Damn. Has it already been a month since The Snob returned? How is it already September? But we did it, y’all! We survived the summer! And what a great summer it was in Brooklyn. We had the Knicks in Five, the Liberty winning the Commissioner’s Cup, the World Cup playing at every bar, people outside all day, every day, block parties galore, and Spike Lee keeping the party going, celebrating Michael Jackson’s birthday with DJ Spinna in Ft. Greene Park.

It was a blast, but let’s get into what happened this week on The Black Snob!

SUMMER OF SLAM: After spending my first two summers in Brooklyn dealing with my fibroids, then running away from my problems by running away to Mexico, I finally got to experience a real Brooklyn summer. And what a summer I picked to be present for! The Knicks! The Liberty! The block parties! The World Cup! It was so hype, I almost don’t want it to end. (BK Loves MJ Caps A Dreamy Summer of Black Joy in Brooklyn)

NON-BALLER ALERT: Faux 49er Daejon Love was allegedly out here stealing hearts and cash with no skills and not one defined ab on Instagram, which made me resurface this classic Black Snob post: “How to Die Alone with All Fifteen of Your Cats.” The message? Don’t be afraid to die alone, ladies! Your cats will keep you warm, and they won’t run your wallets for reportedly $1.3 million. (How To Die Alone with All 15 of Your Cats, Daejon Love Edition)

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BLACK FASHION FOREVER: It’s almost Fashion Week in New York, which got me thinking of the devotion so many have to designer labels and brands, despite those brands not sharing the love if you’re “shopping while Black.” Like, Louis, Gucci, Prada (Karlie Redd voice) do not need your money, but I know some hard-working, uber-talented Black designers who do! (Hermès Doesn’t Need Your Money)

SOUNDTRACK O’ THE TIMES: What do Prince, Radiohead, Sade, and the cast of Little Shop of Horrors have in common? They’re all on this playlist about surviving today’s trying times. From a spiritual cover of Al Green singing R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” to songs about being laid off, The Snob’s got you. (The Great Regression Needs A Better Soundtrack)

THE SNOB IS AN ETHICAL SNOB: In “Black Snob Is, Black Snob Ain’t,” I do a bit of housekeeping and let everyone know what this revamped blog is and isn’t about. Namely, I don’t do clickbait. All my “This 1 weird trick” headlines will pay off, among other things. (Black Snob Is, Black Snob Ain’t)

‘A DIFFERENT WORLD’ REVISITED: Ahead of the release of Netflix’s reboot of the classic and influential HBCU sitcom, “A Different World,” my friend Mitu with The Pilot Podcast is going deep with a review of the original show’s pilot. You know the one? With Lisa Bonet as Denise Huxtable and ‘Aunt May’ (she went by Maggie then!) when she was still a teenager. I kept waiting for some line about his “Uncle Dwayne” from Peter Parker in one of those Spider-Man movies, but why would Marvel want to make me happy! You can check out the episode on both Apple Podcasts and Spotify. (The Pilot Podcast)

HELP A FRIEND: Before I reemerged as The Snob, I was editor-in-chief of The Root, where I hired journalist Terrell J. Starr to be a political and investigative reporter for the site. He did amazing work for our community, from breaking down complex legal and geopolitical issues to interviewing almost everyone who ran for president in 2020. Terrell has dedicated his life to telling the truth and bringing us the news we need. Now he needs us. Help my friend Terrell honor his mother, who recently died from alcoholism, and help a Black journalist who is struggling during these fraught times. (Terrell Starr: My Mother Died of Alcoholism, Please Learn From My Pain)

THE SNOB IS ON TIKTOK: I’m everywhere you need me to be. The Snob is on Threads. The Snob is on LinkedIn. The Snob is on Instagram. The Snob is on BlueSky. The Snob is on YouTube, where we will be posting The Black Snob Podcast later this month! The Snob is cutting up on TikTok. The Snob is also on Elon-free, Nu Twitter, but that shit is still broken. So follow me, and please subscribe to stay up to date on all things Snob-related. I also made this fun video breaking down 5 Facts About The Black Snob. Take a look below! (5 Facts About The Black Snob)

@theblacksnobI'm not really a snob and other fun facts about THE BLACK SNOB, aka Danielle Belton! #theblacksnob

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Three weeks in and we’re still steady snobbin’! But as The Black Snob gears up to start taping her podcast, she’s been a-blogging! If you haven’t been paying attention, here’s what you might have missed!

DIVA DOWN: Dolly Parton left us this week at the age of 80, leaving a massive void where compassion, wit, and incredible talent once stood. As The Snob writes, we’re running out of quality divas because the system that used to crank them out is woefully broken. How many incredibly fabulous, talented women are trapped in the mushy middle due to the death of monoculture? (Goodbye to Dolly Parton and All the Divas Who Raised Me)

SHOPPING, ME & ADHD: Women be shoppin’ was The Snob’s private shame until she learned her propensity for blowing the bank buying clothes wasn’t a character flaw, but a lack of impulse control from her ADHD going undiagnosed and untreated her entire life. Now clear-eyed and annoyingly sober, she realizes having shame over something she never had control over was a waste—just like her money. (Drama & Dresses: How ADHD Made Me Shop Until I Dropped)

ATTIAH BEATS WAPO; SPIDER-MAN BEATS RACIST: In the first-ever “Good News” column on The Snob, it’s all about fighting back and winning. Opinion columnist Karen Attiah won her case against The Washington Post, which unlawfully fired her for her social media comments about Charlie Kirk. And in Minneapolis, Spider-Man tussled with “Where were you on January 6th?” right-wing provocateur Jack Lang, proving, yet again, that superheroes are “woke” and always have been. (Karen Attiah Won, Anti-Fascist Spider-Man Rocks Racist in Minneapolis and More ‘Good News’)

SOUP’S ON!: When The Snob was sick last week, she ate a lot of homemade chicken ramen, but not “Top Ramen,” a poverty meal from her once-broke past. She instead used these chewy, delicious frozen ramen noodles from a business out of New Jersey. Learn The Snob’s quick and easy recipe for chicken ramen, and get these noodles! She swears you won’t be disappointed. (Ditch the Instant Noodles and Upgrade Your Chicken Ramen Restaurant-Style)

‘CARELESS PEOPLE’: Media empires are crumbling, and what’s being raised in their wake are monstrosities led by some of the worst people you could ever meet—mediocre, careless “leaders” who choose their ego over logic, or even money, every time. (How Careless, Mediocre Leadership Destroyed Media)

SUBSCRIBE TO THE SNOB POD!: The Black Snob Pod is coming soon! Subscribe to its YouTube channel today so you don’t miss it when the first episode drops! Also, The Black Snob is on TikTok, where The Snob will soon post clips from the pod, her life, fashions, and more! The Snob Pod launches next month after Labor Day! (THE BLACK SNOB POD YOUTUBE)

The Black Snob has been back for two weeks now! Hooray for me. If you haven’t been paying close attention, here’s what you may have missed!

A LIFE LOST: The death of Jason Arday, a Black, disabled professor hounded by racists in the press over unfounded accusations of plagiarism, hit me pretty hard. While some scream about a non-existent meritocracy, we’re crying over the lives and careers lost. Like Arday, we’re all trapped in a rigged game where Black people are told we must work twice as hard for crumbs, while getting thrice the scrutiny. (Jason Arday, the Myth of Meritocracy and the Perils of Being ‘Twice As Good’)

MISSISSIPPI, GODDAMN: The ghosts of Mississippi — those new and old — still haunt me, as I reminisce about a trip I took in 2014 to Jackson for the 50th commemoration of Freedom Summer. In the shadow of some mysterious deaths, I argue that we need to rally around Black Mississippians as we did in 1964, and demand reparative justice. Now is not the time to offer unhelpful advice like Black Mississippians “should move.” We should be following their lead in the modern-day fight for equal rights. (‘Strange Fruit’ In Mississippi, The Black Snob Pod, and Celebs Who Blocked Me: Real Housewives Edition)

AUGUST IN MARTHA’S VINEYARD: August is almost over, which means soon the residents of Martha’s Vineyard will be free from all of the traffic and ridiculousness that comes with people packed on the island in August. I didn’t really get into this in my post about the so-called “Black Elite” and Martha’s Vineyard, but the island is the indigenous land of the Wampanoag Tribe. And those people, along with many of the folks who live and work on the island, are not rich. So while the tourists bring money, they also bring a lot of problems. Most people who live there can barely afford housing, and the lucky few who can are still struggling financially. So if you go next year, be respectful, tip nicely, and actually take the time to learn a little about the island’s indigenous and Black history beyond being a fun getaway for those with means. (Who’s Afraid of the Black Elite? What the Discourse Around Martha’s Vineyard Gets Wrong)

MEGXIT PART II: Some online called Harry and Meghan leaving America a “recession indicator.” I thought it sounded more like “a country on the brink of collapse” indicator. Are we all gonna die? I don’t know. But what I do know is … Harry, Meghan, and the kiddos won’t be here to see it! Oh, no, they will not! Also, how bad does America have to be if you’re Harry and you’re willing to go back to London to be hounded and harassed by the same tabloid fervor that killed your mother? (I Think I Know Why Harry and Meghan Are Leaving America)

FROM STEPHEN A. TO STEPHEN B. CRYIN’: I unpack my trip to Cabo and Stephen A. Smith getting a thumbs-down from the National Association of Black Journalists for his frequent attacks on Black women. I know Smith thinks this is about his criticism of the left, but I think it might have more to do with how he didn’t even try to talk to a Black journalist about this and instead whined to Sean Hannity on Fox. (The Snob Went to Cabo, Everyone Else Went to NABJ, Except Stephen A. Smith, Who Was Clowned By NABJ)

THE MYTH OF MERITOCRACY: They told me it would be lonely at the top, but I never imagined how much. In my essay, “Success Is An Empty Room,” I unpack the myth of meritocracy and how the upper echelons of our society are filled with humans — disappointing humans — who are more style than substance and have more money than personality. But that’s not a crime. What SHOULD be a crime is how they are born with every advantage, only to play a protectionist game, keeping those of us who aren’t born rich out. (Success Is An Empty Room)

SNOB POD!: The Black Snob Pod is coming soon! Subscribe to my YouTube channel today so you can be among the first to hear (and see) what The Snob is talking about! From career to culture, from politics to mental health, and more, The Snob Pod launches next month after Labor Day! (THE BLACK SNOB POD YOUTUBE)

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On Monday, I relaunched The Black Snob.

Like, for real. The Black Snob is live again. GO LOOK NOW!

You can read why I decided to relaunch my old blog here, but the Cliff Notes version is that it was due to one part missing writing publicly after I finally got my ADHD under control, and one part “recession indicator.”

But for the first time in a long time, I actually considered it. What would it mean to be The Black Snob again? And who is The Black Snob today? I was only 30 and still struggling — mentally, financially, physically — when I started the blog back in 2007, but next year, I’ll be 50. And in some aspects, life has never been better — I lost 70 lbs. I fell in love. I moved to Brooklyn. I have a ton of great, supportive friends. I became half a socialite. I took up Pilates. I finally got my formerly undiagnosed ADHD under control, and I haven’t had a hypomanic episode related to my bipolar disorder in a decade or more.

But in other aspects — cough, unemployment, cough — it was kind of wild. Journalism, as a profession, is dying. More than 600,000 Black women were pushed out of the workforce in 2025, and I was one of them. I would go up for jobs, make it far in the process, just to end up passed over for internal hires or ghosted after lofty promises. It was as if the universe kept telling me — “Do your own thing,” and I kept going, “SHUT UP, UNIVERSE!”

So yes, I’m going to be blogging 3 to 4 times a week now. But the fun doesn’t stop there. I’m also launching a video podcast, THE BLACK SNOB POD, coming soon to YouTube after Labor Day, September 2026!

Subscribe today to THE BLACK SNOB POD to be among the first to see it!

I will continue to maintain this Substack, but most of my updates will happen on The Black Snob. If you aren’t following me there already, subscribe today. You can also stay in touch by following me on Instagram, Threads, and YouTube.

Thanks for your support, and stay snobby!

*A version of this post originally appeared on LinkedIn

Recently, a woman came to me for networking advice, and I told her how I never saw myself as networking — I saw myself as making friends.

If I weren’t a journalist and writer, my dream job would be friend-making — just going out into the world, to events, to gatherings, and meeting new people, making potential new friends. My friends have loved and sustained me when I didn’t exactly love myself, and I had to learn the hard way that just because a relationship fails doesn’t mean you’re a failure. Sometimes things just don’t work out, and that’s OK.

But the questions I get about networking made me realize that too many people think there is a shortcut to success through transactional relationships, but transactional relationships are not real. They go away the minute your job title, access, or money does. But a friend, a true friend, will go through the fire with you, support you, love you, and speak your name highly in rooms when you aren’t there.

But it can’t be all about you.

It has to be about “us.” But for most of my friendless childhood, “us” was hard to come by.

When I was very young, I was a lonely, awkward “gifted and talented” kid who struggled to make friends.

It wasn’t for lack of trying — I was as outgoing as I was awkward, being so tightly wound from birth until forever, not realizing that much of my weirdness was about undiagnosed ADHD and a propensity to over-identify with adults.

Children were wild, unpredictable menaces to me. Thus, I became the kid version of the feds.

I abhorred disruptive behavior and often narc-ed on offenders. For me, school was already dreadfully boring: sitting still for hours and struggling to pay attention while my peers struggled to read aloud and control their emotions. I already didn’t want to be there, and here were my classmates, acting out because they were also astronomically bored, but unable to conform due to their natural immaturity. They acted out; I complained. They bullied me for being a “teacher’s pet.” I complained more. By the fourth grade, I’d learned my lesson — my teacher told me she didn’t need to know “everything,” and I realized this was pointless. So I settled for checking out. I would stare out of the window for hours, silently playing “pretend” in my head, or I would doodle cartoons in my notebooks and read ahead in class, never paying attention, but also never getting in trouble for it.

I guess the “teacher’s pet” thing wasn’t exactly wrong. Sorry, guys!

Still, I would go on to be mostly friendless from fifth grade until my sophomore year of high school. I couldn’t wait to grow up because I knew — just knew — that my personality would make more sense as an adult than a child.

And it did.

College was a dream of best friends, large friend groups, lots of activities, and joining my sorority, Zeta Phi Beta, Inc. during my last year at Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville. But then something inevitable happened — I grew up and moved away from the Midwest, taking media jobs in Midland, Texas, and Bakersfield, Calif., and later Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and now New York City. I’ve had more than 16 addresses in the pursuit of my career, meaning every four to five years I moved and had to start over, making new friends and dating in new environments.

Because I’ve been the kid with no friends who desperately wanted friends (but wasn’t willing to change anything about my personality to get one), I learned all the hard lessons that come from being thrown into the deep end of the socialization pool with no floaties. You either drown and come out bitter, or you learn how to navigate a social network in real life. You know? The original “social network” — your friends, neighbors, classmates, co-workers, and family.

My trial by near drowning taught me a lot, and those lessons followed me from city to city and relationship to relationship.

Here’s how I make and keep friends, even as an adult, despite having to move every few years:

1. Quality, not quantity: I always say jokingly that I have about “30 best friends,” but in reality, I have only a few. Truly good friends are precious and hard to come by. These are the people who truly love you for you, not what you can do. These are the 4 a.m. jail call people, and it’s better to have one or two quality friends than a legion of transactional wishy-washies. We all deserve someone who accepts our quirks, knows our intentions, and deeply loves us despite us being messy humans. These friends are your core. You may have known them for decades, but you’re still in the fight together.

2. Pick people based on their goodness and compatibility, not what they can do for you: Meaning, don’t write people off because they don’t fit who you “think” you’re supposed to be friends with or because they seemingly don’t have what you think you need. That’s a transactional relationship; that’s a conditional relationship. That’s not friendship. When looking for friends, whether in your professional circles or personal ones, always start with the baseline of whether they’re a good, kind person, then go from there.

3. Find your community through common interests: When I lived in Bakersfield in my mid-20s, I found friends in the various creative and cultural communities of Bakersfield — hanging out in the music, food, bar, art, and local theater scenes. I was a regular among the grungy, artsy downtowners and thrift store kids. I even sang in a local jazz band and made friends at open mic nights. What I didn’t do was stay in the house wondering why I was so lonely. I got out of the house and into the streets, searching for “my people,” and found two devout Episcopalian redheads who became priests; immigrant, French-spitting rappers from Sierra Leone; a gregarious and friendly Mexican-American record store owner; a rainbow of hilarious and ambitious local theater kids; ska-loving punks; aspiring comics, artists, and actors; and of course, all my homies at The Bakersfield Californian newspaper who I partied with after hours and got me through some of the roughest times in my life.

4. Confidence is contagious: Being emotionally secure and confident draws people to you like bumblebees and butterflies to a rose garden. Tend to the rose garden that is your life so you feel good about yourself. What does that look like? Self-love, self-care, self-respect, and, ironically, humility. Because when you have empathy and can see things from the perspective of others, you’re less likely to take things as personal when friendships stall or don’t work out. But when you feel good about yourself, other people can see that and want to be down with the winning team.

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5. If at first you don’t make a friend, try, try, try someone else: Don’t let a relationship going sour keep you down. Sometimes things don’t work out, and that’s OK. But there are more than 8 billion people on this planet to get to know, and I can assure you, your people are out there waiting to meet you. Don’t be discouraged if you haven’t found them yet. Just keep putting yourself out there and looking. Keep introducing yourself. Keep starting conversations. Keep leaving your house. If you set aside time for finding friends, you will eventually find the tribe you seek.

6. It’s not personal: This is a hard one, because no one likes rejection. But often it’s not really rejection — it’s protection. Not everyone is meant to be in your life, and that’s OK! But also, adults are busy people! They have spouses and kids, careers and families. Good people are often very active in their communities. Meaning, if they don’t call or text right away, it’s not personal. If they have to reschedule or cancel sometimes, it’s not personal. And if it doesn’t work out, guess what? It’s not personal! It takes two to tango, and if one of you can’t dance, that’s not your problem. Simply accept that they’re an acquaintance, not a close friend, and move on.

7. Be the friend you’d want to have: You have to show up, be present, and love and support your friend just as you want them to do for you. And if you can’t, you need to communicate. Communication is the difference between a friendship sustaining or petering out. So don’t be afraid to make that first text or call. Don’t be afraid to make plans with someone you like. And don’t play games. Because being dependable, loving, and kind is what makes it a friendship. And if you want good friends, you must first become one.

8. Stop networking and start “friendworking”: Networking events can feel forced and impersonal sometimes, but a casual backyard BBQ, a community sporting event, or a chill happy hour can get you further in the friend department than hitting up the latest corporate meet market. I once had a man ignore me at a networking event until he overheard how many unique visitors my old blog, The Black Snob, used to get. Suddenly I was worthy of conversation, but I no longer cared about him or what he had to offer because he’d revealed himself to be completely superficial. It’s about friends first; “what can you do for me” is much, much further down the trough (or never).
   

Why make friends as an adult? A friend will get you further than a stranger. While making friends will not magically lead to a job or the next level of your career overnight, it can over time! Friends who know your skillset and background are more likely to look out for you and make recommendations. But friends are not about landing a gig — they are an investment in yourself and others. Friends are about love, respect, bonding, support, and community. People who have friends often live longer, are happier, and have more fulfilling lives. Don't allow work and other distractions to keep you from nourishing and growing your relationships.

So make time for friends, real friends — new and old. Keep a calendar and pencil time in for phone calls, lunches, dinners, drinks, and coffees with friends. Work out with friends. Invite them over for a meal and a chat. Go for a walk together. Real, in-person connection will enrich your life in ways you couldn't even imagine.

Some tips on being a good friend: Be intentional. Follow-up. And if you make a mistake or miscommunicate, apologize. Don't make failing your friend a habit. Value the relationship. Water it so it grows. Be a person of your word, and follow up with friends in a timely manner. And be reliable! Try not to cancel too often or be chronically late; you wouldn't show up late for something you value, and your friends have value! Invest in them. Grow with them. Build with them.

If they're good, they'll pour equally into you. And suddenly you don't feel as alone in life. You have people you can call on for advice or companionship. You have people who will introduce you to other good people. You have people who will be references. You have people who will share your rate card and sing your praises. But you'll also have people who love you, whom you can love back, and share important life moments with.

So stop networking, and make a friend. Bond over something deeper than your resume, because despite us all being on LinkedIn — life is more than work.

Now make a friend and get to living!

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So, yeah. Haven’t written anything in a while …

Wait, scratch that. I write every day; it’s just garbage! In fact, it’s more like I haven’t published anything in a while. I’ve had writer’s block since October last year, and everything I’ve written of late has made me question whether today is the day I will start writing prompts for ChatGPT or Claude in hopes of sparking an idea or catching a glimpse of my former writing.

But here I am, still raw-dogging life (without AI). These are artisan blogs made the old-fashioned way — through misery and humiliation!

A few updates, good and bad:

The Bad: I’m still trying to figure out my memoir. It’s nowhere near finished, and I feel completely defeated over it. I’ve been stuck for months on an overly long chapter about my second hospitalization in Los Angeles, and it’s making me question whether my life is interesting enough for a book. Mostly because I barely remember the hospital stay (or any of my stays except for the first one), despite it being the longest at almost 3 weeks, and it having a motley cast of characters. It’s also hard writing the early chapters because they’re about a time in my life when I truly hated myself. It’s unpleasant!

The Good: Come August, I will have been in a relationship for four years, my longest romantic relationship in life. The previous record was less than three years. I was single for two decades before meeting the boyfriend. I may be almost 50, but in dating years, I’m around 25; I’ve had so little experience. This, of course, is my own fault, as it did take me a long time to trust my own judgment again after picking a slow-talking karate thug in my 20s as my future ex-husband.

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The Bad: This job market? Horrid. Worst I’ve ever seen it. Half my friends don’t have jobs despite being smart and ambitious careerists. Some have pivoted to writing books. Others have pivoted to consulting. I pivoted to both last year. The book is hell, but the consulting? Not so bad!

The Good: Did I mention I started doing media consulting for nonprofits and other brands? That’s actually been challenging (in a good way) and even fun, although I had about five meltdowns trying to set up my LLC in New York while figuring out how to pay myself through it. But I did it! Congratulations to me. (If you have any communication needs, shoot me a note!) Also, it’s not lost on me that I can manage a budget and a P&L from my C-Suite days, but I almost died trying to deal with LegalZoom, Bill.com, Intuit QuickBooks, and the State of New York.

The Bad: That man is still president, and his administration is still administering.

The Good: After nearly 50 years of white-knuckling it through life, I was diagnosed with adult attention-deficit and hyperactivity disorder, and the medication has been an absolute game-changer.

I’ve gone untreated my entire life, and have suspected I had it at least since 2007, but was worried about how the medication would impact my bipolar disorder. Sometimes ADHD meds can swing people into mania, and I didn’t want to risk my sanity for a struggle I thought was manageable. But I talked it out with my doctor after reaching a breaking point. The breaking point was writing my book. I’ve been on sabbatical, aka off work, aka “unemployed,” for more than 18 months, and stuck on the chapter for almost as long. It’s crushing me emotionally. So I went to my psychiatrist, and he assured me that on a low enough dosage, it shouldn’t impact my mood swings.

Now, post-generic Ritalin, I can’t believe I was out there, deep in the struggle, surviving on pure adrenaline and caffeine to get things done for the entirety of my adult life. I had a lot of coping skills I’d picked up to mask it — like writing everything down, keeping a detailed calendar with alerts and reminders, putting certain bills on autopay, and using outside pressure and guilt to fuel my performance. It just barely worked for exactly 46 years until I left my job and couldn’t seem to finish my writings or, quite honestly, get anything done in a timely manner. This has historically frustrated everyone from my close friends to my family. I kept waiting for “the spirit” to move me, but “the spirit” was probably exhausted, burnt out, and couldn’t cope.

The spirit is back now, because what I thought was an intangible, invisible life force was simply my brain finally getting, on the rare occasion, enough rest to function. The medication stopped the dysregulation, and now I feel blessedly normal. No brain fog. No fight-or-flight exhaustion. No burnout. No racing, overlapping, “manic” thoughts. It’s wild. I’ve never had a medication change my life in such a radically positive way with no real trials or tribulations in the form of annoying side effects.

For example: I thought GLP-1s were the best drugs I’d ever taken before ADHD meds, but you do pay a price for those in the form of digestive issues and nutritional deficiencies. The third best drug was Abilify, my mood stabilizer that I treat bipolar II with and broke my cycle of hospitalizations (but caused me to gain weight like most bipolar medication), and the fourth place winner is Prilosec, which is great, except I can never stop taking it because it has ruined my stomach acid levels forever. Whenever I try to wean myself off of it, the GERD comes back 10-times worse than it ever was. But the ADHD meds don’t have much of a downside, other than I might switch to an extended tablet that lasts all day, rather than the small dose I’m on that lasts about 4 or 5 hours.

In conclusion …

I’m hoping that, thanks to the ADHD meds, I’ll be able to read and write again without wanting to bang my head against my laptop. Which will be really helpful because … I’m bringing back The Black Snob, and I’m going to need all the stable brainpower I can muster to focus on redeveloping and relaunching the brand.

For those who don’t know, The Black Snob was my popular politics and pop culture blog that I published from 2007 until 2012. It was an Obama-era sensation that paved the way for the career I would go on to have in television and digital media. Almost every opportunity I got after 2010 was from The Black Snob. I loved it until I didn’t because I had no “work-life balance” when I wrote it, often updating the site 6 times a day, 6 days a week. But I’m older, wiser, and more patient with myself. I think there’s a way for me to dedicate myself to The Black Snob without burning myself out so badly that I give up blogging and most public writing for more than a decade.

So stay tuned! Because “I’m still here,” still standing and still strong! You can follow my journey to relaunch The Black Snob, among other tales from my life, on this Substack, Threads, and LinkedIn.

So give me a follow and let’s get at it!

OK, everyone! I have an announcement! Ting-ting-ting!

Howdy, all! I won’t beat around the proverbial bush, but I’m moving from Substack to Ghost for a variety of reasons. While Substack is fun, and I get that many people are on it, I’m not in love with the platform (or some of the things that have happened here).

So I’m launching a new blogging site and newsletter on Ghost called ANTISOCIAL, powered by the O.G. “Black Snob,” yours truly. It’s the same content as this blog, but so much more! ANTISOCIAL is a wellness, lifestyle, and culture blog for people who are trying to strike that balance between living out loud and protecting their mental health. Written by yours truly, it’ll cover all my favorite things — food, fashion, culture, history, lifestyle, and wellness — with some of the usual media and social criticism you’ve come to expect from me.

If you’re already a subscriber, there’s nothing you need to do! Everything has already been transferred over, so you’ll still receive my newsletter.

But why the name ANTISOCIAL? Well, it’s not about sociopathy! It’s the anecdote for our always online lives by bringing it back to our homes, our passions, and our IRL relationships. And you may feel “antisocial” sometimes, avoiding people and the places where they congregate, but that’s OK. Even I, a hardcore extrovert, go through these moments. But ANTISOCIAL is all about finding that balance between getting the social interaction you need, having the personal time you crave, and making both meaningful.

ANTISOCIAL will have all the posh, snarky silliness of the old-school Black Snob, with wellness, lifestyle, and cultural content carefully curated by your favorite journalist and pseudo-socialite.

I’m also relaunching my professional website: daniellebelton.com, your home for when you want to know what I’m up to career-wise! Like that memoir I’ve been working on since forever!

Follow me on ANTISOCIAL and daniellebelton.com, as well as on Instagram,  Threads, and BlueSky. (I might do TikTok and I might not. Still on the fence with that one!)

So join me at ANTISOCIAL, where we will live fearlessly!

Before I ever ran a news site or got myself proverbially “blown up,” Danielle C. Belton was having a great run in media. I can tell you that.

Possibly the best run I’ve ever had.

I managed to stay employed in this volatile media market for a decade. For ten years, I did not get laid off, the news organizations I worked for did not shutter, the whole business wasn’t sold, I didn’t quit in a fit of rage, I managed to stay mentally stable and healthy, and the show wasn’t canceled.

Some of that was pure luck, but a lot was due to my hard work as a journalist and leader, where I kept an eye on my newsrooms like Ace Rothstein kept an eye on the Tangiers in Martin Scorsese’s 1995 epic Casino. From my perch — the desk in my walk-in closet — I lived in our Slack channels, observing all and getting involved when necessary. I delegated where possible while protecting and overseeing my personal news empires. But like Ace working for the mob in Las Vegas (he wasn’t of Italian descent or from the region but was a Midwestern Jew), I was an outsider. I didn’t go to an Ivy League School, wasn’t well-connected, and was the rare news leader who happened not to be a white man.

Nothing was guaranteed, and I served at the pleasure of those who owned the publications I led.

I’ve been in media since I graduated from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 1999. However, employment was rarely reliable or steady, except at the very beginning. My first three jobs came fast and somewhat easy as I went from a St. Louis-based marketing firm to two local newspapers in Texas and California. Then, I took a break after several severe mental health episodes and my fears that the intensity of my career was impacting my overall well-being. I fought my way out of the darkness and back into the light, rejoining the journalism world in 2007 when I launched my old blog — The Black Snob, but I struggled to find regular employment for over a decade. I went from nonprofit communications to news sites to TV and back again. I was a freelancer and ghostwriter in between. Without the help of my father, I might have ended up on the streets. My wages were so paltry.

Then I met Lyne Pitts, the then-managing editor of The Root, around 2014 and just kept popping up at events the website held to chat with her in hopes of landing a job. At that point, I’d been circling a potential gig there for years, befriending nearly every managing editor the organization had in its history. Pitts was the first to actually hire me as a regular freelancer (one year, I wrote more than 75 entries for The Root 100 list in less than a week because I wanted that sweet, sweet $75 a pop for each written entry), and later as an associate editor in 2015. After a year of writing, editing, and recruiting new talent, I was promoted to managing editor, then editor-in-chief, and my journey with stable employment began.

But much like Ace at the end of Casino — after a decade of full-time leadership work — it’s all over … for now.

Earlier in January, I announced that I would be leaving HuffPost shortly after my earlier message about staffing cuts to the newsroom. My leaving was intentional — I wanted to save jobs — but it was sad for me because I truly loved being a part of HuffPost and had been looking forward to participating in its 20-year anniversary.

I joined HuffPost in 2021 during a very uncertain time. It had gone without an editor-in-chief for quite a while, and BuzzFeed had just acquired it. I was the news org’s third editor-in-chief and second Black woman leader, after Lydia Polgreen.

After a round of layoffs, I was brought on that April to lead the beleaguered newsroom. But the staff didn’t know that I, too, was carrying my own scars and baggage from past experiences. HuffPost was the first media organization I led where I’d never worked as a freelancer, staff writer, or mid-level editor beforehand. I was nervous, a bit paranoid, and didn’t know who I could trust.

Still, I did my best to bond with people in a difficult virtual environment. We were still in the thick of the pandemic when I was hired, and I wouldn’t meet anyone in person — not my superiors or my staff — for months, which often made the job feel surreal. Despite this, I made an effort in good faith to bond with everyone by embarking on a 30-day listening tour, talking to various teams and individual staffers about their experiences at HuffPost and their dreams for their roles, teams, and the organization. I appreciated how so many people were honest with me about their feelings and concerns as we all began the slow process of learning to trust each other.

It wasn’t easy, though. The virtual environment was challenging for me, a people-person who thrives off the energy of interpersonal relationships and in-person engagement. When I wasn’t stressed out trying to grasp what was happening, I was often disassociating. Everything felt intangible as I would grow quiet during meetings, unsure how to engage. After some hard conversations with my then-boss, BuzzFeed’s Head of News, Mark Schoofs, and my team leads, we got past the discomfort and awkwardness that plagued those virtual interactions my first year. We began to collaborate better and trust one another.

With the advice of Schoofs, as well as my executive coach Sandra Cohen and my father, a long-time manager in the aerospace industry, echoing in my head, I decided to make the cornerstones of my leadership empathy, transparency, and consensus building based on their advice and something my father had told me years ago when I had my first management role.

No surprises.

My father preached honesty with one’s staff. He said no employee should ever be confused about where they or their team stands in the eyes of their leadership. Don’t want until a performance review to tell someone they are struggling or missing the mark.

Schoofs encouraged trust and transparency with my team. He told me I needed to open up to them and rely on them more to succeed. Cohen highly valued empathy in leadership and coached me on healing relationships with my leads through personal transparency, communication, and better understanding.

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As a result, every year until 2024, while I was the lead at HuffPost, the organization grew — in traffic, team size, diversity, and revenue. We relaunched HuffPost Voices as a multiethnic, intersectional site, adding a new vertical, Indigenous Voices, in 2022. We often reached over 330 million cross-platform pageviews monthly, including a record-breaking 565 million cross-platform pageviews in September 2024. The staff also grew from 115 to more than 130 team members. We won or were a finalist for more than 17 awards, including three ASMEs, two Writer’s Guild Awards, three Deadline Club Awards, one Goldziher Prize and LA Press Club Award apiece, and many more. In the Fall of 2023, we launched our membership program where our audience could contribute to HuffPost so it could remain free for most readers. We then revamped it, creating ad-free options for HuffPost readers this year.

Sign up for an ad-free HuffPost here and support this fearless, award-winning newsroom today!

Things were exciting. And my team was firing on all cylinders. I was imagining what our 20th anniversary would look like in 2025 while hoping for the best as we worked our way through the 2024 election. But 2024 was challenging as it dragged all its woes upon our doorstep. Misinformation and disinformation were running rampant. Social media platforms were becoming hostile to news alongside specific segments of the general public.

The news industry was not immune to the revenue struggles plaguing us everywhere in media. Newsrooms had been shuttering since the pandemic hit and continued to do so — Vice, BuzzFeed News, and so many others either shut down or had their workforce reduced radically. The revenue model was horribly broken, and advertisers were fleeing hard news in droves, not wanting their wares to be promoted next to incendiary stories about politics, violent crime, racism, or the industry’s own personal Nicky Santoro (only dumber yet somehow more dangerous) — Donald Trump.

Santoro — the man who aspired to be the mob boss of Las Vegas in Casino — was ruthless, amoral, and petty. Trump wasn’t all that different. He was also a “friend” of the media initially, much like Santoro was a “friend” to Rothstein. While some in the media believed Trump was “good” for business, I knew better. I knew there was little interest from this would-be strongman in freedom of the press, expression, and information and that he cared not for any of the various amendments in the U.S. Constitution. After 2016, he was openly at war with the press alongside his many followers. Most politicians just “pled the refs” with journalists, but in 2024, he chose scorched earth — capitulate or face his wrath. Watching organizations I’d long admired, like The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, bend the knee to someone who actually enjoyed the comparison to ruthless mob bosses like Santoro made me feel sick. When I declared in an op-ed that we at HuffPost had no interest in caving, the newsroom and BuzzFeed stood by me, as I prepared myself to dig in my heels and fight.

Despite HuffPost’s best efforts, we were up against something much bigger and sinister — public apathy and a lack of resources. While billionaires prop up shaky media organizations on the right, most mainstream publications and more prominent news outlets are alone. They live and die by advertisers, who have essentially told much of the digital news industry to drop dead.

Fast forward to this January, while the new administration went on their Elon Musk-fueled rampage through our government programs and services, HuffPost was contending with cuts and drastic changes. And I knew I had no other choice but to leave.

It wasn’t a decision I made lightly, even though I felt it was the only one I could make.

Like many former staff writers and editors, I did not know or understand the mysteries that happen at the top of a company. I wondered what it was like, but I could only make assumptions. At that time, I thought leadership didn’t matter because so much of it was interchangeable or unknowable. What mattered were the people making the news every day. I thought it didn’t matter who led or owned something — because “bosses gonna boss” and sometimes ruin everything at their staff’s expense. It wasn’t until I saw what it was like having a “good” leader versus a “bad” one that I realized leadership was more than just the man behind the curtain. Leadership was the difference between a peaceful workplace and a terrible one.

The personality of an org starts at the top.

In my previous role at The Root, my team sometimes called me “mom.” Something I did not completely love (I was younger or the same age as some of the staffers who called me that), but I came to respect it for what it represented — they trusted me. They liked working for me. They were dedicated to The Root and its audience. And, other than the occasional petty squabble between passionate staffers over nonsense, we were a happy family where we could complain about each other but would close ranks if anyone from the outside disrespected a team member. But The Root was also small. The largest the staff ever got under me was 22 people.

At HuffPost, it was harder to bond with more than 130 people intimately, but I was up for the challenge and did my best despite being:

1. Terrible at remembering people’s names and faces

2. Someone who disassociates in virtual environments

I trudged forward anyway. From listening tours to office hours. From monthly letters of recognition to lunches, happy hours, and trips to Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles to meet with my team. To dinners and work functions. Over time, we forged an incredible bond. However, I often wondered if my team felt the same about me as I did about them. Part of being in leadership is that most leaders get very little feedback — good or bad. And I craved connection. And no matter how close you are with your team, unless it’s a small one like I had at The Root, it’s hard for more junior staffers to feel comfortable telling their boss of bosses what they actually think.

Still, with the help of my leadership team, we made it work, and we were successful for three glorious years. I greatly valued the intelligence, guts, guidance, and insight of my executive editors, Kate Palmer and Whitney Snyder, veterans of the HuffPost newsroom, and our operations lead, Marta Rodriguez, who was my right hand throughout my tenure. It worked, and the four of us teamed up to make HuffPost a great place to be. Because the heart of that newsroom is so beautiful and pure — it’s worth protecting. And that’s what I tried to do the entire time I was there: championing our work, protecting my team, and lobbying for more resources. Because I didn’t see myself as “the boss,” I saw myself as in service of the newsroom, just as my team saw themselves as in service of the audience.

It sucks that you have to leave to find out what people actually think of you. But I was overwhelmed by my team’s response. So many thanked me for my years of leadership and willingness to step down to save jobs. So many told me that seeing a Black woman as the lead inspired them and their careers. We were all human. Ultimately, we all made sacrifices to protect something we built together.

HuffPost had its buyouts and layoffs the first week of February, shortly after my last day on Friday, January 31st. I deleted Slack on February 2nd. I stopped checking my work email shortly after. And then, in a matter of days, I was finally removed from most company systems.

It was over.

What I’m going to do next? I don’t know. I’ll probably take a month or two off to decompress from everything. After all, I was preparing my very “knuck if you buck” approach for Trump 2: MAGA-boogaloo, and now I feel like Ace Rothstein, flying through the air after someone put a bomb underneath his 1981 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz. Because it all happened so quickly — the crisis, my decision, the cuts — there was no time to absorb what was happening. The year came in very “grand opening, grand closing” for everyone.

But I’ll always be rooting for HuffPost. (Sign up for their membership program here!) And I’m grateful for my time there and at BuzzFeed. I learned so much — about leadership, about myself.

And while I may have rejoined the ranks of those sans jobs, I am optimistic that there is something even more special out there waiting for me. I know that I’m wanted and needed and that no job defines any one person.

To paraphrase, at the end of Casino:

After a decade of employment, in the end, I wound up right back where I started. I could still write and edit, and I could still make money by knowing what people liked to read. And why mess up a good thing?

And that’s that.

Just published a new op-ed at HuffPost on the saga at The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times and the decisions from their billionaire owners to NOT put out endorsements despite decades of doing so at both publications. In the case of the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, he has chosen to hide behind the patina of endorsements don’t matter; how, according to him, people don’t trust the media and endorsements are why; and some version of we’re returning to our non-endorsing roots as if he can’t comprehend that to choose not to endorse in this heated political environment looks to readers of and journalists at his paper.

A “non-endorsement” in this heightened atmosphere, especially when both publications had prepared pro-Harris op-eds, is an endorsement … for Trump. This move of convenience, clearly meant to shield Bezos and his many businesses from the tyranny of a Trump win, was an act of cowardice by our most cowardly class — billionaires. Billionaires who donate to Harris quietly, in hopes of not ruffling feathers. And billionaires who back down from endorsements, quite loudly and proudly, without comprehending the damage done to not just their newspapers, but the entire media industry.

Never mind the folly of bending the knee to a would-be president who has not yet won the election or been sworn into office. Never mind that this could have been an opportunity for Bezos to flex his own nearly $206 billion worth and stand up to the man threatening to bring fascism to our doorsteps. Never mind the storied Post — of Woodward and Bernstein fame, of former publisher Katharine Graham’s mettle — now of tarnished reputation that may take years to build back, if it’s ever able to with Bezos at the top.

Thus proving the quote “The billionaires will not save us.” They’re too busy kowtowing to a would-be authority. Who knows what was promised, if anything, but a non-endorsement after killing one for Harris is essentially an endorsement for Trump.

To paraphrase the Post’s Trump-era slogan, democracy didn’t die in darkness after all. It died in broad daylight, after a meeting with one of the richest men in the world. Afterward, the many journalists of the Post were left to pick up the pieces of their tarnished paper — some choosing to quit, others posting their disappointment and anger on social media. More than 200,000 digital subscribers as of Monday had dropped the Post, reportedly 8% of their subscribers. And the journalism world shook at this decision that took away so much through an action so pathetic and small.

Read the full Op-Ed on HuffPost Opinion here.

“I don’t cook. I don’t clean, but let me tell you how I got this ring” — Cardi B

My mother was always into the “mystery” of Deloris. As in, my mom, Deloris, had her mythology about herself, but then there was the reality, which was largely a secret until she died in 2018 and my father started getting nostalgic, spilling all the tea on who she was to him. His reality of her was in stark contrast to the hard-core perfectionist who could never apologize for anything that raised us.

I always saw our mother as a supremely confident, charming, beautiful woman, who was smart and funny (both on purpose and unintentionally), who was affectionate, devoted to her family, and a lot of fun to be around. But she was also a bossy, constantly complaining, controlling, money-obsessed, argumentative mess who could push your buttons to the point of meltdown. Mostly because she could not admit fault and let her kids almost always believe we were responsible for why she was always contradicting herself or acting ridiculous.

But when she died, I learned my mother, who never cried in front of us, cried ALL THE TIME in front of our dad, was at times deeply insecure, and was emotionally all over the place while not being able to cook to save her life. Every “good” recipe she made was my dad’s family recipe that he taught her.

I used to ask Mama, “How did you and Daddy meet?” and she would be purposefully vague, as she never liked to tell a story that didn’t make her look or sound perfect. After she died, our dad told us they met at his apartment one day when a co-worker of hers, who knew his brother, brought her by his home unannounced to fix them up. Because my dad did not get this memo, he assumed something was up (my dad is the most suspicious man alive), and tried to play off my mom, who called him afterward a few times before it sunk in that she was 1) single and 2) interested. She initially pursued him, which I guess she thought was “wrong” and “looked bad,” because the attitude she’d given us our whole lives was that our dad chased her in his “runover tennis shoes” he was using as house shoes at the time.

Our dad said once he realized she was single and interested, he did do all the chasing, but for whatever reason, my mom could not tell this story that humanized her. She couldn’t tell any story that humanized her.

This was to all our detriment.

I grew up thinking I had to be perfect. That I had to be perfect to be loved. Perfect to get a husband. Perfect in school and my career. Perfect to be successful in this society. There was no room for error, as errors were not allowed.

I was a good student and well-behaved by her standards, so I thought perfection was obtainable. That it was always just around the corner. And I chased perfection for YEARS, thinking something must be terribly wrong for me to not be what I thought my mother — and by extension, our father — was.

It’s not like either of them were offering up “I sure screwed that up” stories.

Because my parents had a healthy marriage, were successful, and were strict/disciplined financially but without context, I learned all the wrong lessons. I thought love just “happened.” That if you were perfect, someone nice would “pick” you and all would be well. Well, I got picked by someone I was woefully incompatible with in college and rolled with it because “no other boys liked me” so I thought I should just be grateful for whatever “I could get.”

As I got older, even after that relationship blew up in my face, it was easier to not bother with relationships or pursue dead-ends, rather than take the risk of opening my heart to a nightmare who would abuse it. Yet, as watching copious amounts of reality TV would teach me, some of the worst women to ever walk the earth, who were extremely flawed to borderline insane, could find a man who loved them, screaming fights and all. And sometimes those men were “good.” So what was I, a fake perfect girl, doing wrong?

Well, no. 1: I was a “fake” perfect girl. The only people attracted to my rigid nature were those who were controlling and desired a facsimile of a woman, not a fully formed, well-rounded human being with emotions.

No. 2: I thought I had no agency or power in this and that love just “happened.”

After my mom died in 2018, my dad started providing context to who my mom actually was, and it slowly seeped the real reason why I’d been single for nearly two decades since my college relationship fell apart. I wasn’t doing the work. I wasn’t really trying. And I wasn’t being my authentic self.

The true story of my parents’ courtship revealed that my mom had the formula all along, but simply didn’t bother to educate us in it. There was nothing wrong with what she did to find love, and if I just dropped the ego, the Perfect Patty facade, and did the work, I too, could end my streak of loneliness.

So I had to unlearn the lessons my mother taught me about love and act on what she actually did.

She raised me to not date. She “encouraged” us to focus on school and doing what we enjoyed, and that love will simply “happen.” She made pursuing love sound foolish and immature and that women who chase after love are “desperate” and nobody likes desperate. She encouraged me to play aloof at all times and let the guy just “figure it out” if you like them or not. And men, not being mind-readers, never figured it out.

Contrast this with what actually happened to my mother. She was called an “old maid” by members of her family when was 21 and still single. She met my dad when she was around 26, years after she’d finished college and was working as a school teacher. According to reality, she was quite “desperate” to meet someone “nice,” so she flooded her network (other teachers) to see if anyone knew anyone they could fix her up with. That “anyone” was the music teacher at her school, a married guy who was friends with my dad’s younger brother. It was this man who introduced my parents by bringing my mom to my dad’s apartment one weekend. More than six months later they were engaged to be married, and the rest is history. They never really lost their passion for each other and were giggling in the kitchen, chasing each other around well into their 70s. They were married until the day she died in 2018 from complications related to dementia. My father was her primary caretaker, and he still loves and misses her to this day.

Why my mother was so down on love when it worked out great for her is one of those great mysteries I’ll never know the answer to. I can only conclude that she was afraid of us getting pregnant when we were teens (a real fear and problem in the 1990s) and went overboard bashing men and boys to discourage us from getting knocked up. She could have — I dunno — talked to us honestly about having sex, about protection and discernment, but I guess that was too hard. It was easier to freak out anytime a boy was mentioned and drag heterosexuality through the mud to Jedi mind trick us into believing we were “weak” if we liked a boy.

More than 30 years later, there’s only one grandchild between three girls, and no one is married. Mission accomplished?

When I was in my 20s, I told my mother how absurd she was about us dating. But because she could never admit she screwed up, the best she could offer as an apology was an angry statement, “NOBODY GAVE ME A BOOK ON HOW TO RAISE KIDS!”

My mother was a beautiful, charming woman, who could not cook and probably had OCD (she vacuumed the house every day and dusted every other day, cleaning the clean) on top of anxiety and a host of other issues her Boomer-adjacent self would never cop to. Like her fears and traumas around money or the mental block she had around certain types of people or activities. She couldn’t pump gas or use an ATM. She never learned how to use a computer, and was wholly dependent on my dad for everything as the “passenger princess” in his life. She was not perfect, yet she found love because, despite her messaging on perfection, you don’t need to be perfect to find love and happiness. You can be a literal hot mess who overcooks every piece of meat and vegetable that comes across your path; who makes spaghetti a “soup,” and who gives terrible advice on dating and relationships, then cries at the drop of a hat while panicking over nonsense, and someone will look past all that, see you for you, then value and love you. My mom was more than just the “chief cook and bottle washer” as she called herself — she was a fully-realized person, worthy of love.

So don’t waste time. You don’t have to be your ideal self to find happiness. Take that trip. Go on that date. Wear the bikini. Discard reservations about not having the ideal “beach body.” Focus on what makes you happy and pursue it. Stop waiting for the perfect moment or perfect time or perfect body to live your life. We only get this one life and it’s too short to waste it waiting for a perfect day that may never come. If you want love, career, friends, wealth, or family, pursue those things without fear. It’s better to put yourself out there and try than stay inert and never achieve anything.

You can do it. Because while perfection is an illusion, love remains real.

It's been a long time since I left you… without a blog to read. Blame it on the writer’s block.

And the fibroids.

Well, maybe not the fibroids anymore. They gone, girl. They gone.

On August 1, every fibroid in my uterus that ruined my quality of life and made me miserable — all 68 of them (!!!) — was evicted from the premises. My OBGYN/surgeon went in there and scooped them all out, stitched me back up, and sent me home after a brief, overnight stay at Tisch Hospital in New York City. Originally, she had recommended a hysterectomy because, apparently, my uterus REALLY likes to make fibroids. But as a 46-year-old woman who’s never been pregnant and had never even tried to get pregnant, I wasn’t quite ready to let the dream die.

My reasons for never trying were pretty simple — I was too broke for children for 90 percent of my career and I hadn’t met anyone I wanted to comingle DNA with. Sure, I met the occasional dude who said he wanted to put a baby in me, but I had no desire to co-parent with those people. Now, mind you, I had my egg count measured during the apocalypse… I mean, “lockdown” … after getting emotional re-watching season three of Shahs of Sunset where MJ grapples with the fact that she’s well north of 40 and wants a baby. I went to my then-OBGYN and learned my egg count and uterus were something much worse than MJ’s rosy outcome. (Despite her excessive partying and … um … other things, her eggs were pristine and her uterus was “young.”) My prognosis was something along the lines of “you’re old” featuring a few scrappy eggs that are probably pickled in vodka with a sprinkling of dust. But maybe one good egg survived and that’s all you need. And don’t talk to me about donor eggs and IVF. I am not a millioniare. It’s divine intervention or adoption with me, and I’m cool with that. But to give our good Lord a chance to work a miracle, I needed to keep my terrible, fibroid-producing uterus. So, a myomectomy it was!

When I discovered I had fibroids three years ago after I had a period that lasted a month, I was reluctant to try surgery. Mostly because when I was a child I had surgery on my lower jaw to remove a benign tumor and it was a traumatizing, bloody, infection-riddled saga that lasted months. Out of it, I developed a fear of needles that stuck (no pun intended) with me for almost a decade afterward. I did not want surgery. So I tried everything else. Various medications. Diet changes. Birth control. IUDs.

And the fibroids won every time.

Also, I quickly learned nearly EVERY BLACK WOMAN I knew who was over 40 either had fibroids or had fibroid surgery. Like, I have maybe one friend who doesn’t have a uterus trying to kill them. Everyone else? They’re statistics. Now why Black women are more prone to fibroids, no one seems to know but there are theories (*cough, hair relaxers, cough*). And since I had a relaxer from age 14 until I was 22, I’m going to go with it just might be the creamy crack all along.

All my friends said “get the surgery” and yet, I hesitated and tried countless half-measures out of the fear I was slow-walking myself into a hysterectomy.

Then, in the middle of all this, I met my boyfriend in August 2022 at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Las Vegas. Introduced to me by my long-time friend and his then co-worker, we hit it off immediately because we discovered he’s a member of Phi Beta Sigma and I am of Zeta Phi Beta, his sister sorority. I’ve always had a soft spot for Sigmas (duh), as the Sigmas of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville helped me move into almost every dorm room and apartment I stayed in on campus. They also looked out for me way before I even joined Zeta Phi Beta. They were a bit rough around the edges, those Illinois bruhs, but I can bring out the teddy bear in the thuggiest of men. Plus my mom, an exceptionally charming and beautiful member of Zeta Phi Beta, who also felt loved and protected by Sigmas when she was an undergrad at Philander Smith College, would bake them cakes for moving me around. We both pretty much had them wrapped around our fingers, her more than me though, as she was the original and I’m just a copy.

But my boyfriend was a sweetheart, and despite us both thinking this would lead to absolutely nothing (as that was what we were used to while dating over 40), two years later, we’re STILL TOGETHER. And we’re happy but between us there are no children. So more than a year ago, when my third OBGYN (I went through a lot of them on this fibroids journey) suggested I chuck my uterus into the trash, I had to hold back tears. I realized that if I was going to give my three good eggs and raggedy uterus a shot, I needed to evict these fibroids.

Nothing else worked, so surgery was the only option.

My fifth OBGYN and the one who did the surgery also initially recommended a hysterectomy and with her, I did start crying all over the place, distraught. She was the third doctor to recommend it and I was devastated. So even though to have a kid would be divine intervention at this point, to give the universe, Jesus, and my uterus a chance, I had to face my fears and have surgery.

Now, I won’t bore you with a long-ass story about the surgery because there is no long-ass story to tell. I went in, I went under, the doctor scooped the 68 buggers out, stitched me back up, and after a rough initial 4-to-6 hours of trying to walk, I was pretty much fine. I was in bed all day the day after I got out of the hospital but two days later, I was up and walking around and feeling borderline euphoric. The little energy vampires in my abdomen were gone and the aftermath was fine! I feel great! There’s a little discomfort and I’m taking Advil around the clock, but I feel better than I’ve felt IN YEARS.

Pre-surgery, I was a miserable, depressed, anemic, weepy mess. Now I’m a happy, energetic … um … weepy mess … but they’re happy tears now! And my boyfriend has been by my side throughout it all, being so kind, loving, and helpful. And my friends have all shown up and shown out. Showering me with flowers, food, gift baskets, and visits. I feel like the luckiest and most blessed and highly-favored woman in NYC.

So, if you have fibroids and you don’t want them, get the surgery. And you don’t have to lose your uterus if you don’t want to. Just keep insisting on keeping it until the doctors get the point and tailor the best surgery to suit you. Because life after fibroids is so much better. You don’t have to worry about chronic anemia because you bled so much that you ruined both your energy levels and your outfits. And the minute I was on the other side of my surgery — happy, healthy, and fibroid-free — the depression I’d been in for months was lifted and I was finally free.

I was finally me again.

I wrote a thing for HuffPost about what I’m calling “The Great Regression,” this horrid rollback of rights, laws, norms, and protections under the guise that you can “make America great again” by making it demonstrably worse for everyone.

Also, did you notice? My chosen profession is en fuego in the absolute worst way. Newsrooms are shuttering. Newsrooms are doing layoffs. Newsrooms are struggling. This industry has been on precarious footing since the day I joined it back in 1999, but this time feels different. Because I was so late to the “magazines dripping in millions of revenue while your local paper had a staff of 100+ people” party, all I got in school was how this field would eat me alive because it was about to be dead soon, thanks to the Internet.

But it’s been a slow decline. Kind of like the metaphor of the frog in a gradually heating pot of water that will eventually start to boil and make frog stew.

I think it’s stew time, folks!

But I don’t think journalism is ending. I just think it’s changing. Now what the hell it’s changing into, damned if I know. I’m no Nostradamus. (Shit, even Nostradamus wasn’t Nostradamus!) We can all survive this if … I dunno … private equity and greedy individuals stop treating news like a bustdown. Journalism is a public good, not a cash cow. If you become a billionaire off the news you’re probably doing the news wrong.

I digress though … this story is actually about me … so smart and self-assured me … realizing I’d been duped into believing there’s a hand at the wheel of our society. Jesus take the wheel, please, because nobody’s driving this car and we’re heading off an anti-Democracy cliff.

I wrote:

The help is not coming part is both terrifying and a rallying cry. As in — it’s time to go to work, folks! It truly is on all of us to pull together and tackle this head-on like this is “Avengers: Endgame” and everyone has to come back and kick ass to save the day. You, me, your grandma, your homeboys, that kid who gave you a purple nurple in the fifth grade, John Wick, Chris Evans (suit up, bro!), the other Chris Evans, anyone named Chris. Everybody, anybody, do something! Anything! This is not a drill.

It’s for real this time.

So, I’m going to do my part to save the world while stress-watching “Vanderpump Rules” (it’s so bad this season!) Please ignore how I start rocking back and forth, and look like I might pass out. I’m fine. I promise you. I’m down to fight. Let’s goooooo!

At one point during my chat with Dr. Wendy Osefo, PhD of Real Housewives of Potomac and “four degrees” fame, we repeated the iconic line that happened between Nene Leakes and Kandi Burress during one of the many, many reunions they sat through for The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

“We see each other!”

And we do.

From the moment I reconnected with Wendy (we both ran in overlapping circles back when I was living in Washington, D.C.), it was a meeting of mutuality. The high school nerd girl struggle is real, whether you were a cool nerd like Wendy or just a struggling, tragic extrovert/emotional nerd like myself, and it continues to be a struggle if you’re engaging in a world that doesn’t always respect the things a nerd — cool or not — brings to a platform like Real Housewives.

In my latest for HuffPost, I sat down with Wendy to chat about this season of Potomac and the DRAMA of the show. It’s my first published piece for 2024, a year where I’m hoping to write more.

For you non-writers, there are two types of writers — ones who keep everything short and struggle to elaborate, and ones who are famously long-winded and have to kill many of their “darlings,” aka the meaty paragraphs that serve nothing, but read nicely! This should shock NO ONE who knows me, but I’m an overwriter. I write too damn much, child.

So here, for your amusement are the top four sections I had to cut from my Wendy Osefo profile:

ON HIGH SCHOOL AND HOUSEWIVES: While I’ve been told that Gen Z is less, um, ridiculous about the high school drama (thank the Lord), there are no Gen Z Housewives. This is a game played by women in their mid-30s and up, so it’s predominantly the territory of Gen Xers and Millennials who all bear the battle scars from the tyranny of the popular girl clique and either being in it or NOT in it as a young adult. Therefore, the Real Housewives franchise is unmoved and unchanged by how passe this all plays out during a time when most women work; where looks are still important, but are supposed to be secondary; where most women feel they have to go to college just to survive, forget thrive; and most women have accepted that this may or may not come with a man or any kind of partner. But at the end of the day (a common phrase on reality TV), it’s all reduced down to man/clothes/house on Bravo, and Osefo has an adoring man, wears nice clothes, and lives in a lovely home with said man and her three children. Yet, if the mess stopped there, we could just crown her queen of the ‘wives and move on, but it’s not that simple.

ON MY HOUSEWIVES HABIT: I consider myself a student of all this, obsessed with it in fact, due to my own traumatizing experience with childhood bullying. I was a nerd and tragically “uncool,” despite my many, many pointless efforts at being cool. For me, watching old episodes of Bad Girls Club or Real Housewives of Potomac is my way of exercising the demons that once plagued me by finding out what happened to all the so-called “prettiest” and “most popular” girls in college and high school who thought this currency would extend into the real world. Basically, for huge swaths of these former debutantes, it is a wasteland of cheating allegations, broken engagements, divorce, and struggle until Housewives creator Andy Cohen came along and offered up the chance of a lifetime to start a clothing/makeup/liquor/three-wick candle business on the side while exercising their own personal demons on national television for our amusement.

ON MY EXCITEMENT/BEFUDDLEMENT OF SEEING A FELLOW NERD ON HOUSEWIVES: So I say all this to say (another reality cliche), I was always surprised that Osefo even wanted to join the circus considering she’s not from this former group of Housewives desperately clamoring for a second-act after the first blew up in their faces. No, Osefo is actually from the latter, smaller group of women who actually seem to LIKE their significant others (or being single), and have “real careers” that actually translate into the power and influence others are trying to get by joining Housewives. Think Jenna Lyons, legendary fashion impresario, who seems befuddled as to how she ended up on Real Housewives of New York, or Dr. Nicole Martin, a successful anesthesiologist, who also, at times, seems flustered over how ridiculous things can get on the very unserious Real Housewives of Miami. They seem to exist on these shows for no other reason than … I guess they like to fight on the quippiest, funniest, most high-stakes level? Perhaps as an exercise in extroversion for introverts on the spectrum? They really don’t need this! As in, Osefo doesn't quite need this either. She has four degrees! She’s a professor at John Hopkins! She’s on MSNBC! She likes her husband! Girl, why are you here? 

Or to put it another way by quoting Housewives icon, Nene Leakes, where is your scooter?

“People didn't understand how I could occupy the space of a professor, but also get plastic surgery,” said Osefo. “Like, no, professors don't dress like you. Professors don't look like you. Professors don't get their nails done. And the truth is, I am a multi-hyphenate not just in my career, but in who Wendy is. I occupy different spaces. And it's okay to be like that.”

AND THIS BIT OF SHADE: It’s no knock to those using this as a platform to de-platform a man, as I am a fan who loves all Housewives, even the terrible ones. But the reality is some housewives need Housewives and others are just there for the lulz. I don’t need to point out who’s who. The whole point of “shade” (the no. 1 verbal gymnastic competition ‘wives engage in) is you already know what I know and we all know to be true. Don’t get mad at me for pointing it out!

On Threads, I decided to drop not one, not two, but three “iconic” pictures of myself. Two from when I was almost 300 lbs and one from after I lost 75 of those pounds. (Photo by the incredible and very iconic Victor Jeffreys II. HIRE HIM FOR EVERYTHING!)

These drawings as proof to all (and myself) that I used to be a pretty talented cartoonist before I settled on this journalism thing.

This response about how I was so obsessed with the R&B group Jodeci as a teen that I once drew them in colored pencil and how for years the picture hung in my family home in the basement bathroom. Bonus: I also wrote an entire screenplay based on them on the old family PC that has been lost to time because I don’t have anything that can read a floppy or hard disk anymore.

This rant about Threads sending me anti-LGBTQ+ content when I very much do not like or want anti-LGBTQ+ content. (Shout out to my mom for raising me to know being a bigot is bad for your health because she’d kill me!)

This repost n’ a quote on how I’m losing the war against my very temperamental uterus. I was on my period for 4 months, y’all. FOUR MONTHS. (Read more about my horrible uterus here.)

This Thread on how my family keeps me humble because they know how truly ridiculous I am. (RIP GrandPa Pigeons!) (Photo by Gara Elizabeth Lacy. HIRE HER FOR EVERYTHING!)

This response to a Thread about men's (and my own) propensity to disagree with people when I agree with them, then repeat back their same points, only differently worded to their everlasting frustration. Except I only do this to men. It’s fun! (Except when it’s me and my boyfriend doing it to each other!)

This bit of encouragement to go outside of your box when finding/making friends. Different can be good! Also, people with friends live longer, so make some!

Merry Christmas Eve, everyone!

(Also, follow me on Threads here. I don’t really do whatever they do at X/Twitter anymore.)

Between potential media mergers that sound more like abominations than good ideas and a tough digital landscape that saw more casualties than wins, I feel like the entire media/news/entertainment industry is riding deep on the struggle bus after a tough 2023.

Some of it was because of the dual Hollywood strikes and losses in the streaming wars, but a lot of it was from declining revenue from a recession that never quite emerged. Yet, somehow every corporation tightened their advertising budgets anyway, leading to digital news crisis after crisis as the revenue model fell apart and most free news outlets went with it. I’m proud of the fact that HuffPost is doing well despite industry headwinds, and declines in social media with Facebook deprioritizing news and Twitter/X imploding. We have a growing audience, a popular homepage, and tons of talented, award-winning journalists — all of whom I’m grateful for.

But 2023 thoroughly kicked my ass, as has nearly every year I’ve worked in journalism since I entered the field 23 years ago in 2000.

But none of this is new. You could argue the revenue model for journalism has been in shambles since the mid-2000s when magazines and other print publications started collapsing.

Recently, as part of my work on my book, I reached out to several of my old editors and co-workers from my five-year stint at The Bakersfield Californian newspaper. At the time, when I worked there from 2002 until 2007, it was a small, but mighty family-owned paper, still doing quite well thanks to a robust classified section and its early adoption of the internet. The then-executive editor was Mike Jenner, who is now a professor at the University of Missouri, the j-school I should have probably gone to but my mommy wouldn’t let me.*

*It’s a long story that begins with arguing over spending $20 on college applications and paranoia, and ends with fears of racism, which is wild since I ended up going to undergrad in southern Illinois, a known hotbed for the KKK.

The journalism we did in Bakersfield during that time was quite impactful on the community, uncovering corruption and government malfeasance. It was the only time I ever got to work in a large, traditional newsroom — an experience I still pine for to this very day. (Most of the digital sites I’ve worked for haven’t had traditional newsrooms save for the former Gizmodo Media Group sites I worked for as editor-in-chief of The Root, and HuffPost is now a remote/hybrid newsroom thanks to the pandemic.)

In Bakersfield, I gained a reputation as a popular, versatile writer who would work on one of the biggest mass homicide stories of that period, back when I was a general assignment reporter. I often tagged along with veteran crime reporter, Steve Swenson, and my good, long-time friend who left journalism to become an Episcopalian priest, Christina Vance. At the time, she was the then-night crime reporter. I did everything at The Californian, from drawing illustrations to education reporting to writing humor columns. I would later take over the entertainment beat, where I had The Californian’s first ever “blog” in 2004 on the old, original blog site, Blogger.

But once ol’ Craigslist came to town, it was a precipitous decline, as it was for all local newspapers, with revenue drying up as the once lucrative small ads moved to free services online.

Because I’m either too dumb to quit journalism or an uber genius who cracked the code on how to survive in this volatile industry, I gave up on my childhood dream of being the Black female Dave Barry with occasional Bill Watterson-style doodles and did what my artistic and analytic father did before me — leave something I loved and was quite good at (in his case it was being a talented engineer in the aerospace industry and in my case — writing) to go into management because … money.

Thankfully, like my father before me, I had a knack and love for people managing, although I’m a bit more of a passionate people person than the omnivert who raised me.

Today, management in media is not as glamorous as what it was to be a syndicated newspaper columnist or cartoonist back in the 90s. Here was teenage me, admiring Vanity Fair’s Dominick Dunne and NYT’s Maureen Dowd at the height of their influence and powers, with their expense accounts and fancy parties in New York and LA, thinking this would be a viable path for me. “Yes,” young me thought, “I’m good enough to be in every newspaper and magazine in America! I just have to pay my dues and climb my way up to the top!” only for print media to croak on me shortly after I graduated from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 1999.

It didn’t matter that all the biggest names in this game who were not Clarence Page or Eugene Robinson, were typically white. I just figured, hell, I could be the first Black woman to pull a Molly Ivins and be the Oprah of opinion pieces.

To my professors’ credit, they warned me that the internet was going to kill my chosen profession and my columnist dreams. Former SIUE professor Riley Maynard used to tell us that most of us wouldn’t make it and would end up accountants or lawyers or anything but journalists. Well, he said that to everyone but me as I was almost certain, even then, he was not talking about me. I was the editor-in-chief for two years, running the student newspaper, the Alestle, and the winner of the Bob Hardy scholarship. I was a big fish news nerd who excelled in the small pond of SIUE. And failure wasn’t an option for me. It was either “go big as a writer or go home,” literally, which I did in humiliation twice in my career, first in 2007 and again in 2013. I still remember telling my academic advisor, professor, and then-department chair, Patrick D. Murphy, of my then-dream of working for CBS News’ flagship news magazine, 60 Minutes, and rather than tell me I was completely delusional and to aim a little lower, he told me he felt I could do it.

I chose print over TV so 60 Minutes never happened (yet!), as my TV career was thwarted in 2000 when a local news station recruiting me out of Idaho told me not to worry because “the white supremacists are way north of here.” I chose to pursue a job at the Midland Reporter-Telegram instead where then-editor Meta Minton had the good sense to not mention Midland’s own problems with racism, and the rest was history.

When I tell you that this profession has kicked my ass so many times, I’m really telling you that I’m amazed we even got to this point, with me writing about my career from the tenuous, precarious security of an EIC gig while artificial intelligence and other media nightmares breathe down my neck. Every year of my career has been under the gun. And I did it all with an at-times crippling mental illness that threatened not just my livelihood, but my very life.

It also didn’t help that I was Black, female, and often quite chubby. But plucky me never let little things like that keep me down. If anything, I thought they were assets because they made me more empathetic, creative, resilient, and intuitive. I love being a Black woman (chubby … not so much, but that’s something I’ve been working on since high school), and while the occasional job didn’t happen because someone didn’t realize Danielle C. Belton of North St. Louis County, Mo., member of historic African-American Greek letter organization Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Inc., was a “Negress” until she went to the job interview, I was grateful those employers showed their misogynoir early so I didn’t have to suffer the indignities of working for virulent, sexist racists. Seriously, thank you for not hiring me as, to paraphrase Alice Walker, until you do right by all people, everything you do is going to fail.

And boy, did these publications fail. Most don’t exist anymore or are completely irrelevant now.

I credit my longevity in this industry as one-third talent/smarts, one-third charm, and one-third healthy delusion. It is a crazy thing to think you’re not only going to survive in this jacked-up business but become editor-in-chief of a Pulitzer-Prize-winning newsroom. None of this was guaranteed. Not when I was in local newspapers. Not when I was a blogger. Definitely not when I was part of the Black press. And not when I was in nonprofits as a social media editor. It wasn’t even promised when I was head writer for a long-defunct, late-night talk show on BET!

And most assuredly not when I was hospitalized not once, not twice but four times for mental illness woes and suicidal ideation.

I credit my old editors, co-workers, and friends at The Californian for saving my life and loving me back when I thought I was unlovable. The incredible support of that newsroom — alongside my family — is why I’m here right now, writing about the dire state of media while still being firmly in the fight.

I’m not going to give up on my dreams. I still love to write, as I write something every day, usually in my journals. I’m almost 95.5 percent positive that at some point in my life I will be a published author under my own name. (I’ve ghostwritten a book or two for others.) And I love leading a newsroom. Even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. And I’d rather slug it out with “my people,” who are journalists — the only people who have made sense to me since I entered the Mass Communications program back in 1997 — than be a lawyer like my mother wanted me to be or an accountant like Dr. Maynard threatened my classmates they’d become. It’s a good, crazy life. One I wouldn’t trade for any other. Journalism is constantly changing, challenging, evolving, creative, meaningful, purposeful, and exciting. Plus, you get to know things before everyone else and I’m fairly nosy. If I wasn’t a working journalist, I’d probably be a failed writer or artist, presently folding sweaters at a Macy’s in a dying mall somewhere in St. Louis, as this is what I did when I was a “failed” journalist back in 2008-2009.

I credit my family, especially my sisters, mother, and grandmother, for why I was convinced I was so “special” and thus just kept going no matter what was happening within me or around me. They all saw things in me that I did not see for myself when I was young and my mother in particular worked hard to preserve my self-esteem in the face of the loneliness and childhood bullying that marked most of my formative years. For them, their dreams for me only went in one direction — high and higher. So high that around 2008 or ‘09 I had the most insane conversation with my grandmother, whom we kids called Granny, where she admonished me for not “landing Obama.” This ignored that I was about 16 years his junior and he was married to Michelle when I was in freshman in high school, but the sentiment was there. She was convinced I was going places and thought one of them should be the White House. My mother was a bit more subtle, telling me in hushed tones one day in 1999 during the Clinton impeachment trial that she thought I could be on TV, defending the president like one of his lawyers, a Black woman, Cheryl Mills.

Both my mother and grandmother have since passed on — Mama in 2018 and Granny in 2021, but in 2020, when I got the job at HuffPost, one of the first people I called to celebrate with was my baby sister, Deidre, who screamed with excitement when I told her. Deidre, who watched me deteriorate in my 20s to a nearly unrecognizable state when I was sick with the worst of my Bipolar disorder, knew more than anyone how hard it had been to come back from the depths of that. And we always talk about how neither of us ever wants to return to the struggle of my past.

I’m looking forward to 2024 in journalism even if the industry is in shambles. Even if digital media is suffering. Even if everything seems hard and bleak and a certain former president is threatening revenge upon the free press if he returns to power. Again, I’m either too lucky or too delusional to think otherwise. For some reason, I’m an optimist. For some reason, I think there’s still some hunt left in the old dog or even crazier, that it can learn some new tricks.

I mean, I did it. And it was hard and sucked, but it worked out OK. Maybe 2024 in media can be OK too.

Years ago, after I first became managing editor at The Root (and later its youngest and first editor-in-chief), I interviewed comedian Mike Yard, who at the time, was on Larry Wilmore’s old show on Comedy Central. I was wearing a very conservative blue dress and my hair was as it always was back in 2016 — long and straightened while being loosely curly. Despite my best efforts to reject my girliness, I was obviously a “lady person” who was into “the lady things” and seemed ridiculously bougie because that is who I am. Mike, a lovely individual, was from St. Croix but spent his teen years in East New York.

East New York, for those who know nothing of this Brooklyn enclave, is interesting. And by interesting, I mean, it’s mostly older housing stock, car washes, very suspect-looking motels, gas stations, fix-a-flat places, and a police department folks seem to take issue with for one reason or another. And, I got the impression while talking to Mike for our interview that growing up there in the 80s and 90s was not for the faint of heart.

But something funny happened while we chatted. He asked me what I knew about “mayonnaise sandwiches,” joking, “I bet you don’t know nothing about that!”

Upon which I said something like: “I never ate a mayonnaise sandwich although my baby sister did sometimes when we were little. I preferred fried bologna sandwiches.”

And Mike said something like: “Oh wow, I thought you were bougie-bougie. You got some hood in you after all!”

Of course, I laughed because I’m about as “hood” as a Harlem toile scarf designed by interior design maven Sheila Bridges. Meaning… not. At. All. But I have been to the “hood,” lived in various “hoods”… as *cough* an adult gentrifier, and my favorite cultural period in American history is the Harlem Renaissance.

Years later, in Paris, France, I would have a very similar conversation with hip-hop icon, GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan during the Clan’s 36 Chambers anniversary tour in 2019. We bonded over all the gross things we ate as kids: from cut-up boiled hot dogs to Vienna sausages to Velveeta to, again, fried bologna.

(I admitted that what killed fried bologna for me was when I started the first grade, I asked my mom to pack me a fried bologna sandwich for lunch only to learn that fried bologna, once cold, is absolutely disgusting.)

For some reason, these shared experiences of “gross” foods that were common amongst working class and poor people in the 70s through the 90s was the great uniter for me and other Black people who grew up differently from me. I grew up in this in-between space where we were better than upper middle class, but my parents were from humble beginnings and not bougie, especially my mother who was hostile to the idea of bougie Blacks. This was mostly because she had felt belittled and shunned by them, being a deeply impoverished country girl from Jackson County, Arkansas who sometimes had to choose between sanitary napkins and food in college.

Meaning, I have almost nothing in common with most Black people who grew up in our tax bracket because my parents didn’t do any “bougie Black people” stuff. No Jack and Jill, no cotillions, no overseas vacations, no convertibles for my sweet 16, no fancy private school education, and no over-the-top birthday parties. But I also have very little in common with people outside of that bracket, as I once got screamed at for forgetting to lock my friends’ car doors in college because I hadn’t ridden in a car with automatic locks since I was about 5 or 6.

Most kids at school, especially after we first moved to the “white” end of the school district, assumed my family was poor. My father had raised us to never talk about what we had or money, so we never dissuaded anyone of these notions. While everyone else was in their Guess jeans and Nike tennis shoes, I was wearing “name brand” clothing from Marshalls where the tags were ripped out so you wouldn’t know what name brand it was, and pain-inducing, cheap sneakers from Payless ShoeSource that my pinky toes still bear scars from. Also, my father was hardly ever at school or at any of my events because he had to work, so people just assumed I didn’t have one. Folks were shocked when they learned my mom didn’t work and that we lived in a four-bedroom ranch home in a then-tony suburb where everything was named after horseracing.

In college, this was somewhat similar, although if folks actually paid attention or went to my dorm room, it was pretty obvious I was only cosplaying as a broke college kid. I didn’t have a car like a lot of my friends, so people assumed I was poor, but in my dorm room, I had an endless wardrobe, a personal desktop computer, and a cell phone back in 1996 back when most students had none of these things. Especially at my college, which I once joked was the K-Mart of higher education.

I always, always felt like I was living a lie when it came to what “class” I actually was back then. I knew nothing of the Bougie life, so the so-called “rich” kids mocked, shunned, or didn’t even know I was alive. But I also knew nothing of struggle, so I got bullied a lot by the poorer kids, who saw me as an annoying imposter when I tried to bond with them.

As a high school freshman, a girl who I thought was my friend launched into a tirade about how my mother was my father’s “slave” because she was a stay-at-home mom and that REAL women worked, while men, like her father who had abandoned his family, weren’t dependable. Therefore, according to her, my mother’s marriage had to be awful. This, of course, was very, very far from the truth of my mother who was basically Martha Stewarting her way through domestic bliss — crocheting blankets, making elaborate crafts and decor, and baking delicious cakes. I remember being confused and trying to reason with her about how my parents were equals, shared everything, and made all their decisions together, while my mom’s name was on everything from the house to the cars, but that only made her more angry.

We didn’t stay friends much longer after that.

Another time, at 15, I had a crush on a very hardscrabble young boy in my class as a sophomore. I would help him with his homework in hopes that one day he would like me. When my friends found out about the crush, one said she thought this was “odd” because the boy seemed too “niggafied” for someone like me. Then, another girl, who for whatever reason had a real hard-on from mocking me and making me miserable, found out I liked him, and teased me about it in class. I (who had very little control of my emotions back then) had a complete meltdown. I ran out of the classroom screaming and crying, waiting it out in the bathroom until after the late bell rang, then went back to the classroom to get my things to find the girl still there. She chose to be late to her own classes just so she could continue to mock and berate me.

Classy.

She, of course, told everyone I was crazy, including the boy, and he stopped speaking to me altogether.

But my efforts to fit in were always met with the oddest responses from the other kids and teens, mostly because there was no way for me to fit in. Even though I lacked the ability to be truly invisible due to my over-the-top, extroverted personality (I was “popular” only in the sense that people knew of me because I demanded to be seen whether or not anyone wanted to look at my ass), my parents, and how they’d chosen to raise us, made us outsiders, unable to ever figure out what crew we could get in with. I didn’t really have good friends until almost my junior year of high school.

This, of course, wasn’t all the fault of me being in no-woman’s-land in the working class/Bougie Black divide. I was high-strung. I was extremely sensitive and emotional, and until the fourth grade, a know-it-all narc. I was obsessed with being “good” and wanting the teacher to like me because all teachers to me were just extensions of my mother.

So, yes, I was the kid in elementary school who called the teacher “mommy”… twice.

I say all this to say that this wasn’t just about class signifiers and cruelty. I’m keenly aware of the role I played in my own loneliness and torment as a child.

Still, it was annoying in a pathetic, tragic “County Brownie” kind of way.

My life was a series of class contradictions. I had the grades and extracurricular activities to get into a much better university but I ended up going to a school that was then best known as the place where 30-year-old burnouts tried to bang 18-year-olds because my mom didn’t want to spend $20 on an application fee.

On the one hand, I totally understood why my parents were so frugal. Most people wear all their wealth on their backs in an effort to keep up with the Kardashians or in my “Shiny Suit Era” day, Cosby kids or whatever they were wearing on A Different World and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. If given the choice between my father paying for college and buying me a car for graduation versus having a Super Sweet 16 and Guess jeans, I would have still picked being college debt-free and the car. But on the other, it was like my Silent Generation parents didn’t get anything we were going through because it was just too foreign to them. And like most people of their era, they never asked questions as to why my sisters and I wanted to be more like everyone else. I think they thought we only wanted things out of vanity as opposed to wanting to not provide more fodder to superficial bullies and desiring to “fit in” with our social set. We were cute kids and we were smart, but if you didn’t like us because of these things, you could always attack our cheap-ass shoes. People were so cruel to my younger sister that I used to retort in her defense that at least we looked good in our JC Penney jeans whereas they were spending $100s of dollars to still look like crap.

Nikes don’t fix ugly on the outside or inside. But it didn’t (and still doesn’t) stop people from trying.

While in our MTV generation-era high school, we were outcasts. To our country cousins from rural Arkansas and our city cousins from the Southside of Chicago, we were “rich.” My more impoverished tormentors thought I was a painfully uncool and uninteresting poseur. Those who were wealthy and ignored me thought I was an invisible nerd wearing Spring ‘92 edition Sears Outlet. I wish none of this mattered, but for at least a bulk of my adult life, it affected me deeply as I didn’t belong anywhere, and everywhere I went I felt like I was faking the funk.

Even to this day, where I live a pretty nice life and my long-time friend/fake big brother, Jada, mocks me for how tragically bougie I am, I still get a little nervous when I have to be around uber-wealthy people for some of the same insecure reasons my mother didn’t like being around them. Usually from the fear they can somehow smell the delicious but not-really-cheese Velveeta on me.

Fortunately, in Negrotopia, (a.k.a Obama-era Washington, D.C.), I was not alone in being a woman without a social class. There were plenty of people who knew the disgusting disappointment of cold fried bologna, Top Ramen, and being unable to afford to travel home on the holidays, even though they would pretend like they didn’t know what people were talking about if it came up in “mixed” company. I could go party at the White House and at the W Hotel with the Braxton sisters and still joke about having less than $100 in my bank account.

I was essentially a “fancy” broke person. I could barely afford my deeply discounted rent for my furnished “garden” apartment on Capitol Hill, yet, I lived on Capitol Hill when the houses were going for millions and people just assumed you owned something if you lived there, and could also pop up at exclusive parties hosted by Essence Magazine during Congressional Black Caucus Week, dancing the night away with the likes of El DeBarge and various hoi polloi posing as aristocrats.

I owned nothing but the clothes on my back and the many old laptops, hard drives, and computers I’d gone through since college, but most people didn’t know that. I also had a blog at the time called “The Black Snob,” so people assumed I came from money, which was partially right, but also very, very wrong. Usually, when people started to pry, I would say I was personally broke, but my parents were doing just fine. But I also was constantly making up excuses why I couldn’t join my friends in Martha’s Vineyard for vacations because, ahem, I could not afford any kind of vacation on my freelance writer/blogger salary of $45,000 a year.

Even now, I still feel very broke. Mostly because I’ve never owned property, purchased a car on my own, had kids (which have become a signifier of wealth … who can afford kids these days!), or turned into a “real adult” who “does adult things.”

Today, my favorite shows to watch — aka “Real Housewives of Every City Except Orange County” — are all about “aspirational wealth” where quite a few of the so-called Housewives are not actually wealthy but are really just severely in debt and two bad decisions from jail time.

I, at times, don’t think these women know what class they are either, considering on this season of The Real Housewives of New York City everything got turned on its head. Formally a show about white socialites and aspiring white socialites from the Upper East Side who would NEVER go to Brooklyn for ANYTHING, it is now a multicultural mishmash of different versions of Bethenny Frankel. The new gaggle of not-quite-Housewives on an episode from the newest season bitched about actual rich person Jenna Lyons choosing to fly first class without them on vacation and also went in on fashionista Jessel Taank for being vague about her possibly posh background. Half the women were doing different versions of what the “County Brownies” used to do in St. Louis when I was a kid, which was argue over which now rich person once had it harder. Or, in the case of my high school and what Jessel was doing, which County Brownie’s parents, uncles, or grandparents had it harder.

The whole “my grandparents picked cotton!” argument versus “my parents grew up in the hood… like the real hood, not the fake one!” while they were all living in McMansions and wearing Jordans was weird.

This new version of RHONY was such an odd turn from the previous iteration that involved falling down drunk in posh estates on St. Barts and in the Hamptons, banging French “pirates” who looked like Johnny Depp, while flying in helicopters and private jets. (First class was for people who couldn’t get their friends to fly them out of the Berkshires to the Hamptons on their own personal aircraft.)

But even THOSE women were broke half the time too, usually from either divorces, poor decisions, or playing “keeping up with the Bethennys.”

Anyway, I’m tired.

I was telling this to my therapist recently, mostly about how I don’t feel like I belong anywhere while at the same time, I belong everywhere. I’m a rich, broke person whose parents both chopped and picked cotton as kids, who grew up working-middle-upper-middle class and who is somehow overly educated while only having an undergrad degree from a college for people who can’t afford college who only breaks out her Gucci tote bag when traveling because I am too embarrassed to carry it anywhere else.

I can speak the “King’s English” but understand AAVE. I’m the only person in New York City who has an Android phone and PREFERS IT. (Fuck peer pressure! Everything your iPhone does, my Samsung did years ago!) I also know for a fact that Velveeta is excellent for helping the harder-to-melt cheeses blend in when making any kind of macaroni and cheese, but don’t tell the wannabe socialites because they’ll gag.

I mean, they still eat it and love it when I serve it to them, but shhhh! It’ll just be our little secret!

As for me, Mike Yard, and GZA, we’ll always have Vienna sausages, and how much we now refuse to eat them.

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Editor’s Note: I wrote this post when I was depressed. I’m presently not depressed anymore, but I still felt this disjointed mess was worth publishing.

Everyone thinks happiness just happens. But it doesn’t. It takes work, and being happy is work.

Or I should say, staying happy is work.

As most of you know, I’m in the process of writing a book about living with Bipolar Disorder, type II. I’m finishing up the proposal with an editor — since even editors need editors, and I kept writing myself into navel-gazing circles, never getting to the point. The book covers large swaths of my life — from childhood to career to friendships to my love life — detailing how being Bipolar intersects with it all. Presently my life is usually pleasant, but it wasn’t always that way. Life is a garden that constantly needs tending to stay beautiful and healthy, and my garden used to be overgrown, dry, half-dead, and choked out by weeds. People have this tendency to think good things just happen, but it’s something you work at, plan for, and build on. Happiness is intentional. Success is intentional. I want to be happy and successful so I do the things, all the things, that it takes to keep my life simple and easy to manage so I can focus my energy on making my dreams come true.

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I worked very hard to get to my happiness. Dues were paid in abundance. My book editor asked me yesterday how many times I’d moved in my adult life. I started out counting the different cities I lived in until I realized that in some cities I lived in multiple places. In Midland, TX I moved twice. In Bakersfield, Calif. and Washington, D.C., I went through three different apartments. And I’ve now lived in three different places in NYC. On average, I move to a new city every 5-to-7 years but move to a new apartment every 2-to-3 years. I moved a lot when I was younger because I was convinced all the “bad juju” was in the apartment instead of in my own head, following me wherever I went. Now I move because I’m constantly in search of a better apartment. But pre-New York City, my life was chaos. I didn’t open mail and I barely took care of myself. I was lucky if I made $38k-to-$45k any given year, up until 2016 when I became editor-in-chief of The Root. So I’ve been “stable” for exactly seven years out of my 20+ year career.

I make it a point to not worry about anything I can’t control, but last week I was depressed despite my best efforts. My usual down payments and investments into my future happiness didn’t work because what happened to bring me down was unplanned and beyond my control.

The problem? I have fibroids. Numerous painful and inconvenient fibroids in my uterus.

Now why I have all these fibroids nobody knows. They only know that they’re common in women, especially Black women. They could be hereditary. They could be environmental. Who knows? There’s a lack of interest in studying and investigating why your uterus turns on you by our academic institutions and medical professionals even though women are more than half the U.S. population. Instead of making birth control more accessible and figuring out better, healthier, and safer ways for women to family plan, we just accept that being miserable one week or more out of every month until you hit menopause is just part of life.

I’m probably perimenopausal at this point as the clock is rapidly running out on my fertility. Up until about four days ago, I’d been on my menstrual cycle for the longest I’ve ever had it — two freaking months. My hormones were all over the place as I was on the brink of a meltdown. I can’t take hormone-based birth control because I had a blood clot almost three years ago and most BC pills increase your chances of clots. In lieu of a tangible solution, I’ve run out of tampons three times now despite buying the most super of super-sized tampons in boxes with 36 tampons. And it’s been a lot of work to not take out my frustration and misery on those closest to me. My doctor, who is probably tired of me emailing her, has thrown all the spaghetti at the wall to see if any of it stops my cycle. For seven weeks, nothing really worked, until we tried the combo of an IUD insertion and Medroxyprogesterone tablets.

Despite the spaghetti wall, I feel like I’m just slow-walking into a hysterectomy in a few years, but anything that can stave off surgery, I’m for trying.

My hope though is that this IUD will get me across the finish line of making these fibroids more manageable. Meaning, my mood should be back to 100 percent in another week or so. I honestly can’t wait, as I’ve worked so hard to have a good life and I want to go back to enjoying it. I want to return to being happy.

Happiness is having all your bills on autopay knowing there’s enough money in your accounts to cover them with some left over. Happiness is living in a place that is easy and pleasant and feels like home because you made it so. Happiness is taking it easy, especially after a day that was hard. Happiness is a few close friends and a good family, knowing you are all tight even if you don’t talk every day. Happiness is giving (and receiving) a warm hug. Happiness is the beach. Happiness is embracing the day knowing that it’s brand new and “no one has ever used it before,” as my mother used to say. Happiness is buying an amazing, but expensive mattress because you know how valuable good sleep is. And happiness is knowing you can afford it.

It’s also knowing you have your own back if no one else does. You have to plan and put down those investments into your own happiness every day if you ever expect to enjoy anything about this life. Every day might not be perfect, but in general, you’ll be better off with more good days than bad.

Except for when things happen beyond your control.

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Peter Pan isn’t just a book, movie, and stage play. For a lot of people, it’s a way of life, as they never want to grow up. Neverland is New York City — the residence of perpetual teenagers with six-figure salaries and Manhattanite Multi-Millionaires and Billionaires. While NYC is a place of intense grind and struggle, for a select few, it’s just opening night parties and endless free shit. For those of this class, there is no incentive to grow up even as you continue to grow older. Even if they marry. Even if they have kids. They’re still living a very high life that doesn’t resemble anything like how the rest of America, outside of the coastal cities, lives.

When my baby sister and her son came to visit me in Brooklyn for the first time this year, she remarked that I lived like I was “still in college.” As in, I was single, and most of my friends were highly social and also single, and we liked to hang out at each other’s homes or attend fancy parties. By contrast, my sister, who is three years younger than me, is a homeowner, has a child, owns a car, and is, by all measures, an adult regularly doing adult things like managing her 401k and mowing her lawn.

Can’t relate.

Her life is not dissimilar from the one our parents led — of parent-teacher organizations and taking the kid to practice. I’m the one going “Look at this picture of me partying with Carole Radziwill!” to her as I collect photos with former and current members of the Real Housewives like people collect Pokemon cards.

Like, I’m a very serious person until I am not.

I peaked late in life. In fact, you could argue I’m still peaking as I prepare to turn 46 this weekend. All I can think about is how next year could be even better as I seize new opportunities and pursue new dreams. Which is probably why I love my birthday so much. It’s proof that I did it again. I made it another year when I could have easily ended my life in my turbulent 20s when I struggled the most with my Bipolar disorder and clinical depression.

Some people pine for the past. Their past bodies, their past selves. The only thing I miss from my 20s is the time I lost being sick. When other people were out having adventures, falling in love, having kids, or partying, I was broke, living in dust belt cities drinking tequila at noon to get through my anxiety as I entered and exited various mental health facilities.

Today is such a total vibe, I never want it to end.

I love living in Neverland. But while others clutch on to youth like a gun, I have no problem getting older and growing up. Mostly because, for me, getting older has been an overwhelmingly positive experience. Getting older meant better jobs, enhancing my career, which meant more money, which meant living in better places and having nicer things, which led to having adventures and making friends. I feel like I’m better looking and in much better shape than I was a decade ago. I look forward to being 80 and hopefully looking back on my life and being pleased with the places I went and the things I did while still being too overdressed for whatever brunch I’ve sidled up to. I want to be like my play grandmother, Mrs. Long, who used to babysit me when I was a child. She’s in her 90s and is as spry, active, funny, and beautiful as ever.

I want to be like my grandmother, Corine, who rocked fur coats and fly outfits her entire life. She was even dressed to the nines in her coffin when we sent her off to be with her Lord and Savior at 93. I know that growing old can be this wonderful, beautiful thing, and I want it. I embrace it, as I am not afraid. It’s why I take so many pictures of myself and those I love. I saw growing up how much joy old photos brought my father. Having proof of the life you once led with the people you cherished most, is priceless.

So, per usual, I’m throwing myself a birthday party even though this is a non-milestone year because I don’t care. I love my birthday! I love my birth month. And I love celebrating every year I have survived since I moved back home in defeat in 2007. Sixteen years ago, I was a mess and didn’t want to be here, but I stuck with it and, in the end, I figured it out. It was the hardest thing I ever did, but I did it. And now I’m so grateful that I get to reap the rewards of learning my lessons and growing from my failures.

Thanks for the 46 years. Here’s the 46 more.

Editor’s Note: The post is about someone, or a lot of someones in fact. Hence I’m light on specifics, but those who know? You know who you are.

Most people close to me know I’m not a judgy or prejudicial person. I can see the good in most people. I’m an optimist, a lover, and someone who thinks we’re stronger together as a society when we’re all working toward a shared goal. I don’t really have any prejudices that I’m aware of but one.

I can’t stand stupid people.

All my life I had to fight … stupidity and the strain of anti-intellectualism that permeates almost every aspect of American society. From the lowest of the low to some of the highest offices in the land, I have often argued that stupidity — and its cousins “willful ignorance” and “gullibility” — are at the root of so many problems in our society. Get the whole team together and you have a recipe for national disaster. There’s a reason why the first things maliciously controlling people attack are books, schools, educators, and intellectuals — because one of them might slip up, make some sense, and convince people to open up their eyes and deal with reality.

CAN’T HAVE THAT!

Ignorant masses are easier to manipulate and control. Combine that with suppressing wages and fomenting cultural in-fighting, and you have a permanent, but bizarrely proud-of-it underclass.

This often goes beyond our usual dividers of race, age, class, gender, sexuality, ability, ethnicity, and belief. Those dividers are real, but not insurmountable if we agree to respect the humanity of others. No, stupid people are not the domain of any one race, religion, or political party. Stupid people exist in every aspect of our Republic, on every level, and in every workplace, and are sometimes even inside your own home.

The Stupid™ is calling from inside the house, yo! Get out!

But before I go deeper into my rant, there is a HUGE difference between a person who has chosen willful ignorance as a lifestyle and someone who is simply “intellectually uncomplicated.” The intellectually uncomplicated usually aren’t at risk of hurting anyone but occasionally themselves. They don’t brag about how they detest reading or struggle with learning. They don’t give those who know more a hard time. In fact, they usually want to work with those who know more in hopes of improving their own situations. They have instincts and “guts” that are excellent bullshit detectors. They’re curious about things. They make an effort, even if it is difficult at times. They can have ambition. They can achieve great things. They’re often kind, loving, productive members of society. And the last thing they’d ever do is discourage someone — especially their own children, family, or friends — from doing better for themselves. In fact, they champion it and are proud when those they love do well. Maybe they’re intellectually uncomplicated from lack of opportunity or poverty. Maybe they don’t have the rigor or interest for more academic pursuits, but they’re at peace with that and aren’t fearful of others who do.

They’re down-to-earth good people and we need people like this for our society to function.

So, if you are a poor-to-average student who lives a good, decent life — whether simple or not — but contributes positively to society in some way shape, or form, you are not who I have beef with. You understand what your limits are. You know being “not into nerd stuff” doesn’t mean you don’t have tremendous value. You don’t have to lie or embellish. You’re proud to be who you are and where you’re from, but you don’t have to chop others off at the knees to bring them “down to size” in order to feel superior. You don’t even want to feel superior.

You mostly just want to be left alone.

I respect you. I like you. You are my friend. I’m probably related to you, as my descendants were made up of hard-working people denied an education thanks to rampant discrimination, poverty, and Jim Crow, but made the best of their lives anyway. So yeah, you’re all cool.

Stupid people tho? Maliciously, aggressively stupid people who are in denial about their lack of intellectual acumen and use their narcissism and self-loathing to set the world on fire? They’re my enemy. They are my kryptonite. They’re the only people capable of making me irrationally angry with a blind, stammering madness rooted in how the real villains in almost every aspect of my life as a nerd were people who thought I read books and knew big words to “spite them,” therefore I needed to be destroyed.

I’ve tried to befriend the maliciously stupid and got burned over and over. I’ve even dated and fallen for a few aggressively dumb, awful people. (They can occasionally be charismatic and I have a bad habit of confusing confidence with arrogance.) Each time this happened I found myself in a parasitic relationship with essentially Cthulhu or some other destroyer of worlds. Or at least my world. And maybe a few others. And like Batman, I have rules and a code, but the wickedly stupid have no code, no boundaries. They’re basically the Joker from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight but without his oddly meticulous planning skills or Heath Ledger’s fatal charm.

Some (stupid) people just want to watch the world burn.

Stupid people are always talking about how someone else needs to “know their place,” as if the place of The Stupid™ weren’t a garbage bin. And no shade to Oscar the Grouch, who is actually quite witty, The Stupid™ (who are unfortunately legion) are basically a bunch of bitter betties who rather than “do the work” or “make an effort,” prefer to sit in their dumpsters and shout at the people who do. (I.E. they are the folks who are filling your comment section with racism, sexism, various phobias, and typos. Pretty sure Doja Cat is rapping about these individuals on “Paint the Town Red.”) They value things with no value and celebrate schadenfreude. They are incapable of being happy for anyone who might have something they do not have. Everything is a competition and they’re losing, but rather than look within, they’re on social media actively ruining it for everyone else being the living embodiment of the Spider-Man pointing meme.

It can’t be their fault for their lot in life! It just can’t! It was their mother, father, teachers, government, employers, landlords, former friends, exes, the bus driver, Meghan Markle, Megan Thee Stallion, and Meegan, the smartest girl in their 8th grade geometry class’ fault.

And this would all be fine! I could accept them if it weren’t for the fact that they’re often both dumb and dangerous. They’re the people who hurt people over minor infractions — real and imagined. They stand for nothing while falling for everything. They shoot women for mocking them. They prefer to torch everything rather than live in a Democratic society where someone, sometimes might have something they don’t have, like a brain.

And don’t get it twisted, the malignantly stupid are not “dumb.” Not all of them anyway. Some of them have read a book! Some even used their parents’ last names to get into Ivy League schools and then, with tutors and sometimes straight-up cheating managed to barely graduate. Then, armed with their papers and pedigree, they go around saying the dumbest shit ever but insisting you have to listen to them because THEY WENT TO HAAARRRRVAAAARD and they never shut up about this! The Stupid™ know the tricks of the trade. They know that for many people appearances and how things seem equals what they are in the eyes of those easy to manipulate. If I rock Gucci does that mean I am rich and therefore can afford it? God no. It only means I blew a lot of money on a bag. Or that it’s fake. Or that the tags are still on it and I’m hoping to return it to Neiman Marcus. Or that I got it from some version of Rent-the-Runway.

It’s all window dressing. It’s all the Great and Powerful Oz until you pull back that dressing and see a small, pathetic con man.

A degree from Harvard is great. But if you’re a legacy who just had it all handed to you and you put forth minimal effort just to be in rooms your wealth and family name already put you in? Wack.

Saying things are a “meritocracy” when you just married well and your wife’s dad hired you to run his company? Wack.

Nepo babies who pretend like they weren’t born on third base, but actually hit a triple? Wack.

Saying you’re a self-made billionaire when daddy wrote a multi-million dollar check to get you started and you’re still not actually a billionaire, just mid-tier rich? Like, you’re the Applebee’s of rich people? So wack.

Either way, THE LIES!

But don’t let me stop with the rich and famous morons. We brokies have our own idiot crabs-in-a-bucket situation going on where some people on the bottom “don’t want you to have shit” and “want you to be broke and miserable just like them,” as my Granny used to say.

My Granny, a fiery and fashionable woman who rarely minced her words, worked hard to get her family out of a cycle of poverty that had them trapped for generations. All with an 8th grade education.

But not everyone in her life was “pleased” that she had gotten out of sharecropping and moved on to be a homeowner alongside her husband. But my Granny did see her haters as motivators. It wasn’t like she was gonna move out of her house to be “down.” Who does that? Instead, she and my Grandpa dressed to the nines when they went to church and were proud of their family and us grandkids, and all we’d accomplished.

She felt like if you didn’t like her, looked down on her nine kids, or wanted to accuse her of thinking she was “better” than others, cool.

Better to be not on a plantation than on one.

There’s an easy test to identify if you are among the malignantly stupid — mainly you will be offended, easily, by everything just written here because you know you live in a glass house built on a pile of shit. Rather than be introspective and make amends to those lives you’ve ruined, or just ignore this and pay it dust, you will try to destroy me with your illogic and irrationality. It won’t work. (You think you’re the first dummy to try to keep me down??? I am from Missouri and went to college in Southern Illinois, sir! I went to the integrated school with some of the “finest” future Klan members.) But hey, you can try! I’ll never knock the “try” even if it’s pointless and you’d be better served taking some reading comprehension courses.

Long story short, I always feel sorry for the nice nerd in the bad situation. Things like being the only “House” intellectual on Bravo Housewives and such. Here you are, a medical doctor in Miami or a four-degreed doctorate in Maryland, being thrown insults about shit that, quite frankly, does not matter. You’re trying to educate future generations and help save lives. Does it really matter if you have the latest Louboutins-on-loan, a Botox-ed to-hell-and-back face, a sugar daddy, or are the queen bee in a hive of nonsense? Not really. But these aren’t BAD things in and of themselves! I have no problem with looking good, feeling good, and buzzing over your queendom while making your paper by whatever legal means you choose to make it. It’s only bad when you’re surrounded by people for whom these are the only things that matter, and do you know the places where what only matters are the superficial and skin deep?

In high school and Hollywood, my friend.

Well, I’m not professionally pretty, so I probably won’t make it in Hollywood very far. And while I graduated from high school, I’m very much like my father who said to himself when he looked at his childhood bedroom that he shared with his two brothers for the last time: “I ain’t never coming back here.”

So props to all the brainy folks in dumb situations. I came from the land of stupid and I ain’t never going back. But to those who choose to or can’t leave? Thoughts and prayers, girl. Thoughts and prayers.

If you know me, you know I’m always writing a book.

I have one novel I’ve been working on for more than a decade and other, unfinished novels in the hundreds of pages I haven’t touched in two years or more. I wrote a historical novel during the pandemic that’s an amazing high concept but in dire need of being … completely rewritten.

Right now I’m working on my memoir/humor book about my life with Bipolar disorder. It’s a humor book because, c’mon, I basically grew up like a Cosby kid who could never have “big fun” because my parents wouldn’t let me do anything. There are no real wild stories about irresponsible sex or wantonness unless you count my affinity for “virginal” booty-popping — which is when you’re a virgin but you dance like you’re not and freak out if a boy pays attention to you).

While my story, at turns, can be sad, my “rock bottom” was less sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, and more like Jessie Spano being “so excited” while hopped up on caffeine pills. Meaning it was sad, small, and kind of pathetic. It involved working at Macy’s in a dying mall in Florissant, Mo., living in my parents’ basement getting drunk off boxed wine from Target, taking some Klonopin, and then calling the suicide prevention hotline looking for any reason to stay on this earth.

I’ve been working on the proposal, off and on, for about three years or longer now because my biggest problem since becoming an adult writer is one of completion. There are just so. Many. More. Distractions now! Plus I write about me better when it’s not about me, if that makes sense. I’m too close to my own subject and get lost in the belly button lint of my life.

But with summer ending and Labor Day weekend behind me, it’s time to get to work and fix these manuscripts. Yes, “Fix-it fall” is upon us, or me at least, as I focus on writing, working, personal growth and therapy, exercising (I found folks to play tennis with, y’all!), saving money, and making money. Much like how fall has always been about “back to school,” it’s back to work, back to the never-ending grind that I’ve been on since I was about 13 years old, dreaming of being a published author.

My goal now though, is to finally get this done — by any means necessary — and get this book proposal to market, killing the writing and making money birds with one stone, but I do sometimes wish I could do what I used to do as a kid where I was so bored I had no choice BUT to use my imagination to keep me sane.

Back in the day, I could finish my shitty little novels as a child because I had infinite free time. School came easy to me and I had a non-existent social life thanks to parents whose idea of “fun” for their teenagers was to tell them to “stay in the house.” But as an adult, I’d come up with great concepts, write the shit out of the character development, get lost in the relationships and psychology of the characters, then get bored by the time the plot kicks in as distractions like work and dating would come arise.

Most of my novels are like the TV show Seinfeld — they’re books about nothing, as I’d rather prattle on for pages explaining why a character is so messed up rather than just show them doing something messed up.

But this is a pattern for me, a prolific writer who used to update her blog 6 times a day for years, and once wrote about 2 to 3 reported pieces daily for local newspapers at the start of my journalism career, then would go home and write the longest, comic-book inspired screenplays back before comic book movies were a thing.

(I kid you not. Somewhere on an old hard drive is a 12-episode saga loosely based on DC and Marvel characters, but they’re all people of color and it’s somehow really about mental health, the military-industrial complex, and journalism. Hmmm, maybe I should dust that one off?)

But I’ve always been writing. Even as a child, I wrote a little illustrated flipbook for my baby sister and made my own little “magazine” called The Tuesday Times. I wrote my first (terrible) novel at 13 in a large spiral notebook that was 178 pages written in long-hand cursive. With no portable laptops or smartphones back in 1990, several ballpoint pens (in green ink for some reason) and this thick-ass notebook were how I wrote my novel on the go — usually at school, during class when I was bored out of my mind.

My teachers thought I was taking meticulous notes, but I was actually writing a neo-noir-style detective novel inspired by a short story in the “graphic novel” Garfield: His Nine Lives with a main character named after the character Harry Stone of Night Court, my favorite TV show at the time.

(Remember, I was a child and these were my inspirations. A cartoon cat built for capitalism and a TV show with Marsha Warfield. It was a more innocent time, y’all!)

After that foray, I would go on to write about three or four more “notebook novels” throughout junior high and high school, mostly about college kids (thanks to my other favorite TV show A Different World). Mostly because I hadn’t learned the mantra “write what you know” yet. I remember I once used the term “over-sexed” on the “cover” of one of these novels, alarming my 7th-grade Speech teacher who, brilliantly, asked to read my book rather than jump to conclusions. She quickly upon purusal realized I had no concept of sex whatsoever, didn’t know how sex worked, and there was no actual sex in the novel. I was using the term, incorrectly, to mean “girl-crazy” for my male main character. She seemed so pleased to hand the book back to me knowing I was just a goofy child with a large vocabulary that I only barely understood.

I didn’t attempt to write what I knew until my senior year in high school where I tried to write a novel about high school but got bored halfway through it because I preferred to write a 200-page “screenplay” on my family’s old Hewlett-Packard personal computer inspired by the Jodeci album Diary of a Mad Band and a Vibe Magazine article about their story of going from gospel singing choir boys to carrying machetes on stage. I even drew a picture from the cassette tape art that still hangs somewhere in my familial home in Florissant, Mo. It was in my bathroom in the basement for DECADES.

Eventually, my writerly inspirations would mature right along with me, especially after taking African-American literature, English 101-102, creative writing, and media theory classes at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in the mid-to-late 90s. I would go on to read James Agee, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Ralph Ellison, James Weldon Johnson, Joan Didion, Alice Walker, Joe Eszterhas, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Wallace Thurman, Nella Larson, and more. I would write papers about my favorite writers in the style of epic, tragic Greek poems and funny short stories. My favorite Black writers were mostly from the Harlem Renaissance period and all my favorite white writers were now old “new” journalists. I even named my one and only pet cat after Hunter S. Thompson (the “S” stood for “Shaggy.”)

At the time, SIUE’s mass communications program was in transition and being overhauled, so it was exceptionally rigorous and very grounded in reality as my professors all were former working journalists, some quite cynical about it, who did not mince words about how tough this industry would be. I would go on to rule the roost as the editor-in-chief of the student paper, The Alestle, for two years in a row, out of the 3-and-a-half-years I was in undergrad.

Unfortunately, while my writing improved drastically with college alongside my first two journalism jobs in Midland, TX and Bakersfield, Calif., my completion skills for my book projects became non-existent. Again, I could write 100 pages of exposition but would be so worn out by the time the plot kicked in I wouldn’t finish the book.

Today I have a lot going on. I’m on this fitness and personal health journey that I’ve been adamantly into since about 2021 — graduating from high-intensity training classes to playing tennis and rediscovering pilates. I’m finally making some real headwinds on some long-standing mental health issues I neglected around my spending and dating life. I worked with an amazing executive coach for nearly two years — the incredibly brilliant and thoughtful Sandra Cohen, who helped me adapt to my new role as EIC of HuffPost while getting me to “silence” my inner critic that kept undermining my success. I’m sweeping up the cobwebs of my life and tying up the loose ends. I’m reinvesting in myself and my relationships and experiencing this amazing thing called “growth.”

Meaning — This adult is adulting as hard as one can adult. Now I just need to … finish this proposal, work with my editor on polishing it, and get this bad boy to market — again, by any means necessary.

Will it be any good? God, I hope so. I hope didn’t half-write thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts and screenplays to NOT see one make it to the finish line. Much like how I felt like I just needed one romantic situation to make it past four dates (or, shit, one date) to eventually find real love, I just need one book, y’all. One book to ideally lead to the many.

I’m working on it. I’m working on everything. Let’s get it going this fall.