Seven weeks ago the internet decided we were all locking in. September 1, close the year strong, four months of goals or nothing. I watched it roll through my feed with the particular amusement of someone who spent fifteen years in nonprofits and philanthropy, where we have locked in every fall for as long as I can remember. We just called it Q4. Year-end giving, board cycles, grant reports, the whole organization sprinting from October to December and taking the collapse in January like it was weather.
So I understand the impulse. Summer was for living, as it should be, and then September arrives and the goals climb out of the drawer and look you dead in the face. That reckoning is real. My question is a smaller one, and I've been carrying it around for weeks: to what end?
The locked-in person the feeds keep describing is a very specific person. Up at five, few obligations, a renewable supply of energy, and a body that does what it's told. I know a lot of brilliant, driven people, and very few of them are that person. The Black women I know are carrying the job and the family and usually a few people who aren't technically family. The neurodivergent folks I know do their best work in bursts no calendar can predict. And those of us living with autoimmune conditions are heading into what I've come to call the October slide, when the cold comes in and the flares come with it, right as the holidays start claiming every open square on the calendar. The sprint asks all of us to become somebody else for four months. And nowhere in the plan is there a line item for what we actually need, which includes joy.
I mean joy as a discipline. The settled kind, tended on purpose, the way you'd tend a garden, because left alone it gets crowded out by whatever grows fastest.
Right now, what grows fastest is despair. Most mornings I open an app and something is already waiting to tell me how bad it is for Black women, for Black people, for everyone this administration has decided is in the way. Some of it is true and worth knowing. A lot of it is the same bad news, reheated. And I believe something pretty plain: whatever you feed your attention multiplies. Most of the traditions I grew up around say a version of that, and my own life has proven it more often than I'd like to admit. A steady diet of dread produces more dread, and very little else. The news can be accurate and still be a poor place to live.
I was thinking about the stakes of that while watching a clip of Brittany Packnett Cunningham and Kamala Harris on UNDISTRACTED, talking about this administration's pointed attacks on the institutions that poured into people, and into women like her, who have always been a thorn in the side of that agenda. What I heard underneath the conversation is that being poured into is the threat. Full people are hard to stop.
Which is why I keep coming back to A'Lelia Walker. I've been reading Joy Goddess, A'Lelia Bundles' biography of her great-grandmother, Madam C.J. Walker's daughter. Langston Hughes called her the "joy goddess of Harlem's 1920s," and she earned the title. She followed her interests, and by some accounts her follies, all the way into the parties and the salon she called the Dark Tower, where Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston and Paul Robeson and so many others found one another. Her delight built rooms. And those rooms helped shape an era of Black art and thought we are still drawing from a century later. Her joy had consequences.
So yes, lock in. And tend the joy while you're at it.
Here's where this meets my work. A strategy built entirely on what you're fighting against has a short shelf life. I see it in organizations right now: missions quietly rewritten as opposition, every message shaped around the threat, staff running on alarm. It works for a quarter. Then people burn out, the urgency stops landing, and nobody can quite say what winning would look like. Funders feel this from both sides. Many are being asked to lead in public in ways they never had to before, and the reflex is to go quiet or go defensive. But a foundation with a clear destination has more to offer than a shield: a story that draws the right applicants, makes its grantees' impact visible, and gives peers and policymakers something worth joining. Individuals do a version of the same thing, with positioning built around getting out of a job, away from a boss, clear of a sector that stopped valuing them. Leaving is a direction, and it still can't tell you where to land.
Narrative strategy, at its core, is the work of naming what you're running toward. For an organization or a foundation, that's a story with a destination, one that describes the world you're building clearly enough that your staff, your grantees, and your partners can find their place, and their own joy, inside the work. For a person, it's positioning built around what you want more of: the work that fills you, the rooms you want to be in, the version of you this next chapter is for. First we find it. Then we build the language that lets you carry it, steer by it, and say it out loud in rooms that matter.
Because the room can't receive a direction you haven't named.
For the record, I'm locking in too. On a handful of things that matter, at a pace my body agrees to, with joy written into the plan instead of saved for whatever's left over. But, whatever you're locking in on this fall, know what it's for. And make sure you're in it.
