A grateful goodbye to Austin
It’s been one year since Reid and I pulled a 26 foot moving truck across the country and into the driveway of our new home in Raleigh, North Carolina. We lovingly call it Hometown Manor for two reasons: because 1) we live on Hometown Drive and 2) \our brick home sits among tall trees, behind a spreading mass of azaleas, next to a long drive away, and surrounded by the sounds of bird chatter that make you feel like you are in the country. Here is where we are building a new universe, a cozy corner of the world filled with color, music, plants, and LEGO projects. While I am falling in love with this season more and more each day, I realize that I am also letting go of a place we called home for 12 years, more and more each day. As I work through my grieving process, I decided to write a grateful goodbye letter to Austin and all its people that poured into me, my family, and built a strong foundation for me to grow.
Dear Austin,
When we became your newest residents in 2011, we were following the path of our best friends from college. Newly married and with extra letters behind our names, Reid and I started a new chapter. We called Clarksville home, biked to see shows that we found on freeshowsaustin.com, visited our pals at El Chilito, the Stephen F Austin Intercontinental, and Hotel Saint Cecilia. It was such a sweet time.
Dinner parties, potlucks, and a brand new baby boy brought to life our little yellow house in East Austin that sat across the street from Boggy Creek Farm. For the next five years, our lives blossomed. I discovered how to leverage my childhood experiences into something meaningful and founded a non-profit with true Texan named McCall, surrounded by a loving community - chefs from Salt and Time and Eden East, foster care advocates across the city, like Cortney Jones, leaned on the creative genius of Natalie Davis, partnered with urban farms and my favorite organizations to this day. Joy was so readily available.
Contrary to a commonly accepted narrative about you, Austin, I found a rich, vibrant and present Black community. My community. For the first time in my life, at the age of 30, I was able to surround myself with people that reflected my lived experience as a Black woman. I was offered an opportunity that changed my career trajectory: to build a donor relations and fundraising shop for the Black Studies Collective at UT Austin. My first real fundraising gig! Austin, you invited me to step into my identity as a professional and a woman of color. You brought me mentors, co-conspirators, sisters, advocates, role models, lifelong friends, and teachers. I fell in love with art. Scholarship took on a whole new meaning. I began settling into one of the most enriching identities to date: a leader. A leader of community. A leader of people. A leader of thought.
COVID marked many changes for our global society, but for our little world, it marked when we first began to imagine a life without you in it. Even with the comfort and protection of our four-family pod, we started to feel a loneliness we wouldn’t recover from. Our best friends began moving back east, one by one. The distance we placed between us and family, which at one time felt perfectly negotiated, became too far to justify when we looked into our babies eyes. Without the distraction of a work commute, crowded family events promising free popsicles, or the next “big thing” restaurant opening up, the premium we paid to be your resident was losing its benefits.
I sharpened my forms of resistance against the harshness of your reality: for all the progress you proclaim as a city, an unwillingness remains to be the change so many are demanding and desperately need. This critique is not for you alone. Many cities are hiding behind the bastion of liberalism while its most vulnerable inhabitants are languishing. I ran every day for a year to protect my peace and joy after the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. I wrote letters and attended school board meetings, pushing back against harmful school closures that were misguided, racist, and wrong.
I began to fear languishing within myself. I enrolled in a six month leadership development institute. I panicked and applied to business school. I dug deep into the quiet corners of my insecurities to come to terms of who I could be, even if it meant saying goodbye to you.
My hail mary became one of my greatest treasures: my Thinkery family. I declined admission to business school and accepted a position that I felt was a little big for me in the shoulders, but one that I could grow into as I learned to stand a little taller. Inspired by what Thinkery meant for my children and family, I set out to build a program that could support a vision to cultivate a lifelong love of learning for all children, powered by its CEO and my friend. And here’s why: I was a parent in your public school system and was experiencing an inequitable education system directly. The love for learning was being stripped away by standardized testing and divestment in schools. I realized that informal learning spaces like a children’s museum are solutions to infusing joy back into learning.
But even my dream job working for one of your top cultural institutions wasn’t enough to keep us with you forever. Which brings us to the present. After a year of moving on, but not letting go, I am ready to start the next leg of the journey. My monthly visits will come to an end - we just can’t go on meeting that way. Zuri asked me after I returned from a trip to see you, “Will you be home for my birthday?”. If I know you like I think I do, you are saddened by that question as much as I was to hear it.
Thank you, Austin for all you gave, and all you are. Thank you for the cooling depths of Barton Springs, the love of stained glass, and the giants in the community who raised me. Thank you, Texas, for the vastness and the beauty of Big Bend. Thank you for making me the momma of two proud Texans. I’m so grateful you were a part of our story. Onward we both go.
Sending all my love,
Shaleiah
