My Search for a Purpose

Hello and Welcome to a New (two week late) Blog Post! This post was originally meant for the end of September 🙃 so here's an update for that month:  September: The month started off with the beginning of classes! Which is going to be the majority of this post, soooo details to come! I got to know some community members through some cool resources that YDS has to offer like DivOut, the Marquand Gospel and Inspirational Choir (MaGIC), and Yale Black Seminarians.  I joined a prayer-and-just-generally-forming-community-group within the smaller, congregationalist institution within YDS, Andover Newton. This group has been such a joy to attend on Mondays! You know I'm still having my therapy sessions to keep me relatively sane :) I had an ordination conversation with my pastor, Lonnie. It feels really great to be supported by my church family in this journey that I have embarked on.  Jane finally came back to Connecticut and we got to spend some much needed time together. I always f

Hello and Welcome to the actual last post of my PRIDE! Blog series. Light Blue , Pink , & White: An Exploration of Gender Identity This post is going to be relatively short when compared to the rest of the series because the concept of gender exploration is still super new to me and I'm not the most comfortable being a resource for others in, what feels like, my limited view and experience.  This post is meant to act as a marker of significant times in which I became aware of people's ability to define themselves outside of the gender binary and how I've come to experience this identity. The stories that I will share have much more detail than I'm going to explore in this post, but I want to respect people's privacy and well-being; the stories will be brief.  My first encounter with someone who identified outside the gender binary was in my freshman year of undergrad. This person became a really good friend and was gentle in their corrections of pronoun usage.