When the Story Changes, The Creative Ones Emerge
The Story changes. The shaking is real. Staying shook is a choice.
There are moments when the Story goes left.
At least it looks that way from where we’re standing or sitting.
One day, everything is what it has always been. The story itself becomes the table of our experience — solid, familiar, assumed. Our lives rest on it. We don’t notice it. We just live on top of it.
Then the event happens.
And when the event is significant, the story we thought we knew changes. Our current knowledge becomes obsolete. We don’t know how to move forward. The knowledge we need hasn’t been created yet. It isn’t even conscious. It’s waiting — on the other side of something we haven’t survived yet.
Significant changes shake the table.
When the table shakes, impostors become irrelevant. So does being the exception. The performance falls away. What’s left is just you, and what you actually know, and whether it’s enough. This loss — of the story, of the role, of the self you built on top of a table that no longer holds — is grief.
As a family, we have experienced some significant table-shaking events. Death has quaked our table. So have extraordinary acts of public kindness and generosity we did not see coming. Each time, when we chose — courageously, imperfectly — to stay together, we all stepped back and took on new roles to keep things as stable as possible. We tried on new seats. We shored up our footing in the unfamiliar.
And in those new seats, in those new roles, something unexpected happened.
We could see differently.
What can I see from this new seat that I could not see before? Who can now see what I couldn’t — or chose not to? Maybe it was the table itself that was shaping not just what I saw, but how I saw. Changing my sense of knowing. Changing me.
We were re-created.
This is the paradox. We cannot create new knowledge from the same seat. We cannot create new knowledge playing the same role. And yet we resist the unfamiliarity that new knowledge requires. We want comfort. We want creativity. We don’t fully reckon with the fact that they are incompatible.
Significant change is a creative force. It requires discomfort. Sometimes pain. Pain and discomfort are the price of new knowledge — not a sign that something has gone wrong, but the labor of something being born.
When we can manage to stay together in the pain — in the duty, in the labor — we can all be changed. Hopefully for the better. We may even arrive at something more surprising than a new story.
We may realize we don’t need a table at all.
Good grief.
Stay Maladjusted. Stay Creative.
Caroline
Create the Knowledge That Changes Everything: Join the Gladys Pilot
We are losing our most creative leaders at exactly the moment we need them most.
Not because of bad people. Because of exhausting systems. Systems designed for a narrow population that burns through the creative capacity of everyone trying to serve a broader one. The departure comes later. The depletion comes first — and it comes quietly, invisibly, in the daily grind of leading inside institutions that were never built for the work you are actually trying to do.
Gladys makes that depletion visible before it becomes departure.
What Gladys Is
For five months, Gladys sits in your pocket as an AI creativity and equity partner — helping your organization’s leaders imagine new possibilities, navigate ambiguity, and turn daily practice and monthly peer feedback into bolder, more creative decisions.
Not a chatbot.
A creative thought partner grounded in culturally responsive practice and the real, unscripted challenges of leadership today. Gladys is built for the moments between the meetings — when you need to think something through, when the path forward isn’t clear, when the data says one thing and your instincts say another. Plus, you can also learn to be a leader in the AI era.
Leading through uncertainty demands creativity. Gladys accelerates it. When you work with Gladys, you are not just developing as a leader. You are co-designing the knowledge your organization needs to move differently.
If you are a school or system leader ready to build something real — to develop your creative leadership practice inside a community that takes the work seriously — Gladys is your co-pilot.
Applications open now. Cohort begins August 2026.
Gladys. Accelerating the human relationships that change something significant.
Black Reconstruction, the Voting Rights Act, and the Control of Labor
The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais was a table-shaker.
And we could all become the shook ones — not just Black folk, but the entire Public Body.
Let’s sit with the public discourse for a moment. Media outlets reached for the word eviscerate — to disembowel, or more informally, to gut. I understand the instinct. But I don’t think this decision is gutting. I think it’s worse.
It’s bone-breaking.
In a democratic republic, the vote is the skeleton of the people. Economic agency is the muscle. You need both for movement. A gutting is devastating — but you can still stand. Break the bones, and the body cannot hold itself upright. The muscle has nothing to attach to. There is no movement.
That is what is at stake here.
But we are students of American history. And students of American history know how to follow the pattern.
This decision lives in the same lineage as the organized, extrajudicial, violent terror that swept the South after the Black governments gained control of governance during Reconstruction. That chapter of history is not told often enough, and it needs to be told plainly: in the Southern states, the freed Black majority held the right to vote. They reformed government so that it worked for the working class — in both creed and deed. They built something real. Something that served people who had never been served before. There was no violent revenge…
And the response was not a debate. It was not legislation. It was not a court case.
It was terror. Organized, systematic, and deliberate. Designed not just to remove Black people from power but to break the bones of a democratic experiment that was beginning to work — precisely because it was beginning to work for everyone.
Callais is not identical to that moment. But it is in the same lineage. The same reflex. The same recognition that when the voice of the people is structured in ways that threaten concentrated power, that structure must be dismantled — not because it has failed, but because it is succeeding.
The table has been shaken before. It was shaken by design.
The question — the one history keeps asking us — is whether the Public Body will stay together in the shaking. Whether we will step into new seats, take on new roles, and refuse to let the bones stay broken.
Democracy is not a table. It is a body. And bodies, even broken ones, have memory. They know how to heal. But only if we stay in the labor together. The table is going to shake for a long time, unfortunately.
But even in the shaking, we know that these children will not sit in the back of the bus, and no one is going back in the closet. We have created more knowledge to live out loud.
Follow the Chapter: XIII. The Duel for Labor Control on the Border and Frontier on Substack notes to see the pattern.
Lit — What We’re Reading and Writing This Season
We are working on a few essay-articles about teacher feedback, thinking, being, and leading differently. In the meantime, sweeten your tea with this sugar…
“Perfection in colonial thought systems, conquest habits, and separation efficiencies only direct our agency toward violence, trauma, and distress. We get good at that type of thinking, and those habits are acknowledged for it. This recognition comes at a high cost. If supremacy and its thought routines have been the tradition and culture for the past 1000 years, the new democracy and its ways of thinking and thought routines are the counterculture needed for balance and to right the relationship. “
My family has a way of dealing with ghosts, haunts, and spirits. We have our blessings, our rituals, and incantations. We have our candles, sage, and salts. There is respect for the spirit world and the discernment of intent for those beings that are no longer bodied. When an unwelcomed spirit would visit, there would be much discussion on its message and purpose, finding ways to create distance when needed or desired closeness for comfort for the grieving.
Ture argues that participation (like voting or schooling) only matters if it builds collective power. Where in education today do we mistake access or participation for real influence—and what would it look like to redesign for actual agency?
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