Settling into lockdown a few weeks ago, I kept experiencing a weird deja vu. As I quietly downshifted my energy, reassessed and recalibrated my time, I realized why the strange feeling of being confined to my own home was familiar. It evoked long rainy season days in my Peace Corps village in Togo, where the only thing to do was make more coffee and pick up another book. It reminded me of being stuck with my IRC colleagues in shared housing in the DR Congo when there were threats of violence. The silence and empty streets are even eerily reminiscent of post-2017 earthquake Mexico City.

Soon enough, I found myself down a rabbit hole of old emails and journal entries from those times.

You see, I used to be better at keeping folks updated on my wanderings. There’s definitely a correlation to be made between the lessening frequency of those mass emails and the advent of Skype, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.

Suffice it to say - I’ve fallen out of the habit.

But it occurred to me as I read back through these old missives that perhaps there’s something to be said for revisiting your naive former self (maybe even forgiving her blind optimism?), to better understand how you’ve come to be and think and feel the things you do today. In locked-down Cape Town.

So the night before my 40th birthday last week, I closed my eyes, held my breath and hit “publish” on 19 blog posts that reveal my 22, 23, 27, 28, 29 year old self. It’s terrifying - embarrassing, frankly - to offer this up to public consumption. (Talk about vulnerability - Brené Brown would be proud.)

But it did make me want to add more, to think and write more - to connect more, instead of staying in my own head or within my journal. Connection is a theme that dominates my personal and professional lives, whether it’s hosting a group of cool women to share wine and good conversation, or finding the exact right person to lead an innovative new social justice project.

Many of you know that I’ve long been seriously questioning the way we do human rights and development, and that this is one of the reasons I started consulting four years ago: to explore how else do to this work. I can’t say I’ve come to any brilliant conclusions, but I have come to believe we can improve social justice work through connection -breaking down walls, dismantling silos, getting disjointed parts to speak to each other and work together.

This blog began to feel like a more consistent way of connecting to each other, to shared memories, to perspectives on human rights, development, our careers, what they mean, why we do what we do.

More than anything I’m telling stories, which are a connective tissue across cultures and continents.

I’d love to start a conversation around all of this, but more than anything just appreciate your time and thoughts!