- Kimberley Guillemet
- Kimberley Baker Guillemet
COVID-19.
According to the CDC, COVID-19 is a respiratory disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, a coronavirus discovered in 2019. The virus spreads mainly from person to person through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or talks. To date, it has infected over 288 million people.
For me, COVID-19 signifies more than a virus that has swept the world. It reflects a demand for flexibility and nimbleness. Essentially, it has forced me to embrace surrender.
I’ve always prided myself on being organized and having things planned out. This approach to life has helped me ever since I was a young child. Planning always gave me a sense of control when things around me felt out of control.
COVID-19 has forced me to confront within myself my desire for control and ask myself the question: how will you respond when you have absolutely no control over various factors in your life?
It has caused the following questions to emerge over seemingly mundane events such as:
● When will my children return to school?
● How many colleagues will be present at work today to help me accomplish a task?
● Will my daughter’s soccer season be canceled?
● Will my mother be safe attending church?
● Can our family safely gather at our house for Christmas dinner?
These are questions that would not have weighed on me in 2019, yet here we are, at the top of 2022, and they are very real concerns.
We are fortunate that we now have a COVID-19 vaccine, as well as a pill that promises to shorten the length and severity of the virus. Both of these pharmaceutical advancements bring with them a renewed hope for a return to some semblance of normalcy. I’m grateful that we live in a time and space in which we have access to vaccination, medication and different therapeutic options. However, with the Omicron mutation of the virus, and with whatever iterations and mutations of the virus that will emerge in the future, comes further uncertainty. One thing that this pandemic has taught me is that we cannot hang our hope on well-meaning promises. The reality is that we just don’t know. So where do we get our help? How do we proceed when we just don’t know what lies ahead?
Here’s the reality: we have never known what the future will bring. We have lied to ourselves and lulled ourselves into a comfortable mental space where we’ve believed that we knew what was going to happen from one moment to the next and from one from one day to the next. And for many of us, prior to the emergence of COVID-19, we probably were able to make plans and see them actually come to fruition with some regularity. But COVID-19 has reminded us of the truth that we have never known what lies ahead, nor have we had much control over it.
I am choosing to receive that reminder with gratitude and embrace the surrender. That does not mean I have stopped making plans, setting goals or working toward achievements. I will continue to strive to be my best self and set goals that I believe are worthwhile and meaningful. However, when things go awry or do not turn out in the way that I expect or hope, I am learning to surrender and pivot. There is always a blessing that we could not have foreseen when we experience what we did not expect.
As we begin 2022, full of hope for what the next 365 days will hold, I challenge all of us to anchor our hope not in what we think we know or hope will happen, but in the mindset we intend to use when we respond to the unexpected.
Embrace the surrender.
- Kimberley Guillemet
- Adapted from a quote by Brené Brown
My generation has been calibrated to look at ourselves through one lens, at least as it pertains to our professional lives. As children, we were encouraged to go to good schools, become professionals, excel in our careers and ride off into the sunset. Indeed, I feel very blessed to have procured the academic training, professional achievements and life experience that I have.
However, when we achieve goals that we have set for ourselves, we must be careful not to allow ourselves to be lulled into complacency. After achieving set goals, we should never feel as if our contributions to the world must cease or are limited to a certain form or genre moving forward.
I felt moved to write a book a few years ago that would equip young people with the tools they needed to succeed in elite academic and competitive social spaces, and would help their parents and educators effectively support them. Despite my abilities and accomplishments, I kept talking myself out of it. The excuse parade pummeled me relentlessly. It wasn’t the right time. I didn’t know enough about the book writing and publishing process to execute the project. No one would be interested in the subject matter. And perhaps the mental impediment that resonated the most with me: what gave me the audacity to believe that I could make a meaningful contribution to a field outside of my professional expertise? The list of deterrents kept me paralyzed and stuck in inaction. For a while, I allowed my fear of failure and public vulnerability to convince me to abandon the idea.
Then 2020 happened. Specifically, the summer of 2020 happened and young people across the country started vocalizing their experiences with oppression, trauma and dejection during their tenure at elite independent schools throughout the U.S. Their long-suppressed emotions were bubbling up. I knew that I had to take action.
I started writing. I wrote furiously and purposefully calling back into the forefront of my consciousness stories that I had long since buried. I wrote and wrote and wrote until my book Black Prep: Life Lessons of A Perpetual Outsider, was fully formed. The book officially launches on December 7.
My hope is that the book will help young people, parents and educators alike. My prayer is that it will help people, who like me, had to navigate the unfamiliar terrain of elite educational spaces with no roadmap. People, who like me, felt as if they were constantly being told they were inferior, not good enough, and not worthy of having a seat at the table. People, who like me, needed the support of my village and reiteration of my worth in order to remain resilient and whole in the face of adversity.
It is important that I deliver one key message loud and clear: you are good enough. You are more than enough. You are the asset. You do not have to change who you are in order to be successful in elite spaces. If anything, you may simply need to change the way you see yourself. See yourself as the asset.
I hope that the book will not only support and encourage young people, but that the book will inspire others to step outside of their comfort zones. I took a step outside of a well-trodden professional path to do something in new and uncharted territory.
We all must remember that no matter where we come from, our background, our educational level, and even our achievements, we write our own story. We decide how we will move forward in our journey. While we might not always select the terrain over which we must traverse on the road to achieving our goals, we can be intentional about deciding where we are headed.
Be brave and courageous. Seize each moment and do not take one day of your life for granted. It is imperative that we share who we are with the world. In this season of giving, please be brave enough to share your gifts.
- Kimberley Guillemet
- Elizabeth Scott
I’ve had a lot of experience with apologies, both giving them and receiving them. I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of an authentic apology and I also know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a disingenuous apology. Because I understand the impact of insincerity in the context of an apology, I strive to make sure that my apologies are sincere.
When we initially make a mistake or cause harm to another person, we might not be fully cognizant of the depth of the harm we’ve caused. I can acknowledge that I’ve certainly had situations where I inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings or did something carelessly where I wasn’t aware how the other person felt. I can remember times when someone whose feelings I had hurt shared their experience with me, and where I initially felt as though they were overreacting or that what I had done was not that big of a deal.
I am grateful that I have come to learn and appreciate over time that when I have harmed someone, the apology is not about me. It doesn’t matter if I agreed that the person had the right to have hurt feelings. Nor does it matter whether I intended to hurt their feelings. What matters is acknowledging the harm that I caused and validating the aggrieved party’s experience. Moving forward, I can demonstrate my sincerity by taking action to not engage in the harmful conduct again.
This month’s World Changer of the Month is Willa Bruce. In 1912, Mrs. Bruce along with her husband established Bruce’s Beach, a safe haven for Black beachgoers in Manhattan Beach, California. Racial discrimination ultimately drove the city’s seizure of the land through the use of eminent domain in 1924.
Publicly, the local government stated that the land was needed to build a park, however, the city had just recently built a park near the location of Bruce’s Beach. Moreover, the park was not built until approximately 1960, over 30 years after the eminent domain proceedings had concluded.
It was not until this year, nearly 100 years after the Bruce family was divested of their property, that local and state officials took action to rectify the past injustice done to the Bruce family and returned the land to the Bruce family descendants. This action reflects contrition and a sincere desire to do better moving forward.
It takes integrity and courage to acknowledge the truth and take steps to rectify the past, especially when it is embarrassing, bureaucratically difficult and inconvenient to do so. Not only does acknowledgement of past harm create a path forward for healing, reconciliation and progress, but in outwardly recognizing the errors of the past, we guard against repeating them in the future.