Interview with Shayla Lawson

At a time when everything feels so divisive, Shayla Lawson brings a message of love. So while posting anything mere days from a heated election seems fraught, it seems the right time to run this interview, which is quite different from the ones we typically run. More, well, political. Radical. If it’s radical to attest to the need for equality and love.

I had the good fortune to be in Shayla’s workshop at StoryStudio Chicago’s StoryBoard. We didn’t keep in touch, though earlier this year I interviewed them about their latest book, How to Live Free in a Dangerous World. (One of my favorite books of the year!) But a few months ago we reconnected, even met in-person, and have been texting often. I’m grateful for our connection, their work, and their generous spirit. Shayla inspires me to dream big.

You can follow them on Instagram and TikTok if you’re hungry for more of their message.

I’m so happy Shayla agreed to this interview!

You wrote this book when you were battling illness, and then had to battle to find a publisher. Did you ever doubt this book would be published? How'd you keep going? 

I pitched the book before my diagnosis, knowing we needed more resources regarding America’s place in the colonial landscape that looked at travel as an education in humility not an escape. Once my diagnosis prevented me from being a put-on-your-backpack-and-go girly, I knew I wanted to tell a different story about what “traveling” represented. Networking. Coming to terms with self. Being part of a great dialogue of integrated thinkers worldwide who are connecting through various tools. 

The first version of the book found a publisher but not for the money I wanted. I knew what I had to say was important so I held out. I believed in it so much, I was taking meetings in a neckbrace, anticipating surgery, making the pledge I could complete it once it went to auction. I recorded many of the chapters recovering from surgery and wrote at least four of the initial chapter drafts (On Blackness, Storytelling, Online, etc.) in the hospital. 

I knew we were gearing up for a time when we needed a survival guide. And I had (have) survived.

I felt charged after reading this book, ready to live free. Can you tell readers about what a LIVE FREE revolution would look like?

So many of us are tuned to the frequency of liberation and I’m so proud to hear it singing in so many avenues. I know a lot of us are scared about a future in which our global northern liberties, the easy access to materials we take for granted, are a threat to the very lives of people across the globe (particularly in the global south). I’ve spent time as a professor, an architect, and working on advertising strategies for big companies. I wrote a text book survival guide but recognize most of us communicate via social.

I created a dossier of ideas on how to utilize our creativity, our hypersensitive revolutionary free buzzing, to elevate the discourse on shifting our countries’ consciousness. It’s natural to point fingers. But few of us realize that call out for dismantling leads to more militarized forces in our social media algorithmic metrics. Speak your truth. Feel what you feel. But recognize we have to address the source of our pain through our beauty. Our creativity. It’s lonely out there believing no one is listening. But if we are seen actively loving one another. If we’re calling out global siblings live and creating content that shows what assumptions of freedom we’re willing to challenge in order to shift our privileged cultural consciousness liberty is ours. We can live free. 

Reclaiming the sacredness of our individual bodies. Investigating the ways we each live in humble deference to the project of freeing ourselves. Then we can listen, then we can be heard. Art is a way to get in touch with that.

We have to find the energy to keep going. We need to find rest and pause in this work. We need to find love and the reconnection to our bodies. We need to fortify the individual liberties that make it possible to continue moving forward. Because we, Americans in particular, cannot put out the call for anyone to be “free” until we know that feeling intimately. 

Is there a song that ties into this book in some way?

I recently went to Costa Rica for an intensive surgery. It was there I learned my favorite line from Bob Marley’s “Redemption” was actually a Garvey quote:

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery only ourselves can free our minds. 

I believe in generational healing. I believe that, as a people, if we hit the right frequency we will speak the answer to they legacy into existence here. In our times. 

We, the people, bringing this world to peace, is the next logical step in line. 

None but ourselves…. LIVE FREE. 

Thank you, Shayla!