"I want to be good, but I also want to be better, which sounds like they're the same thing, but in a lot of ways they aren't." He goes on to explain, "For me, process is much more of my concern than outcome. I can't control the outcome, but I can control the process which helps navigate the outcome." Here he references how basketball is applicable to music: "During a game, you can't be focused on whether the shot's going in or not, you focus on shooting. The time to worry was when you were working on the process of shooting a.k.a. during practice."

"This is your assignment.

Feel all the things. Feel the hard things. The inexplicable things, the things that make you disavow humanity’s capacity for redemption. Feel all the maddening paradoxes. Feel overwhelmed, crazy. Feel uncertain. Feel angry. Feel afraid. Feel powerless. Feel frozen. And then FOCUS.

Pick up your pen. Pick up your paintbrush. Pick up your damn chin. Put your two calloused hands on the turntables, in the clay, on the strings. Get behind the camera. Look for that pinprick of light. Look for the truth (yes, it is a thing—it still exists.)

Focus on that light. Enlarge it. Reveal the fierce urgency of now. Reveal how shattered we are, how capable of being repaired. But don’t lament the break. Nothing new would be built if things were never broken. A wise man once said: there’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. Get after that light.

This is your assignment."

—Wendy MacNaughton, Courtney E. Martin

I will never shy away from overextending myself or being open to the organic process of love flowering between people. I have seen so many people make shipwrecks of themselves because of insecurity. I have seen who I become in my insecurity and it's an exhausting experience. So many people meet now at this juncture of being used to being unloved and used to living on and within their insecurities almost like a survival instinct. I want new survival instincts for all of us, based on security, vulnerability without fear or emotional retaliation.

| Mykki Blanco