Living Mosaics

“I am a mosaic of everyone I’ve ever loved, even for a heartbeat.”

[Black square with white text: I make my ramen the way a friend taught me in eleventh grade. Every fall, I listen to a playlist made for me by a boy I drove across the border to hook up with. I eat sushi because a girl who won’t talk to me anymore made me try it, and Indian food because my best friend’s parents ordered for me before I knew what I liked. There are movies I love because someone I loved loved them first. I am a mosaic of everyone I’ve ever loved, even for a heartbeat. / 29,211 notes / Tumbl share, message, heart icons.]

And isn’t this one of the ways that intersectionality appears in our lives, lived and breathed and experienced moment by moment, within a larger culture comprised of family and lovers and students and coworkers and friends and neighbors and strangers we met for just a moment?

We aren’t alone. The people who surround us deeply impact the ways we think….and the ways we eat, and move, and work, and read, and interact, and vote, and worship, and love, and speak.

The wider our circles, the more diversely we live.

The narrower our circles, the more constrained our lives.

Celebrating who we are is powerful. Celebrating the people in our lives who have impacted us is powerful. Opening ourselves to more people and experiences is powerful.

Let it in. Let it be beautiful. What a gift.

With I Am Intersectionality, I hope to provide thought-provoking resources that will help us understand more about our own personal intersections, and what those intersections mean in the historical and social moment we are living in today. If you’d like to get an occasional email with articles and resources on intersectionality, sign up here!