Since I started working at MICA I’ve been very dissatisfied with my quality of work. Not because I do not have the resources to achieve it but because I have been thinking about small time activism events such as planning Black history month and other events in the community. While I can’t say I have done what I wanted to do while I was here, I full heartedly believe I have been given something better. I believe that I have been able to expand my mind towards bigger issues and solutions. If I were to plan the month all over again, the newfound knowledge and appreciation / passion I have for activism would take form in a different way. I am changing my focus to abolition and community mutual aid projects. I think firstly that the criminal justice system is one of the worst plagues of this country next to the government. It seems apparent to me that they might never help us in this current state and so it is up to ourselves to help each other. The community has divided itself for too long and must reach a collective mindset in order to focus on helping each other. If we redistribute our resources we might not only survive but thrive. It reminds me of the muslim concept of Zakat. Zakat or the charity we give is distributed from every able person in the community to help uplift those who are unable to give. By giving and distributing our resources and living to not only please our maker, but assist our community as one of the primary goals, people are able to lift up the least advantaged of us all and therefore help the whole community. Since I worked at MICA I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to not only be more radicalized and brazen, but to burn out from this work. Constantly helping the community but not yourself takes a huge toll and this goes to show that my work on self care this semester has fallen on deaf ears for myself despite me being the person who made the research about it. I’ve started listening to this podcast since I joined the team and it’s called “What radicalized you” on spotify. It’s the first podcast where I’ve been determined to listen to all the episodes because of how potent they are. If I were to be asked what radicalized me I’d say my entire life has set me up to a point where I cannot ignore injustice. From a young age I’ve always been the underdog myself but I was gifted with the branzeness and anger that some folks just do not have. With this anger and loud mouth of mine I find that even when it is hard I find the will to speak up almost instantly. I can’t help myself. When i see injustices such as the violence the government has inflicted on us, the environment being torn apart by rich capitalists, the criminal justice system forcing families apart and leaving people with no semblance of a life, all of which cause me great distress amongst many other injustices our community is forced to see everyday. Watching my family grow up extremely poor with no type of help from the outside community except in the form of biweekly food pantry help was the most I saw of community activism and it saved my family from struggling with food. I saw the violence and addiction and money troubles that trap a family, especially family of color, into generational curses. It was really when I got older that I saw the generational trauma that had yet to be broken was supposed to be broken with me but the obstacles that made it hard for my parents still affected me. How was I supposed to be this breaker of chains when I was struggling with my own trauma that had been in my DNA for hundreds of years? I can’t sit here and do nothing. I find that this current way of sustaining our system using outdated methods that do not consider the whole entirety of a person let alone the circumstances that systematically affect them is horrendously outdated and inefficient and I am nothing if not a person of competence and efficiency.