Special Episode: Mikelina, Part 2

This next special segment comes to us from our latest edition to the stealth team Mikelina Born to Ethiopian, Eritrean immigrants. Mikelina grew up in Arlington, Texas as part of a tight-knit haha diaspora community. They became active in community organizing while attending Texas a and m University before moving on to Harvard Law School where they became steeped in abolitionist theory and subsequently turned their focus to the issue of mass incarceration.

They have dedicated their life to advocating for non carceral restorative solutions to public safety, and have worked on a diverse range of issue areas, including street and gang violence, jail, decarceration, cannabis reform, and women's incarceration. They're also a lifelong athlete, artist, dancer, musician, and general, all around badass, and I am extremely proud to be able to call them one of my very best friends.

They identify as trans, masculine, non-binary, and have been living proudly in their gender for over 10 years. So without further ado, let's hand the mic over to Mikelina. This is part 2 of a special episode we’re pleased to bring to our STP audience.

S6E13 Pt 2-Mikelina_March 26

Adam: [00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome back. This next segment comes to us from our latest edition to the stealth team Mic. Born to Ethiopian, Eritrean immigrants. Michel grew up in Arlington, Texas as part of a tight-knit haha diaspora community. They became active in community organizing while attending Texas a and m University before moving on to Harvard Law School where they became steeped in abolitionist theory and subsequently turned their focus to the issue of mass incarceration.

They have dedicated their life to advocating for non carceral restorative solutions to public safety, and have worked on a diverse range of issue areas, including street and gang violence, jail, decarceration, cannabis reform, and women's incarceration. They're also a [00:01:00] lifelong athlete, artist, dancer, musician, and general, all around badass, and I am extremely proud to be able to call them one of my very best friends.

They identify as trans, masculine, non-binary, and have been living proudly in their gender for over 10 years. So without further ado, let's hand the mic over to mic.

Mikelina: Alright. So picking up from where I left y'all last time, this past December in Texas, I had a huge aha moment when I realized that coming out to my dad didn't have to be the prerequisite to moving forward with my transition.

When I saw that there was a belief at work that could be renegotiated, it was like seeing a glitch in the matrix, a tiny crack in my constructed reality. All of a sudden, my world of possibilities got a whole lot bigger. I felt a major sense of expansion. It made me wonder, [00:02:00] what else could I possibly be wrong about?

What other invisible beliefs and stories might be quietly shaping my reality masquerading as objective truth. Since then, I've been going through this process of a belief audit where I'm taking inventory of the different beliefs and stories operating in the background of my psyche and actively interrogating where they come from, whether they're actually true.

And trying to be really honest about which ones might be holding me back and need to be let go of, it's been a really humbling process. I mean, I've literally built a whole life around being someone who questions things and is aware of, you know, constructs and things of that nature. As a first gen black queer trans kid in Arlington, Texas, learning to poke at presumed truths.[00:03:00]

To be dangerously curious. It was necessary for survival, and naturally it became a big part of my identity. I found purpose and resonance in being a truth seeker, a skeptic in law school. I learned to identify as a crit, specifically a disciple of critical race theory and critical queer theory. But of course, we all have blind spots.

And I think those of us who have spent our whole lives questioning and resisting the beliefs, being forced on us by our families, society, religion, academia, I think we are particularly vulnerable to forgetting that sometimes we need to turn the critical lens back on ourselves. We are meaning making animals.

We are helpless to the impulse to make sense of our experiences. It's a beautiful feature and [00:04:00] pesky bug of being human. There's no opting out. But what we can do is be aware that that process is happening and exercise a little bit of agency over it, because the moment we forget that we're the ones authoring our narrative of reality, we stop questioning it.

We stop being curious about it, and then we end up conflating our stories with objective truth. And that's where we get into trouble. The stories we tell are constructed, and because they're constructed, they're fluid. This is how multiple things can be true at the same time. That's why we so often say things like, hindsight is 2020 because there's what was true then.

And then with time and space and change, a new truth emerges. It is like this belief audit has unlocked something, and as I've been engaged in [00:05:00] this work, my world has started to change in some really interesting ways. Things that have felt super stuck, so stuck that I assumed them to be fixed and solid and real are beginning to flow and shift.

A few days ago, I found myself on FaceTime talking to the first girl I ever loved. It had been 15 years since we had seen or talked to each other. It was surreal and what came outta that conversation that I never thought would ever happen in a million years was no doubt, one of the most profound belief shifts.

I've ever experienced, not a small tweak, but a full dismantling. But to understand how [00:06:00] we found our way back to each other, I need to tell you what else has been going on. So a few episodes ago I mentioned this person. I've been dating Julia. We've been together for almost six months now, and I'm happy to say that this is the first time I think I really.

Feel seen and held in a romantic relationship. It's safe and grounded. Dare I say healthy? What a concept. And here I thought drama and chaos were the true signs of love. And while I give a lot of props to Julia for being an incredible collaborator in manifesting this dynamic, it's clear to me that this profoundly different experience of love.

Is largely because I've decided to show up differently, to choose differently these days. I choose to honor my boundaries, to understand and advocate for my needs, and I'm able to do [00:07:00] that because I actually believe that I'm worthy of being loved for the person that I am. I no longer believe that I have to earn the right to be loved.

It's one thing to think I deserve love. It's another thing to really feel that truth deep down in your gut. So even though I've had quite a few serious, beautiful, committed relationships, in a lot of ways, this feels like I'm doing commitment for the first time. And while all of this is amazing and objectively positive, it's also been pretty dysregulating.

It's kicked up a lot of old stuff. I keep finding myself thinking. Wow, it could have been like this. The bright light of this new healthy love puts a spotlight on the relationships of my past relationships where my low self-esteem led me to [00:08:00] stay in or even fight for things that were toxic and abusive.

With all of this percolating, I found myself heading off to Peru. For this healing retreat that I had booked for myself last year, the timing was uncanny. For 10 days, I disappeared into the rainforest, completely off grid. I spent most of my time in meditation and silence. I fasted from food, from conversation, from all the normal creature comforts and distractions.

It was unlike anything I'd ever done before, unlike anything I'd ever experienced. And I came back feeling transformed, shiny and new. Grateful to return to my Brooklyn life, but now with a new sense of clarity around who I am, what matters most to me, and what areas [00:09:00] of my life need tending to, it was like somebody had done a deep clean with Windex to the glasses that I was wearing to look through, look at my life.

And in this clarity, I saw a whole chapter of my life that I had stored away in the dark corners of my mind with the intention of never revisiting. It was the story of my first love. We'll call her Riley. I had certainly thought about Riley many times over the past 15 years since we last spoken. But I'd never considered that reaching out or reconnecting was a real possibility.

I had made peace with the reality that we would never speak again, that I would have to find closure on my own. I was still living inside the story. My 19-year-old self had written that Riley hated me, resented me, that I had been a [00:10:00] burden on her life, a queer experiment gone wrong, that she'd much rather forget.

As the years went on, I figured that after we broke up in a very tragic, dramatic fashion in an Arlington Starbucks, I figured she had gone on with her life, realized she was actually straight, and that she had no interest in being reminded of the messy closeted secret thing we'd had. We were together from 13 to 19.

We'd done all of adolescents together. I assumed that the significance of that relationship was one sided, that she probably never thought about me, and that she'd be really upset if I reached out. It would be an unwelcome intrusion. My curiosity had gotten the best of me a few times. I'd Google her name, try to get a sense of where she might be, who she might be now, and for a long time there was no trace of her.

No [00:11:00] Instagram, no real social media presence. But then a few years ago, I found her on LinkedIn and since then, once a year or so, I'd go to her page just to see that she was out there, that she was real. But that was it. After the retreat, I got back and out of nowhere I had a thought that had never occurred to me before.

My phone number hasn't changed since high school. I've had many phones. Many data swaps, but I wondered what if she's still in my contacts? I had literally never thought to look, maybe I wasn't ready to, so I slowly typed in her name and sure enough, a number popped up and it had that promising blue color indicating that it was a number.

With iMessage capabilities, my heart started to pound. What the actual [00:12:00] fuck, how have I never thought to look to see whether or not she was in my phone. So I started to type out a text, super polite, fully prepared for the worst case scenarios. One, it's a complete stranger on the other end, and that she has since changed her phone number or worse, it is her and she wouldn't want anything to do with me.

And would possibly even tear me apart for reaching out to her like this. The text read. Hey, I don't know if this is still Riley's phone number, but this is Mickey from Arlington. Super random, but I thought of you recently and thought I'd reach out to see if you have any interest in touching base or connecting by phone or something.

I've thought about it a few times over the years, but just never really had a good way of contacting you. I am not even sure if this is still your number. Totally understand if not, but wanted [00:13:00] to shoot my shot and if this is the wrong number, sorry in advance. As soon as I sent the text, I felt something shift.

I didn't know what would happen next, but something started to heal. I felt like a wound began to close up. It felt like the beginning of a whole new era. And then only, and then almost immediately after I let out my sigh of satisfaction, my phone bust Jesus Christ. It, it was her. Hey, yeah, this is still my number.

Wow. What a pleasant surprise. I would be happy to reconnect. What's the best way to catch up? And just like that, a whole system of beliefs and stories that have shaped. My relationships, my insecurities, my sense of self, [00:14:00] my yarn, ball of baggage started to unravel. The saga continues. Next time. Take good care of yourselves.

I'll see you soon.

Adam: Wow. Words cannot begin to express how grateful I am to have michalina in my life, and I am just so beyond excited that you now get to have Michalina in your life too. A huge thank you for being a member and for supporting this show. I hope you'll join us next time with more tales of transition from our beloved mic.

Until then, stay safe, stay strong, stay centered, stay awesome. See you next time.