As informative and overwhelming as it has been filling our brains with anti-racism nonfiction over the last three months, I’ve seen dozens of posts asking white and non-Black allies to read simply “normal” Black literature. This is a very straightforward, albeit small, way to normalize Black culture in our world of white supremacy. We don’t only want to read about the ways that Black people are oppressed and how to fight the system, but we can actually fight it by simply reading a regular novel about a Black person living their life. Naturally, I dove right into my favorite genre to start the search for a good read—coming-of-age debut young adult novels—where I found the powerful and heartbreaking gem that is Color Me In by Natasha Díaz for August’s truelane book club pick.

In a word, Díaz’s writing is enchanting. Nevaeh Levitz is a high school sophomore whose parents, a Jewish father and a Black mother, have recently split on definitively un-amicable terms. Nevaeh is white presenting, which means she has light skin and appears by a visual account to be a white person in most communities. This affords her a ton of privilege that she doesn’t understand, which her Black female cousins on her mother’s side are swift to point out when she moves to Harlem. No longer in the wealthy white neighborhood of her comfortable childhood, Díaz skillfully takes us through Nevaeh’s identity search for whether her Blackness can fit with her whiteness, and if she can find a way to be proud of both cultures.

When reading good fiction, you never need to question whether your protagonist is a real person or not—they are real enough on the page and their experiences affect you similarly. In Color Me In, it was clear right away that Díaz was drawing on personal experience throughout, and I was not surprised in the end acknowledgements to find it was autobiographical fiction. Unpacking the memories of a life you put away long ago couldn’t have been easy, and Díaz crafted the story beautifully.

Dancing with the electric colors of New York City on hot summer nights, dozens of dynamic characters from every walk of life, a magical first love that goes exactly the way you want it to and plenty of high school and social media drama, this is a novel that is full of spice and life while taking you to places of loss, heartbreak, and fear. The lows are low, but they teach you lessons along the way—including the importance of continuing to work towards closing our nation’s prolonged chapter on racial injustice.

Order Color Me In from Black-owned bookshop The Lit. Bar today:

Where to begin?

Over the past couple of years, I know I’ve insinuated that I may or may not have been looking for something more than running truelane full-time. Four years—how long I’ve been blogging as my full-time job—is as long as I’ve held any job, really. But over the last two, I’ve mostly felt lost. I tried to set goals and make plans, but the plans were mostly one-off phrases like “write a book” and “get out of debt” but never did I concoct a plan to accomplish these goals. Finally, something about my twenty-seventh year taught me to be proactive rather than reactive, and that has kicked off a string of spreadsheets that sprouted ideas and kept me on track and here I am writing a blog post about why I’m temporarily reacquainting myself with corporate America.

I feel like I’ve been living a double life all summer. Back in June, I re-enlisted with the temporary employment agency I worked for back in Minneapolis, but it’s been a brand new experience from the get-go. You’ll never believe what I did this summer—I worked as a pier agent for Royal Caribbean Cruises (I know! Not! Princess!) for one day, checking people in for a cruise to Alaska. It was thrillingly unbearable. Then, I spent a few days working the front desk for a Jewish social services center, which was overwhelming and stress-inducing. After that, I worked for about a month in shipping & receiving for Adobe on Lake Union, walking distance from my apartment; those 30 days were about the most bored I have ever been in my adult life. The reason I took these gigs was just for life experience, writing inspiration, and the fact that they had an end date.

I took a few weeks off afterwards to travel and see family and decompress from the bleakness of the mailroom job, and then on July 16, the agency called me in the late afternoon with two opportunities. One was an events coordinator at a valet and event rental company, which sounded like too much responsibility for a temp job—especially when they told me it was temp-to-hire, meaning I’d be working full-time as a regular employee as soon as possible. The other was for an office assistant at a property management company for about a month, and with a completion date in sight, I said, “Sign me up!” 

It started the next day. I woke up at six o’clock in the morning, hopped on the commuter bus downtown, and as soon as I walked in to the fifth floor office of this commercial real estate & property management firm, I had a weird sense of…place. Something felt—oddly—right.

I’ve been there every weekday, 8 to 5, since that Wednesday. Reentering the office world I left in August 2015, I’ve had a weird sense of déjà vu, but at the same time, a completely different experience from the corporate financial world I was in before. All of the corporate clichés are the same. All of the coworker interactions are the same. But there’s something different—maybe it’s the stage of life I’m in, maybe it’s just that the office and work are better suited to my personality. But it makes me wonder…maybe I didn’t hate working in an office? Maybe it’s just that I hadn’t found the right one. I look forward to going to work every day, and truly, I didn’t think that was physically possible for someone like me.

In fact, I look forward to it enough that they’re going to offer me the job—full-time regular—and I’ve decided I’m going to take it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking for a new career—this job is just an EP in the discography of my life. I’ve believed for a long time that I could someday be a full-time author, and I still believe in myself enough to go for it. In fact, I don’t mind sharing with you that over the summer, I cranked out page after page on my first novel. The first draft of the manuscript is over halfway done, and that excites me so much. But I’ll be honest, I want to be in a better financial place before I drop everything to write books. I’ll still be working on it in my free time, but I’m tired of stressing about putting a $7 latte on my credit card while I sit in the coffee shop and tell myself I’m living the dream of being a writer.

Things have been so shaken up since July 17 with moving, the job, family stuff, and more that I feel like I haven’t even had a chance to process these changes. But then, there’s been some weird change in me, and it feels strange to have been able to feel it so palpably. Although I don’t feel settled in my surroundings, I feel more settled within myself. I’m starting to wonder if it’s a early-twenties-to-late-twenties change. Patience is something I’ve learned over the last year, which I think was an instrument of fate because it is absolutely driving all of the situations in my life right now between moving and not being able to unpack or furnish my apartment right away, as well as the temp-to-hire process.

Let me say plainly that truelane certainly isn’t going anywhere—I won’t be quitting or cutting back on posts or social media, but the content will evolve, naturally, just as it always does when anyone else grows and changes. I’ve been joking that this new 8-to-5 office job is a side hustle I started to go along with being a full-time blogger and influencer. I shoot over my lunch break or write and email at hotel lobbies downtown after work. My early twenties have come and gone, but for me, the hustle is starting just now. I’m hoping that not having to seek out random projects every month to pay my rent will allow me to redirect my creativity into new directions and fresh avenues.

In the meantime—here we go again, corporate America. Ever since I moved back to this city of industry by the sea, I’ve been wishing for a new experience without knowing what it was. This job is giving me a chance to place myself in a new community, spend more time in unexplored neighborhoods, and be a part of something bigger than just myself. And let’s be honest…curate a fabulous work wardrobe.

When I made the move to truelane from my first fashion blog zipped in 2015, I created this ‘Life’ section in anticipation of writing articles that would change the world. After all, one of my “sister lives,” as my friend Allison calls them, is being a renowned journalist—sharp as a number two pencil, quick as a fly-catching frog and as hard-hitting as they come. As much as I love to write, that isn’t my style, and since the world-changing articles weren’t coming to me I focused on my outfit posts and travel content and let life hang in the balance.

Fast-forwarding four years, while trying to brainstorm ways to stay creative and relevant in the Age of Influencers, I started to rethink my approach. What if the category of life included just that; life? Could I write little blurbs about things I’m thinking about or going through that don’t have to be groundbreaking? As soon as the thought popped into my head, I shook myself.

Of course everything I write doesn’t have to be groundbreaking.

The epiphany spoke to the pressure of being good enough—scratch that, ~*~*UNBELIEVABLY INCREDIBLE*~*~ enough—in 2019 to have anyone even turn their heads in your direction. My generation and I struggle with pressuring ourselves to become amazing in a short period of time; look at all the nineteen-year-olds out there who have built an empire or created a film or crafted gun control campaigns while I sit here unable to accomplish anything. It’s a classic and negative cycle of comparison, and it usually takes a whiskey and a phone call with my mother to start climbing out of it. If I’m not going to write something revolutionary, why hit ‘publish’ on anything at all?

I had to hammer it into my brain for weeks before sitting down to even write this post: not all of my writing is going to be great. If you want proof, just look at the first draft of my young adult novel I’ve taken an entire year to get halfway done. Does that stop me from writing it? No (okay, sometimes). Why should I let it stop me from writing anything else? One blog post is a microscopic commitment compared to a 60,000-word manuscript. The point of this blog page was to put myself out there; to flex a writing muscle or two and get over the fear of putting my words in front of others. It might have taken me four years to overcome that fear, but every day I realize a little more fully the importance of pushing yourself. Not everything has to matter. What matters is doing it at all.