About dreams that hang in air. I have seen them and they are me. I call them too, the art of grant writing. Something about writing inspirational grants will make you become like dreams that hang in air. They will stick to you like smoke all over your clothes and demand things and time in ways that leave you wearing the dreams more than you wear your life.
I tried to stop grant writing this year. In fact I started the year with a department chair that can only be described as insipid, asking me to stop writing grant. I eloquently stated that that would be the day I decide to quit any place. Little did I know that words have power. So I quit and went on to a place that demanded that I dream wild and unhindered.
It’s been three months in this new place and the grant we just submitted last week can only be described as inspirational. We wrote it too with a new team of people. The one thing I dread more than anything is change. I will beg to stay the same so long as I don’t have a date with change. Yet change shoved itself down my throat this year and demanded that I take a stand. I did and with this new team, even the sky has no limit.
See while I started the year in a weak place and among people and places that limited my growth and potential, I begin to close out this year in a place and a space that can only be described as dreams. They saved me in the year 2023. Dreams hanged in my air, touching everything, getting all in my clothes and my mind, wearing me more than I wore myself. The dreams were insane. A center grant for example for a woman many would say has no experience. I agree. I was once the one relegated to qualitative studies because of what use is a woman with only a PhD, right, qualitative studies which I love by the way. So I stepped away and started dreaming with new people.
If 2022 was indeed my most ambitious year, I thank 2023 for being my most dreamlike year. A year where I did what Toni Morrison and Lucille Clifton ask that we all do whenever we find ourselves in need of something different, Dream…
Writing with Juliet Iwelunmor 
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