Life & Wisdom Quote by June Jordan

Truth, for June Jordan, is never a clean recital of facts; it is an ethical demand that starts inside the body. The line rejects the comfortable idea that honesty is just courage plus clarity. Instead, it frames truth-telling as a discipline: you cannot accurately name what you feel or what you witness without doing the harder work of excavating the self that’s been trained to look away, smooth over, or survive by staying vague.

Jordan’s phrasing matters. “In the process” insists this isn’t a one-time epiphany but a repeated practice, a kind of inner reporting. Pairing “what you feel” with “what you see” collapses the usual hierarchy where observation is “objective” and emotion is “extra.” For a Black feminist poet writing amid civil rights aftermath, feminist struggle, and U.S. militarism, that pairing is political. Systems of power don’t only police what can be said; they police what can be felt without punishment. If your fear, anger, tenderness, or perception has been delegitimized, then “getting in touch” becomes less self-help than self-reclamation.

The subtext is a warning against performance. Public truth without private reckoning curdles into slogan, righteousness, or a rehearsed identity. Jordan is pushing toward a more dangerous honesty: the kind that notices your complicity, your conditioning, your blind spots, the ways you might be repeating someone else’s script even while claiming to speak freely. “Really deep, serious” is her refusal of the cute confession and the shallow hot take. She’s describing truth as intimacy with reality, and with the self that reality has marked.