Today is the first day of Black History Month.
For me, this moment is about naming what my work has always been oriented toward and what I am actively choosing to embody now.
The work I am doing through Power and Praxis and beyond is rooted in a commitment to center voices that are routinely overlooked, silenced, or pushed to the margins. This work is structural necessity. When the least protected among us are treated as expendable, the entire system corrodes. We do not build freedom by sacrificing parts of the whole and calling it progress.
This pattern shows up everywhere. In politics, healthcare, and in clinical spaces. It also shows up kink and power exchange. We talk about liberation while quietly deciding who is allowed access to safety, dignity, and care, and who is expected to absorb harm for the sake of other folks comfort.
That framework has never interested me.
What I am moving toward, and naming more clearly now, is matriarchy as an organizing principle. Not gendered rule, and not domination under another banner, but a way of relating that centers love, community, collective responsibility, grit, and grace. A way of understanding power as something that requires skill, restraint, and accountability rather than control.
Human history already gives us examples of this. Cultures that understood care as strength and relationship as infrastructure, and cultures that survived because they were rooted in fierce love and mutual responsibility. Those ways of being were not fragile, they were resilient.
For a long time, I resisted stepping fully into what leadership meant for me. That hesitation was shaped by trauma, reinforced by repression, and mirrored back to me by systems that punish clarity and visibility, especially in Black women. My body carried the cost of that suppression long before I had language for it.
At some point, that cost became untenable.
What has shifted is not the absence of fear, but the presence of alignment. I have released the need to shrink or soften my position, and I accept the mantle of leadership as it exists for me now. Not as authority over others, but as responsibility to the work, to the communities it serves, and to the futures it helps shape.
Power and Praxis is more than a training or a program. It is a stance toward power itself. It acknowledges that power is never neutral and that avoiding it does not make us safer or more ethical. Skill does. Awareness does. Accountability does.
This is Black History Month, and I claim my work as part of a living lineage committed to intention, relational accountability, and a love that confronts systems where they fail the most vulnerable.
I am operating in my leadership now, clearly and without apology, and I understand what that asks of me.
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