I will be there at opening and fall out of your establishment whenever I have to leave. My favorite day became Sunday very quickly. I love brunch like Oprah loves bread, do not @ me. Brunch is life, that is it, this section is done.
Canvassing Taught Me…
- My identities dictate how people treat me.
- My gender presentation dictates how people treat me.
- Being vulnerable on a street will get you spit on.
- Being vulnerable on a street will get a drink thrown on you.
- Being the bigger person will get you spit on.
- Being the bigger person will get a drink thrown on you.
- Customer service voice Isaac sounds like a 15-year old white girl.
- No one can make you feel better about harassment
- No one can make you feel visible when people pretend you don’t exist
- Resiliency can only get you so far
- Being harassed by police officers while working is scarier when you know your job can not protect you.
- Raising money for an organization that only partially supports you is hard on your conscious
- Hopelessness will come.
- Anxiety will come.
- The white people smile is the bane of my existence

- Sometimes you feel invalidated because you just have to keep going
- You begin to hate people even when you are not suppose to
- You stop greeting certain demographics of people out of fear
- Depression will come
- That I am not capable, as a human being, to tolerate what canvassers go through
- That you should respect canvassers because they are strong human beings
Wisdom Comes When You Least Expect It

I think the most important thing I learned from this experience is that I found my voice. The feeling of hopelessness that I felt for much of last semester seems so small to me now in the wake of getting out of a situation that was draining my humanity. I know what it feels like to not have humanity anymore, and it sucks. I have been feeling this feeling of hopelessness for so long and it took living in my own real world hell to actually do something about it. I am a care bear, the strong friend, the one who will purposefully go out of their way to make sure someone else is fine while I am dying. I did not recognize this until I met the best human on this Earth, my director, Morgan. I am not sure if they realize how profound our meditating and mindfulness meeting was but it put a lot of things into perspective that will drastically help me as I move towards the future. The specific thing that changed my life was when Morgan said, “Sometimes, being the person everyone turns to becomes too much of a burden. You have to remember that you can not set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.” It messed me up. Those words made me recognize what I have been doing for most of my life. I try and save everyone else with work (canvassing), with compromise (relationships), with enabling (friendships), with commitment (work), with love (everything) and forget to save myself. I’m still trying to figure out if it is because I do not know how or if I never intended on saving myself in the first place.
D.C. was amazing. D.C. was everything I expected and a lot more. D.C. was what I needed, wanted and everything in between. D.C. was the wake-up call that set a fire under my sleep walking reality. I am so grateful for my experience and, moving forward, I’ll make sure that #WereNotinKansasAnymoreIsaac will always serve as a reminder that I am loved, I deserve what I want and I can not save the world by setting myself on fire.
Thanks for reading!
-I
