There are moments when certain words or phrases strike me as urgent. Today as I was reading through, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon, I was suspended in time by his words, “Hiding won’t protect us.” What does it mean to hide? Am I hiding in order to cower away from a threat or evil? Or, am I hiding to ambush a threat or evil? Nonetheless, hiding is only temporary solution; it is a liminal space. 

One can never redeem freedom while hiding. Creativity is stifled in hiding. Comparatively, hiding is different, spacelely, than being alone. Baldwin surmises that the “primary distinction of the artist is that [they]must actively cultivate that state which most [people], necessarily, avoid: the state of being alone.” Creativity needs room which hiding doesn’t easily avail or lend itself towards. The creatives, artist, and those who understand freedom use the banality of aloneness as a space to exhume what humanity is afraid of being— simply an authentic, descent human. It the artist, as Baldwin declares, that affords us the opportunity to know “that there is nothing stable under heaven.”

Hiding forces one to compartmentalize to much of their beauty. It endorses the instability of chaos due to the lack of presence. Hiding is a relentless appeal to avert dealing with reality.

“Hiding won’t protect us.” Were the words Laymon wrote to his mother.  

I felt that…