Antioch College Class of 1992
Studied Art
Preferred Pronouns are She/Her
Bio- Tell us about your self
My attraction to Antioch was perhaps unusual for a person who grew up in Fairborn, Ohio. Most of the people I knew before Antioch thought my interest in the institution was strange. They were right. It was strange and so was I. But it goes much further back than when I was in high school. Though I was born in Philadelphia, my mother was from Xenia and had always felt more comfortable in Yellow Springs than in her own home town. My father, a black man, had come to Antioch to participate in civil rights protests in the 1950s from Philadelphia. My parents talked of my becoming an Antiochian from the time I was a toddler when we visited my grandparents in Ohio. Somehow, that’s exactly what happened. I was the kid who had no idea how to socialize. I liked to make art. I didn’t fit in. Of course, I would fit in at Antioch.
How did Antioch College’s Co-op program prepare you for work life?
When I look back on my coop experiences, they were not as adventurous as those of many of my cohorts. But, in spite of that, I learned to always look for challenges at work. Even when my job as described is not especially challenging, I look for opportunities at work to challenge myself. I’m constantly forcing the evolution of my job so that it offers more challenge and more opportunity to learn. I’m helping to design all of the new work processes associated with a new laboratory information system currently being tested for implementation next year at the company I work for. I’m not certain that I would have felt empowered enough to want to do that had I not had the experiences of coop, where I wasn’t just doing a job, but constantly looking for all the opportunities to learn about work and life during a relatively brief stint with an employer.
How did your Antioch experience prepare you for life?
I wouldn’t be honest if I said that life has been easy for me. I’ve been thrown a lot of curve balls over the years. I think that Antioch may have best served me in preparation for all of those curves by throwing many of its own at me. But aside from the ability to navigate a quagmire, Antioch taught me how to be me. I recently told a friend the story of the Spring and Fall of 1990 at Antioch. If you were there, you remember all the loss the community suffered and the way everyone learned to comfort each other and help each other to move on with the loss of our friends and classmates. There was a moment when I was sitting in one of the memorial gatherings and I realized as I listened to all the stories, that I had no stories. I was shy and had no idea how to effectively interact with people. If something happened to me, there would be nothing to say. I was determined to have a story. I had an idea of the person I desired to be in my head, but my reality didn’t live up to my flamboyant fantasy. So, f*ck it. I became that person, and I haven’t turned back. The realization that you are not immortal can do a lot to make you realize who your authentic self truly is.
What does our charge to “win a victory for humanity” mean to you?
Often, I wish that the victories I have been charged with winning could be massive and change the world for the better. Of course, that would be amazing, but I won’t be disappointed if that is not the way it all goes down. I like to think that those victories are just a directive for basic human kindness. Maybe I notice that a server got shorted on a check, so I make up the difference. Maybe I help the man with dementia explain to his son-in-law on the phone where he is so he can pick him up and stay with him until he gets there. As long as I can do things like that, I won’t be ashamed to die.
Antioch Stories 