An Open Letter to American University Alumni

To my American University Alumni,

My name is Nakeesha "Keesha" Ceran and I am one of you. I am a proud double alumna of the School of Public Affairs (BA'10/MA'12) of THE American University.

The racial events that have embroiled the narrative of our alma mater are troubling, are concerning and are heartbreaking. But work IS being done.

As a staff member of our alma mater, I am most concerned with you-- My community. Following the news stories breaking, many of you lead with language of boycotting the institution. As a staff member that pains me, because I cannot do this work without you. Change starts with how you show up, not show out. Your communication is troubling because it invalidates the work that myself and others, many also alumni, are doing here.

I get it, when we see the news stories, we are met with this reaction, frustration, anger, heartbreak, more frustration. We revert to our feelings as the way in which we are expressing these emotions. We want to do something to show the University that we are frustrated. But isn't there a better way? When I as a staff member hear or see your words in Boycotting, I see it as abandonment. I see it as leaving out those who are trying to do good work, who are trying to make positive changes. So today, I ask that we look beyond our emotions and start to think about how we can bring about REAL change.

In my conversations or through posts from many of you, you are asking what can be done. Well I have a REAL answer for you, one that happens every year-- and real opportunities for you to continue to engage, be involved and support THIS community, your community, my community, OUR community- #OURAU!

While All-American Weekend is a space for celebration, it is also a space for us to reconnect and to see what is happening on campus.  I challenge you, that if you want to do something now, now is the time that you SHOW UP! Our community needs you to show up, to participate and contribute. Our future alumni need you to show that you not only hear them, but are there FOR them. I challenge you to be present, participate in the Multicultural Alumni Reunion Events (MCAR) to show a community that they belong--that this AU that we have had pride in is their community-- not to act, but to listen.

I challenge my non-alumni of color to also show up at these events. Allyship, means also showing up to support. Taking the time to listen and to see how you can be there for others.

And I get it, I get your feelings when you say "I don't want to give money back to the institution." Well, All-American Weekend ticket prices is not giving money back to the institution. It's payment for the events that many of your peers spent time planning and laboring over the details, to prepare for you to have fun, so that you could enjoy your moments and new memories with your peers.

Registration is still open, through Friday, October 14th, 2016. Don't wait until the last minute to register, especially to my DC Alumni.

But in attending it might give you opportunities to think about how you could allocate your giving and donations to American University.

I challenge you to support and fund:

• Student Book Awards (Black Alumni Book Award; Latino Alumni Alliance Book Award)
• Alternative Breaks
• The Frederick Douglass Distinguished Scholars Program

I challenge you to give, obviously money, that's easy. But what I challenge you  to give the most is your time:

• Mentor
• Reach back out to your college clubs and organizations

Fall 2016 List of Student organizations

I challenge you that when you receive that phone-a-thon call, that you think about the student on the other end of the call before hanging up. What can you provide them by giving your time to chat with them for a few minutes of your evening? These students are also eager to hear from us, and the 10 minutes we can spend talking to them about our experiences are 10 minutes that will change their mindset of what their next choice or decision at AU will be.

I challenge you to join the Alumni Association. Work with your local alumni chapters, join an alumni affinity group. Begin having the conversations and program development to support the needs of this great community.

For our community to do better, to serve better, it takes all of us! Please don't abandon the community that needs you.

I hope to see you at this year's All-American Weekend.

Once an Eagle, Always an Eagle,
 Keesha Ceran
 SPA (BA'10/MA'12)

Independent

Independent- this adjective is something that has often been attributed with who I am. I tend to be one who lives life with no fear, I go out on my own, visiting new cities with ease. Exploring etc. I have lived on my own since I was 18 years old, I have had no problem with having a job and paying my bills and making ends meet. I generally don't ask for much from people around me and I can generally handle most of the things that come my way.


But I wonder if this word, is less something that defines me and more something that CONFINES me. I have been pondering this thought for quite some time, especially recently with major things that have happened in my life. I am a giver by nature, one who easily puts the needs of others ahead of my own. I think that passion to give compliments my independence. But in most ways I think it can also be a barrier. Why?

I have a hard time allowing myself to spend time dealing with the things that can get at me deep. I like to be moving on to the next thing, taking on these different opportunities to avoid having to deal with the undercurrent of my experiences. Example, my mother recently had a stroke (she is doing well, back home and walking and talking) but I gave myself a day. A DAY! A Day to "deal" with it, but I didn't actually deal with it. I just go through the motions of "business" and act as if it didn't phase me. It took a breakdown two days later for me to realize that I have a horrible habit of doing this often. And there at the heart of it is the problem,

I am afraid of the break down, I am and have been afraid of letting myself fall apart because in the independence it also means, I don't necessarily allow others to take care of me. I build some space because it is easier for me to take care of others than it is for me to let others take care of me. I don't allow people to get close enough to the breaking point of me. I don't want to get there because for me breaking point is my mother, who for most of my time living with her in high school after my parents divorce dealt with a serious episode of depression. Where me being 13, 14, 15 years old didn't have the tools, context or understanding to know what that meant. But only knew enough of having to wake her up and drag her out of bed in the morning so that I could go to school.

Breaking down meant having to speak out about shame that I have inadvertently carried because of my parents' divorce and the actions my parents took that had a great impact on me and my brother. Breaking down means falling a part and that scares me because who will put me back together. Or who will be around for comfort when I need it most.

There are extremes to this definition, "Free from outside control" means that I have the ability to control, my emotions, what i let bother me. But then there is so much energy that goes uncontrolled? What happens to the emotions that I don't allow myself to feel or those moments that I don't allow to be processed. They don't just go away.

The other layer to this is what is lost? Is depending on someone else a bad thing? Where is the middle to be able to balance a little bit of freedom with the need for people to care for you. What's at risk when you don't let people in all the way. The funny thing is I think I do, but when I need to have my moment of weakness it is timed, it is controlled it is within an experiment almost, like I allow myself to only have the few moments.

The other part of who I am is that I actually am an emotional person. If you have been reading any of my other posts you will see the testament of that. But I always have this block when it comes to the things that can break me the deepest. I learned that young through my parents' divorce and I don't think I truly understood the impact of it until now. There was shame in my parents' divorce. Not many kids from where I grew up had experienced divorce, so there was fear in being the first one. And then you add to it the display that became their divorce, it was painful.

So I think I allowed this pride of being independent as an excuse to put walls up around me that I am now coming to reality with. Being independent in some aspects means that I don't actually have to give all of myself fully because it means that I have to get more raw, more vulnerable to open wounds that clearly are not healed.

So where do I go from here?

Love: A Game of Strategy or Heart

Hey World, It's been a while. We all have guilty pleasures and mine come in the form of reality tv. This time around it's in an MTV show Are You The One?  The show brings together various men and women and over the course of 10 weeks they have to determine who in the house is their "perfect match." The group only gets closer with opportunities to put couples in what's called a "Truth Booth" or at the end of each week seeing how many matches, but not who the matches, are they get right.

What I love about this show is that in 10 weeks you see how people operate and whether or not they are in it for their hearts or just to win the game. Did I mention if they get all 10 couples right, they win $1 million?!

When I watch this show it comes down to two themes are you in it for the strategy or are you in it for your heart? Attraction wins out at during the initial night. We go to what we know, the group thinks more with their eyes than with getting to know the individuals, well because, you're on a tv show, it's some exotic location and well the cast is usually very good looking.

Over the course of the few weeks and when your truth booth guesses and matchups turn out to not be working, you start to play the game with a little bit more sense. Hoping that you start thinking more with your head and heart.

Here's my assessment, for some leading with their heart puts them in the right path. For others it can be a distraction, that all they are left to lead with is their head. But when it comes to what happens after the game, what works out best?

Countless times in this show there are pairs that continue to be magnitized together but we KNOW that they are not a match and you wonder what are they risking? Not only are they risking the money that the other members are banking on, but they are also risking an opportunity to figure out who their possible true match is.  Do you take yourself out of the equation when you don't allow yourself to be open to someone else. What are you actually learning, about yourself, about love?

The precarious situation arises, when the team gets the 10 beams, but you have been rocking with someone who you have allowed your heart to pursue only to find out that your head wins over more and your perfect match is someone you didn't give a chance. Aren't there questions that you end up thinking? Like- What if you leave the show with the person that you spent all that time getting to know, do you ever wonder what could have been with your "perfect match?" What if the relationship doesn't work out, do you call up your perfect match one day and say why not give it a shot?

In the grand game of reality tv around love, honestly I would rather be on a show like Are You the One?  or Married at First Sight rather than shows like The Bachelor. At least with the first two there is some level of science involved, matchmakers are connecting you with someone that you could be more compatible with. It's for you to see the signs. With shows like The Bachelor, you end up risking way too much in the hopes that one individual sees you out of the 20 or so others that are also vying for their attention.

I don't know about the game myself, I am still figuring it out, but I think it's a little bit of both- Strategy and Heart.

That's all she wrote folks...

It's not your silence that kills me... (To my social media loving, status posting, like and reaction ally)

These times that we are in is killing my spirit and energy softly. I have been emotionally disrupted with the events that have happened--- #AltonSterling || #PhilandoCastile || #Dallas and the many other events that caused a hashtag, a headline or a history of terror and trauma that have happened before and simultaneously with this time.

Writing is my release, my healing. I can no longer be quite in the spaces that I influence. Action will be my redemption. My voice matters, my vote matters the most and to all of my folks asking what can they do--VOTE!



                           ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To my social media loving, status posting, like and reaction ally, you aren't silent and I appreciate that. But you are still killing me. You kill me softly with your impersonal acknowledgement of my pain. 

As a social media enthusiast, I get what it means to post something in the spirit of being heard, of being right there in it--to show the world outside and around you that you are conscious and aware. 

What I say next isn't about condemnation because I have failed at this too, but your status update only means words in the volume of the masses, until you ask me, your friend, am I okay, how am I doing? 

I have personally failed my friends in the LGBTQ community, when Orlando happened. Because I like you just posted a status update and thought that was enough.  But following the events of this week (July 4th, 2016), THAT IS NOT ENOUGH, that is not comfort. 

Comfort comes from those we know, care about and love, acknowledging our pain and grief. Your privilege, allows you to not understand the psychological and emotional trauma that the events of this week have caused people of color and that's not your fault. 

But let me communicate to you the experience we have and why the events are not just a news story, or a political issue, but a personal one:  when we see these videos of the torture of Black bodies we grieve for OUR brother(s), OUR father(s), OUR son(s), OUR family members and OUR friends. We feel that pain because we have a level of guilt, he wasn't a person we know (sigh of relief), but he could have been (grief). 

To walk around the spaces that I have felt safe, protected and a member of a community and to feel like no one around me, except for the lone eyes of fellow members of my marginalized community, understood what was bubbling inside me was painful. It was STRANGLING. 

To go to work with this disconnected feeling and not understand it was because my core had been rocked. But to just have this expectation that it was back to work as usual was damaging. 

To have "you" approach me and talk to me like it was JUST a news story, or the next political topic, placed cuts in an already seriously scarred wound.

In the first few days  of the wake of these incidents, two people, two allys have directly reached out to me to ask me how I am doing, specifically about these recent events, and to tell me that they are praying for the pain I am going through. TWO! It didn't mean that in a conversation that a friend didn't acknowledge my suffering or pain, but it says a lot more and feels more comforting when it isn't the one suffering that initiates the need for a comforting response. 

So today I ask you, after you post that status update, or retweet, or like, or react to the post of someone else, move #beyondthehashtag. Talk to your friend and ask them if THEY are okay. We've gotten it in our heads that these likes, these retweets, reposts and reactions are a replacement for a hug, a direct kind word, IT IS NOT!  Because as my latest blog says... I AM NOT OKAY. 

To my friends and family in the LGBT Community, I am sorry that I did not understand this during Orlando, but I know better now. 

Not Okay...

These times that we are in is killing my spirit and energy softly. I have been emotionally disrupted with the events that have happened--- #AltonSterling || #PhilandoCastile || #Dallas and the many other events that caused a hashtag, a headline or a history of terror and trauma that have happened before and simultaneously with this time.

Writing is my release, my healing. I can no longer be quite in the spaces that I influence. Action will be my redemption. My voice matters, my vote matters the most and to all of my folks asking what can they do--VOTE!


               -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Not Okay..

I am not okay

Humanity is not okay

We are not okay

I'm not okay with the state of terror that I live in//

I'm not okay with the blatant disrespect and violence against Black bodies//

I'm not okay with the FEAR, the PAIN, the DISCONTENT and DISORDER that lives within me//

I'm not okay with the silence//

I'm not okay with the neglect//

I'm not okay with the ignorance to not understand the TRAUMA that my community is facing//

I am not okay

Humanity is not okay

We are not okay

I'm not okay with some of the communities I belong to, not acknowledging that individuals they know are in pain and are suffering//

I'm not okay with your inability to say directly to me that you care//

I'm not okay with your inability to acknowledge that you are sorry for what I'm experiencing DIRECTLY TO ME//

I'm not okay with our society making basic expressions of compassion uncomfortable in this moment//

I'm not okay with it feeling like the only comfort I am able to receive, feel and internalize is from my community who is suffering through the same trauma I am//

I am not okay

Humanity is not okay

We are not okay

I'm not okay with seeing Black men & boys walking around me on the street and silently praying they aren't next//

I'm not okay with feeling that I'm making you uncomfortable for sharing my pain//

I'm not okay with feeling that my job is to make you feel less uncomfortable, when my comfort is continuously disrupted in the torment and torture of Black men and families//

Today I am not okay

Tomorrow I might not be okay

But my prayer, my fight, my hope is I will be ~ WE will be ~ Humanity will be

#THISISTRAUMA #THISISTERROR #NoMoreNames #BlackLivesMatter #IMatter