It’s always the people with no abracadabra trying to tell you what to do with your magic.

Say that one twice and feel where it lands.

Because the ones who actually carry a spell of their own don’t spend their energy narrating mine, they just nod when they see it working and step back. The loudest correction always comes from a hand that has never once made something vanish and come back changed. Nobody who has really pulled flowers out of a dark wall needs to hold my instruction manual, they already know there isn’t one to hold.

I said the word out loud one night, half joke and half incantation, under light the color of a bruise still healing on my skin, with flowers spilling down the wall.

Abracadabra is an old word, older than any app, rooted in Aramaic and closest in meaning to I create as I speak, and that is a whole way of existing sitting right there in five syllables. I had been living that word for months without realizing it.

Second Table started as an idea and I talked about one Wednesday morning during our weekly meetups and we just built it, a monthly poetry gathering at Arthur’s Market, and now it has a pulse, whether I walk in nervous or not.

I got up at Moon and River Cafe and read my own poetic words to a room of humans who turned into witnesses by the second poem. The owner of the cafe calling and asking me back for August before I’d processed the moment. Someone came up to me after and said I was building a salon, a real third space for people to think and dig and come undone together, and I was taken aback because I wasn’t trying to stand in the tradition of the writers who built rooms like that before me, I was just following what my heart told me to do, and it turns out that’s the same thing they were doing too.

None of this arrived without effort, and none of it is as light as it might look scrolling past it at midnight. I am sharing the blooming on purpose, the wins and the roots underneath them both, because the flowers only mean something if you can see the whole plant. Come find the rest of it, follow along on Instagram at @badianaspeaks, sit with the woman and the essays at badianaspeaks.com, and watch the bed keep filling in real time.

So when the ones with no spell of their own show up with notes on how I should be casting mine, I don’t hand them the wand to inspect anymore. I twirl the checkered dress, I let the red carpet hold my weight for as long as I want it to, and I say the only two words the moment requires.

I am a woman closing loops that are not mine to keep open. Sovereignty doesn’t come with a request for anyone’s approval, and being grateful for what a person taught me is never the same as staying signed up for more of their class. I built my magic in rooms nobody wanted to watch, and I’m still building it in rooms people are suddenly wanting to notice, and the only feedback I’m taking these days comes from hands that have conjured their own smoke and flowers and found their own gold light against a dark wall.

Everybody else gets the same two words.

Poof.

Be gone.

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The bark of the yew tree is rough against my shoulder blades, warm from a sun that has been working on it all afternoon. Andy’s arm familiarly drapes around my waist with the confidence of someone who knows he does not need to hold on tight. His sunglasses catch the parking lot behind us in miniature, orange and blue, and I am laughing before the camera even clicks. This is what steady feels like in my body. I love the promise of his arm returning to the same place on my waist without having to think.

I have learned to notice these things because I spent years not noticing them. Circumstance had me moving through my own life at a pace that left no room for texture. The lesson came slow and it came from the ground up, literally, from kneeling over a kitchen counter covered in a real harvest from a farmer’s hands directly to my own. Strawberries stacked three boxes deep, their tops still wearing green like a crown, blueberries warm from the farmer’s market sun. The tomatoes smell like July before I even cut into them. I photograph the counter because I want to remember this version of abundance. Raspberries, nectarines and a dozen eggs speckled brown, cream and blue like something a bird curated just for me.

My Mom in Love, Janet’s, garden feels like this in July. The memory arrives from my mind’s eye, while I am standing in my own yard watching hostas swallow the fence line whole. The leaves are chartreuse where the sun hits them straight on and deep green in the shadow underneath, and they brush against my calves when I walk alongside them. A metal flock of birds is fixed mid flight against the gray wood fence, frozen in the exact moment of take off, and I think about how some things are built to look like motion while staying perfectly still. That is what growth has felt like this year. Rooted and reaching at the same time.

The porch in the early morning, blue cushions soft to the skin is a welcome greeting as I let Kimi out for her morning relief. A neighbor’s house sits blue and steady across the way, its windows catching the same light mine does. I let my tea go lukewarm because I am learning to remember there is nowhere urgent enough to interrupt this. My body remembers stillness even when the mind forgets it is allowed. I am learning to let a morning be only a morning.

Andrew holds a watermelon slice up to his face like a grin that outsizes his own, juice just waiting to drip down his wrist in a thin red line, and my heart swells at the sound of him laughing behind the fruit, while my own laughter fills the whole room. His hair is doing what it does when he has been outside all day and forgotten about it entirely. Behind him the shelf holds pieces of us, a cribbage board shaped like the number of years our life is building towards, a Lego cat that guards nothing and everything, small paintings with abstract faces because two artists co-exist in a home and love the abstract. Our life collects itself in objects like this, while we are busy living it.

By night the bed becomes its own sanctuary four paws and two sets of feet tangled together under a TV show, Kimi’s weight pressing warm against his body. The television throws a pale blue light across the room and across a girl asleep on screen, and I think about how rest looks the same whether it happens on camera or off it. My toes are gold from a manicure I got on a whim, his are bare in the low light, and Kimi’s paw twitches awaiting belly rubs. This is the part of the day nobody usually photographs for anyone but themselves, and I photograph it anyway, because I want proof of our softness.

And then the pond, lily pads holding the previous night’s rain in perfect round beads across their surface, green shading into yellow at the edges. One red bloom sits low in the water, bright and defiant against all that green, refusing to blend into anything. It feels a lot like me.

I think about the act of living a life, not just existing in one, often. I am aware that when you are living a life, abundance is not one singular thing. It shows up in beads of water balanced on a leaf that could tip at any moment and doesn’t. It shows up in one flower deciding to be red when everything around it agreed to be green. It shows up in presence from your people as you share your heart through poetry.

I wrote myself whole, and the Universe keeps handing me proof that the sentence was true.

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Not once, but several times. The same number, insistent, almost rude in its persistence, filling a room where I was supposed to be impressive with a sound I could not immediately silence. I stared at my screen, at the spreadsheet I had stayed up preparing, at the finance questions I had written out so I would sound like I belonged there, and I dismissed the call with untraceable mortification because I am absolutely someone who knows better.

I dismissed it again and again, until I finally figured out how to make the laptop stay quiet, while sitting there pretending that had not happened.

After the meeting, during the tour, we got the news. Two million dollars secured for the coop. A site tour for NYS Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, the man with deep pockets and a presence that makes a room recalibrate, hosted alongside Assemblyman Angelo Santabarbara, who is himself a member of our coop.

I walked out of the building where the grocery store will exist soon and into the June air in an utter daze. My body was still catching up to what my mind just experienced and witnessed.

My phone rang, while I was walking and trying to remember where I parked. I recognized the last four digits immediately. The recognition of something that had already embarrassed me once today.

I answered.

It was Richard. Co-owner of Moon and River Cafe in the Stockade. He had gotten my number from the younger brother of the other co-owner, who I had met the night before entirely by accident, in the way that many meaningful things happen to me. It was by way of a detour.

Andrew’s bike got a flat on our evening ride. He took my electric assist bike home to get the car, which meant I had a window, which was unhurried and unplanned, to finally walk into the cafe I had been meaning to visit for months. Moon and River smells like the living room of someone’s grandmother, where the house sat still for a decade and then a group of younger people, thirties, forties, creative and unbothered, walked through the door and said this is perfect, mustiness and all. They kept everything the same and added espresso and intention.

I started talking to a young man behind the counter. Turns out he was the son of the owners of my hair salon. The odds of that sentence existing are slim enough to make you pause and pay attention, which I did. I am always paying attention.

That brief conversation, twenty minutes at most, was the connection that pulled everything in forward motion. Richard called me the next morning, during my first board finance meeting, while my spreadsheet was open and my questions were prepared and I was trying very hard to be the Treasurer I had just been elected to be.

He was kind. He was also not taking no for an answer, which felt less like pressure and a lot like the Universe using someone else’s voice to say what it needed to say directly to me.

I said yes to July 12th. I said yes to July 26th.

That version doesn’t have Richard’s number in it. Doesn’t have the call I recognized from an in-person finance meeting. Doesn’t have two performance dates in July at a cafe that smells like someone’s grandmother decided to let the creatives in.

The flat tire was the entry point.

I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to be early to your own life, to arrive before the world has caught up to the fact that you belong there. The board seat, I was literally handed. My essay in a globally distributed book. My poetry gathering launching this week on Wednesday. The whispers of a September art night being built around my voice specifically.

None of it was planned this way. All of it required me to stay in the moment instead of going straight home.

I am learning to love the detour. It keeps taking me exactly where I need to be.

I opened it slowly because I was not expecting anything when I returned home from a nature filled journey gathering farm fresh strawberries, garlic scapes, homemade sweet treats and flowers from nearby farms with dear friends.

As I read the note, I found my husband telling his wife that she matters, that she is loved, that she is beautiful and seen by everyone, especially him.

I wrote myself whole long before Andrew ever handed me that note, and still, watching someone else witness the wholeness I built feels like its own type of homecoming. He did not hand me an identity. He confirmed one that was already standing on solid ground.

I kept thinking about what it means to receive a note like that on Juneteenth specifically, a day already built around the idea of being seen and being free and being told, however late, that you always mattered.

Andrew’s note became its own small emancipation inside our home, a private declaration that the woman he married never needed permission to take up this much space and more importantly, she is now safe and supported enough by him, her community and her soul tribe of friends to do exactly that.

So I am doing what I do with the things that make me expand to new heights. I am passing it on, because the truth in his note was never meant to live on just a shoebox, in my home and only my heart. It is simply too beautiful. And because I know I am a ripple effect, not a closed loop…I say these words to us all.

Happy Juneteenth!

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What recently made you feel fully known or seen?

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I wake to this rhythm, his regular arrival becoming the sonic architecture of this season of my life. The crow above, the red cardinal flashing somewhere in the periphery like a love letter from across the veil, and underneath it all the sweet chirps and songs of the house sparrow, steady and unbothered, belonging to my early ordinary mornings, like my breath belongs to my body.

This trio assembled itself around me while I was busy becoming.

Schenectady holds me in a way I used to search for elsewhere. Traveling to sacred geographies and attending retreats. I was deliberate in seeking meaning through curated experience. However, when I was not seeking, I stumbled upon a city that holds me like a womb holds what it is growing, with a purposeful warmth. It allows enough discomfort to create expansion. It creates safety that feels like preparation for something I have yet to know. I just feel it’s imminent arrival.

The land here has old bones. Mohawk bones, Haudenosaunee bones, the memory of people who understood that the earth communicates and that some ears are built to receive it. I did not know when I arrived that the land was also waiting for me.

This morning the crow cawed as I wrote his name, in the exact moment I named what he means to me, and I did not look up from the page because I did not need to. I already knew. This is what it feels like to be in the right relationship with your own life, to move through the world and find the world moving toward you in return, confirming things before you have finished asking.

I am in my Divinity Era. I say this as orientation, a way of naming the direction I am facing, the quality of attention I am bringing to my own existence. I am becoming, fully and without apology, the most authentic version of myself, and the crow above my window is the most unapologetically itself creature I have ever witnessed. He does not soften his frequency for anyone’s comfort. He caws at the decibel he was built for, and every morning he finds mine.

The land named me Electric City before I knew I was electric. The crow has been calling my name since before I learned to answer. I am learning to answer now.

I know this because on a June morning I read these words aloud to a poet, , on a bench he chose, in the open air of the city that has been holding me. And when we finished, I looked up and found Lawrence standing at the intersection, a Mohawk man cast in bronze, patient and permanent, watching everything arrive. He helped rebuild this city once. The land keeps that memory. I did not plan that ending. I just looked up.

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What did this awaken in you?

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She was standing at the top of the escalator, and I watched her face privately calculate the negotiation with her body over something that used to ask nothing of her. Her hand found the rail and gripped it. She did not rest her hand on a surface out of habit. She gripped it like she needed it to be there. Her luggage, which she had rolled herself every other moment of the trip, could not also be held. There was not enough steadiness for both. My spouse and I noticed. After that, without drawing attention to it, he became the person who took her bag when we were nearing escalators so she could be steady. That simple transfer, that seemingly small act of love that required nothing of her pride, happened over and over through the whole trip. And every time I watched it, I felt something in my chest fracture open with zero sign of closing.

My father watched this too, and moved to help the way he always has, calm and determined and steady in his tone, the voice of a man who has rarely let us see him rattled. He insisted he had things. He always insists he has things. But I was cataloguing him now. I watched the way heavy bags took something from him that they didn’t used to take. How I constantly considered if he was carrying too much and I could see it even while he would not say it. Then there was the bus. Getting off, the steps steep and narrow the way bus steps are, he lingered his hand on the railing. Twenty seconds longer than I expected. I counted without meaning to. There was no stumble, it was just a man taking the stairs with a new kind of attention. I silently knew, while the rest of him was still unwilling to announce it. The overhead luggage, which he would have lifted in one motion years ago, took him a few minutes. These in-between nothing moments, a hand on a rail, a bag passed to a son-in-love, a breath taken before a lift, were accumulating in my mind like evidence I had not asked to collect and could not stop gathering.

This is the thing about loving parents who have aged beautifully. The beauty becomes a kind of protection, and the protection becomes a kind of lie. The lie isn’t cruel, just the lie your love tells itself so you can keep moving through the world without the weight of what’s coming.

My parents are stunning people. They have carried their years with a grace I have spent most of my life filing under the category of just who they are, the same way I filed the sun under the category permanent. And France undid that filing. Gently, specifically, without warning, in the space of an escalator and a bus step and a bag passed between hands.

They move differently now, more deliberate, more negotiated. They move the way people move when the body has begun to have a conversation with time. I noticed these things the way I noticed weather, which is to say it was constantly, which is to also say I could not stop. Some vacations are just vacations. This one was a threshold. Maybe not the last trip we ever take together, but the last one that looks exactly like this: most of us (sans my brother), this configuration, this version of my parents who can still do this, who are still here and present and bringing us to the French Riviera for an epic vacation and my milestone birthday. The Mediterranean received us and I received it and underneath all of that receiving was a grief that was a whisper. It took me days to put it into words.

This isn’t morbid. I have had to convince myself of that more than once, because the instinct is to call it morbid and put it away, to say I am borrowing trouble, to say I should be grateful for what I have instead of mourning what I will lose. And I am grateful, so grateful the birthday dinner at that table in Saint-Raphaël with those people felt like something I was both inside and witnessing from a holy distance.

They are the same love wearing different faces, and I am old enough now, just turned forty, to understand that grieving them early is not giving up on them. It is the most honest thing I can do with how much I love them.

Every year I get older is one more year of me standing closer to a reality I cannot think about for too long without having to put something down and breathe. My parents will not always be here. The escalator told me that. The bus step told me that. The bag, passed without a word, told me that. And instead of looking away, I looked. I kept looking. I made a study of them the whole trip, the way they laughed at dinner, the way my mother held her glass, the specific timbre of my father’s voice when he was relaxed and happy and in a place that delighted him. I collected them. I am still collecting them.

Because when the inevitable truth arrives at my door, I want to have already done this work. I want to have already sat with the ache of their aging and let it make me more present, more deliberate, more awake in every ordinary moment I still get to share with them. I want to grieve in the way that opens, rather than closes. A grief that is just love with nowhere else to go, so it goes deeper…and makes more room.

The France trip was a gift. So was the hand on the rail. So is all of it, the slowness, the new care, the evidence of time doing what time does to the people we love most. I am learning to hold it without recoiling. I am learning to look directly at the light.

It was good crying. The tears felt like relief and rose up in pools of warmth from somewhere deep in me before I even understood what was happening. It almost felt like they had been pooling for years, just waiting for the day and season that I unlearned holding them back.

It was a Sunday, nine days before I turned 40. I had spent the morning at brunch, the afternoon with my girls, and the early evening in a virtual room full of women writers. I drove home with my hands loose on the wheel, my city sliding past the windows like a film I had already seen and already loved.

When I got and went to my bedroom to change into my Sunday comfits, my husband, a man of few words and enormous, architecturally precise love, had made me a poster board. A handwritten poster board, counting down to my 40th birthday. It had a highlight reel of who I already am and everything I have already done, laid out in his careful handwriting like a document of proof of his observations.

He stood in the doorway. As I held it in my hands. I wept. He embraced me as my body vibrated with emotion. We let go and he left to give me room to feel the grandiosity of my emotions.

I called my childhood soul sister. She answered on the first ring, the way she always has. Her voice carried familiarity, steadiness and warmth, which only comes from someone who knew you before you knew yourself. I tried to tell her about the day, the weight and fullness of it, the way the Universe had arranged itself around me like something that had been in the works for a long time. I couldn’t get the words out. She didn’t need them.

“I cannot believe you’re almost 40,” she said. “Honest to god it was yesterday we were laying on the carpet in your pink room writing notes and giggling over teen life.”

And that’s when I lost it even more.

The pink room.

It was the formal living room of my childhood house, pristine and a little untouchable. The room kept for company and nicer occasions. The carpet was thick and pale, allowing for the ornate carved wood and intricately designed pink cushions to pop. The furniture sat in careful arrangements. The adults moved through it with a reverence, a space that belongs to tomorrow’s guests.

My soul sister and I inhabited it, the room technically off limits was the perfect room to hold the limitlessness of our stories and secrets.

We would stretch ourselves across that carpet and do what girls do: giggle, write notes, whisper the language of our friendship while still figuring out its grammar. We eventually would migrate upstairs to my bedroom, where the walls were pink and the room ran warmer than the rest of the house, heat collecting there like it had nowhere else to go. She would crack the window to let in a sliver of cool air because she always ran toward cold and I always ran toward warmth, and somehow that small negotiation felt like the whole of us, her reaching for the window and me pulling the blanket, both of us finding the exact temperature that let us stay.

We would drape ourselves across my bed and pour everything out onto pages, into laughter, into a conversation that doesn’t need a destination because the being in it was already arrival.

Somewhere between that room and adulthood, I learned to choke it down.

I mean the tears, the softness, my ability to feel in surround sound. The world rarely announces when it starts reshaping you. It presents as a raised eyebrow here, a corrective “stop crying” there. An accumulation of moments that teach you being porous is a liability, that needing is weakness, that the girl sprawled on the pink room carpet was maybe a little too much for the rooms that waited ahead.

So you armor up. You manage. You become extraordinarily competent at carrying things that were never yours to carry, and you mistake that competence for strength for a very long time.

And then, if you’re lucky, if you do the work and build the village and choose the right people with slow and careful precision that only comes from having chosen wrong before, you spend your thirties in the tender and sometimes grueling work of unlearning it all.

My soul sister laughed first, then let me find my way to the words.

“I think adulting,” I told her, somewhere between crying and laughing, the two states bleeding together the way they do when something is both true and overdue, “is literally navigating yourself back to the little girl in the pink room. Before the world told her who to be.”

She didn’t hesitate. “That’s exactly what it is. Except this time, you love her.”

I let those words surround me and settle into my body the way heat does, slowly, from the outside in.

Because that’s the part becoming leaves out of the brochure. She doesn’t go anywhere, the girl in the pink room, the one who felt everything and wrote it all down and giggled too loud and cried at the sheer beauty of ordinary things. She waits. You circle back and find her exactly where you left her, cross-legged on her bed with a journal in her lap and a pen in her hand and the window cracked just enough to let the cool air in, and this time you pull up a seat beside her instead of asking her to be quieter.

This time you say: “I’ve been looking for you.”

Nine days before I turned 40, I came home to a handwritten poster board and wept on my jewel toned bed.

That day I had been in rooms where my story was reflected back to me by the women around me. Recognition. My husband had observed me, unassumingly and completely, the way only he knows how. Witnessing. My soul sister had held my becoming across three decades without once losing her grip. Follow through. A community that had chosen me back. Chosen. I kept stopping mid-sentence just to breathe it in.

What you allow yourself to receive is what you eventually have capacity to give. The tears you stop choking down become the words that free someone else. The girl you return to was never too much. She was always just early.

This is 40.

And I love every bitty ounce of it.

Just in case you didn’t know, I launched a second publication this year called The Sister Field a publication honoring divine feminine knowledge and wholeness.

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Loud Peace

Two perspectives on the benefits of noise. Different voices, same wavelength…

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4 months ago · 2 likes · WATER LOGS and Badiana Badio Eckstrom

The apartment smelled like vanilla and citrus and something clean underneath both. A scent that settles into a space over hours of good company rather than being sprayed into it. Amber had been home with Theresa for a while before I arrived, and the warmth of that showed everywhere, in the easy rhythm of their voices, in the way the afternoon light moved through the rooms unhurried, in the way I felt my shoulders relax the moment I walked in.

Her space was organized the way a woman who knows herself is organized, things everywhere but nothing lost, every object with a reason and a home. Madagascar on the wall in photographs. A cream and gold rotary phone on a corner shelf. A tap light with a gold base and clear glass beads that caught the light and held it. Macrame plant holders in the kitchen, something living and green suspended in handmade things. Her daughter’s room in full pink.

I found the top of her bed and settled in, criss cross applesauce, pillows stacked behind my back, sinking into the mattress just the right amount, that particular softness that makes leaving feel like effort. Theresa was stretched across the bright teal chaise. Amber was somewhere in her walk-in closet, the sound of hangers moving, a low commentary of what stays and what goes.

I was fully clothed. They were not.

“Who loves red?”

I looked up from the bed. “I do, actually. Aries. Fire sign.”

She held up a jumpsuit, red and slinky, halter neck, and my first instinct was immediate and familiar. No way. My boobs are too big for a halter. I never wear those. I said it out loud and they shushed me, both of them, the way women who love you shush you when you’re about to talk yourself out of something good. They sent me down the hall to the pink bedroom with the jumpsuit and nothing else.

I undressed in layers. The baggy navy linen pants with the two white stripes down the sides. The blue Telfar sweatshirt with the raised neck. The green Womaning While Black tee underneath that. Layer after layer coming off in a little girl’s pink room, and I stood there a moment in the quiet before I stepped into the red.

The material was slinky and cool against my skin. I pulled it up expecting to be right about the halter, expecting to confirm what I had always believed about my own body, and instead it just held me. Covered exactly enough. Left exactly enough. I kept my bra on and there was cleavage. It was sexy without being a conversation I didn’t want to have. I looked down before I found a mirror and I already knew. My stomach was flat, the ruching sitting against it like it had been measured for me specifically, nothing needing to be tucked or held or managed. I took a breath, a full one, and nothing moved the way I expected it to.

I walked back into the room.

They went silent first. Then they were everywhere at once, both of them, voices overlapping, what are you talking about, you can’t wear a halter, that is INCREDIBLE on you, that is GORGEOUS, and Amber said the moment I walked through the door there was no version of reality where it was going to look like that on her and demanded I keep it.

I stood there in the red and felt something shift below the surface of the moment. I had been buying clothes larger than I needed, for years. Hiding myself inside extra fabric, inside generous cuts, with the specific hope of not being looked at too closely. The extra fabric was never about comfort. It was armor. It was the thing I learned to do with my body after someone decided it was theirs to take.

I had absorbed someone else’s inability to see me clearly and turned it into a rule about what I was allowed to wear.

My childhood friend, Liz said it plainly, the way she says most true things. We have been taught to sexualize our bodies too much. And she’s right, but it goes deeper than that, because the lesson doesn’t just live in our heads, it lives in the extra large we reach for when the medium is the truth, in the halter we dismiss before we’ve even tried it on, in the layers we build between our skin and the world’s eyes.

There is a difference between sexuality and sensuality, she said, and each has its own right. Each has its own container.

Easter morning I woke up wanting church. I felt it in the chest before I was able to name it. It was a pull toward the container I was raised inside, incense and pew wood and the particular silence of a sanctuary filling up. I was raised Catholic. The impulse is in my DNA.

I didn’t act on it. I let the morning breathe and waited to see what the day actually wanted from me.

What it wanted was Andy and I on the bed of our guest room, criss cross applesauce, facing each other, his hands in mine. I guided him to get specific about what he wants, the real things, the near future things, and then I told him exactly what I had claimed for myself, out loud, in my own voice, in our home. After each claiming we breathed together, held it, and exhaled on a count of six. The air in the room changed. I felt it in my palms where they met his.

Then thirty minutes of gospel yoga, our bodies moving through the claiming, anchoring it somewhere below the mind where it could root. Then as a family, we took our dog, Kimi, for a cemetery walk, resurrection Sunday and the dignified stillness of lives fully lived, the April air cool and clean on our faces.

I am laying in that same room now. The ritual is still here, days later, still warm, the way a good meal lingers.

I did not go to church. I came home instead, to my body, to my husband, to the life I am actively and deliberately choosing, and I found the spiritual essence of the day waiting for me right there in our home where I had the good sense to look for it.

The container I was waiting for was always mine. I just had to stop reaching for someone else’s.

From The Sister Field:

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“Scope Creep: When You Say Yes to Things That Dilute You” - because not every yes deserves to stay.

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I came home from Ireland jet lagged, period in tow, heart so full it needed somewhere to go. It was 4:35am and my body thought it was already morning, which I suppose it was, just not the morning anyone else in my house was living yet. So I sat in the quiet of our guest room and I let myself feel everything I had so carefully, so intentionally, so lovingly set aside while I was away. Because I knew if I let it in while I was there, standing at the edge of the Cliffs of Moher, walking the hills of Howth, raising a glass at Cobblestone on St. Patrick’s Day, it would take up space that belonged entirely to my joy. And my joy was non negotiable.

So I tabled it. All of it. The food comments, the odd one out feeling, the bewilderment of watching us get pulled into someone else’s dysfunction so easily it made my head spin. I tabled it with the quiet confidence of a woman who has done enough work to know the difference between suppression and sovereignty. I would feel it when I got home. And home would hold me while I did.

What I didn’t expect was what else came home with me.

I went to Ireland thinking I was going to celebrate turning 40. What I didn’t know was that Ireland was going to show me who I already was. The Cliffs of Moher didn’t give me anything new. They just held up a mirror so vast and so ancient and so completely indifferent to anyone’s smallness that I had no choice but to see myself clearly. Expansive. Powerful. Unchanged by the opinions of people who were busy shrinking themselves into smaller and smaller versions of who they used to be. I stood at the edge of something magnificent and I felt it. I am also magnificent. I have always been magnificent. I just needed a cliff in Ireland to confirm what I already knew in my bones.

And then there was Howth.

We hiked that hillside on a day I chose, because I was done with the drinking and the slow leak of my own energy into everyone else’s comfort. I got everyone up and I got us into nature and I did not apologize for it. And somewhere on a trail above the ocean, with the warm wind gently blowing cinematically doing what Irish wind does not usually do, my friend Steph started talking about dandelions. How she loved them as a girl. How she never sees them anymore and how that makes her sad because she used to love blowing them, watching the seeds scatter into the air like tiny impossible wishes. She pointed at some yellow flowers on the path and said she thought maybe those turned into the blowy dandelions, which is what I called them in that moment, the blowy dandelions, and she wasn’t sure if that was true but she wanted it to be.

And I said sometimes the story in our head is the better story. So you just own it.

We clocked it. We laughed. We took two steps forward.

And there it was. One lone blowy dandelion sitting in the grass like it had been waiting for us. Like it heard the whole conversation and decided to show up as proof. We manifested it. We literally manifested it with nothing but belief and a willingness to choose the better story over the provable one.

I took a picture of it first. Then Steph plucked it and blew it and I got the whole thing on a boomerang and watched the seeds scatter into the Irish air like tiny impossible wishes coming true all at once.

That dandelion is my 40th birthday. That is the whole thing right there.

I came home and I recorded a reel in my Good Vibes house sweater at 9:51am still jet lagged still integrating still steeping in all of it. I talked to the kids I grew up with in Norton, Massachusetts. The small town my parents chose for their youngest daughter without knowing they were handing her the foundation of her entire life. I told them I didn’t always think I fit in. That I was one of few Black girls, a little nerdy, a little cute, nice as all get out, voted Best All Around in the yearbook which I suppose the evidence was always there. And I told them that turning 40 and putting myself back out there had shown me something I hadn’t given enough credit to before. Norton showed up for me. In droves. In DMs and comments and Substack subscriptions and messages from people I hadn’t spoken to in decades.

My teacher commented. She said she holds a fond memory of me as her student and I had to sit with that for a long time because I didn’t always feel memorable. I felt like the odd one out. The one who didn’t quite fit the mold that was available to me in that small Massachusetts town. But she remembered me. They all remembered me. And the way they remembered me was not the way I remembered myself.

They remembered the spark.

A boy who used to call me a white Black girl slid into my DMs and apologized. He said he was ignorant and he was sorry and he told me to keep going. And then he created a Substack account just to subscribe to my writing. The thing he once used as an insult, my articulateness, my way of moving through the world that didn’t fit neatly into the boxes available to us both as minorities navigating a predominantly white space, became the very thing that brought him back to find me thirty years later. I responded with grace because I am a queen who gives masterclasses in being a decent human and also because I understood something that only comes with enough healing and enough years and enough Cliffs of Moher sized perspective. We were both just kids trying to figure out who we were in a place that wasn’t perfectly built for either of us. Norton taught us both something whether we asked for it or not. The appreciation lives in the in spite of. It always has.

I am not the odd one out. I am the chosen one.

I didn’t see it until now, until I stood still long enough in my own life to watch who showed up. My teacher. My Norton people. My childhood soul sister, Liz, whose cousin found my reel on Facebook within the hour I posted it and sent it to her saying look who showed up in my feed. Carly, another childhood friend, who was most likely to succeed and said wherever the hell that means but okay let me do that and is out here launching her private practice called Seasons because she has always been someone who finds the meaning inside the changing. Andy, my husband, a Norton boy, made me a countdown poster board and updated it every single day and wrote show the world The Original Baddie in his own handwriting and meant every word. Theresa who came to my home the Sunday before I left and put henna in my hair and sent me to Ireland crowned without either of us knowing that’s what she was doing.

Chosen. Over and over and over again. By people who didn’t have to. By people who chose me anyway.

I walked out of my house on birthday eve to get a sandwich because I wanted one and I was done with the unnamed rule I had been living by, the one that said want quietly, want small, don’t reach too visibly, find something at the house that won’t fully satiate you rather than going out and getting the actual thing you want. I know where that rule came from. I know the accumulated weight of being a magnetic Black woman in America who dared to want things openly and found those wants thwarted, assaulted, malpracticed, minimized. My nervous system learned to protect me by keeping my wanting small.

But I am healed enough now. I am 40 enough now. I am post Ireland enough now to say nah. I want the sandwich. I am getting the sandwich.

And when I got in my car with my everything bagel and my Carolina BBQ sauce and my hash browns, Ellie Goulding came on and sang anything can happen and I sat there in the parking lot and laughed because of course she did. Of course that was the song.

Perfection was never the bar. It is an unrealistic aspiration, an expectation that flattens everything real and good and complicated and human about the way we actually move through this life. Presence is the bar. Understanding is the bar. The willingness to overcome in spite of, to appreciate in spite of, to love in spite of, that is real. That is accessible to every single one of us who has ever felt like the odd one out in our own story.

I am steeping like a teabag in wonder of my humanness. In wonder of my impact. I can finally see my greatness with the correct lens on, the lens of the Sedona Red Rocks, the lens of Niagara Falls, the lens of the Cliffs of Moher, the lens of one lone blowy dandelion appearing two steps after I decided to believe the better story.

I say yes to all of it. The greatness that already exists and the greatness that is unfolding as I type. I receive all of it wholeheartedly and without apology.

The blowy dandelion appeared because we believed it would.

So will everything else.

Happy Birthday to Me - The Original Baddie

Some mornings you wake up and you already know. Something in the air is thick with other people’s unfinished business and it is looking for somewhere to land.

Not today.

Not in this body.

Not in this energy field.

On these mornings, my hands don’t consult my brain. They just know. They reach for the copper. They reach for the crystals. They layer the necklaces. One, then another, each stone catching the light like it’s been waiting. The rings go on. The oils get pressed into skin. And somewhere between the first piece and the last, something shifts. The air around me changes. I change. I did not become someone else, I just remembered exactly who I am.

This is what armor looks like for me.

No walls.

No coldness.

No shutting the world out.

Armor is different. Armor says: I am fully present AND fully protected. I can walk into any room, any meeting, any conversation and I do not have to absorb what is not mine. I can feel everything without becoming everything. That is the gift.

Because here’s what nobody tells you about difficult people, draining spaces, and energy vampires dressed in business casual: most of what they’re throwing at you has nothing to do with you. It is their unexamined stuff. Their self-worth, their fear, their unresolved patterns launched in your direction because you are close, because you are bright, because your peace is triggering in the most inconvenient way.

And the old version of me? I would catch it. Hold it. Turn it over. Wonder if I did something wrong. Lose a whole afternoon to someone else’s inner drama.

Not me anymore.

My crystals and copper aren’t magic in the way people dismiss magic, because magic is a real thing. Your loss for not knowing.

However, this act of reaching for my copper and crystal was making my intentions tangible. When I put them on, I am not hoping for the best. I am deciding the terms. I am choosing, before I walk out any door, who I am going to be when the chaos finds me. And it will find me. That’s not pessimism; that’s just Thursday, y’all!

What changes is what I do when it arrives.

My jewelry is handcrafted with love by 1. It carries something extra. There is care in every coil of copper wire, intention in every stone setting. When someone makes something for you with that kind of presence, you feel it when you wear it. It’s not just beautiful. It is charged. It is an artifact of someone else’s devotion meeting your own.

That is the layering. Oils, crystals, copper, intention. All of it landing on a body that has decided: I am the soft place. I am not the dumping ground.

I am not being unbothered because it is a personality. It is not choosing indifference. It is not the cold shoulder or the checked-out employee or the woman who stopped caring. Unbothered is a practice, one you have to build from the inside out, and sometimes, on harder days, reinforce from the outside in.

The ritual is real. Our internal tools are real. The shift is real.

Whatever your version looks like, that might be crystals, a playlist, a particular lip color, a morning prayer, the shoes that make you walk differently. The principle is the same: you are allowed to show up armored. You are allowed to decide before the day begins what you will and will not carry. You are allowed to be fully in the world without being consumed by it.

And for the people who mistake your peace for an opening? Who see your softness and think “vulnerable”? Who bring their unprocessed wounds to your doorstep and call it conversation?

They can kick rocks. 🪨

You and I have somewhere better to be, fully in ourselves, dripped out in intention, armor up, energy locked.

Unbothered isn’t something we are performing for the world.

It’s something we are building, one ritual, one stone, one sovereign morning at a time.

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My aunt called me yesterday.

She never calls me.

The first time, I ignored it. I assumed it was a mistake.

A pocket dial. An accident. Unintentional.

We don’t have the kind of relationship where she calls just to chat.

Then she called again.

I was sitting with my sister and my niece, who are visiting me for a long weekend. My niece looked at my phone and said, very firmly, “Aunty, that’s not a mistake. She wants to talk to you.”

She was right.

I answered.

My aunt told me she was sending me the business card of a naturopath in New York so I could “have a baby.”

“You should have one baby,” she said. “Try for me.”

I said yes so I could end the call.

I was viscerally revulsed. My body knew it before my mind did.

It wasn’t about babies. It wasn’t even really about her. What stung was the implication beneath the gesture that my life, as it stands, is somehow incomplete. That my happiness is lovely… but only provisionally. That it demands one more credential to be considered real.

Marriage.

House.

Baby.

Check, check, check.

As if joy only counts once it conforms.

The ache wasn’t super loud, it just sat on the surface of me like an unwelcome guest.

And if I’m honest, what hurt most wasn’t my aunt’s opinion. It was the familiar loud echo of the traditional framework underneath the ‘caring’ gesture. Something my parents believe, something their stories to her prompted. The old script. The life they believe is correct.

There is still a small, tender part of me that wants my parents to look at my life, as it is, and see it as whole. Not almost. Not eventually. Not once I add something. Whole.

The next day, my husband and I had acupuncture. Since the start of the year, we have been going together. We are treated at the same time but in separate rooms by the same doctor.

Today, I let him go back first. I needed to settle myself before returning to this room where my healing happens. I wanted to shake off the remnants of others’ misplaced “care” from my body so that the incorrect message wouldn’t seep inside me.

Our house has been full. My Mom visited the week before. Now, it was my sister and my niece’s turn. There has been lots of movement and shifting energy lately. I wanted to regulate before returning to everything. Yet again in my life, an appointment made over a month ago lands right on time.

While walking me back to my treatment room, the black bubbly receptionist Rayne greeted me with Lunar New Year blessings and told me to take them and slip them in my purse. I stepped in. The room was warm. The music was soft. The hum of heaters soothed me while I sat down. Ginger turmeric tea warming my hands, while I waited for the acupuncturist. I set my tea down and pulled my blessings from my Afroyla purse.

They read, “Joy + Happiness” and “Wishing you happiness + prosperity”.

It felt symbolic. An obvious reminder from the Universe that my life is already abundant.

My acupuncturist cupped me first.

The cup over my heart loosened easily. The one on my lower left glute popped off completely.

When she came back in the room, she explained that when a cup pops off like that, it usually means that area doesn’t need much work. The energy is already moving well there.

She smiled and asked, “Do you know where you’re going in life? Because that glute point tends to hold when someone does not know. Most people go their whole lives trying to figure that out.”

Without hesitation, I said, “Oh my God, I do.”

And she nodded. Of course you do. That’s why it released.

My heart cup loosening was beautiful too. My heart space didn’t need much work either. There was something profound about that.

Later, when she needled the front of my body, it felt spicier than usual along my legs. It was the energy moving, clearing and shifting.

And as I lay there, tears streamed from my eyes. I was not sobbing. It was just water spilling quietly. I didn’t even realize it was happening until I stood up and had to wipe my face.

My body answered before my mind did.

It released something I hadn’t fully articulated. The grief of wanting my happiness to be recognized as complete by the people who raised me. The tenderness of accepting that they may always measure fulfillment by a different rubric.

My calm afterward told the truer story.

Grounded.

Relaxed.

Steady.

Open.

The body knows when it is not lost.

Someone implied that my life required an addition to be complete.

The next day, my body confirmed that I am already in motion. I am already directed and I am already aligned.

Provisional happiness is a generational script. It says: you’re happy, but when are you going to…? It treats joy like an interim report instead of a final draft.

But sovereignty sounds different.

My sovereignty says:

I do not want your life. Not because it was wrong for you but because it is not mine.

My sovereignty says:

I am not rejecting fullness. I am defining it differently.

My sovereignty says:

My body, my timing, my direction.

And maybe the most radical part of this entire moment?

I am not incomplete.

My happiness does not require replication.

It does not require a baby to authenticate it.

It is not awaiting approval.

When I left that session, I felt calm in a way that didn’t need defense. The kind of calm that comes after something integrates. My calm was the settling of my truth.

I am open.

I am tender.

I am steady.

I know where I’m going.

And for the first time, that knowing feels embodied, not argued.

Happiness is not provisional here.

It is present.

***The Original Baddie is a reader-supported publication. Your support means so much! A simple heart click can help me reach more people. And if you love my work, sharing it would be amazing. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.*** Thank you <3

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“Always remember that the love you deserve lies within you FIRST!”

I wrote this sentence on a small Valentine’s card at my local coffee shop, surrounded by the semi-low hum of espresso machines and blenders. This particular coffee shop is a favorite for me because it holds the casual intimacy of community. It was meant to be a simple offering. I thought it sweet, encouraging, easy to receive. But the longer I sat with it, the more I realized how much history, resistance, and devotion lived inside my words.

Especially in February.

Black History Month asks us to remember, not just dates and names, but the interior lives of Black people. Our longings. Our self-regard. Our insistence on worth in a world that has repeatedly tried to deny it. To say that the love you deserve lies within you first is not a hollow affirmation; for people who look like me, it is a radical act.

February is Black History Month, a time when we are invited sometimes gently, sometimes urgently to remember where we come from. It is the 100th anniversary of black history month. For me, remembering has looked like writing. This past year, I made a commitment to my writing. It was not casual or quiet. I committed with intention and reverence. And in doing so, I’ve come to understand myself as part of a lineage. A lineage of griots. Staying committed to the act of telling my story, even when my mind scrambles, even when I am overwhelmed. Especially then.

In many West African cultures, the griot was the keeper of memory. A griot is a storyteller, historian, poet, and oral archivist, someone entrusted with preserving the truths of a people through spoken word. Griots were around long before books were accessible to us, long before our stories were considered worthy of record. Griots ensured we were not erased.1

When I commit to my writing, I understand myself as part of that lineage.

Every word I have sent out into the world over the last year, every sentence shaped by honesty, every truth spoken without apology has been an act of self-honoring. It has been a declaration that my story matters. That our stories matter. That the lives, inner worlds, and imaginations of people who look like me are not footnotes, but foundations.

This freedom did not arrive by accident.

Greats before me fought through ink, through speech, through protest, through sacrifice, so that I could speak my truth openly. My ancestors whispered stories in conditions that did not allow them to be written down, trusting that someday, someone like me would speak them aloud. So that I could write without permission. So that my joy, my pain, my complexity, and my love could exist in full color.

So when I say the love you deserve lies within you first, I am speaking to myself as much as anyone else. I am reminding myself that self-belief is inherited. That self-trust is ancestral. That loving myself out loud is a continuation of the work.

I write because I love myself.

I write because I remember.

I write because someone made room for me to speak.

This Valentine, this Black History Month, this moment in my writing life. I stand rooted in that truth. I am both the love letter and the lineage. The writer and the remembrance.

And I will keep telling our stories

Special Note to my Parents - Happy 47th Wedding Anniversary ! You two are sooooo special!

nope,

new year same me,

just a human living soulfully

embodied.

Loving myself in ways that society

wouldn’t teach me

because empowering me

would not make

capitalist America

any money.

So I learned

in the margins

in the pause,

in the places

they told me not to linger.

I learned in mirrors

that didn’t flatter,

in silence

that finally answered back

they started as a whisper.

Same hands.

Same hips.

Same bones holding stories

they tried to rush me through.

Same nervous system

unlearning the lie

that rest is lazy

and worth must be proven to you

I am not

a renovation.

Not a rebrand.

Not a glow-up sponsored by shame.

I am not a before.

I am not an after.

I am a during.

I am a becoming

that now does things my way.

I am cyclic

wax, wane, return.

Contradict myself?

Good.

That means I’m feeling

deeply

enough to feel the yearn.

Same me

but with sharper no’s.

No’s that sound like drums.

No’s that don’t explain.

Same me

with yeses that live in my gut

not my calendar

not by people pleasing

or chasing faux fame

This body

not a problem

not a project

not a thing to be fixed for public comfort.

This body is an archive.

A map.

A home that remembers

what my mind tried to forget.

They sold me resolutions

instead of remembrance.

Discipline

instead of devotion.

Hustle

instead of holiness.

They told me:

Be smaller.

Be quieter.

Be useful.

I said

I will be rooted.

I will be breathing.

I will be unreachable

by systems that profit off my exhaustion.

Same me

grief composted into wisdom.

Joy no longer postponed.

Power no longer outsourced.

Same me

unpolished

unexploitable

undeniably here.

So no

new year,

no new me.

Just me.

Listening.

Softening.

Telling the truth slowly.

And that

is my revolution

that doesn’t get virality

however

is my living reality

and is most importantly

the one that matters

most to me.

So no

new year

no new me.

***The Original Baddie is a reader-supported publication. Your support means so much! A simple heart click can help me reach more people. And if you love my work, sharing it would be amazing. To receive new posts become a free or paid subscriber.*** Thank you <3

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Writing has been with me for as long as I can remember. When I was a little girl, one of my most prized possessions was a Little Mermaid journal with a tiny lock on it. That journal held my secrets, my feelings, my early attempts at understanding the world. It mattered to me not just because I thought it was pretty or private, but because it was mine. A place where my voice belonged to me before I learned how quickly voices get edited, softened, or quieted.

As I grew, writing followed me everywhere. I filled random notebooks and journals. I wrote five-page notes to my friends as a teenager. They were long, earnest letters folded into those intricate origami shapes we all somehow knew how to make without instruction. I don’t know how we learned that, only that we did. Writing was how I processed, connected, loved, and made sense of being alive.

And then, at some point, I “grew up.”

I absorbed the narrative around adulting. The idea that there comes a time when you put childish things away, when hobbies become indulgent, impractical, or unnecessary. Writing, I told myself, was something I loved, but not something I could prioritize. There were more serious things to focus on like school, work, stability, making a real living, meeting expectations I believed were required of me. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I set my pen down.

Fast forward to the last couple of years, and something remarkable happened: I reclaimed the title writer. And in doing so, my entire life began to change, so much so that even five years ago feels like a different lifetime. The transformation has been bewildering and profound. I am still in awe of it.

I would be remiss if I didn’t thank my writing for that change. But more than that, I thank myself for doing the inner work required to hear my own voice again. For learning how to turn the volume up on me and turn the volume down on the expectations that once drowned me out. When I learned to listen inward instead of outward, my inner voice guided me right back to my pen. And from there, I entered a state of becoming that still leaves me astonished, even as I write these words.

There is another part of this story, too, one that exists alongside mine.

My husband loves Lego as much as he did when he was a boy. He builds with the same devotion, curiosity, and joy. And I am grateful to my inner self for recognizing the importance of loving a man who never abandoned that part of himself. “Hobby” feels like too small a word for what Lego is to him and, by extension, to us.

Our niece calls our home the Lego palace. We have woven Lego into our décor in thoughtful, creative ways. It sparks conversation, delight, and connection when people visit. It has become a source of shared joy for our family and friends. More than that, it is a visible testament to what happens when you say yes to your inner child instead of silencing them.

Somewhere along the way, we both made a quiet and what feels to me, radical choice: to allow our inner children to exist in adulthood and to honor that choice in each other. In doing so, we began to retrieve all the fragments of ourselves we had given away in the name of conformity, acceptance, and meeting the expectations of others. We gathered them back every discarded interest, every silenced instinct, every piece we were told to outgrow and we took them home.

We made ourselves whole again.

And that is what I mean when I say I think I wrote myself whole. Writing was not just something I returned to. It was channeled creativity and it led me back to myself. Through it, I remembered who I was before I learned who I was supposed to be. Through it, I reclaimed a life that feels expansive, honest, and deeply my own.

This is how I am ending the year. Not with resolutions or reinvention, but with wholeness. With gratitude. With a pen in my hand.

***The Original Baddie is a reader-supported publication. Your support means so much! A simple heart click can help me reach more people. And if you love my work, sharing it would be amazing. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.*** Thank you <3

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When I look at this collage, I don’t just see photographs. I see the curation of love, resilience, and memory. I see the smell of Sunday dinner simmering diri blan avec sauce pois (white rice and bean sauce), laughter and music bouncing off highly trafficked kitchen tiles, and the sense of familiarity in every corner of a house that shaped me. This is visual art and it’s a celebration, of home, of family, of the ordinary magic that often goes unnoticed.

Growing up Haitian-American, I didn’t always see stories like mine on magazine covers or in movies. But within those walls, my parents cooking extravagant spreads together on holidays, siblings sprawled on the couch, my friends coming and going like our house was their own. In those moments, we weren’t just existing; we were giving shape to something beautiful. A home. A legacy. A place where we had something to hold onto, even when the world outside tried to tell us otherwise.

At its heart, Home Is Where the Art Is wants to remind you that art doesn’t always need a canvas, and masterpieces don’t always need white walled galleries. Our everyday lives, our kitchens, our laughter, our family meals, our passed down recipes, our weekend rituals are art too. They carry depth, texture, love, and history. And sometimes, they tell the stories that matter the most.

Maybe you didn’t grow up in a house like mine in the suburbs. Maybe your memories are different. That could be high brow events and galas, small apartments and city lights, grandparents holding you close, siblings chasing down dreams, friends that double as family. Maybe your home moved with you across zip codes, across continents, across time. But wherever that home is now, wherever that memory lives…That’s art. That’s love. That’s legacy.

I share this collage with hope that when you look at it, you’ll remember the corners of your own childhood home. The scent of something being cooked. The sound of laughter deep and easy. The feeling of belonging. And maybe, in seeing mine, you’ll see a piece of yours too. Maybe someone else will see their own story reflected, and feel connected….Maybe I made this collage to build connection. Who knows (shrugs). I don’t have all the answers but this for me feels like a step in the right direction.

Because home, in its many forms, is not just a building. It’s the people. The ordinary and intimate moments. The love that lingers when plates are cleared and lights are dimmed for the night. Home is where stories begin. And sometimes when told through a collage, through memory and love home becomes its own masterpiece.

And like any masterpiece, mine didn’t take shape alone. It began within , where I finally said out loud in conversation that photography was an art form I wanted to play in.

And when told me, “Use your holiday time with your family as practice,” something clicked. Art doesn’t appear out of thin air. It grows where connection is strong. It grows where people talk, dream, and dare each other to try something new.

So Home Is Where the Art Is isn’t just about the pictures. It’s about the home I found in conversation, in community, and in the creative generosity of others. It’s proof that art…like family…is built together.

***The Original Baddie is a reader-supported publication. Your support means so much! A simple heart click can help me reach more people. And if you love my work, sharing it would be amazing. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.*** Thank you <3

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She lives in the extremes.

It insisted on being written. The poem that followed is my attempt to understand that pattern. Why some of us love so fiercely, feel so deeply, and oscillate between too much and too little without ever settling somewhere in the middle.

She has never been gentle with living

Never been steady or slow

She rushes to the edges of everything

With intensity and chaotic control

She loves like a wildfire rising

Two hundred percent of the flame

She loves past the boundaries of reason

And the Universe answers her the same

Extremes birth extremes

What you pour out comes back magnified

When you give more than you’re holding

There is nothing left to divide

She comes from the chaos of too much

Echoes of her past as vibration

She learned to survive with her silence

Swallowing pain, swallowing pride;

Oh the sensation

She can’t do the middle of anything

She can’t walk, she either falls or soars

It’s never a little or a whisper with her

She demands nothing or pushes for more

Why does she cling to the extremes?

Why fall for that reckless swing?

The pendulum pulls with a force she knows

She even inked it into her skin

Maybe she trusts the lightning

Because calm has always felt like a lie

Maybe stillness reminds her too closely

Of the silence before she cries

So they watch the extremes call her closer

Like tides that refuse to retract

They pray she finds the middle ground

And they wearily watch her move too fast

Her extremes birth more extremes

What she pours out comes back magnified

She gives more than she has to give

It’s either depletion or an urgency to thrive

Why does she cling to the extremes?

Why fall for that reckless swing?

The pendulum pulls with a force she knows

She even inked it into her skin

***The Original Baddie is a reader-supported publication. Your support means so much! A simple heart click can help me reach more people. And if you love my work, sharing it would be amazing. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.*** Thank you <3

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Lately, the words guiding light have been echoing in me with a weight I couldn’t have grasped when I was younger. Maybe it’s because I’m on the brink of middle age, or maybe it’s because life has finally slowed down enough for the details of my past to reveal themselves with new meaning. The things you think you’ve forgotten. The background noise of childhood suddenly steps forward and taps you on the shoulder.

For me, that tap came in purple.

But before that, it came at 3 p.m. on CBS.

The First Guiding Light

When I was a kid and then a teenager, Guiding Light was the final show in my Dad’s daily CBS soap opera lineup. He skipped the 2 p.m. slot because it just wasn’t it for him. But at 12:30 it was The Young and the Restless, at 1:30 it was The Bold and the Beautiful, and at 3 p.m. it was Guiding Light.

That one was my favorite.

I think it’s because it was the only one that aligned with my life. School ended just in time for me to catch those closing storylines. As technology evolved, my dad moved from taping to TiVo, but the ritual stayed the same. Each afternoon or evening he’d sink into his bedroom, remote nearby, ready to be swept away.

Sometimes I’d join him…quietly, not wanting to disturb the ritual of his routine. I’d sit beside him and be absorbed into a world of drama, language, and American cultural theatre. Looking back, what I loved most was not the show but the closeness. The way I presume those stories spoke to his inner creative. The little doorway it gave me into the parts of him that were otherwise never spoken.

I didn’t have the language for it then, but those afternoons were a kind of inheritance.

The New Guiding Light

Fast forward to now.

I was at acupuncture recently, ‘under’ you know that liminal rest time when the needles do their quiet work. My eyes were closed, my breath slow, and suddenly I saw purple. A vivid, saturated purple that wasn’t quite a color but almost a presence. And as I watched, it shifted into the shape of a lighthouse.

A purple lighthouse, its beam rotating steadily, casting light in all directions.

And the first question that rose up in me, was,

Am I a guiding light?

It felt too big, too profound, too connected to some part of me I hadn’t quite named. How strange, I thought, that the phrase I associated with childhood afternoons and a long gone soap opera had found me again. This time from the inside out.

Reflections from Others

What made the question linger is that people have been telling me versions of the same thing. Not about the show… but about me.

Recently ‘my brother from another mother’, Tobi, told me that when I spoke to him. I really spoke, not at him but into him. It gave him life again. He sent me a song afterward, saying, “This is what your words felt like.” The lyric that stood out to him was I know a place.

He said talking to me was like being walked toward the light.

Tobi didn’t know about my acupuncture vision. He didn’t know about the question still sitting in my chest. But he spoke into it anyway, without trying. And he’s not the only one. Versions of this reflection have come from multiple corners of my life.

I don’t receive these words from a place of ego. I don’t think of myself as someone who has all the answers. But I do sit in deep gratitude for the fact that in a world that often feels chaotic, I can be something steady for the people I love, care for or I simply encounter. A reminder. A mirror. A lighthouse, maybe.

Becoming the Light

When I think about that purple lighthouse now, it feels less like a question and more like an affirmation I hadn’t yet learned to claim. A symbol that my childhood memory and my present identity have braided together.

Guiding Light was once something I watched.

Now, it’s something I am learning to be.

Not in a savior way. Not in a performative way. But in the quiet, authentic way of someone who has walked through her own darkness and learned how to carry a lamp.

Maybe that’s all any of us are really meant to do. Turn our own lived experiences, our stories, our small rituals, into beacons that help each other find our way home.

And if I can be that for even one person, then what a beautiful inheritance that is.

***The Original Baddie is a reader-supported publication. Your support means so much! A simple heart click can help me reach more people. And if you love my work, sharing it would be amazing. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.*** Thank you <3

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What childhood memories have come back for you with new meaning?

was there that night, along with so many other dynamic creatives. We didn’t talk much, just a few exchanged words and the warmth of mutual recognition.

Since then, we’ve stayed connected on Substack. That quiet online support. The kind where someone reads your work, leaves comments and simply sees you. I’d planned to attend one of her literary events in New York City but couldn’t make it happen, so we promised to connect sometime soon. It turns out sometime arrived in perfect alignment.

Scarlet within the last few years returned to New York City, and I moved to the Capital Region full-time this July. On Tuesday, within minutes of direct messaging on Substack, we realized we were in the same part of New York, on the very day the city was about to welcome its newest mayor.

(I appreciate perspective on Mayor Mamdani’s speech)

We Need A Black Woman In Charge

What Are The Hidden Messages For Black and Brown People In Mamdani's Acceptance Speech?

When my kids were younger, I used to love to take them to the cinema to watch Pixar animated movies. What I always found interesting were the multiple interpretations deeply entrenched in the storylines of these blockbusters. My kids understood the movie's storyline one way, and I, as an adult, understo…

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10 months ago · 170 likes · 54 comments · Zuri Stevens

Dinner plans came together effortlessly, as if time itself was in on the arrangement.

I often feel like divine timing is underestimated. So many moving parts often have to align for us to enjoy these moments that make up our life stories. Like yesterday evening, me and Scarlet’s paths cross again, in the sea of talented writers on Substack. We both naturally made spending time with each other a must. Which also feels synonymous to the feeling of ease and joy I feel living in New York.

New York has its own current, and lately, that current feels contagious. A ripple effect of relief, of laughter, of possibility moving through this state and beyond.

Scarlet and I, smiling wide with eyes gleaming from temple to temple, are part of that wave. Our connection, rooted in writing, creativity, and shared Caribbean heritage mirrors a broader shift happening not just in New York, but within me. Something about this moment feels like arrival, and I can’t help but ask, as I often do:

How good can this get?

And of course… there’s another story, in the theme of awe, wonder and divine timing, still waiting to be told in collaboration with ! Stay tuned.

***The Original Baddie is a reader-supported publication. Your support means so much! A simple heart click can help me reach more people. And if you love my work, sharing it would be amazing. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.*** Thank you <3

Subscribe now

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For weeks now, I have moved through the world in soft awareness.

I have not reached outward.

I have listened inward.

I have let the silence hold me, like the hold of the tape of my broken toe.

Every ache, every flutter in my body, have been messengers, not alarms.

My body has spoken in whispers of hormones, emotions, and energy.

I am learning to meet her voice with curiosity, not fear.

She has not betrayed me, she has evolved with me.

I have released the need to define love by its intensity.

Love, I am learning, can also be consistency.

A steady hand, a familiar tone, a rhythm that does not break.

What once felt foreign…PEACE…now feels a lot like home.

I understand those who remain lost in their own inner worlds.

I bless them from afar, knowing I too have needed silence for weeks now.

Connection always returns when the tide is right.

For now, solitude is my companion.

I trust that what is meant to meet me will not miss me.

I trust my timing.

I trust my becoming.

***The Original Baddie is a reader-supported publication. Your support means so much! A simple heart click can help me reach more people. And if you love my work, sharing it would be amazing. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.*** Thank you <3

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I don’t typically provide commentary on entertainment. I usually prefer to enjoy shows and movies without wading into the fray of criticism or cultural analysis. But this one felt like it needed to be said, mainly because it was living rent free in my head.

Full disclosure, this is my opinion. I’m not necessarily demanding a debate. I’ve been a fan of Ryan Murphy’s work, including the Monsters series. But the Ed Gein season of Monsters? That was not it for me at all.

From my perspective, watching this particular season was infuriating. The show portrayed Ed Gein, a white psychopath, as an iconic character in American history, someone who shaped an entire genre of film. It sensationalized his story, built a sympathetic narrative around his mental illnesses, and even showcased all his adoring fans including subsequent white serial killers. Meanwhile, in real life, a Black teenager trying to pull candy from his hoodie while being harassed by police can easily get shot on the spot with the dismissive excuse, “I thought the suspect was armed”.

This contrast put me in a rage most of the show. I merely continued to watch in hopes there would be some redemption arc relating to actually portraying this monster as a monster, but I was sorely disappointed. The show blatantly depicted how cavalier and easy it was for the community to label Ed Gein, as nonviolent or non threatening by suggesting he “wouldn’t hurt a fly”. Yet, in reality, Black and brown people are often immediately perceived as threats, assumed to be dangerous simply for existing. Make it make sense.

We have a serious problem with how American culture glamorizes white murderers, continually retelling their stories with a kind of twisted reverence. At the same time, Black and Brown communities are disproportionately incarcerated under political propaganda like the “war on drugs” designed to rally America behind systemic racism and maintain the status quo.

This isn’t just about a TV show. It’s about the larger cultural narrative that chooses whose pain is worthy of empathy and whose lives are expendable. It’s about how media can perpetuate dangerous myths, shaping public perception in ways that uphold systemic inequalities. When we elevate the stories of white criminals as “complex” or “tragic,” or “sexy” but reduce Black lives to headlines of violence or criminality, we reinforce a racial hierarchy that continues to harm communities of color every single damned day.

I’m not saying all true crime or biographical storytelling is inherently problematic. But we have to be mindful of the stories we tell, how we tell them, and who we center in those narratives. Representation matters not just in who appears on screen, but in the messages we send about justice, humanity, and value.

So while I don’t usually weigh in on entertainment, this season of Monsters felt like a painful reminder of the work still left to do, not just in Hollywood, but in society at large. And as frustrating as it was to watch, it’s also a call to stay aware, stay critical, and keep pushing for stories that reflect the full truth of our world.

***The Original Baddie is a reader-supported publication. Your support means so much! A simple heart click can help me reach more people. And if you love my work, sharing it would be amazing. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.*** Thank you <3

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