The one thing I was becoming more aware of in my late twenties was the abject loneliness of being a Black woman. Whether you are coupled or not, there is this strange displacement that comes from being Black and leaving childhood behind for good. Our time in the space of the innocent is always truncated. But the more I grew in my maturity the more I understood that my womanhood would always prove both outspoken and othered by the world in a way that made it impossible to truly feel a part of it. Strangely, even so, I felt called to protect it. There was a certain equality I started to demand for those I saw as unwanted, unrecognized by the world, with little regard for my own position—which was perilous. There was a recklessness in my discontent that, foreign country or not, I attribute to how being a Black woman is always a foreign feeling. Even when we’re in the company of each other, there are so many moments when I find us brushing up to feel each other on all our haunches, uncertain if we will be taken into the fold.

Shayla Lawson, "On Storytelling (Hoensbroek, Netherlands)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

A woman that I love more than life once told me, “Disability is really just a measure of time.” With time, all of us will be different than we are right now. In sickness, we all become time travelers. “Disability is just time working differently on the body.” At a certain point in time, we all will have to consider what we can no longer do. Some of us just reconcile with this earlier.

Shayla Lawson, "On Time (Mexico City, Mexico)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

That’s the only real way to stay in love, I believe. To stay curious enough that opening each part of your heart feels like delicately unhinging each clove from a bulb of garlic, each experience made roughly of the same material but each reflection filled with new reverence. An adventure.

Shayla Lawson, "On Love (New York, New York)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

… falling in love is about building a mythology around who you really are.

Shayla Lawson, "On Love (New York, New York)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

The modern question of pronoun usages is not just a conversation about self-actualization, it’s a battle about who gets to define language. And, in our contemporary times, if English is meant to maintain its function as a “universal” language, it will have to adapt to function in the more equitable world we are building, not just the colonial one it forged.

Shayla Lawson, "On Them (Amherst, Massachusetts)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

When we don’t ask people’s pronouns, we risk a lot more than misgendering them. We miss the opportunity to correct any misconceptions we may have about how people see themselves in the changing world, as they continue to educate themselves and realign their values. We miss the chance to rectify a dying system that dictates “men” one way and “women” the other, asking us to utterly deny how far we’ve come from those antiquated notions when we look at what people are actually doing in the twenty-first century, how we are actually living. Our world has grown diverse and broad. Redefining boundaries is what’s become interesting to us. Not reinstating traditions that didn’t have our best interests in mind to begin with.

Shayla Lawson, "On Them (Amherst, Massachusetts)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

In my travels, I’ve noticed that white locals like to assume the reserve they notice in the people they consider the cultural fringe comes from an inferiority of experience. That, somehow, in our avoiding the spaces in which they feel most affirmed, we’re denying ourselves the opportunity to feel we’re a part of something. In reality, what they’ve missed is that many of us have moved on from feeling we need to be a part of the dominant conversation. That we have comfortably carved out our own. So comfortably, in fact, that our connection goes beyond shared age, language, socioeconomic background, or ability. This was the passport “whiteness” was meant to offer to all people of less melanated skin. A stamp of security. The stamp of the majority. But it hasn’t proved the case when it comes to whiteness and traveling.

Shayla Lawson, "Online (Montélimar, France)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

In my most romantic moments contemplating the internet, I’m in love with the organism that surrounds the organism of our bodies. The multicellular collection of microcosmic breadcrumbs we leave behind, that organize like mycelium to tell the stories of who we are more intricately than we could ever describe ourselves. When I stop thinking about the data collected of our life online as an invasion of our privacy, I think about it as a multifaceted, categorical collection of everything we’ve been, everything we’ve done, everything we’ve asked to become. Not just in the collection of what we share, but also in the recognition of what we respond to and who calls out to us.

Shayla Lawson, "Online (Montélimar, France)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

Everybody needs someone who sees in them the divine when they are struggling to make it out of their lowest point.

Shayla Lawson, "On Dancer (Bloomington, Indiana)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

Dying for me always had to be accompanied by the chaotic abyss of losing someone and the darkness that consumed you. Humbling yourself to losing, until it had stolen so much of you that everyone was worried about you by the time you decided to return to earth. I hate that, when I actually analyze the ways that I’ve been taught to process grief; I understand this too is unhealthy. […] What I had been taught about loss is that it must destroy you in order for it to have validity. What I have been taught about death is that it must surprise you in order for us to grieve it.

Shayla Lawson, "On Dancer (Bloomington, Indiana)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

A postwar era is never so. How often I forget the trauma and tragedy that has beset so many people I’ve loved from Palestine, Syria, Sudan, Rwanda. The era goes on. There is no “post” dying.

Shayla Lawson, "On Dying (Maastricht, Netherlands)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

This for me is why I can no longer call myself a Christian. I’ve been tethered to and exhausted by it too many times, by a white man trying to craft himself in God’s image. I’ve given up on worshiping anyone who can’t imagine a world with me in it.

Shayla Lawson, "On God (Montserrat, Spain)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

Gods don’t write the story of who they are, people do, so assured that the truth is derived from their own image.

Shayla Lawson, "On God (Montserrat, Spain)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

Real intimacy is the only way in this world to truly be brave.

Shayla Lawson, "On Intimacy (Kyoto, Japan)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

This is what makes my heart beat in spite of all the heartache. Life’s raw capacity to be sensual and unpredictable.

Shayla Lawson, "On Intimacy (Kyoto, Japan)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

Intimacy is not about the fact we need each other. It’s about facing the fact we are each other. The separations in how we feel are an illusion. The separations in who we are, are a myth. We are each other. And until we’re willing to draw close to one another, art is a refuge for me because it helps me see all those places where we overlap.

Shayla Lawson, "On Intimacy (Kyoto, Japan)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir

I don’t know where we are anymore; I don’t know what we’re supposed to see, or how far we’re supposed to love each other. But covering over the places we hurt is not a better decency. Art is how we see our pain. Intimacy is art’s fruitage.

Shayla Lawson, "On Intimacy (Kyoto, Japan)" from How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir