Letter From The Editor
I left the country in September 2025, with a plan to return in December. I am writing this from much further away than that, in time and in distance both, and I have stopped pretending I know the exact day I'll feel finished. A sabbatical, I've learned, is not a withdrawal from the work. It is a way of staying close enough to it to ask whether you still want to do it and to be honest about the answer. I do.
That sentence cost more than it looks. There is a quiet arithmetic to this kind of work, the kind that rarely appears on any ledger, and most of it stays invisible. I am not interested in itemizing it here, but I will say only that by the end of 2024, a year that looked from the outside like a season of accomplishment, my body had finished negotiating with me. It simply stopped absorbing the weight of not only the organization but life, and I had to step away.
I've come to understand that work built from scratch in an industry that did not ask for it will always look slower and less polished than work that inherits a blueprint. Some of what reads as disorganization from the outside is the texture of building something that did not exist before. I feel this more deeply than any critic could, but I've decided to stop letting the loudest doubt set the temperature of my spirit.
What has changed during my sabbatical is not my commitment; it is my understanding of where commitment has to begin. That is with myself, and after with a version of this work that doesn't require my depletion as the price of admission.
I'm not writing to you from the far side of all this, healed and resolved. Some of what surfaced in 2024 is still unfolding. But I've also decided that I don't have to wait for perfect circumstances, or a fully repaired life before I'm allowed to build something again.
Contribution takes different shapes in different seasons. Showing up with what you have is not a lesser version of the work. It is the work.
I have to admit I didn't plan for this to land where it did — the day before Jubilee Day. I was born and raised in Texas, where the day was never abstract, so I wasn't going to let it pass without a word. Juneteenth was as much a beginning as an end: the catalyst for one of the most generative chapters our people have ever authored in this country.
At the center of everything I've done is a single impulse that has never once left me, to help people feel seen. To make it plain that their stories and their work matter. The BID INC journal is the newest form of that. Same purpose. Different season.
Because what I've been describing in my own life is, in its own way, what BID is doing now too. I’m calling this era a reconstruction. The work ahead isn't about returning to what we were; it's about rebuilding on a sturdier foundation and doing it together. And that kind of building is too much to rest on the shoulders of a handful of people; it has to be built by a community willing to contribute.
So I'll leave you with the questions I had to answer for myself. What do you need to do for yourself to live from overflow? And what of that overflow can you pour into the next era of our community? JR