Welcome to Sojournalisms — A Note Before We Begin

The Note Before It Begins

There is a moment every evening in La Paz, Baja California Sur, when the city stops.
Not gradually. Not one person at a time. All at once, the way a room goes quiet when someone says something true.

The sun begins its descent over the Sea of Cortez, and the malecón — the long waterfront promenade that serves as La Paz’s family room — fills with people who have come, as they come every evening, to watch. Families with children running between their legs. Couples leaning into each other. Vendors working the crowd. Elders who opt for higher ground and sit on a rock or bench, who have watched this particular sunset from this particular angle more times than they could count and still show up.

I showed up too. Every night, for our first three months in Mexico, because I needed it. Because I had just driven across America, crossed an international border and landed in a city that did not yet know my name — and the sunset reminded me, every single evening, exactly why I had come.

This is Sojournalisms. And this is the note and my message before it begins.

I am a journalist.

That fact matters here, because it shapes everything about how I intend to tell this story.

I spent a year shy of two decades in Washington, D.C. — reporting, writing, advocating on Capitol Hill and in the streets of U.S. cities for incarcerated people and those seeking racial justice. I learned to document what I saw with honesty. I learned that the most useful stories are the ones that don’t look away from the complicated parts. Through it all, though, I yearned to live out, document and tell my own story.

After 17 years of wanting to be abroad, I left D.C. to relocate to La Paz. It’s not like the timing was right — it never was. The roof of my house blew off once. Love found me at an inconvenient moment. The toilet overflowed, causing a whole mildew-sewage-drywall problem that sent us to live in an Airbnb for a year while our home underwent an extensive and expensive reconstruction. My children, who once accepted the idea of moving abroad, settled into schools, and I couldn’t bring myself to disrupt that.

Life stacked reasons to wait, and I kept letting it until the stars aligned; I realized it was time to say “no” to the continuing laundry list of reasons that held me hostage — including a full-time job layoff just two weeks before I planned to relocate.

Sojournalisms is a documentary series — on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and here — about what a deliberately slower life actually looks like. Not the version designed to make you feel inadequate about your own. Not the highlight reel. The whole thing: the geckos and roaches, the language-barrier headaches, the months of Airbnb musical chairs and the December week when temperatures hit the mid-80s, when we became permanent Mexican residents and signed an apartment lease, understanding that we actually lived here.

The spine of this work is slow living. I know that term may sound foreign or radical to many of us. To slow down on purpose, in a culture that measures worth in productivity, is less a lifestyle choice than a countercultural declaration — and I intend to document what it costs, what it requires and what it quietly returns.

Throughout, I’ll keep returning to these themes:

There is something else I need to name directly.

As a Black American woman, I have never fully felt like I had a home country. Not in the United States, where I was born, educated, built a career and raised two children. Not yet in Mexico, where I am learning the language, the logic of daily life and the weight of arriving as an outsider in a homogeneous country that has its own complicated relationship with American presence and still grapples with racism and colorism.

I am still looking and still arriving. I am finding, to my own mild surprise, that I am unhurried about it. The search itself has become the thing. The asking of the question — what does home mean for someone whose history makes that question difficult to answer? — is now my life’s work.

A word about the writing here.

The long-form pieces in this newsletter are written for the page. I am a journalist by training and a storyteller by nature, and these dispatches are composed with the care I would give to any piece I intended to publish in a magazine or between the covers of a book — because that is exactly what I intend, eventually, to do.

This newsletter is, among other things, the rough draft of something larger: chapters about travel, a book about my childhood, articles about living a deliberate life. If you are an editor or a publisher who has found your way here, I am glad. Stay.

If you are a reader who has been thinking about doing something different — leaving, slowing down, needing less, finding a pace that feels like yours — you are exactly who I am writing for. A slower life is available. Regardless of budget. Regardless of background. Regardless of how long you have been waiting for the timing to be right.

The timing will not be right. Go anyway.

Welcome to Sojournalisms.

Chapter 1 is already live. Start there.