Even Jill Scott

I should confess up front that I'm a TikTok lurker. I don't post, I comment very sporadically, I ignore anyone that I know "in real life," I kind of just watch. Hold that thought, because it turns out to be on theme.

That being said, what the algorithm brought me this week was a clip from Scott Evans' House Guest: Scott and Jill Scott trading the lyrics to "Love Rain" back and forth, line for line. He isn't interviewing her in that moment. He's showing her, really demonstrating, with her own words in his memory, exactly what she means to him. And her face runs a whole sequence I can't stop thinking about. First the flicker, a half-second of disbelief. Then the joy catches up. Then tears. And then, underneath all of it, gratitude: that she gets to do this, live this, and actually hear what her words have done in somebody's life. Jill Scott — Jilly from Philly, a woman whose words have raised us, married us, and helped put us back together for twenty-five years — is moved to tears that she matters to somebody. And grateful she got to find out.

I recognized that flicker immediately, because I've worn it. Maybe you have too.

A lot of us got extraordinary at pointing our attention outward. We learned to make things land for other people, whether the room, the message, the mission, or even the family. We became precise about everyone else's value and approximate about our own. And when somebody hands us an accurate description of what we mean to them, we treat it like a package delivered to the wrong address. Check the label. Surely this is for someone else.

If the rooms you grew up in or worked in were drawn for somebody else (and for Black women, for queer folks, for the neurodivergent among us, they usually were), then you likely trained hardest in the giving direction. Generosity was rewarded. Receiving was never on the syllabus.

Here's the good part. Receiving is a skill, which means it can be practiced, which means the flicker is not permanent. And on the other side of it is a specific kind of joy: not the quick kind, the settled kind. The kind that changes how you stand.

But notice something about Jill's moment: somebody handed it to her. She didn't generate that on her own. A person sat across from her and proved the true thing out loud, her own lines given back to her from memory, and the sequence her face ran was a response to being witnessed.

Most of us don't get handed that. The evidence of our mattering exists, but it's scattered, it lives in other people's lives, and the day-to-day rarely routes it back to us. Some of closing that gap is inside work: grounding, practice, whatever returns you to yourself and lets you hold what's true. I keep my own practices for this and they matter more than almost anything. But some of that gap is structural, and structure is my lane: you can put someone in your corner whose actual role is to see your work whole and say so with precision. That's a real function. It has a name. It's called counsel.

Carrying on from my last post, I'll add that being described correctly starts by being described as mattering. When I sit with a client and say what I see — the pattern she can't see because she's standing in it, the value she walks past daily because it comes easy to her — the seeing is only half the job. The other half is helping her survive hearing it. Helping her let the sentence finish. The discovery and then the positioning: first we find what's true, then we build the language that lets her carry it into rooms out loud.

I think especially about people in public service and the work around it. Your impact is the realest thing about your work and the hardest to witness: it lands in other people's lives, on other timelines, and reaches you translated into a dashboard for the funder or maybe a bullet for the board packet. Whole careers of consequence, witnessed mostly in metrics. That's a design gap, and design gaps can close: partly by building witness into your own rhythm, and partly with someone whose job is to hold the mirror steady while you name what you've built and carry it forward. Especially if you're remixing a career of service into its next phase, and the fullest version of your story is the one thing your résumé has never told.

Because the room can't receive what you haven't.

So back to Jill. What I want, for her, for the women reading this, for myself on the days the flicker wins, is more practice. Enough practice that when somebody tells us we matter, the face skips the disbelief and goes straight to the joy. Not because we've become arrogant. Because we've finally become accurate.

May we all get that good at receiving. May the surprise become recognition.

(And yes, I'm still lurking on TikTok. But I'm receiving over there too. Apparently it's practice.)