Who are You?

Erica Lee

Restorative Justice Practitioner & Beneficiary

I love my two younger brothers and my family more than they know. I think we need a world where we can be brutally honest and humorous about the human condition.

I have dealt with autoimmune disorder a majority of my life, and keep saying that it's cycling out in hopes that one day this pattern (the immune system is trying to protect me, but is on hyper overdrive, therefore actually harming me (sound familiar?)) will transition to be in healthy balance once again. As a youth, in the face of this autoimmune condition Alopecia hair loss, shaved headed women were not yet in vogue (I’ve always been a trend setter) and I was desperate to belong. I developed a nasty habit of stealing so that I could buy stuff I did not want to impress people that I did not care about. I adopted a core belief that if my needs are going to get met, you are going to have to suffer. If my needs are going to get met, someone has to lose. This is manifested into what some would call criminal behavior, harmful at best.

If all that I have done was just to get me to restorative justice, I am grateful for that. Because of my identity, the way I look, the people I surround myself with, and my family I get to heal harm with grace and beauty. I'm not okay with the fact that so people, whether they did more or less harm than I did, are serving time behind bars and inhumane conditions without the opportunity to heal and live with beauty. We all deserve better than this. These punitive approaches do not achieve the safety and efficiency they promise.

I was raised in the restaurant industry, and from a young age knew that restaurants did and do have the potential to be a spoke wheel of healthy community. Simultaneously, I saw the height of drug addiction, illness and single parent economic hustle in my colleagues/babysitters.

I saw growing up in the restaurant the absolute necessity for every person to be on the floor, the humming aliveness of hospitality, the flow, the struggle, and also the underbelly along lines of race and racism, Someone who happened to work in the front of the house, public facing; they were predominantly white, English speaking, United States citizens meeting the back of the house that was predominantly Latinx, Spanish speaking, without United States citizenship. There were exceptions, but the stereotype ran deep. While I can understand having affinity with people you share a common experience with, the venom and the viciousness across lines of race, gender, language, country of origin and ability was unappetizing at best. As an older sister I learned that I have influence and that my younger brothers were consciously or unconsciously vulnerable to our family trauma. We are all healing now. That’s what motivates me to change.

Thank goodness mentors began to show up; people who could see me when I could not see myself; wisdom keepers who understand the way of rite of passage work for youth to be transitioned into adulthood (late bloomers welcome) with the hope that we remember what we learned, take it back to our communities, and are recognized + reintegrated in our community as changed. I am community taught. I have never been institutionalized in higher education, and part of me takes pride in a type of freedom my mind has, a sense of what is possible without having to conform. At the same time, the way I have had to hustle, grind, cheat and steal gives me a certain type of imprisonment to overcome.

My hope is that we can all get free together.

Maybe we can even have some fun.