The Cop in My Head

and the Blueprints We Build

There is a cop that lives in my head. His beat was established on the front lawn of a church, where I, as a child, watched adults interact after service. I had a knowing—a simple, clear feeling—that the rules we learned in kids' Bible class were not the ones they were living by. I saw the gap. When I pointed it out, I was met with a spectrum of invalidation: I was ignored, I was punished, I was silenced. Everything except validated.

Photo by Tara Winstead: https://www.pexels.com/photo/mental-health-related-conceptual-art-8378723/

That was the cop’s first day on the job. His mission was born from survival. The rule I internalized was simple: I don't fully understand the way things work. Others must know more than me. Take note but don’t rock the boat.

But the noticing didn’t stop. My brain constantly maps how everyone and everything fits together. I see systems, patterns, possibilities. I pace and think and see these webs. And the cop’s voice would immediately interject: These ideas are off the path. The people around you won’t take you seriously. They will say you are delusional.

And they did. When the internal pressure of seeing what I couldn’t communicate built to a breaking point, I would melt down. And the world around me would pathologize my distress. They called me delusional. They said I needed help. That something was wrong with me. The cop was just the internal echo of an external system that could not tolerate my way of seeing.

For years, this cop’s primary weapon was to weaponize the very process of learning itself. When I would sense a tension in a system—a crack, a hypocrisy—and later see it resolve in a way I didn’t perfectly predict, the cop would pounce. See? it would sneer. Your vision is messy. You didn’t have all the information. You were wrong. It framed my attentive curiosity—my method of understanding the world—as a personal failure. It taught me that if I couldn’t be perfectly right from the start, I shouldn’t dare to think at all.

My journey toward pro-humanity education has been the process of disarming this cop. It began with finding a new language and a new community. It was listening to educators like Kokayi discuss concepts that gave words to my formless knowing. It was deconstructing, piece by piece, the old stories I had been told about myself, getting ready for a path I didn't even know was coming.

And then, the path opened. The idea was to build racial trauma centers. It was one of those "off-the-path" visions the cop had tried so hard to suppress. But this time, I had a new response to the cop’s old lies: “My job is not to be perfectly right, but to be attentively curious.”

I held onto that. We built EAGER.

In 17 months, we did not just have an idea. We built a robust virtual racial trauma center, a community deconstructing together. We saw a physical center open in a greenhouse, built with pro-humanity students in community. And now, the work is spreading—Arkansas, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Florida, Oregon and more. This is not a theory. It is a reality.

The evidence of my capacity is not a fluke; it is the pattern. It is visible in EAGER.

The cop’s most powerful lie—that my ideas are delusional—has been dismantled by a network of healing and community. The child on the church lawn, who noticed the fracture, was not broken. She was noticing a real thing. The teenager who melted down under the weight of an invalidating world was not sick. She was a person having a rational response to an irrational system.

The cop in my head is not gone. He still patrols the old pathways, whispering his warnings. But his authority has been revoked. His central case has been thrown out for lack of evidence. When he now whispers “delusional,” I don’t have to argue. I don’t have to get lost in the overwhelming web. I simply point to the work we are doing. I point to the greenhouse, to the virtual rooms, to the map.

I point to EAGER. And in that single word, the cop’s lie is silenced, and the child’s knowing is finally, simply, true.