This naming is no simple business, I see

When his voice disappeared, it cracked open a way of interacting—with colleagues, friends, even his own family—that he’d never considered before. And it made some of his most earnest, deeply held beliefs a bit less theoretical and more real. He learned what it was like to be silenced.

The house-napping was a deep violation. Two years later, the two younger kids, now 9 and 10, still ask whether the women will return to take over their home. But the house incident would turn out to be only phase one.

It’s a privilege to bemoan abundance. We should all be so lucky to worry about having access to too much information, rather than too little. But that doesn’t erase this predicament. Through recent years, we’ve seen what too much online content can do. It obfuscates truth. It breeds falsehoods that damage human connection and empathy. It exhausts us.

You can’t expect people to engage with a brand that doesn’t, at the baseline, want to or agree to advocate for their humanity. If I am suffering from oppression and your brand seems to not care, ignore it, do something that actually adds onto that oppression, I do not owe you my interests, I do not owe you my money, I do not owe you my time. I don’t owe you anything. So you can’t expect people to care about you if you don’t care about them.

Information architecture, at its core, is about organization. It’s about making things seem logical. It’s both an exercise in tidiness and labelling; not unlike Marie Kondo’s dream of simple, purposeful spaces, information architecture focuses on making the most of the space we are given.

Some days I still tell myself to take what is offered, because if it isn’t enough, it is I who wants too much. I am ashamed to be writing about this instead of writing about the whooping cranes, or literal famines, or any of the truer needs of the world. But what I want to tell you is that I left my fiancé when it was almost too late. And I tell people the story of being cheated on because that story is simple. People know how it goes. But it’s harder to tell the story of how I convinced myself I didn’t need what was necessary to survive. How I convinced myself it was my lack of needs that made me worthy of love.

I still liked my name. It didn’t seem fair that he could take it from me...When he left, so did his family, many of our friends, my sense of security, the belief that I was unconditionally loved, my trust in God, my identity as a married woman, my plans to have children, and my sense of self-worth. I wouldn’t let him have my name. He’d taken enough.