000018 — Identity, Pt. 1: The Door
This new J. Cole album, The Fall-Off, has captivated me, and it has invited me into a room in my mind I do not visit often. A room I learned how to keep sealed, not because what’s inside is shameful, but because it’s heavy, because it’s tender, and because I learned early that certain parts of me were safer when they stayed quiet. Behind that door is a kind of darkness I’ve avoided naming directly: the experience of being a Black boy becoming a Black man inside the environment I grew up in. I even feel the hesitation when I say “Blackness,” which tells me everything I need to know. That word isn’t a side detail of my story. It’s a central beam.
There is a phrase people offer like a compliment, like a signal of unity, like proof they are safe. “We don’t see color.” When someone says they do not see one of the most distinguishing characteristics of my identity, what I hear is simple: that part of you is easiest for me when it is not present. The person saying it thinks they are offering dignity, and what lands is erasure. It is a gentle request for me to make my life easier to hold.
Over time, you learn how to cooperate with that kind of love. You put more and more behind the door. Color, and the memories attached to it, and the environment that shaped you, and the specific ways you learned to move in rooms. You learn how to make yourself legible in ways that keep other people comfortable. You learn how to translate your own life into something smoother, something easier, something that does not require anyone else to feel anything complicated. You learn how to unsee parts of yourself so others can keep pretending they are seeing the whole you.
You can flatten this into “race” as an abstract category, or “culture” as a distant label. I’m talking about the micro thing inside the sentence. “We don’t see, color.” That little “we don’t see” is the part that sticks in my throat. I know there are other versions of that sentence. We don’t see your hurt. We don’t see your past. We don’t see what you survived. But I need to stay with this one first, because this is the one I learned to cooperate with before I had language for what it was costing me. Those sentences can be spoken with good intent, and still, over time, they train you.
When I limit seeing, I limit being. I learned to set whole parts of myself aside and call it maturity. I narrow my perspective and call it moving on. I take the very things that constructed me and learn how to unsee them. It works, for a while. It keeps the peace. It keeps you safe. It keeps you from having to explain. And then one day you realize you have been living with a door in your own house that you never open.
I did not realize how much I had left behind until the third listen of “Two Six.” This morning I was sitting in my office chair with my feet up, looking out the window, doing nothing else. No multitasking. The task was listening. And in that kind of attention, the door felt closer than usual. At the very end of the track, there is a line that landed like a hand on my back, steady and loving, not forcing me through the door, and refusing to let me keep pretending it is not there. “But I knew I’d find a way.” It was not the words by themselves. It was what they activated. Thousands of moments where I did not have language yet, and I have it now. A whole archive of scenes from growing up where the only option was to adapt, and to move, and to endure, and to become something stronger than the environment wanted me to be.
That is what this album has done for me. It tells a story that somehow touched my own: becoming, emerging from a broken home and a broken community, and living inside the strange coexistence of aliveness and numbness. A place full of laughter and love and creativity, and full of struggle everywhere you look. It is rare to look around and see a family doing well. Examples of goodness exist, and they are scarce enough that you notice them like light.
Environments condition. Not as a label. In the transitive sense. We go to the gym because the environment conditions the body. We put ourselves around people who are growing because environment conditions the mind. The same is true of where you grow up, and what you are exposed to, and what you are not exposed to. The environment teaches you what to expect from life, and what to expect from people, and what to expect from yourself.
Lately I keep coming back to seeing. Seeing without distortion, without filters, without labeling. Seeing clearly. Seeing without flinching. Seeing without immediately translating. Seeing the whole thing: the broken and the beautiful, the fear and the fight, the ache and the resilience, the parts of me I learned to hide and the parts of me that kept me alive. It was seeing something other than broken that allowed me to see a way out, and it is also finally being willing to look at what was broken without needing to pretend it didn’t shape me.
That is why this is hitting right now. Because “we don’t see color” becomes a pattern of unseeing, a habit of reducing complexity to avoid discomfort. And I have done my own version of that unseeing inside myself. I learned how to keep parts of my identity behind a door so I could keep moving. And now I’m in a season where moving is no longer the only goal. Being is.
And I keep noticing something else as I sit with this. I have been trying to write an essay for a while. Not “I’m a writer” essay. Not “publishable” essay. The older meaning. The pure definition. An attempt. I have drafted a bunch of them, and I kept dancing around the same door, trying to talk about the room without going into it. Trying to make it tidy. Trying to make it legible. Trying to make it land clean.
This one did not come from effort the way the others did. It came from attention. From sitting in a chair and letting the only task be listening. From a line that did not ask my permission, and from a door that finally felt close enough to touch. So yeah, I think this is the first essay I have been wanting to write, and not because it is finished, and not because it is polished, and not because it says everything. It is because it finally attempts the real thing. It attempts to tell a part of my story I do not talk about much, and it attempts to see what is true without unseeing myself to make anyone else comfortable.
