But think about it for a minute.

There are so many moving parts of life moving all at once, almost always invisible to the human eye. If we think of the world and the universe as people, try to visualize with me, will you? Please tell me that, if you’re reading this, you were taught about the skill of visualization while learning your comprehension skills.

Big Momma Universe is sitting (mine looks translucent, shaped like one of the hazard people in Monsters, Inc., and all of the background is such a deep blue, with twinkles and stars and purples, very astrological). And she’s seeing all these things, and millisecond after millisecond she’s rewriting, creating, assigning—who knows what. Hypothetically of course, because there’s been no one to bring back anything and tell us that it couldn’t true.

So what if we ourselves are walking, breathing second chances, yet they tell us to understand that we are living for the first time?

A girl in 1944 could’ve been understanding a cause to a disease so in-depth that we could be able to modify our genetics naturally just so future lines have a smaller chance of contracting the illness. But then she dies. Didn’t document, hadn’t shared her ideas and theories, so the work is gone. But maybe it’s like clear ink; it only appears to be gone if the thing needed to make it reappear interacts with it. That could be us in a million different moments. So we, too, could be just walking second chances.

I believe in chances. I try so hard to combat everything that I’m taking in on these apps. Even when you aren’t meaning to hear think pieces, you scroll a bit too long and you’re bound to be hit with someone’s unsolicited thoughts.

Even the ones that throw a hook on it and lie on a scenario that never happened just to seem like they had a reason to talk about it, when we know they didn’t.

Especially when it comes to how we navigate relationships, changing in life, etc., I try to push all the other convos out of my head. So I do believe in chances.

There have been so many things that I have done for the last time in my life, some with knowing that it was going to be the last time and some without. And some of them I wish I had a second chance to go back and do all over again, but the thing is, we never will. We will never get the chance to relive something exactly as it happened. So we mourn that moment silently, sometimes before our brain can even process how it might affect us, because we are in the moment.

I’m coming to—what I was about to call an end— a detour at a crossroad that I’ve been at before.

I’ve been sitting crisscross applesauce in the middle, practicing that faith that everyone wants me to have. Practicing letting go of control, even if just a little (my therapist is going to get a KICK out of these last couple months of my life when I can start going back to her).

And I’m a little excited, but also very aware of what either decision means.

The main question circles me in the middle of that crossroad: “If you made this decision, and this is how things are panning out for you, why are you leaning so closely to that instead of choosing the other path?”

And the simple answer is comfort. But, like always at these crossroads, security ain’t always where the comfort resides. And if you let yourself get so comfortable that that is no longer secure, baby, it may be time to try the other path.

Ouuu…

I’m jumping around like an auntie in church typing that. Don’t you love when you get to preach to yourself without someone chiming in?

This could be my second chance to walk closer to everything I’ve been saying I want. Big Momma Universe is like, “My child, my baby, my tiny, tiny bird, I tried to let you do what you wanted to do, but I can’t watch you struggle no more, my child.” It’s like she ripped a hair right out from the root, follicle intact, and braced me to tell me it was going to hurt.

And it did.

When you have been doing all the things you know how to do and there is literally no way out of this corner, you have to make a different choice to get yourself out of the corner.

If I want to take Big Momma Universe up on her offer of a second chance, I will have to leave some of my bag-lady baggage there. All of my little mementos and things will have to stay, and I just bring myself.

The attachment we grow to our things…finally having something to call our own. Something we didn’t need anyone else to obtain.

The same shackle that sends us into overdrive when we finally get out of the grips of what formerly oppressed us is the same shackle that keeps us in that corner. The things that once made us feel buoyant and full of life are now the same things dragging us down, attempting to nail us in place.

So funny how quickly things change when you start leaving things up to chance and not doing things on purpose.

So I sit again, in the middle of my crossroad, and I know this will just be another thing I will not be able to step around. Either I stay in the corner, spinning in circles trying to save myself, OR literally save myself and give me a chance by picking something different. On purpose.

I think I’ll leave these thoughts here and let my spirit settle a bit while I’m sitting at my crossroad and convince myself that the lane I’m running fastest away from is the lane where I need to be.

What about you? Do you believe in second chances? Can you truly allow yourself to surrender to the whim of possibility and choose something different?

𑣲.

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When will you?

Come up for air, that is.

I feel the air rub against my cheeks just as it ran through the trees hair, but I still can’t seem to catch my breath enough to say the things I need. But I’ve perfected “fine” so well in my 26 years of living that no one sees me trying to catch my breath. When my coach told me there was no air down there, I still bent over, pretending to stretch my arms and my back, knowing there was absolutely air down there and that I needed the reprieve.

My toes wiggle through the grass, so I know I haven’t just floated away, filling my head with thoughts that I literally have no space for. So the butterflies become beautiful, and I wonder what patterns they have on their wings while silently wishing the wasps that continue to surround ONLY my car would just sting me so I can have an actual cause for at least one of the pains I’ve been feeling.

All of this is noise. But quiet feels like the only way to label this time.

Shutting my mouth when I really want to respond, rebuttal, defend. Shutting my emotions off when I really could use a hug, or a nice back rub with a glass of wine I don’t have to pay for. The acts of service that truly take things off my plate and don’t just move them around for me to later discover that they are still mine to handle.

Sucking it up, essentially, so that I can get through this time whole—however whole presents itself to me.

It’s one of those very apparent parts of life where you decide to change, not change by chance.

The literal quiet is as much protection for others as it is for myself: protection for the relationships and arrangements I have so that when it is time, I can respond from my highest self and not the one thats just surviving. I’m still living in the aftermath of times when I’ve let fear, avoidance, and overstimulation end things I once held dear, realizing what it took to hold other people’s feelings at the same time as my own.

I don’t want to repeat those patterns. I think, truly, that this is the period of change that people initially mistake for peace—the non-reactive. But I’ve been here before. I know this is the thin line we toe when trying to figure things out before we react, only for it to become another act of self-abandonment.

I’ve been humming my way through the days for months now, songs built on whatever thought seems to be on repeat the moment I realize I haven’t taken them drugs today. Take the drugs, honey. Save yourself one less cuss-out this week, okay.

That wordless rhythm gives me a bit of control over the pacing of time that keeps seeming to pass me by.

Life is real quiet, but it’s everything but still.

Often, when we hear someone sharing the testimony of their entrance into a new season, it’s, “Oh, this was needed and rejuvenating.” But all I ever think is, When did you feel the rejuvenation? Because anytime I have entered into any space that I wanted to be in, it has felt like the entry fee has been every layer of protection I’ve ever worn. A final nod that says, bitch, that’s what you called protection?. It laughs at what now stands on the other side of the doorframe.

But there was a time when new seasons did, in fact, feel rejuvenating, even when things weren’t perfectly laid out or figured out. Like deciding not to renew a contract at a job, not because I was being fired or laid off, but because I just didn’t want to do that anymore. Deciding that the small town that housed that opportunity never served me and that I didn’t want to spend another 365 days of my life somewhere that didn’t fully make me happy or contribute to my happiness.

I just took the leap, moved, and said I was going to make it good. And I did.

Quiet is the only word I can find to describe this season I’m in. It’s so quiet all I can hear is noise: the rejections to jobs I didn’t even want in the first place, the chime of emails from leasing agents checking back in to see if I’m going to spend $2,200 on 1,000 square feet, the cries of my baby who can’t seem to locate the pacifier that is attached to his pajamas—the same one I’ve made a plan to ditch three times this year.

There is something almost funny about trying to figure out my entire life while also caring for my medically complex son, knowing my worth and having to settle for less, knowing the value I bring and still forcing myself to sit at tables where, when I give the same “bluntness and straightforwardness” that they give to me, it’s labeled dismissive or uninterested. When really, do you know how interested someone has to be to share any kind of emotion?

And so I say, I cannot be the problem in every room. As I journal, plan, and apply, I ask for where I am the problem to be revealed to me in a way I can see it and receive it. An ongoing mantra that I’m never above correction, but as a highly intelligent woman, I know I’m not crazy either.

A tiny Lizzie McGuire like figure is pacing my mind constantly, trying to build new desires after the ones she was sure were hers to keep turn out to never have been hers at all. Is the nuclear family actually what she wanted, or did she want a family that wasn’t wrapped up in struggle and survival? And all the things that she feels like she’s supposed to want at this stage in life, but has absolutely no interest in? Or perhaps she’s trying to find the balance of still being the lover she is, while having moments where she doesn’t have to make sure someone else is happy, but only herself. Because doesn’t she deserve something even before all that she will give?

She sits with that thought in the tiny chair in the corner when the pacing becomes too much, trying to figure out how to hold space and hold herself accountable for all the decisions that led her here and all the ones she had no control over. And she just sits. Quiet. In the loudest place possible.

In the last few months, I’ve walked through grief, love, heartache, hope, passion, and needing. And though these are large experiences, they too have sounded like their own kind of quiet hum, but I’ve just had to keep moving through them.

If I were completely honest, I’ve been trying to do more than survive, even if I have nothing tangible to show for it. And that’s worth something to me.

Every time I say no when naturally I would’ve said yes. Every time I didn’t rearrange things to accommodate someone else when naturally I would’ve. Every time I’ve extended myself only to be rejected in some way, I’ve continued. Every time I allow someone else to care for my child, knowing there is going to be something that irritates me when they return him. Every time I get myself something with the small funds I’m bringing in because, don’t I deserve to dance in my season of maintaining? To have something, even if small, for myself?

Facing my hurt. Facing the declining balance in my bank account during this job search post-layoff. Facing the uncomfortable fact that I literally have no clue where life goes from here.

I found myself asking: if all my “right” and “good” decisions for me haven’t produced fruit, where do I go? What do you do when you know you can’t return to the bad habits that never served you, that only left you feeling more empty and foolish?

And honestly, I have been sitting with this question, asking and hoping to find an answer or receive an answer, and it has yet to come. The only thing that I’ve heard myself echo is: sit.

And wait.

And it is this question that reinforces the need for quiet. Only I can save me now—not that anyone has come to my aid before. But this season requires tender patience and devotion. It requires me to trust myself, something I don’t have much of put away for much of anything, even when I don’t know what is to come.

Being surrounded by people and also reminding yourself not to perform is like being on stage doing the acting but also being in the audience, reminding yourself that the people on stage are actors and have real lives.

It’s nice to vent and all, but the people you are venting to—even if it is a therapist—9/10 also don’t know what to do. And honestly, after being encouraged to share and lean and need and all those things, only to be met with “I know you’ll figure it out” or “It’s all going to work out” feels more like a slap in the face, a kick to my spine, a shattering the mirror of my real life I’m trying to show rather than offering a hand on my back in my time of being down. This is what happens when your community has already seen you survive so much but doesn’t hear the exhaustion from surviving.

But I keep those things to myself as well. I leave those conversations in the same places they started because I have enough emotions to carry, and feeling unloved and unsupported can’t join me here.

So the silence that my quiet provides asks the questions:

What happens when you have done everything you know to do, and the only instruction you keep receiving is to sit still?

How do you continue believing that your life is moving when there is no visible evidence that it is?

How do you learn to distinguish between being stuck and being still?

And as I continue to open my windows each morning to a new day, I hope these answers come to me more gently than they did in the first few months of this new season. I hope I learn that stillness is not the same thing as stagnation, that quiet does not mean nothing is happening, and that I can trust myself even when I cannot yet see where all of this is taking me.

For now, I’ll sit. I’ll wait. I’ll hum. I’ll keep coming up for air.

And maybe that is enough for today.

ᥫ᭡

Thank you for spending a little time here with me. I hope this gives you permission to sit in your own quiet for a little while, to come up for air, and to be gentle with yourself in the seasons that don’t come with clear instructions.

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a sharp memory. I credit that, truly, to my self-identified woo-woo, but we won’t get into that here. Being the empath that I am, it doesn’t surprise me that I remember things so vividly. My earliest memories go back to around four years old. It wasn’t until I started having deeper conversations with people that I realized most don’t remember that far back.

A gift and a curse.

Oftentimes, in my daydreams, I think about the moments I never documented. Like the first time I kissed a man I knew I loved immediately. There’s no video, but I wish there was. I wish that when I’m telling my girlfriends about it, I could pull it up and show them the exact moment I’m describing. I want to see it outside of my own brain. I want to witness my memory the way I witnessed the moment.

I don’t often share the story of my son’s birth with people, especially because they expect it to be some somber-ass story due to my preterm delivery. But it’s actually one of the biggest sitcom moments of my life. Funny is such an understatement.

I wish my birth plan had gone accordingly in that way. I wish I’d had my photographer there, as planned, and my camera set up to film me laboring and giving birth. I find myself doing random things and remembering the night I gave birth, wishing I could put it on the TV and watch it over and over again. To giggle. To cry. To have a moment out loud that says, though it’s my baby’s birthday, this moment is mine too.

But the only people left to tell that story are the ones who were in the operating room.

Lately, I’ve been thinking so deeply about the moments in between the ones we document, especially as the person who’s almost always behind the camera.

This is a quality I’ve had for a very long time. The amount of Vivitar cameras my mom bought me as a child is actually insane. My momma need shares in that company. I watched my uncle tote around a variety of cameras at family functions, and he may never know that he captured some of the only photos I have left of myself before middle school

.

Maybe that’s where all of this started.

My love for preserving life has allowed me to become the best fly on the wall. I hold a lens in my hand, trying my hardest to capture a moment exactly as my eyes see it—exactly as my body is feeling it. I want to make sure I caught the flirting happening between two people because that photo might one day become the image they point to when they tell the story of how they fell in love. I want to capture people dancing because, these days, all I want to do is go freaking dancing. I want to capture joy and life alongside every other experience this life gives us.

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As someone who’s been documenting her life for over ten years now, I’m always mindful of other people’s desire to be captured—or not to be captured. I never want to shove a camera in someone’s face or include them in my little vlogs because not everyone feels the same quiet peace that I do while documenting. I’m always worried about being a bother.

Probably why I don’t have many good pictures of myself.

This year, I’ve been trying to detach from my desire to be captured exactly the way I imagine it. Which is incredibly hard when the very reason I want to be photographed is because I want the image to take me back to that exact day, that exact feeling. I already see the photograph before it’s ever taken.

Even when I put the camera in someone else’s hands, set everything to auto exactly how I want it, and explain the vision, they still don’t have my eyes.

So when the session is over and I’m swiping through the photos and none of them are “good,” the artist in me—the little girl who’s doesn’t have many digitized and physical memories—starts to unravel. The anger bubbles in my stomach. My thoughts begin to race. It’s fine. Don’t say anything. Let it go.

But even when I try, whatever comes out of my mouth usually sounds harsher than I intended. The atmosphere changes. Sometimes it even starts an argument.

This year, I’ve really been trying not to be that person anymore because I can finally see how my desire for execution, when placed in the hands of people who don’t have my vision—and sometimes not my skill—impacts the people doing me a favor.

Because that’s exactly what they’re doing.

They could’ve said no.

It hurts them. It creates tiny paper cuts in our relationship. And even when I’m telling myself, Come on, Lex. It’s just a picture, and while I absolutely agree...

It is just a picture.

It’s also so much more than that to me.

Because I’ve realized the camera was never really about taking pictures.

It’s always been about preservation.

Maybe it’s one of those hyper-independent eldest daughter things. I’m much more confident alone with my tripod and my camera than I am asking someone else to capture me. I don’t have to feel like I’m rushing or using up too much of someone’s time. If I don’t get the shot on the first try, I never feel like a bother asking myself to try again, and again, and again. But when someone else is behind the camera, it starts to feel like, Lex cares more about this picture than anything else. Especially when part of your career is literally capturing your life, to people who aren’t in that line of work, it can feel incredibly cringy.

I wish I was captured the way I capture other people.

Randomly. Off guard. In my own little moments.

My favorite thing is slipping one of my little digital cameras—or even just my iPhone—out of my pocket and capturing something no one else noticed. Like when my homegirl and her husband are together just doing their thing. Things I know feel like second nature to them, but from the outside looking in, I can see whatever love has bonded them. I can tell they existed before parenthood, too, and I love that. It makes me happy to witness what I believe love looks like.

They might look at the photo and think, Aw, this is cute, because they’re deep inside their own lives. But for me, it’s a moment of being noticed and not perceived. Looked at with soft eyes.

I want more of that for myself.

To be admired so deeply that it’d eat someone alive if they didn’t capture me in that exact moment. Or even just a, Let me grab this real quick. She may want to have it.

Because I do.

I want to see myself outside of myself. I want something tangible to hold my memories. I want proof that I was here the way I remember being here.

I wrote this once in the Notes on my Substack: I think every Black woman should be documenting herself.

What better archive than the one you choose to live alongside, rather than leaving your story for someone else to file away?

I believe that so deeply.

We need to write, and paint—even if terribly. We need to sing, and dance, and craft, and capture. We need to do it for ourselves. For history. For all the women who fought, lost their lives, were silenced, doubted, and erased. For every adjective that belongs in this sentence but still somehow isn’t enough.

We have to because they couldn’t.

Too often, their memories only get to live through the ways other people perceived them, received them, and decided to tell their stories.

When I create as the artist I am, I think about preservation in everything I touch. Even the smallest things. I think about preserving fingerprints. About the wedding dress tucked into a box in the back of someone’s closet for years and years because someone decided it was worth protecting. I think about the way Michelle Obama’s clothing can only remain on display for a limited time before it’s carefully stored away again so the garment itself can survive.

To someone who doesn’t find value in preservation, all of that probably feels excessive.

But what you care for today gets to continue making history tomorrow.

It’s the same reason our grandmothers hung Obama and Michelle calendars on their refrigerators or framed their photos on the wall like they were family. At one point in their lives, they never imagined they’d see Black people become President and First Lady. So they preserved the evidence that they had.

Because history isn’t promised to us.

Who knows if it’ll be another 220 years before it happens again? And hell, by then people may not even be able to identify as Black without someone insisting they’re being excluded or othered or whatever new language society decides to use to explain away our existence.

That’s why every act of Black joy feels like resistance.

Because so much has always been taken from us.

We must not treat ourselves like the porcelain dolls we were given as children, only to be told not to touch.

We need to touch.

We need to smell and taste and fall and bleed and cry and laugh and fail and win and lose and love.

We need all of it.

Every nick.

Every bruise.

Every scar.

Proof that we were here.

And we need to start telling the story before people think they have the right to tell it for us.

ᥫ᭡

Thank you for spending a little time here with me. I hope this reminds you to step into your own frame, to preserve the moments you’re living, and to see yourself with the same tenderness you offer everyone else.

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Until next time.

Every year on my son’s birthday, it pours rain. The day he was born, the fireworks did not linger into the next morning. Gloomy skies wrapped themselves around the window of my hospital room. The next year, Tropical Storm Chantal altered all the plans we had to celebrate. But I woke up at 4 a.m. to change my plans. This year, it held out for him until he made his wish and cheered himself into two.

Then it poured.

I don’t remember who exactly told me that rain on your birthday is a good omen. That it means good luck and blessings. It made me feel less sad that, though my baby be Cancer like his momma, he hadn’t had a summer day of sun just for him.

I always say that as he passed through my body, I gave my luck to him. A motherly offering of well wishes. In return, I’ve coined myself favored instead. Every birthday, the sky has cried before I could. And maybe that’s mercy. Maybe it refuses to let me carry all the weeping alone.

This week, two years ago, I held my son for the first time.

His heart monitor kept time beside us. The respiratory therapist whispered not to move too quickly. I remember staring at his face, covered by the noisy CPAP, terrified that breathing too deeply would somehow rattle him back into his isolette. I had imagined motherhood as rocking chairs and lullabies and comfy pajamas and slippers as we matched in our diapers. Instead, mine arrived wrapped in chest tubes and intubations, in wires and latex gloves.

Weeks after his birthday, I touched his skin ungloved. His hair was softer than I could’ve imagined. No more than two handfuls big, no longer than my forearm, the respiratory therapist placed him on my chest. And maybe, for the first time, I felt like a mother.

The thunderous nature of my entrance into motherhood has caused me to learn to step lightly. It reminds me that this very thing is as precious as it seems. Still so very delicate, like my one-pound baby.

Two years later, I’m still cradling the same baby to my chest. He still looks up at me like I am talking too much. The vibrations from a CPAP machine are now little hand taps as he hugs me back. I think this is as holy as it gets.

My son sat in his first church recently. A sanctuary turned into a communal space for gathering, but it still be holy.

My son will never know pews the way that I do.

He’ll never know the hard candy at the bottom of Grandma’s purse or the digging for coins as the ushers came around to usher us to the altar. He’ll never know the excitement of hearing the coins chime against the offering plates.

But he scaled the pew like the kids I watched in the back row of church. We were never allowed back there. The Lord’s house didn’t allow for no playing. And the back Sunday school room was open to anyone who seemed to need it. We were to sit in our family-appointed pew. Sit prim and proper and quiet next to generations of people who’d come because my grandma told them to.

Gripping the wood of the pew that was older than he and I combined, his bare feet squished the red teddy fabric beneath them. He knocked on the wooden panel next to our seat and looked back at me to join him. We created our own pocket of music amongst the poems being read beside us. He turned over my shoulder, offering smiles and “hi’s” to the people in the rows behind us. He climbed over into the arms of a man I did not know. I watched as he bounced and laughed and played with him. He came back to me again.

There are still times I believe only I can keep him alive. Only recently have I offered myself days of reprieve. Months in the NICU will teach a mother that. Watching other women care for your baby before you’ve even had a chance to look at him will teach you that. It convinces you that vigilance is love. But watching him laugh in someone else’s arms, I had to swallow my survival and make room for trust. Because maybe that moment was his to have alone.

He’ll never know pews the way I have.

But he’ll know auditoriums, and they’ll be holy.
He’ll know stages, and they’ll be holy.
He’ll know open arms and warm hearts, and that’ll be holy.

He, he will know that he is holy.

Because holiness isn’t found inside stained glass, though he yelled for me to bring him to it, to run his fingers against the colors.

It lives wherever love refuses to leave.

It lived in my mother and his father, who laid eyes on him and came back to let me know he was okay before I could even get off the operating table.

It lived in the long walks down corridors and underground tunnels, though exhaustion had stolen my smile.

It lives every time he reaches for me without wondering whether I’ll catch him.

It lived in birthday candles burning just before the rain came.

I read a ton of books before my ushering happened. I read a ton of poems that sang my sweet boy’s pitter-pattering feet to sleep. Every night, I still share words with him.

Nikki Giovanni wrote Mothers for mothers like me to find. She taught me a poem her mother taught her, and she taught her son.

i see the moon
the moon sees me
god bless the moon
and god bless me

She says,

we must learn
to bear the pleasures
as we have borne the pains

Maybe that is what these last two years have been asking of me. To stop waiting for joy to apologize for suffering. Because the apology ain’t coming. But to let them sit beside each other, with their own cups of respect. To believe that miracles can arrive carrying both sunshine and rain.

Since the birth of my precious baby boy, I’ve done my best to hold the pleasure and the pain. Decorating his bedside as his weight slowly increased from 500g to 750g. Every gram earned feeling like another prayer answered.

@herblackhandIn this family, there is nothing too small for celebration. 🎉 I struggle to celebrate myself but this journey has brought out my inner celebrator and planner. I know the baby won’t remember any of this, but I will. As much as people tell me the #nicu will become a fiction of my imagine once we’re all home I know that I’ll remember it too vividly. Most of the projects that fill my baby’s bed space are to keep me from going insane and to give me some sense of control in this situation but are also to honor my child. To fill the space with joy and celebration. The baby may be receiving around the clock from others but each day I’m able to do more things independently in my own way. And like always…one day closer to coming home ♥️ Shoutout to @Dollar Tree for the 🎈 #postpartum #pretermlabor #prematurebaby #incompetentcervix #pretermbaby #pregnantlife #blackmoms #nicuawarenessmonth #postpartumrecovery #23weeker #nicumom #nicumama #neonatal #preemie #preemiestrong #nicujourney #nicustory #healing #selfcompassion #growth #lifeafternicu #nicuawareness

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Collaging custom art for him weekly to show my admiration. Fighting with fire codes and bitter nurse managers, trying to give my boy a piece of heaven in hell.

Don’t they know he be holy!

Don’t they know he was ushered by the rain.

Before I knew his cry, the sky announced him.

Every July, the clouds gather to witness him. Ancestors guiding his feet as he’s learning to walk. Calming his breathing as he learned to sip from a straw. Dimming the lights in his room to allow him to rest.

They wait until my boy laughs.
Or sings.
Or dances.

Until he blows out another candle.

Until another year has found him.

And then—

they let go.

Whispering,

same time next year.

❃ 𓆸 ❃

Thank you for making room for my words today. I hope you leave carrying a little more tenderness than you arrived with. If you’d like to keep reading, subscribe. If you’d like to pour back into this work, you can leave a tip. Until next time.

I turned Alexa on — not Apple Music’s pillowtalk playlist, but the rotation of songs that made me sway and sing. I dabbed the beauty blender, flicked the brush across my face, lined my lash line with the new black liner that arrived earlier that week. I had a pimple — an actual sized one that lowkey hurt — and I let her sit. Proof of youth. Proof of humanity. You can’t dress up and make up to wash away that part of yourself, no matter how the end result may alter your perception.

I pulled apart the intact spirals from my flexrod set and saw her unthawing.

There she was.

@herblackhandLove a midnight curl! #microlocs #curlylocs #flexirods

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My eyes gave drama. My hair was full and bouncy. My perfumes mingled with each other the way I’d hoped. The dress fit beautifully. I had spent a whole week trying to figure out how to present this woman, and here she was — assembled, whole, ready. I didn’t need anyone to confirm it. I saw her first.

When I came around the corner, the room shifted.

I felt it before I saw it — the way the air changed, the way attention moved. The night confirmed everything the mirror had already told me, and something in my spine responded. I sat a little straighter. I walked a little slower. The admiration wrapped around me like the softest silk scarf resting on my shoulders — weightless, warm, entirely mine to receive.

I had spent so long prompting the world to see me. Asking for it. Angling for it. Performing for it.

That night I just walked in.

And the night walked toward me.

We were only slightly late to my reservation.

The restaurant was emptier than I’d imagined but they had a DJ and the music filled the space that the crowd didn’t. Now was he good…ehh debatable. His set felt more like an unexperienced lover. A jerking—edging. And not the kind we like. More like I love you then we breakup and now we’re back together then we break up again. Whiplash.

I’d been practicing something lately — letting the night take the lead. Not managing, not directing, trying not to fill the silence with my own noise. But here I didn’t have to practice. The evening had its own momentum and I felt myself surrender to it naturally, the way you exhale without deciding to.

We ordered whatever we wanted. We danced at the table. We laughed loudly. We talked with the waitress about her trip to Punta Cana and my trip to Colombia. We knew we’d be hungry again before the night was over because we always were, and there was something tender about that — the way a night can know you. The bill came and I let it be handled and didn’t make it complicated. Small surrenders. Little acts of receiving.

Then the lounge.

The drinks, the music, the body moving without thinking about how it looked moving. For a moment I was in the middle of a dance floor without a single care about who was watching or what they thought or what story they were telling themselves about me. I was exactly where I wanted to be and it showed.

The night flirted with me on the way out. Lingered at the edges. Reached for my hand as the it found its way to its next doors opening. And for the first time in a long time I didn’t rush toward what I wanted — I waited for it to come to me. Because I’d been rewiring something in myself. Learning that what is freely given can be trusted. That you can’t categorize a gift as real if you prompted it yourself.

So I waited.

And the night gave it to me anyway.

The weekend had its own language and I let it speak.

We held each other. We rested. We ate. We watched movies that didn’t have any animation — which sounds small but felt like an act of being known. We laughed at things that didn’t need to be explained. I didn’t ask for reassurance. I didn’t reach for more than what was being offered. I let the hours be what they wanted to be without my hands shaping them into something I needed.

This was the new thing I was learning about myself — that my silence was not absence. That my stillness was not passivity. That when I stopped filling every room with my wanting, something else rushed in to fill it instead. I had spent so long driving that I’d never known what it felt like to truly be a passenger. To look out the window. To trust that someone else knew the way. Or that their way was safer than my own.

I let the weekend lead.

And the weekend rose to meet me. Again and Again and Again.

There is something that happens when you have already loved yourself well before anyone else gets the chance. You stop being hungry in a way that makes you grab. You become the kind of full that allows you to receive slowly, to taste things instead of swallowing them whole. The weekend lingered on me the way Im learning to linger on myself — unhurried, deliberate, like every detail was worth the time it took to notice it. In a spirit of devotion.

I didn’t know what any of it meant for tomorrow. I didn’t ask. Some things are only yours to hold in the moment they are happening, and the asking turns them into something smaller than they were.

So I held it.

And it held me back.

If you have never made love to yourself, anyone who tries will always fall short.

Not because they aren’t enough. But because you couldn’t show them how. You haven’t shown yourself how. You haven’t stood in a mirror with forty minutes and a pimple that lowkey hurt and chose yourself anyway. You haven’t pulled apart your own spirals and watched yourself unthaw. You haven’t walked into a room slowly enough to feel it shift. You haven’t layer 3 different oils to make sure you look like the sweetest Krispy Kreme glazed dozen.

I turned twenty six in the middle of learning this.

And the weekend — the whole beautiful, unhurried weekend — was the world’s way of showing me I was getting it right. That when you linger with yourself, you give others the permission to linger with you. That when you stop prompting and start receiving, life fills the space you leave. That stillness is not emptiness. That full is not the same as satisfied. That you can be held without being kept.

By the end of it, I felt like I was being reintroduced.

Not to someone else.

To myself — through familiar eyes with new perspectives. The woman who had grown. And underneath her, still present, still recognizable, still worth finding,

the woman I had always been.

݁˖ ❀ ⋆｡˚

Thanks for spending a few minutes of your life with mine. Twenty-six already feels like it's teaching me a lot, and I have a feeling this next year will give us plenty more to write about. If you'd like to stay for it, subscribe. If something here lingered with you, you can also leave a tip to support my work. Either way, I'm glad you were here.

I think that's why I've spent so much of my life trying to figure out who I am underneath everyone else's version of me. Underneath the gossip. Underneath the expectations. Underneath the sexualization of mere genetic design. Underneath the names people gave me before I ever chose one for myself.

I’m seeing myself these days. And remembering all the women I have been.

When it is my time to leave this earth, I will be ushered into wherever I go next, not by the family members and friends who’ve gone before me, but by the versions of me that had to die for me to be.

I die to myself daily.

And each time I do it blindly.

Every time I choose to breathe through it instead of crashing out, an old me dies. Every time I hum my little VaShawn Mitchell to get me through the day instead of being seated in my stagnation, an old me becomes something I can no longer fit inside. Every time I come face to face with a decision, and I make it from who I want to be instead of where I am today. I die all over again.

When I travel, I am not a souvenir girl. I always say the pictures are souvenirs because, chile, I know I take a bunch of them. But on my recent trip to Colombia, to usher in my 26th birthday, I was in charge of all the photos. Of the sights, and of myself.

During COVID, I got heavy into self-portraiture. I was sick of being in my house. My family was sick of being in the house with each other. So I retreated to my bedroom, where my imagination could fly.

I created these beautiful backgrounds and played with different lenses on my old Sony A5100. I took these photos of myself sweating, okay. Before ya girl could afford a clicker and proper lighting. It was taping empty tissue rolls onto the front of my iPhone flashlight to give me a spotlight. It was taking a paper cup and cutting a slit in the bottom to make myself a tripod to place it on. It was relying on self-timers and hoping that I was in frame and in focus.

I loved this art.

Capturing myself.

I have always documented my own becoming, to memorialize myself. To remember all the women that I’ve been.

This trip was no different.

The air was moist and my edges danced against each other remembering who they were before I loc’d them up. Kinky, free, curly and unbound. Sweat met every part of my body the moment I walked out the door and I just let it roll, because it was no use wiping what was always coming back. A mess, I thought. So unladylike, but we existed in the same heat so I knew I wasn’t doing this dripping alone.

I walked knowing I was not invisible, even though I felt like it the moment I sat alone with my book, my thoughts, and whatever number coconut lemonade I was on. People looked as they saw my camera, I didn’t try to avoid their gaze. I looked and acknowledged them acknowledging me because what could I do. Disappear? I couldn’t. So, I hope they enjoy the free feast I’d given them.

I propped my camera up on the many tripods that I brought across the ocean with me. And I posed. Trying to remember who I was, and figure out who I am.

Even now, as a little time has passed, I look at these pictures and I’m still unsure. But time will tell me, of course. It always does. There were many women on this trip, I feel. At least that’s what the pictures looked like.

I learned I don't need to be witnessed to see myself.

So much of how I viewed myself has come from what others have told me, and from what a mirror has reflected. Neither of which I’ve ever felt deeply connected to.

Men have told me how pretty I was, and my knowledge of attractiveness in relation to myself was based on what someone else believed. But isn’t that everyone’s? Beauty is based on standards, is based on preference, is always subjective. So I think, knowing this at my core, I never believe that I am more one thing than the other. Because two pairs of eyes can look my way and have two different feelings.

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I look in the mirror and wonder if this is what other people see. I’ve stood in the mirror and asked. I’ve asked the question, “What exactly do you find attractive about me?”

As I’ve returned home, I have been asked multiple times what I enjoyed most about the trip, and my answer has consistently been:

1) leaving

2) getting cute

That’s my favorite part about vacation: getting dolled up and having somewhere to go. And I felt pretty. Not because anybody validated that for me, but because I validated it for myself.

It was in the way I gave my name and didn't look back to share the decision of where I sat. It was in the way I held myself at night and my hand as I faced myself each day I wanted to go home. It was in the way I let the dresses I packed dance with the body I have now instead of spending the evening tugging and pulling and negotiating with fabric. What is behind me ain't my business anyway, unless you're here to tell me this ass is fat. Then talk loud. (That gene skipped me.)

Since having a baby, I’ve gained a bunch of weight, partially from my sedentary lifestyle, but also from PCOS. And having been a smaller girl my entire life, I now have things that have their own labels and stories. Like the arm fat they’ve labeled for aunties or the women who know how to make a mean pound cake. And I do. I do make a mean pound cake, lol.

And then there’s the midsection pooch that, to others, looks lazy, but to me looks like exactly where my baby stayed for six months. Right at the bottom of my middle. A reminder of my sacrifice. A reminder of my own rebirth, always.

But for once, I wasn’t trying to put a tummy in a waistband, worried about whether my arms jiggled a bit too much, or overly worried about whether I had the camera at an angle that didn’t give me a triple chin. I just was.

And that was beautiful to me.

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Watching myself transform is my very favorite part of getting ready. Knowing that I can be whoever I want to be. If I want to be soft and girly, I have a nice baby pink blush for that. If I want to give sultry and full bottle of wine, I have a lip and eyeliner for that. When I want to give “please see the skin I was blessed with,” I have a $26 moisturizer and a $40 serum that does it every time, like I created the meaning of supple.

And I was all these things. And each day seemed to represent the transformation that was happening.

I wanted to prove something at the beginning of this trip. I wanted to prove that I was somebody to myself. That I hadn’t lost myself in someone else’s inability to see me fully. That I hadn’t lost myself in the evidence that I shared my body in an ongoing way.

Then I wanted to be casual, and free. Like fear hadn’t sat with me the entire way over. And as confident as I needed to be, I was, as I strolled around the streets of Cartagena, not worrying about who saw me. Who saw me go back down the same street I had just walked because Google Maps said I was going in the right direction and I was not.

When the woman whom 26 would welcome settled in, I saw the same eyes that look back at me every morning. The ones I’ve said belong to his father, but for once, I thought maybe they belonged to me. They’re soft, melted drops of chocolate that caught the perfect golden-hour sunset. They say, I’m here with you, while pleading, please be here with me too.

The kind of eyes that made me remember the kind of mother I swore to be, even on my worst days.

Kind.

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Looking at these photos, I kept thinking about all the people who helped me to see myself—some intentionally, some not.

I remember the first time I felt like a woman. It was in the palm of a man’s hand. And it was like one morning I rose, I blossomed. Not because a man did anything, but because he saw me as such.

He saw me in a way I hadn’t yet learned to see myself, and that made me feel exposed. It made me feel safe, too. Safe to morph, and safe to change. His hands wrapped around parts of my body that I’ve owned since birth but hadn’t full known and made a runway for my becoming. He stood back and gave my wings time get acclimated with the change. And reminded me that expansion was my birthright and those who try to condense me shouldn’t be here.

The same hands that once held my metamorphosis so gingerly and proudly no longer had the capacity to hold these new changes. And in that, I thought, if this person couldn’t, will anyone? Will I always be too much change for any space? Will I always change so much that those around me won’t remember me? Or choose to reintroduce themselves to me? Or could they only love her in that form?

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When people die, their loved ones hold onto their memory because it’s all they have left of them. But if you could have more than that, why wouldn’t you hold onto what is still here with you, even if may be different?

I’m still all of the girl who made a tripod from a paper cup in her mama’s house. I’m still the girl who threw on her sparkly gray booties and black dress for her first official outing in Raleigh. I’m still the girl who wandered through the streets of Nashville learning line dances on rooftops without the help of a little liquid courage. I’m still the girl who sat front row at my weekly open mic and graced the stage as “Her Black Hand.” I’m still the girl whose belly never really rounded but felt all the change.

I’m still very much the girl I left behind.

But this woman has so much to carry around, and I do it with so much grace and passion. This woman gives you something to hold onto that my girl couldn’t possibly fathom. This woman is sturdy, dependable without question. This woman can be soft if you let her. If she lets herself. This woman can only be one form. One that exists only in this moment. Never again to be duplicated.

As I stare at the pictures from my trip, I see so much beauty. Tangible in its nature, visible to an eye that likes it. But I also see the beauty of all the women I had to kill so that I could live today. The versions of me they misunderstood, and are still misunderstanding. The versions of me who stood firm no matter how unstable the platform was.

I still see remnants of the girl who entered through the back of Duke when she was just someone’s daughter, and the girl who left as someone’s mother. The girl who was once a million things, but no one at all.

She is still looking back at me when I look in the mirror.

Maybe the point isn’t whether anyone else sees her. Maybe the miracle is that instead of detaching from her, I’m noticing all the ways she’s still with me.

⋆.˚ ☾⭒.˚⏾⋆.˚

Thanks for sitting with me in this one. If you’d like to keep reading my thoughts, questions, observations, and occasional existential crises, you can subscribe or support my work. Thank you for spending a few minutes of your life with mine.

Withdrawal, as defined by Healthdirect, is the process of cutting out, or cutting back on, addictive substances. It is also called “detoxification,” or “detox.” You can have a physical or psychologi…

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When an artist finds a rhythm, he locks himself there. Everything in his life becomes an IRL DND. The music is going, vibrato be the pulse of blood flowing through his veins. He hasn’t seen light in days. He goes from project to project, moving about the room because this could be the one. The masterpiece. And he’ll sit on the stool, surrounded by all his doing, still unsatisfied and thinking something is missing, that something isn’t right.

It never is for him.

He’ll rip the canvas. Shred the notes he took. Throw the water cups across the room. In fury: Why can’t I just get it right? Why can’t I create what I see in my mind? Why is it so hard for me? They did it. They do it. Why can’t I?

This spiral is a series of exchanges he’s attached his worth to. The things he puts on DND are the very things he doesn’t have to do, the things he doesn’t have to show up for. They make him uncomfortable because he doesn’t understand. How could they love him, make space for him, see him, if he can’t do all that for himself?

He’ll deem himself unworthy.

And throughout it all, he’ll watch the dump truck drive away with everything he’s poured himself into, tears streaming down his face. That will be the first peak of light he’s seen in days. He’ll numb himself to sleep and wake up wondering where everything went.

When you start again, you have to confront the mess you made first.

But when you start over, you can leave the mess.

An easy solution.

A quick fix. Or so it may seem in the interim.

But unless you’re cleaning as you go, that space will get messy too.

When you choose to start again, you look at the mess you’ve created and sit in the middle of it. You may feel overwhelmed by all of it, so you pick one spot to gather first, then the next, and then the next until the mess is clean.

Will it get messy again? Yes.

But because you’ve been in the mess before and cleaned it up, you can choose to create systems that help you make a different choice next time.

When you choose to stay, sometimes that choice comes with the hardest part of all. Often the determining factor between the two.

You must ask for help.

Express a desire. Express a want. Express a need.

And you hope the people in the space with you choose to clean and stay too.

But it doesn’t always happen that way.

Starting new feels good at first. It taps into that dopamine and adrenaline your body desperately craves. It has you scrolling Pinterest looking for “live, laugh, love” quotes and “healing looks good on you.” But just because the mess you left is in the rearview doesn’t mean you don’t see it. It will show up in the new space too.

Once it isn’t shiny anymore, new and easy, your inconsistency will show up. And what you first tidied and tended to will become things you say you’ll get to... one day. And one day becomes five, and then months, and then never, because the messes you create make you uncomfortable. So you leave instead of addressing what caused the mess.

Especially when you know exactly how to sort it out and return order.

Maybe at one point someone shamed you for having mess. Made it such a big thing that you no longer want extra eyes on it. A thing you don’t want anyone else to hold…but you.

Once the new beginning no longer feels like a fresh start, you’ll begin seeing everything you left in everything you do. You’ll start handling it rougher when you once treated it like something worth having. Your irritation will grow faster when you first promised slow and intentional curation.

You’ll come around less and less and find every excuse as to why you haven’t been back.

One day that space is going to lock its door on you.

And you’ll sit outside wondering how you had the key and still couldn’t open the door.

You’ll watch through the screen at the trail of mess you left behind this time, and it’ll hit you that it’s not the first time you’ve seen it.

But it’s the first time you’ve been locked out.

It shows up as the same lesson in different ways.

In the Bible, wisdom is often tied to stewardship. Proverbs warns against the consequences of neglecting your surroundings, describing how disorder can take root when what has been entrusted to us is left untended (Proverbs 24:30–31). Later, the virtuous woman is praised because she “watches over the affairs of her household” (Proverbs 31:27), and in 1 Timothy 3:5, caring well for one’s home is presented as evidence of being able to care for greater responsibilities.

The Quran offers a different but complementary reminder: “There is no blame on you for what you do by mistake, but only for what you do intentionally” (Surah Al-Ahzab 33:5). At some point, what was once an accident becomes a choice. What was once oversight becomes neglect.

In Hinduism, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad teaches that “a man acts according to the desires to which he clings” (4.4.5). The things we repeatedly choose shape the lives we eventually inherit. We do not simply leave our habits behind; we carry them with us.

And in Judaism there is a saying: “As long as the candle is still burning, it is still possible to accomplish and to mend.”

To mend.

Not replace.

Not abandon.

Not start over.

To mend.

Even Aaliyah, in her own way, echoed the same truth: “If at first you don’t succeed, dust yourself off and try again.”

Across centuries, cultures, faiths, and songs, the invitation seems remarkably similar:

Return to the room.

Clean up the pile.

Light the candle again.

And begin where you left off. And if it’s been so long since where you left off, you can choose to start anew from this moment and create something stronger.

All extend the grace that space once represented.

When you first entered it, you wore your best outfit. Brushed your hair, washed your face, and showed up with flowers to adorn it. An offering that said, for as long as I am here, you shall have life.

And life shall be a representation of what is created here.

But after a while, too much from the outside got in. It left muddy footprints you never made time to clean. Candles burned beyond their wicks, and the flower vase hasn’t been filled in so long.

The space forgot what life looked like, but held so much of it.

And it still welcomed you.

Still offered you a place to rest.

Still fed you when you decided nourishment was only a reward for accomplishment. Or when you feel like you deserved.

Still sang the songs of who you were so you wouldn’t think it was that hard to return.

That space has seen so many different assignments you’ve brought back. So much hurt you never released but leaked behind your every move.

And it still embraced you.

Not because of what you do, but because it did.

And as long as you unlocked the door and were brave enough to come in, it welcomed you.

Just because you left the other mess doesn’t mean it’s no longer there. It’s just another thing you’ve left for someone else to deal with.

And the mess won’t clean itself.

There will be a person who comes in to pick up the pieces you left to pile. And they’ll think, how could anyone just leave this here? How long were they here to have this much mess? Did they have no one to teach them how to clean?

They’ll pick up the frames that once held pictures of moments you swore you wanted to last forever.

And they’ll turn them over to see the note etched on the back.

They’ll wonder if you ever saw it.

If you ever stopped to admire it before you put it on the shelf as a memory.

As something that used to be.

They’ll look around at the pile and think they’ve hit a jackpot.

Ain’t that funny?

How someone else’s trash can be someone else’s treasure?

How someone can walk into a space you once occupied and see the value instantly, while you never could.

Or you forgot as the mess got bigger.

How all of the joy you claimed couldn’t exist there just needed a little tidying to be seen. How some of the greatest love and joys are already resting alongside us, there, just waiting for us to see them.

One day you’ll come back to that place, and the door will be locked as you drag the pieces you managed to keep from your new place.

And it will be so tidy.

The windows will be open as the curtains sway against the vinyl spinning on the record player. You’ll think you’ve seen a ghost as the treasure sways to the music and the light wraps its way around it.

I’m unsure if you’ll see it and wish you’d tried to clean the mess up, or claim you had to leave to see what it could’ve been.

Standing in the middle of the mess felt daunting and exhausting and hard.

No one ever sat with you and worked alongside you to clean.

Only barked demands that made it harder. Pointing out what you had already seen for yourself.

So when someone finally tried to sit with you in the mess, you panicked.

Retreated.

Because if they’re offering, then they can see.

And that’s too much exposure.

And you wouldn’t dare let them see you bare. Naked of all the masks you’ve worn to survive.

And you’re so used to starting anew that it becomes a choice you’ll have to confront in every space you enter.

Because how could someone possibly stand in the mess with you and think it’s worth anything?

Think it’d be worth cleaning?

And you’ll be so ashamed of the mess that you’ll take that as a direct attack on yourself. Self-blame will weigh down the very thing this space was born to foster.

Understanding.

And life lived.

The space may not be exactly the same as when you first entered, but the bones you remember are still there. The frames will hang nonetheless, but only if you continue rehanging them. And when the wire on the back has worn thin from time, you choose to place it on the side table instead of leaving it on the floor.

Staying, gives room to welcome change.

Gives room for reflection.

That space becomes a place of dedication and curation.

A space that once had piles you chose to avoid but one day realized that no matter where you went to start anew, those piles would show up again wearing different clothes.

And you’ll have replicas of what existed in the piles you left, but it’ll never feel quite as good.

You’ll find the same music box and turn the knob, only to discover the song it played—or the song you hoped to hear while reaching for something familiar—is missing the thing that made you remember.

The thing that made it memorable in the first place.

Don’t spend your life starting over if there is a mess that is cleanable and you have someone willing to help you clean it, no matter how long it takes.

Pile after pile.

Find joy in discovering the very things that used to make you smile and laugh and think, I’m so glad I stayed to clean the mess, even if it took me a million tries.

Because life gets messy.

And adding things to your life makes it messier.

That is just a fact you can’t run away from.

How you choose to clean the mess is what matters.

Sitting with each pile, one by one, choosing what stays, what leaves, and what can be replaced to make this space everything it needs to be to foster what it was meant to.

So yes, starting over feels good.

Rebranding feels like alignment.

Until slow season hits again and you have to move the flowers to a new window so they can get the little light the space now offers, and you’re still trying to figure out why they aren’t thriving the way they used to.

And that, is a real life’s work. Not the very things that grant fame and accolades but a life that looks like dedication. Not in finding spaces that never get messy. Not finding people who never disappoint you. Not becoming someone who never makes mistakes. And not leaving the flowers you promised life, to die in a window that no longer feeds them.

But learning that everything worthwhile eventually asks for maintenance.

The relationship.
The dream.
The friendship.
The faith.
The work.
Yourself.

At some point, all of them will hand you a broom and ask whether you’re staying.

And maybe maturity isn’t knowing how to begin.

Maybe it’s knowing how to return.

Again.

And again.

And again.

⋆.˚ ☾⭒.˚⏾⋆.˚

Thanks for sitting with me in this one. If you'd like to keep reading my thoughts, questions, observations, and occasional existential crises, you can subscribe or support my work. Thank you for spending a few minutes of your life with mine.

I don’t have just one answer for you, and honestly, not enough characters here to write it all.

But I will say this: the people carrying the heaviest grief are often the people who loved most deeply and were loved deeply in return.

I know a ton of people read All About Love by bell hooks in our COVID years, but this season of my life brings me to a A Litany for Survival by Audre Lorde:

No matter what we do in life, our lives are going to end. And the line we were never meant to survive just rings through my ears. Because why not take all the chances you can if we’re not going to survive this anyway?

I was in the shower one day, early before the boy (my baby) woke up, with my momma propped up on the ledge that held my soaps. We were just talking, and I was thinking about a friend of hers and how she has experienced so much loss in the last few years that there have to be a large number of days that feel like hell for her. And though I have people who love me, my mom and I are alike in this way: I don’t have a ton of people that I think will miss me long after I go.

But the long list of new dates that have been etched into her mind against her will are proof that not only did she love well, but that this grief she’s carrying is the cost of being well loved.

The day someone died.
The first birthday without them.
The anniversary.
The random Tuesday when she heard a song on the radio and broke down on the way home.

Grief creates its own calendar. One you never volunteer to keep. Dates appear against your will and your body remembers them before your mind does.

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There has been so much loss around me throughout my life. Family members whom I wasn’t close to. Family friends. My friends’ friends. Classmates.

And when I’m close to those people who are experiencing loss, I’m always at a weird place within myself. Whereas on a normal day, my ability to provide comfort and assistance comes second nature, in such a tragedy I often don’t know what to do. The delicacy of life is sitting in their lap, and I don’t want to disturb that. So I do what doesn’t require them to think of what they need.

I don’t want to hug or touch too much in case that’s off-putting, and I definitely don’t want to say the wrong thing. So I offer my presence and allow them to feel and cry and be. I don’t expect any more of them.

My mom and I joke around that we are the repast friends. We will serve food, clean, and tend to you and your guests, no problem. I am very good behind the scenes in these scenarios.

Until I was someone’s emergency contact.

And what I thought I’d been terrible at, in that moment I had no other choice but to do and just hope it was good enough.

It’s like my mind didn’t even think about it. A normal 45-minute drive felt like two hours. My heart raced the entire time. My hands shook as I gripped the steering wheel for dear life, trying to get to them so they didn’t have to be alone a minute longer. And I just prayed the normal state troopers weren’t at their normal post because I was definitely speeding. I pressed the buttons of the elevator like I was trying to win a prize at the arcade, then anxiously rode to the floor I knew to exit to. And in that moment, everything I always worried I wouldn’t know how to do, I figured out.

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And years later, I hope it was enough. I hope that I didn’t say anything stupid or talk too much. I hope I didn’t make it about me. I hope I held them long enough and didn’t let go before they were ready.

And still, that loss, though it did impact me, felt so far from me. It wasn’t mine. Though I knew the person, I hadn’t known them nearly as long as they had. But years later, I keep their name on my tongue in remembrance, in joy, in laughter, and in wishing my son got to meet them just one time.

That kind of grief is woven into the deepest layers of our lives. In the messages we find that we forgot we sent. In the stories that people share like they talked just the other day. In the pictures that were tucked away in books on our bookshelves. In the way we steal phrases and add them to our repertoire as a way to say, I’m still loving you, and as evidence that they loved me too.

I don’t hold my inexperience with death as some trophy or consider myself lucky (someone has actually told me that). It scares me to think that I’ve gone this long in life without being heavily impacted by it, that when it does come, I’m going to be a mess. While I don’t think that just because someone has experienced one loss it is anything like the next, as the planner I am, the scenario-conversation practicer, I have no playbook to pull from, and that terrifies me.

I’ve watched grief rip people apart, and some never put themselves back together. And what if that’s me?

This current bout of grief feels new. It’s a lot heavier than previous ones. I usually cry for a little and then it’s business as normal. But I’ve been a mess. Messier than a mess. I’ve sobbed more days than I can count. One day I woke up from my sleep at 4 a.m. like my body realized they were gone. I walked through places like ghosts lined the walls and were just watching me float by day by day. This is the price I pay for loving. The risk I took knowing that everything that starts will one day come to an end. And even though I knew, I never thought it’d be this soon, but I always knew it would hurt this bad.

Over the last few years, I’ve had my fair share of run-ins with grief. Death and living.

I’ve grieved decisions I wish I would’ve made. Decisions taken away from me. Love shared between friends. Love shared between lovers. These kinds of heartbreaks feel strange, because they linger quietly. The people still exists. The memories still exist. The life you imagined still exists somewhere in your mind.

But it’s gone all the same.

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And when they say grief sits on your chest like an elephant, that is honestly the best way to describe it. Like struggling to breathe but having to anyway. Like your bra being clasped too tight and your back aching. For a little while, we get to be uncomposed with an audience, and it’s okay, but eventually you have to go back to regular life activities.

But you never really do. Nothing is ever the same as it was before. You aren’t the same as you were before, and there was no time in between the change to grieve that.

And I often wonder if other people can see how heavy I feel. Do I look like I’ve experienced loss? Have my mannerisms changed since and I haven’t noticed? Do my glasses not actually hide my teary eyes the way I hope they do so I can play fine for a moment? I can never tell for myself, but I do wonder if other people can.

Because I can. I’ve seen the brightest people carry such a weight around them while still smiling and laughing and dancing and singing. I’ve seen it, only for them to go home and bow at the waist when the performance is done. The quilt of their life now has hanging strings: a favorite song, a meal, or a thought they turned to share and realized that no one was there. These are the threads that they pick at. The threads they try so hard to resist pulling, lest they come undone.

Every anniversary feels like the first time your body learned about the loss. Like time has stood still this entire time. And you hope you don’t always feel like this. But there’s a part of you that thinks that if I don’t feel this grief, then it may seem like it didn’t matter at all, like I never loved them at all.

That is the second part of the risk attached to love. Every time we allow ourselves to open up, we give up our control. We never know when these connections that we hold so deeply will end, but we can count on our bodies remembering even when we don’t think they are.

I often tell people I grieve so much while people are alive that I’m not sure how I would feel if someone I loved deeply ever died. I am one of those girls that randomly cries when she realizes that my mom won’t be here forever. Or that one day, my son won’t occupy the same home as me. Or that one day I won’t have someone to sit on the couch with to watch our shows like we’ve done for years. Not because Im pessimistic (I try so hard not to be) but to because I know that one day it all ends. My worry often hinders my presence, and I hate that.

Grief is the price we pay when loved, and sometimes the aching reminders of love are the cost of being well loved back. And there is no clock counting down the days that the hurt stops. Life doesn’t stop for your grieving, no matter how much we wish it did.

The cost isn’t grief. It’s carrying people and meaning with you long after they’re gone. It’s remembering, and hoping that the people around you aren’t tired of hearing you talk about the same thing over and over. It’s becoming someone different because they existed and different again because they’re gone. I don’t think it’s something we get over, and I also don’t think it’s love that doesn’t have a place to go. That love still belongs to them as it does you.

And even though we know the cost of it all, I supposed that we would do it over again. Even if we never meant to survive. Perhaps the point was never avoiding grief.

Perhaps the point was loving enough that it would hurt when something ended.

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Because immediately I was like, why does she have to shoulder all of that? The way women usually do, right?

Then I saw another post of a woman talking about sharing her daughter with her bio dad for the summer, and how this co-parenting and motherhood journey is one you picked for yourself. And these are the people that you chose for your child.

Reading it that way settled differently than the first take.

But as I read her hard truths of co-parenting during the summer, I hung my head and was like, she is so right.

I’m angry at the unfairness of things in my life, but right now instead of thinking about someone else’s behavior and what it mirrors back to me, I literally must now sit down in the mirror and look at all the decisions I made that landed me here.

Now, I’m not saying that we should drown ourselves in blame and shame. I think that accountability and blame can share space.

Oftentimes, I have no problem pointing out something that is not working (blame), hoping the thing, person, or whatever will take accountability or be held accountable. But the truth we are all learning is that you can’t make anyone do anything they don’t want to do.

If the grace you gave was supposed to create room for change and change didn’t happen, then they didn’t want to, didn’t have the capacity to, or whatever the reason may be.

But this is where you point the finger at yourself.

After you have addressed something, decided to give grace, and clocked that change hasn’t happened, and you don’t do anything.

Now the dissatisfaction is on you.

I’m not saying that everything bad that has ever happened to you is all your fault. That is absolutely not true.

When bad things happen to good people, outside of catastrophic events, we often just say “bad things happen to good people”. A phrase that I’m sure is supposed to provide comfort.

But a hurt body is still searching for the cause. The why.

And in that thought, one of the ways “good” people can turn the finger to themselves is asking: how much did they overdo? Overgive? How much was forgiven that was unforgivable?

The people-pleasing.

The fear of it getting good right when they call it quits.

After reading the second woman’s post, I thought long and hard about all the areas I’m unhappy in my own life and turned the finger to me.

What have I done to contribute to my own suffering?

What am I still doing?

And if possible, how do I change it?

With the two ladies I spoke about above, the changing part is a bit impossible since it is in reference to a human being, and you can’t just return those, even with the receipts of stretch marks and hospital bills.

But in another example, I find myself always unsatisfied in a job because, genuinely, I don’t believe I was born to labor this way. Work, yes. Slave and sacrifice myself, no.

Every time things get going and that probationary period passes—shit, this last job, I knew from day one that that wasn’t the place for me. But the bills had due dates, and I had been out of work a year, and my lease was ending. I didn’t want to just be living in my boyfriend’s apartment, even though he said it was fine, living out of a duffle bag, with my apartment in storage, so I stuck it out.

But I was miserable every day.

So I looked at the jobs I had before and the jobs I have now, and these are the patterns that I find:

I’m inexperienced in being paid well in a corporate setting. On social media, I know my worth and I know my value, I have the numbers and the portfolio to prove it, and I have experience with large-number invoices that I know will only get larger.

In corporate, I’ve never been in roles that they felt needed high pay, I guess I can say. Very grade-one, tier-one jobs. But not because I wasn't trying. I apply to the higher-paying leadership roles and never hear back. So in my mind, even though I know the current landscape of the job market and how crazy it is, I’m like something on this resume isn’t passing the system, so I rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, and hope I start at least getting some interviews.

But I never do.

In always needing to take a job instead of wanting one, frfr, it leaves me making decisions from a desperate place, and I can tell you those types of decisions never pan out great.

They hurt worse than whatever you felt in the waiting before. That is the pattern. My need became the primary thing on my mind, and in turn, I jumped at anything, even if it didn’t align all the way.

In every role that I have ever worked, the JD never matches the actual role of the job, probably because the people who are writing it have never worked the job they’re hiring for. They don’t even engage with them on a day-to-day basis to actually know what the role entails for real.

So I get into the job, and for me, I’m like, this was not in the JD. All these extra tasks need more compensation, right? No. They don’t give a damn about that. You accepted the job at this rate, and you will work whatever we throw at you. Then we will evaluate you based off what you accepted, even though we know you’ve done more than you originally agreed to. That’s the cycle.

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You need, you accept in spite, then you work it the best they’ve ever seen it work. You add discomfort to your outfit every day. You watch others get the acknowledgment for the work you did. You come early, you stay late. And you perform so well and catch all the balls they expected you to drop that you burn yourself out. Now they’re unhappy you’ve “reverted” back to what was just on the JD, and here comes the performance plan. And maybe even termination.

While yes, the jobs and the people I worked with had a role in all of this, ultimately I played the biggest part. I let my need, that was a teeny bit of desperation and a lot of fear, allow me to accept whatever was given to me. Because in my mind, it’s taken sooooo long to get this, I don’t know the next time anything like this will come. I accept whatever pay they offer, even when I counter, because I need to pay my bills, and Duke Energy doesn’t care about the comma in my bank statement as long as when the money is taken, it goes through.

And I work so hard. Harder than everyone on my team, with the hope that I’ll be rewarded in return. That they’ll see me as an asset and be considerate, thoughtful of me. And in every space—work, relationships, whatever—it has never been that.

And that is a hard thing to sit with.

Because the truth is, I could’ve wrecked my life in a different way. I could’ve quit those jobs before they drained me. When a partner didn’t improve or change the way I needed, I could’ve said this wasn’t enough for me the first time and removed myself, but I didn’t. And that’s on me.

Is there ever really a gain on our end when we avoid the accountability we need to take ourselves? I don’t think so. I think at the point you get here, the first few times, you’re so broken you couldn’t receive a gain if you wanted to.

But we can lose, I believe. We do choose the jobs we have and the people in our lives. We hold onto so much of what they say in the interviews and in the stages of life you’ve had with each other before the ending. We lose the time we could’ve chosen something better. And honestly, that for me is the hard truth that stares back at me when I look at myself in the mirror.

That even though I believed that I could get better, I was too afraid to say that whatever it was, wasn’t as good as I thought it had been.

When I look at the choices I have made, the biggest sadness is that I can clearly see who I was when it started and look at this current version at the same time.

I don’t push away the what-ifs because honestly, maybe it will be motivating moving forward. What if I had just walked away when I first felt led? Shit, at least by now I’d be over it. What if I had left that draining-ass job before they had the chance to terminate me? Shit, if I had to move back to my momma’s house three years ago instead of with a man, there’s still a big possibility that I’d be back on my feet again by now.

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But I didn’t. I stayed. And I hoped that all the things I felt were contributing to my unhappiness would change. I hoped they would see how much I gave and deem me valuable. But they never would. I can’t, nor can you, make someone value you. Either they do or they don’t. Either they love you or they don’t.

That is the black and white I need to practice.

The uncertainty that comes with believing in people despite what they’ve shown you is not for you. Either you are sure or you aren’t. Either you are committed to trying or you aren’t. Either you see all that I do or you don’t.

Either way, the world keeps turning nonetheless.

I’ve never been too naive to believe that I was not replaceable. I’ve always known that to be true. In jobs that’ve let me work the day just to fire me. In men who I have given my everything to, only to go off and be with other women in secret.

While others may “replace” you, you are not replaceable. There will never be another you because you possess qualities that are specially designed for you.

We will never be able to control the actions of others, so we have to control our own actions. After we have acknowledged the patterns, we have to be in constant check-ins with ourselves to make sure we are not doing those damaging behaviors. No working more than asked. Not accepting what someone has to offer you if it is not what you want. Walking away, period.

^{It is okay to leave.}

^{It is okay to leave.}

It’s okay to leave.

This shift in thinking can change how we engage not only with the choices we are making, because we make so many of them, but also in the way we take control over our lives and choose better for ourselves.

Maya Angelou said it best when she said,

Forgiveness will be the one for me. Forgiving myself for staying longer than I should’ve. Forgiving myself for falling in love with potential instead of proof. For accepting things when I knew I wanted more. Forgiving myself for overworking and overdoing.

And then correcting my behavior going forward.

Because at the end of the day, we don’t know what we don’t know. But the moment we know more than we did, we have to do something different. It can be the thing that changes your life. The thing that saves you from wondering day in and day out how you keep finding yourself in the same positions over and over again.

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I spend a ton of my day singing every song my son wants me to request through Alexa, and other times I’m just humming my way through the day. Humming in my baby’s ear as he’s trying to process his emotions, hoping that he remembers these songs as the songs I used to sing when we occupied the same body.

It’s my body taking blow after blow, trying to navigate his frustration to a word his mouth has yet to learn but his brain knows so well.

One of the songs I remember most from childhood is the one that goes, “The green grass grows all around and around, and the green grass grows all around.”

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I first learned that song in kindergarten. It sometimes just silently plays in my head during the day.

When I first learned it, I was just proud of my memorization skills. When I used to perform my poetry, I always thought about the answers to questions I would get if I were ever asked, and one of them was how I learned to memorize. And it was because of this song. It first showed me I could, even if it was long.

The repetition feels safe in song as I hum along my day, or an upbeat moment as I try to change the temperature in the car when the iPad dies in the backseat and Alvin and the Chipmunks is no longer the background noise to my thoughts.

The other day, as I was singing it while picking up toys in the playroom, I stopped and really thought about what I was singing.

I was singing the process of it all.

While the seed was in the ground and the tree was growing and branches were coming and the birds were nesting, all while green grass was growing all around.

In motherhood, the seed was in you, the pile of baby clothes needing to be washed is growing, the lack of memory if these pump pieces have been cleaned is growing, people are calling to talk to the baby BUT THAT BABY DON’T TALK, friends are going out and never think to invite you, I’m cleaning up the playroom while they’re getting updates from the playroom at daycare.

And I realized something—this whole time we sing the process, but never the praise.

Almost never so much as a thank you.

I felt that so deep in my soul as I cleaned up the same mess I clean up every day, almost at the same time.

Everyone loves the fruit, but hates the tree.

And the more you sing the song, the more it adds on to the tree. And ain’t that a mother?

She be root for all creation.

The world likes to paint men as the strong ones, but I ain’t never seen a cis male (gotta make sure I’m politically correct) bleed from their body for days on end while experiencing contractions and still go to work. I ain’t never seen them dilate 11 cm and push the light of their lives out of that same vagina. Never seen them organize a photoshoot, latch a baby, or pump while cramping in between fundal massages. Never seen them be first attack for every virus that runs amok and still manage everything that needs to get done.

The weight, the pressure of perfection. The think pieces of good mothers and what to make of them, but never on the friends that disappeared, never on the fathers who never rose to the occasion, never on the family who are selectively involved.

Becoming a mom has continued to show me just how strong I am, no matter how tired I am of being strong. In the moments of doing, I don’t even realize I’m doing because it is literally my baseline.

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When I was in like 4th grade, we had a science class and we talked about trees. The only thing I remember is that you can tell how old a tree is by the thickness of the trunk.

She’s sturdy. Reliable. Able to withstand.

The tree in the song is mothers everywhere. Constantly growing, shedding, and housing other people’s needs.

And as I held a toy in my hand in that moment, it made me sad.

Because in the last two years of motherhood, I can count on one hand how many times someone has turned to the tree to thank it for the fruit they love so much.

If you have a “normal” pregnancy and everything goes well, you might spend the early days of motherhood with people consistently checking in on the baby, offering a meal, or having had that set up in your planning.

While you were inviting loved ones in with their bears, flowers, and balloons, I was signing treatment documents, gloving up to touch my baby, listening to monitors of mine and four other babies. No comfy pajamas, no meals waiting on me when I got home. My mom used the two weeks she’d dedicated to me for October in June as she stayed with me on the couch on my two-week admission.

It was getting a balloon and knowing the celebration wasn’t for me. I’ve yet to see a balloon that says “Well done mama,” but mine read “It’s a boy.” It was being wheeled out of the hospital to go home empty-handed, down the same hallway that would be my heartbreaker every day for the next six months—having to watch other moms turn left with their hospital bags and excited partners, while I turned right into dread and fear and worry and praying that hearing nothing meant everything was fine.

For me, it was my mother’s friends who are trees of their own—some who have sat in the same seats I did in the NICU—they turned to me.

It was arms wrapped around me when I didn’t even know I needed holding. It was check-ins through my mom, not to overwhelm me, but to remind me I was loved. It was Apple Pay notifications, random gestures that made us step away while the baby rested, going downstairs to eat another Subway sandwich or something way too salty from the cafeteria.

A lot of people have told me over the last two years how well I’ve seemed to handle it all—the NICU stay, the moving, the appointments, the sickness, the surgeries, everything.

But they only say that because they chose to pick from the branches for the fruit I continue to bear.

They saw me posting every day and “making the most out of a bad situation.”

But what they didn’t see were the moments I sat on the edge of my seat, hoping they wouldn’t make my son NPO for another seven days in a row, then complain that he was gaining no weight at all.

What they didn’t hear was my heartbreak when I was told my milk was more risk than benefit for my own child. Only to hear nurses who had never had children nor milked themselves while swallowing 16 oz Body Armors whole and guzzling protein shakes daily, nor sat on the other side of the curtains that gave them a job, joke about how I should just fill my bra with lettuce to dry my milk up because what was the point.

They didn’t have the words anyway.

That’s what many people said we finally gained 1% of our capacity back and didn’t have a standing reservation with Duke University Hospital.

It’s funny how people don’t know what to say while you’re in it, but can’t seem to shut up about it once you’re out of it.

They came and sat under my tree for shade while they thought and asked for advice, and I offered fruit—tips I had learned along the way.

They took it. Consumed it.

And I, on the other hand, jumped to reply to the notification because any adult conversation that didn’t involve a care plan was good for me, but it was just another taking.

Mothers are the absorbers of so many things.

But who comes to water you when everyone thinks you don’t need watering because you’ve continued to produce so much fruit?

My mother came and comes for me. But when she’s away caring for her own fruit, who comes?

My life as it is now exists in a structure that lacks support. But this trunk must stay firm. It takes every blow anyway—every “I can’t make it,” every “you should’ve called,” every “I forgot,” every “I thought I…”, every “Im trying…”

I’ve become the support, the provider, the caretaker, the planner, the nurturer, the friend, the therapist, the shade on sunny days. I am all of those things, and people still see the limbs as branches they can freely swing on.

If I were a thinner tree, if I showed how frail I feel sometimes, would they even attempt to swing from me? Would they even glance my way on a sunny day? Would they notice the flower that took me forever to grow?

I don’t think so.

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Is this just another place the world tries to tell us our value is tied to how much we can endure and how much we produce?

I have been perceived as strong, and people have no problem coming to observe me. Being an audience to my dysfunctioning.

Everybody loves the baby and hates the mama.

I let out a cackle at the truth of that.

The constant “Where’s the baby?” The “let’s get the kids together.” The reaching for my child before they ever greet me.

Mothers are just portals for another thing for people to love.

But how can you love the fruit and hate the tree it came from? How do you separate that love? How do you ignore the very thing responsible for your joy?

Oftentimes, I find myself wearing the hats of 20 different roles at any given moment. Not at all the experience I thought motherhood would be.

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So I pose the question: what makes a strong tree, and what makes a mother?

Just because a tree is large does not mean it is sturdy. Just because fruit is bright doesn’t mean it isn’t spoiled.

Some trees get cut down because their trunks have rot so deep there is no saving them. They become a danger to all. And then what’s left is a stump of what used to be—will people still come sit with you because they knew you before?

Trees need structure. They need specific handling in their early years to give them the best chance to grow strong. The soil has to be good. The watering has to be consistent. It has to have exposure to the right elements to remain through all seasons.

Because even when the branches are empty in winter, the tree still remains.

To be a mother is to change, to morph, to accept that people will forget to see you while looking for what you made.

They will see the child but not the strategy it took to get out the house on time, clean, and in one piece.

They will see the family photos but not the planning, styling, coordinating, and execution that made them happen.

They will see the smart child but not the hours of research, the late-night Googling, the “am I doing enough?” searches.

They praise Ms. Rachel, but not the mothers doing it day in and day out with no help at all.

Everything our children become is a reflection of their mothers—even when it isn’t our fault.

So we try our very best to shape the very best.

Because we know we grew them, nurtured them, listened to them, spoke to them, and loved them into becoming.

Everyone loves what hardworking mothers produce. They love to enjoy it.

But when do we make it the standard to acknowledge the ones doing the work?

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The ones who haven’t had more than 19 minutes of deep sleep a night in years.

The ones who sacrificed their mental health so their bodies could remain in service.

The ones who silently absorb everything because they know their child doesn’t deserve the fallout of them dropping all the balls they’re carrying—when no one else is coming to pick up the load.

The ones constantly strategizing while trying to also be where their feet are planted.

When do mothers get to be loved, the same way fathers get love for doing the bare minimum?

And I just keep thinking about that song.

The green grass grows all around and around…

A song I learned in kindergarten. A song that never really left me. A song that sounds simple until you realize it was never really simple at all.

Because while I am mothering, doing all this labor for the benefit of others, the grass just keeps growing.

The world, our friends, our families—it all just keeps expanding, asking, needing, taking.

And time just keeps going.

All around. And around. And around.

Not stopping for the mess I just cleaned. Not pausing for the emotions I just held. Not waiting for the moment I finally sit down and breathe.

Just growing.

Just like me.

𓇢𓆸𓇢𓆸𓇢𓆸

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I remember rushing home to open my books, reading some words, mispronouncing others while trying to sound them out in my head because I didn’t want to ask anyone how to say them. My readers know what I’m talking about. I would look at the pages and wonder about the lives of the characters. I still do that with books and movies now. Then I be like girl… these people are not real. They don’t even have a backstory outside of these pages. But in my head they did.

I built worlds around these people. Gave them meaning somewhere in my own life. Remembered details about them like my best friend’s secret that I swore I’d keep until the day we died.

In my own little world just daydreaming, it felt.

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I love parallel experiences. My son often has parallel play time. They may not be playing together every second, but they’re beside each other swapping toys, taking breaks to sign the same words, sing the same songs, dance to the same music. We’ve always been this way as humans, we just get older. Becoming a mother makes you realize that.

It makes you pay the extra $29.99 for iCloud storage because you’re constantly thinking about them growing up while simultaneously begging time to slow down. It makes you understand why your parent(s) cried at your special events. The complete wonder of it all. I’m in awe of my child even through misty eyes, messy hair, and dirty t-shirts.

And in reading, you can always have these parallel experiences too. Friends can read the same book, put it down, and never think about it again. But me? I think so deeply about it. Even if just 1%, I am changed by every story I consume. The gratitude I have for authors being brave enough to pitch, edit, and share their work is never unacknowledged by me.

The characters, for however long it takes me to finish the book—and these days I’m happy if I finish one in a week — become like friends I talk to every day but have yet to meet.

I miss when I could finish a book in a couple hours without feeling guilty. Before motherhood, before dishes in the sink, before laundry baskets waiting in corners, before constantly thinking about what somebody else needed from me first. But even now, reading still feels like returning to myself a little.

We make room for different experiences in this way. It’s okay if someone didn’t love the book the way we did. We still love them nonetheless.

The more I fantasized about what life as a writer would look like in my late teens and early twenties, the more I realized I needed to read.

In every city I’ve lived in I’ve made it my business to get a library card. To wander the aisles. I remember living in this tiny town called Aberdeen, North Carolina, where the library was a straight shot down the road from my apartment. One of those Hallmark-looking streets. The library itself was a small home transformed into one, so from the front door you could practically see the whole thing. It felt homey. Like you could lose track of time there.

As I began living alone, I began building my own library too. Because to me, a well-read woman was a dangerous woman. I collected classics people accidentally mispriced online or left sitting in thrift stores. Every Goodwill I walked into, I scanned the book aisles for Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and so many others.

Those were my stars then. Shit, they still are now.

I read their work like sacred text. The same way Christians pull scripture during times of need, I can pull a poem, a line, or a book recommendation to make someone feel seen. To give them space to think. To sit with themselves awhile.

I am a sucker for an old book. Something about them makes me feel grounded. Like, this book was once pristine and now it’s not. It has history. A story within a story. Somebody bent this spine so much the lettering is peeling. I don’t know if the water stain on page 33 came from tears or condensation from a water bottle. The pages yellowed from oxidation. Folded corners. Scribbled notes.

And don’t even get me started on the smell. It’s one of my favorite scents in the world.

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When I check out a book with all those qualities, it excites me. Someone loved you. Someone probably paid a late fee because they couldn’t bear returning you yet. Someone curled up in bed and devoured you whole. Someone other than me experienced these characters. Held them. Loved them. Read them over and over just to make sure they didn’t miss anything.

How beautiful is that? To be worn in. To be loved so deeply you have visible evidence that someone at one point couldn’t put you down.

But one day they did.

And just because the book was returned doesn’t mean the characters aren’t still honey on the tongue. Doesn’t mean someone somewhere isn’t still talking about them to their friends, their partner, shit nowadays the internet.

Intimacy leaves traces.

By now, I’m sure you realize this was never really about books.

It was about the photographs turning red from being developed too late, but still meaning something because we know the stories behind the stills. About the caricature drawing from years ago yellowing from oxidation while the ink somehow stayed.

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We are all loaned and borrowed in some way. The love is given the same way too. We don’t know the duration of the time we have with each other, but we hold onto it for as long as we can. Sometimes until the creases in the spine become the creases beside our eyes because we laughed so hard together.

The bent page corners become conversations we had to step away from but knew we’d return to. The tiny tears in pages become apologies accepted even though the damage had already been done.

We are no different than the books we return.

We sign up for library cards knowing there are rules about fines and due dates, and still sometimes we keep the books longer than we should. Thinking: what will it hurt? No one is missing this. I’ve had it this long, it’s practically mine now.

People do the same thing with love.

Some sign papers promising forever without knowing if forever means fifty years or fifty days. Some never stand before anybody at all, but still wake up every morning grateful there’s a hand beside them to reach for.

And though eventually we may have to return the books so somebody else can experience them too, you never really forget the story. You never forget how it made you scream, cry, laugh, or momentarily forget about the real world outside the pages.

Even if just for a moment, it was yours to have.

I take my son to the library now. Honestly, not as often as I want to. But he crawls across the floor pulling books from shelves while I follow behind picking them back up. We bring stacks home and keep them separated from the books he owns. We read those first every night. Then eventually the return date comes and instead of taking them back, we renew them because he’s still interested.

Some nights we have to quietly hide them away before bed so we can finally return them without him noticing.

Every night he points to the same pictures asking, “Who’s that?” and every night I answer him the same way. One day “who’s that?” will become “this is…” and I’ll realize he thinks these characters are people he knows, just like his mama.

One day I’ll show him my bookshelf. Pull down old photo albums with pictures stuck together from their time in memory boxes. Show him concert tickets, movie stubs, folded notes tucked between pages. And I hope he asks me about them all the same way he asks me about his books now.

I’ll tell him about every story I’ve ever loved. Including the one that helped me become his mother.

I read — see: love — so my son will grow up brave enough to dive headfirst into stories even knowing he may have to let them go someday. I hope he understands that even after the book is returned, the story still matters. That even when you put something down forever, pieces of it continue living inside of you.

Like classics lining the shelves of your own life.

If you want to keep reading the real, unpolished parts of this life journey, you can subscribe or support my work. Either way, I’m glad you’re here

Is This Your Baseline?

I heard this question as I scrolled a video on Instagram, and that question alone stopped me in my tracks.

When me and my friends talk about baseline, we are often talking about our lives off and on our medication and maybe, in some way, evaluating if either of us need to go and up that dosage. But in this case, the baseline was in reference to love. And loving deeply.

And that hit me and made me think about what my baseline of love is.

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about love in all spaces in my life. How I receive, how I give, how I’m processing it. And there has been a ton of back and forth with my homegirl in my head. I think I’ll name her Shelia. I was driving today and was like, if I give her a name is it still talking to myself? Anywho.

Most of that back and forth with Shelia has been: do I struggle to see how people are trying to love me, or am I just unloved?

I have always been a lover girl. Never one to plan my wedding down to the napkins and seat covers, or at all honestly, but just in experiencing moments with people.

My baseline is to hold on to small moments and give them meaning, to share a space in my memory bank with you so I can call back on it in my interactions or thoughts of you. My baseline is to find a way to show I care and try to share love all ways. My baseline is to carry things with you.

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To give. To feel. To share.

I think that would be my Pretty Hurts answer of “what are your aspirations in life.”

To give. To feel. To share.
To receive. To feel. To learn.

There is nothing casual about intimacy, no matter what level you label it as. There is nothing casual about welcoming people into your world. For a moment, a season, or maybe even the rest of your lifetime. As big as you feel it is as big as it is.

And I can’t participate in the keep-it-casual discourse and this included the high vs. low maintenance friendship convo.

Ain’t nothing casual about the love I give.

It’s full-bodied wine, a perfectly cooked steak, a full face of glam, a “I’ve never heard this song but I’m here in this moment with you so will you dance with me,” and I don’t care who’s watching as long as your eyes are watching mine, even just for this moment.

There is nothing casual about it.

I thought about my baseline of reception, and that bar is in the pits of hell. Lower than lower. If you put your ear to the ground to listen out for her, you would be on the ground for a while.

And Shelia was like this, this is what I’ve been trying to get you to see.

I do not live my life with the expectation to receive anything. I don’t live my life thinking anyone will give me anything, or if they wanted to they would, and if they don’t express the desire then they won’t.

And immediately Shelia was like, when you do not fully express and allow yourself to need, you try to estimate someone’s capacity. You rob yourself of the intimacy that you so deeply crave.

And let’s break down the word crave here as well.

Immediately my body associates it with a want and a need. But my brain often equates it to desperation. I think all need lands under that pillar. If I express a need, then I’m begging. Cue Fantasia: “I ain’t gon beg you.”

But no one shames pregnant women when they have cravings. Because they care for her and want her happy, they make it happen. Even if it is running to Lidl as soon as you get off work to get olives (that weren’t even good), to mix with red onions and feta and whatever the hell else that was nasty after seeing everything they said they wanted mixed together.

Because she had a need in her “condition,” those who decided to love her obliged and did what they could to help.

Our condition as humans is just that.

We do have a need for connection. We need community. Our brains need connection. Our mental health needs connection.

I think about the best time in my adult life so far (please be kind, I’m still a freshman in this adult life) was when I had steady plans and was consistently thrown into community. Similarly to when your aunt throws you into the pool to “teach you how to swim.” It can either go very good or very bad.

And this time it went both.

Not because of who the people were, but because they were people.

They weren’t think pieces forced onto my timeline for me to consume only in my head. They weren’t some figure on the internet that I couldn’t even fathom was a real physical person. They were people with smiles my undiagnosed autism didn’t have to try and decode in the moment. They were full body hugs upon notice that never knew of the internal panic that existed as I got ready and sat in the parking lot before going in.

They were clinked glasses and dancing bodies.

I felt connected. I felt loved and embraced.

To be fully present in the transition from stranger to friend is a surreal experience. People simply be living their regular degular lives and here they are healing you. Holding you when they didn’t even know you needed holding. Shit, sometimes when they do.

When the locations that housed that community no longer felt like home, in a way, the embrace went too. And I haven’t found it again. Partly out of my new life as a mom and partly because of fear. I almost rewrote that, but I’m allowed to have fear.

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When you feel like your community is a revolving door of people who never return, I think a bit of fear is normal. Especially when you don’t subscribe to the casualness that this age wants everyone to have.

Maybe temporary is a better word for some things. Because something may not be forever and still not be casual. If I felt big feelings, it was anything but casual even if it never had a label.

My baseline of giving is intimate, but my baseline of receiving is not.

I crave community, friendship, family, romance among friends, romance among lovers, and myself. I crave connection because I know how it feels to be embraced. To be seen, welcomed, and wanted.

When I was younger I thought romantic partnerships were the only things that could provide that charge, but now, even though I struggle often to curate it, it brings me peace knowing connection can be a multi-stemmed vine.

That makes me sooo happy. Hopeful even.

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How can I ask people to share their burdens and loads with me and not feel like I can ask the same in return?

It’s the eldest daughter in me. Make yourself small, make your needs small, make it all happen for yourself. All of the things I don’t apply to others.

In this stage of my life, if someone asked who I would have dinner with if I had the opportunity, I think I would say the version of myself right before she learned how to perform — to shrink herself in the demand of space for other people’s ideas, wants, and needs.

Because the more that I am trying to know myself actively, daily, no matter how much work I do, I cannot see her.

It’s like having a vision of the life you want, writing out the steps to accomplish the goal, but if you cannot visualize it then you can miss it and it can be just that quick.

And then you’ll spend extra time trying to arrive somewhere you’ve been the entire time.

So glad you made it this far!

This baseline topic has opened up a swirl of thoughts. But more than anything, it has made me realize that oftentimes I want to express my needs, I want to express my wants, but I don’t know how to feel like I am not a burden.

And that struggle makes me hyperaware of my willingness to give.

While I know not everyone has trained themselves to anticipate needs and stand in gaps, subconsciously I think I hope people see how much love I give and share and pour and mirror that back to me.

And it hurts my feelings every time they don’t. Not because they intended me harm, but because they are not me and cannot possibly guess my need, but I was hoping they could.

If I could date myself, would I? If I could friend myself, would I?

Idk.

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Though I know I am a good person and have the best intentions, I know sometimes my fear of rejection and general shyness creates a guard. But is the guard so high that my desire for connection isn’t being seen?

This is such a loaded stream of thoughts that I am sure I will write on this again, as it has exposed a piece of me that needs a bit of care.

And I appreciate it.

Because the lover girl in me wants to feel the love that is being given to her. And the woman in me does not want to have perform in order to receive it either.

If you want to keep reading the real, unpolished parts of this life journey, you can subscribe or support my work. Either way, I’m glad you’re here

You remember being told as a child, you mess up, you clean up.

Actually, this one has never really been confirmed amongst my friends. Did y’all mommas say that?

Well, my momma did. Oh, and if I didn’t apply it then, I’m applying it now.

As I pick up the pieces of what I thought was mine to clean up over and over again, I think I’m finally swiping them into the dustpan this time. Into the trash and out with last week’s leftovers nobody ate.

I was about to say it’s bittersweet, but that’s not how it feels right now.

It doesn’t feel bitter. It doesn’t feel sweet. But it feels large.

Like the next step you make can either catapult you into where you’ve always wanted to be or nail you in place, forcing you to ask yourself the same question your inner voice has already answered a million times before.

They’ll tell you that a spirit always on the go will feel the most discomfort in a settled state, and I’ve been there. I’ve been in the moments I said I wanted. The job, the apartment, the artistic endeavors. I told myself to sit in the chair I said I wanted.

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But the more I sat in the chairs of what I used to want, the more I wanted to crawl out of my skin and leave the shell of me there to fossilize so there’d be proof I existed. Alexa play “I Was Here” by Beyoncé.

But the truth is, once you decide to leave the chair, that is just it.

The same discomfort you felt in being settled will present itself again, only this time in the opportunity to choose something different.

And it doesn’t even have to be some life-altering, dramatic change.

The smallest decisions can make grand impacts in your life.

You don’t have to move across the country. You could just block that man who can’t seem to keep his peen in his draws.

You don’t have to go back to school and dually enroll in a master’s and PhD program. You can just decide to wake up two hours earlier and work out.

Either way, you chose.

And that is one of the bravest things we can do.

The other day I was sitting there watching my son independently play in his playroom, and I just thought, I hope I’m teaching him how to choose. How to decide. Because that’s a skill I’m just now learning myself.

We talk about transitions as if they only happen adjacent to huge life moments, but we seldom talk about the transition that happens when you become 18 and jet off to college with no intention of returning outside of holidays, lol.

At 11:59 p.m., 17, it was my momma’s rules, my momma’s ideas, and wherever mine fit in between them. My life had been this sculpture of what my mother tried to give me.

And then at 12:00 a.m., 18, it became mine to know how to decide.

And I didn’t.

Because I wasn’t taught.

And honestly, I’m still terrible at it.

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And it irks my entire being because I want to be decisive. I want to sign the dotted line with certainty. But instead, I hold decisions like my favorite wishing ball, hoping it’ll tell me something I haven’t already told myself time and time again.

They’ll call it honest if you break someone’s heart if your intentions weren’t malicious.

So I’ll call it brave to break your own.

We always see bravery dressed up as some heroic act. Some bright-ass spandex outfit with a matching cape.

But bravery isn’t always pride and gleam.

Sometimes bravery looks like keeping notebooks in all the places your mind feels safe enough to wander so you can empty out all the racing thoughts saying:
you’re making a mistake
go back
this is the worst decision you could’ve made

Sometimes it’s weeks of sobbing by yourself just in case you do go back because you don’t want to burden people with the reality of being an indecisive woman.

Sometimes bravery sits on the same sofa as the heart simultaneously breaking, hoping that saying — if you love something let it go and if it’s yours it’ll come back — is true.

Because then you could hand the responsibility of choice back over to someone else and avoid sitting with all these uncomfortable temporary feelings.

I’ve never been much of a heartbreaker to other people. I tend to avoid it if I can.

But I’m no stranger to breaking my own heart.

The more I delay a decision, the more I deny myself.

And that’s something I’m trying to become more aware of.

How much can you deny yourself before it becomes its own form of heartbreak?

Do you extend to others the same grace you deny yourself?

And that’s probably the most heartbreaking part of all. You already know the answers to these questions.

You knew them the first moment your body felt unregulated and you swiped it away as just anxiety or a passing chill.

You knew when you couldn’t find the same softness you once naturally extended toward something, or someone, not because they explicitly hurt you, but because of the way they simply were.

The average adult makes approximately 35,000 decisions every single day.

Some just feel larger than others because they force us to sit crisscross applesauce in front of the mirror and acknowledge the risk.

Love is a risk.

Dreaming is a risk.

Wanting and desire are risks.

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The more I’ve grown into myself — which is such a funny phrase because all I can picture is myself growing into some oversized overalls or something — the more I realize risk feels so large because I make everything so damn permanent.

Every friend. Every lover. Every job.

Whatever it is, my body welcomes its presence and immediately tries to make it at home.

But some things just can’t get comfortable here.

So when they decide we no longer align, my heart tries to squeeze the hell out of them before they leave.

I’m learning I will never leave things exactly as I found them. It’s impossible when you are as magnetic as me.

Now, I’m not saying I’ve done no damage, because we all experience each other differently. But what I am saying is that even if I did 10% damage, my intentions were 100% good.

And like my momma always told me, where you mess up, you clean up.

So best believe I tried.

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But as I learn more about myself every day, I’m learning the beauty of maintaining instead of constantly starting over.

And also the beauty in clearing house.

No matter how many layers of concealer you have to put on the next morning because you cried yourself to sleep the night before.

Life is still waiting for you.

Another 35,000 decisions will still need to be made.

Just because you blew up what you thought was the best version of something doesn’t mean it actually was the best.

Sometimes — and I’m telling myself this while sharing it with y’all — just like a cavity, you have to expose the decay.

You have to clean that thing out before you start packing in a new filling. (Feeling, for those of you following along.) Alexa play “Bag Lady” by Erykah Badu.

Otherwise the decay rots at the root, and extraction becomes the only option left. Another outcome your delayed decision chose for you.

And who are you to let anyone or anything come pull you out yo’ shit?

In my search for establishment and comfort, the lines of permanence grew real blurry.

Just because this heartbreak feels large doesn’t mean it will always feel this large.

And even if it does, there will still be days it doesn’t.

And on the days it doesn’t, we lean in.

And on the days it does, we lean in.

Because how can we devote ourselves to other people and our interests, trust them with our health, our secrets, our changing, our worries, our fears, and not equally trust ourselves?

The only person we have to answer to every single moment of every single day.

Sometimes when I write things like this, I wonder where this piece will end up in a couple years when I have a little more age on me.

I think there’ll be a young girl on the other side of a search engine asking:
does it get better?
when will it stop hurting?
how many more chances should I give?

And if she stumbles upon this piece and makes it to the end, I hope she knows it’s okay to put her choice first.

To give to herself instead of constantly denying herself for a change and see what that feels like, even if in the moment it feels like betrayal.

I hope she keeps questioning herself. Questioning the world enough that she never becomes satisfied with simple answers.

I hope she leaves the Google searches long enough to write her own history instead of depending on everybody else’s to get her through.

I’d tell her to become a founder in her own life.

Don’t wait until it’s too late.

Because right now could already be too late if we never decide.

If you want to keep reading the real, unpolished parts of this life journey, you can subscribe or support my work. Either way, I’m glad you’re here

We—and when I say we, I mean my beautiful baby of a son—who is approaching 2 years old in the next few months. And girl, they talk about 2, they talk about 3, but they don’t talk about the 18month-until period.

The defiance. The testing of boundaries. The deciding that TUHDAY we’re standing on our high chair eating ⅓ of our dinner because I attempted it and succeeded one time without falling, so now I know I’m invincible.

The books and podcasts and the AACAP (American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry) will say they’re exploring, that it’s a natural part of development. And you keep that in mind as you’re trying to keep yourself regulated while they wail and tantrum, then look up at you like they weren’t just doing all that. And the parent in you immediately thinks, okay:

1. Is this a behavior I’ve exhibited that they’re now mirroring? Us self-aware moms create self-aware children, but we’re also aware that they’re hyper-aware of everything, and we don’t want to pass that down too.

2. How can I show you that you are loved in this moment?

The question comes without my mind even fully processing the thought: How can I hold space for you?

And when the wailing is all done, and the hugs and kisses and clarifying questions have been asked and babbled and signed with baby fingers, and needs and wants have been met, peace is restored. The moment after—that’s where the curses are broken.

But the holding and kisses and grounding were for them.

Who holds the mom?

Let’s get into it.

Of course, as always, these are my thoughts. You do not have to agree. But I haven’t had an original experience in my life, so I know some will.

Not in a self-pitying way, but who holds the holder? But the louder question is: who does the holder allow herself to be held by?

And for me, my holding is not something I was taught. It was developed from a need that I never got. I was an expressive child, but I didn’t have a holder as a parent—probably because she didn’t have a holder as a parent, who didn’t have a holder parent, and so forth.

I had needs, but soon learned the expected response and chose not to engage. Not even try. Because why would I share these large feelings if I knew they’d hit an ear that would never truly hear them? Or become the next hot topic on a phone call with a friend about how disrespectful and defiant I was?

I learned to shrink and have needs only I could fulfill.

So when I moved into early adulthood and promised myself I would become who I wanted to be, that was included.

Especially when you meet a man who makes your life feel like every backyard dinner movie scene with four strings of twinkle lights hanging above the table, your favorite bottle of wine open beside a random one you picked up for your friends to try, sitting in the middle as the divider between three different conversations happening at once.

And in that vision, I’m always in the middle of the table. Close enough to each conversation to remember them well. Witnessing the life I’ve built day after day. Witnessing the love I must’ve poured into these people for them to join me at my table.

That kind of illumination makes you uncurl from the cocoon you learned to live inside. It makes you want to share again, and again, and again, until sometimes you’re like, damn, am I oversharing? Or am I just so excited to tell this person?

It makes you start thinking about new ways life could exist. And in this timeline, one of those new thoughts was a family of my own, which meant motherhood would be a new seat at our table for me. A new stream of thoughts to yap about.

When we talked about starting a family, and I spoke with doctors about what challenges might come, we never talked about what they would look like or what we’d name them. We talked about how we wanted to show up and create space.

We talked about the community we wanted to build around them—so strong that they’d never have to reach too far beyond the people we welcomed at our table. We talked about teaching kindness and never wanting to grow out of kisses and hugs and cuddles on the couch.

We dreamt of a home we never drew blueprints for, but equally desired.

This is what I think about while I’m holding my family.

As a mother of a young child, no matter how much society tries to age children, 2 years on earth is a very short period of time. I imagine that while I’m hyper-focused on keeping this child alive, I look like Anxiety from Inside Out to other people. Moving here, doing this, scheduling that, planning this.

And no lie, inside sometimes feels like that too.

But there are moments where inside feels like I’m gracefully attending to each thing separately. And when there’s a cry, I’m kneeling, attending, helping. When there’s a small, teeny frustration hidden inside a normal conversation, I grab it because I know what it’s like when people miss the undertones of what you’re really feeling.

And I hold it.

I sit and think about how this can be held. How I can pull a chair up to our dinner table and make it feel at home. How we can work through it as a family.

Because in the vision I’ve seen for myself, there can’t be much of anything without a baseline of holding.

But still, the question is: who holds the holder?

And the second question is: once you’ve consciously realized that you are the holder—see: comforter, repairer, listener, brainstormer, etc.—how do you allow others to hold you?

I tell myself: imperfectly.

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I select a few chosen people who may not mind my unraveling. A few I know truly see me because they, too, have borne crotch fruit of their own. Others who may have had adjacent experiences, so I know they won’t fully grasp what I’m saying because they lack the experience—but I hope that because I love them, and because they love me, they’re able to see me without me having to perform for them.

(Though that expectation itself comes from me believing people can identify my needs the same way I’ve trained myself to identify theirs.)

In the moments of tantrum with my son, I give him space to fall over and wail as much as he needs. Providing my breast, my thigh, and my hand to, you know, keep my co-pay in my purse.

I just look at him for a second to give him space to feel. Trying my hardest not to immediately fix, fix, fix like my brain wants to do, but instead to simply hold him.

I don’t want to correct the behavior in that moment, because there’s no point. This is his language. His communication.

I want to listen. But more importantly, I want to understand.

And sometimes this holding and listening is one of those invisible line items mothers tack onto themselves without announcement—and often without acknowledgment.

My body aches from holding the 20lb+ flailing body, and my spirit is frazzled trying to remain calm inside someone else’s big emotions.

Sometimes the holder needs holding in order to continue teaching holding.

Sometimes the mothers of homes are teaching more than one person at a time. Sometimes one of them is holding the space of a partner, and sometimes the other is holding the space of a child.

But in my vision, all are welcomed at my outside dinner table.

And girls, don’t begin to type no think piece in the comments about mothering men. I know.

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But I can’t acknowledge the things I wasn’t taught without acknowledging the things they weren’t taught as well.

For me—and maybe a therapist somewhere has a theory or study about this needing correcting—we all have different skills. Different callings. Different purposes in life.

We may have shared that same dream early on about our family, but different ideas were placed on our hearts to steward that dream differently.

If I want to create a home with all the things I talked about, I have to get comfortable moving in and out of the student chair inside my own home. And the same goes for the other members of my family.

I believe children are brilliant, so who am I to miss out on the teachings of a lifetime sitting right at my own table?

In those moments, I am not the teacher. I am the student.

My body is being taught how to soften in ways I feel my mother forgot while trying to survive. My mind is being taught to quiet itself and not immediately turn what I see into judgment, but instead let the space exist long enough for whatever is trying to bloom to arrive.

Now, I’m not perfect, and never above correction. There are times—OFTEN—when I still have “shoulds” and “woulds” sitting on my tongue.

I’m human.

And I hope I’ve done enough good that gentleness has also been reserved for me. Shit even if I haven’t ( see I’m learning to just arrive.)

But at the bare bones of it all, we all need holding. Physically or otherwise.

I can’t speak for the dads. I wish I understood more, honestly. I wish they would invite us moms to their table so the grace we already extend could be labeled with clarity.

But I can speak for my moms—or at least the ones who may have had a seat at the table in this piece—that while we are wrangling tiny humans who think the grip of their little arms around our thighs is somehow safer than their car seat harness could ever be, when it’s over, we are still feeling every vibration of every cry and kick.

Hold us, please.

Assist in our regulation.

See with your eyes and the roof we’ve been maintaining, trying to make a home for everyone underneath it, that even though it may seem effortless, everything moved by our hands is effort-full.

Wrap your arms around us and help get us to the finish line of recovery so we can move forward and fulfill whatever need our family has next.

When you ask about our day, inquire deeper than the topics our minds could remember in the moment. Ask about the idea we mentioned weeks ago that got lost underneath the pile of daily duties and new responsibilities.

See her tries, and give her the same grace she extends to every open hand she fills, knowing it may never return with anything for her.

Correct the tone, but also see how we got there in moments of overstimulation.

Mothers and caregivers need holding.

A space where their screams aren’t just met with walls and defenses. A place where a sob isn’t answered with “girl, pull it together.” A place where unraveling is understood as untangling—so they can be wrapped more securely.

I write as thoughts and feelings come to me and share them here.

So if you felt seen in this, be bold and share it with a friend, a partner, a parent. Let it be a catalyst for a conversation that builds better understanding and restores closeness.

Because the family and friends we have—and continue to choose—may just be, at least from where I’m standing right now, the most precious thing we have.

And if you want to keep reading the real, unpolished parts of this journey, you can subscribe or support my work. Either way, I’m glad you’re here

I am screaming. Leaving that as the first line.

Today we’re getting into returning to places we never want to be.

As I sit here, surrounded by the same monitors that became regulation in dysregulation for the first 6–7 months of my son’s life, all I can think is: this is my own personal hell. How kind of hell—if it’s even a thing—to lease me out my own corner.

But it got me thinking.

This may be your personal slice of hell, but you are not on an island by yourself. There are parents here who’ve been here longer than I have. People wishing they only had an extra day of observation. And in that… maybe it’s hell island. Let me coin that before Gordon Ramsay makes it a Love Island spin-off where contestants have to catch and forage their own ingredients and impress TikTok chefs or something.

The world is on fire, y’all. I’m saying that like it’s anything new. But in the 30 minutes of sleep I was gifted, that’s all my brain was screaming.

Waking up to find out Trump has his face in a passport—thank God I already have mine (but damn, my renewal is in a few years).

Rent is still an arm, a leg, and a toe—and don’t blink too fast, you might have to throw something back to afford the renewal. (The girlies on TikTok said you can negotiate that… I don’t know if it’s true, but don’t say I didn’t tell you.) People are moving back in with their parents just to catch their breath.

I saw a post about how we need to stop calling ourselves lazy when we’re overworked, undersupported, and exhausted—and I sat with that. Seriously.

Because I am so hard on myself, but I am literally doing the best I can. Raise your hand if you’re doing the best you can. Turn to your neighbor and say, ARE YOU DOING THE BEST YOU CAN? Then turn to your other neighbor and—WELL DAMN IT, IT’S ENOUGH.

My version of hell has me whipped so good. This might be the first time in my life I’ve recognized the trauma so quickly after it happened. The old me would’ve spent the last 24 hours crying about things she couldn’t change. Now I’m just like: present the options so I can choose.

My body rewired panic quickly when crisis was all I knew for months on end. My eldest-daughter syndrome is in overdrive in motherhood, not gonna lie. I’m a solve-a-problem girl, and now I’m really like—skip the fluff, what’s the meat?

When you learn the game of survival for real—not the dramatic version, not heartbreak, not inconvenience, but actual life-and-death decision-making, you learn to play it well. Your subconscious tells you there is only one right answer, and you cannot afford to choose wrong.

So you pull your pants up, strap that bra tight, and show up prepared for the worst—knowing it’s waiting around the corner no matter how many right turns you’ve made.

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As I had to make a decision that felt massive to everyone else but so simple to me, I realized something: the military isn’t the only place soldiers are made.

I march my left, my left, left, right, left into triage after triage, knowing the protocols. Knowing the terms. Knowing the game. Because once you learn, you don’t forget.

Entering the same hospital that once held me captive and stripped me of every identity I thought I had—only a year later, for what was supposed to be a simple procedure turned admission—I fell right back into line.

The questions came like muscle memory:

“Is the blood pressure cycling?”
Oh, those are great numbers.
“What’s his oxygen flow?”
Checks the medical pole.
“Did his stats drop?”
Rewraps the pulse ox around a newborn-sized big toe for the tenth time in an hour.
“Are the meds Q4 or Q12?”

I still believe NICU mamas deserve some kind of medical certification for what we learn just to participate in keeping our babies alive.

My Oura ring told me I had very high stress day—but I didn’t feel it.

I felt calm. Internally steady. So when I checked the app, I was surprised.

As were the people checking on me, who were met with, “I’m fine.”

Because truly—I was.

I met devastation with this child weeks before he was even born. There is very little medically that can take me off my post now.

We are all fighting some kind of war. Sometimes it shows. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s a war you didn’t start and doesn’t have anything to do with you—but you still have to survive it.

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And as I close my laptop, preparing to finally go home, shower, and see my cats, one thought keeps looping in my sleep-deprived mind. If this is my own personal hell, does it get hotter? If the skin I have built here is this tough, are there other parts of me that still need toughening?

And even as I ask it, something in me answers back.

Maybe I am not something that still needs to be built. Maybe I already am.

A mosaic. A mixed-media collage of everything I have survived. Italian leather, polished leather, silk, lace, shit, and a little bit of concrete.

I am all of that, and then some.

If this resonated, sit with it—or send it to someone who’s in the thick of it. And if you want to keep reading the real, unpolished parts of this journey, you can subscribe or support my work. Either way, I’m glad you’re here.

I’ve been in the South longer than I lived in my home state of Ohio now, so I feel like I can consider myself a Southern woman… I think lol. Southern… ish. Like… Southern-adjacent.

Because recently I’ve really gotten into historical fiction, and the most recent book I just finished was Kin by Tayari Jones. I didn’t realize until I started writing this but this is actually by second book by her! My first being Silver Sparrow. I kept seeing people post this book on social media, and when my homegirl told me she had just finished it and that I needed to read it, I was like okay, cool.

$14.99 spent ✅

When I read, I don’t look beforehand. I don’t read the back. I don’t think about what the book is gonna be about. If I hear it’s good, I’ll pick it up—and that’s literally as far as it goes. And if I hate it immediately? I will DNF that thang. I had just finished another book, so I was like yeah, I actually need something to read. So I read it.

And my friend did not warn me. She did not warn me. And you know what—why would she? Why would she warn me? But still… she did not warn me.

Like what even that line! ⬆

It’s a spoonful of my favorite meal right into my starved mouth. That’s what it is!

From the very first page, yeah… it’s a page-turner. I used to read a lot of romance. I still do, but lately I’ve been heavy into historical fiction. And one thing about romance books—especially by YT authors—they love a romanticized version of North Carolina. And I’m not even gonna say it’s fake… maybe that’s how some people experience North Carolina. But I have not experienced North Carolina in a way where I’d be like yeah… let me set my whole novel here.

I’ve tried. Even in college, I tried to see it like that. I couldn’t do it. But a lot of the historical fiction I’ve been reading lately is based in Georgia—Atlanta specifically. And oddly enough around the same time period. And now that I think about the authors have been in similar age ranges and in the acknowledgements speak of some elder’s experience that influenced their storyline.

I don’t know too much about Georgia. Honestly, I don’t know too much about the South in general—not in a way that feels like a deep, rooted identity. Being in the South but not born in the south sometimes be having me feel like I ain’t Black enough. So reading these books? It really makes me want to deep dive, because I know there’s so much I don’t know.

Getting into the book itself, I loved the way this author made every part of it feel like its own section while still flowing. We got to see the characters as babies, then teenagers, then into early adulthood. And one thing about me—I like when characters are around my age. I’m 25, about to be 26. I think they were a little younger than me, but still close enough. And I felt that transition from girlhood into womanhood.

But towards the end—even though they were like 22, 23—they still felt like babies. And when I think back on myself at 22, I was a baby. You couldn’t tell me that but 25/26 year old would pull her for a chat realllllllll quick. I was 23 and pregnant. 23, nonetheless. So reading their lives and comparing it to mine… it just had me thinking. What if I existed in these times? Who would I be? The friend who “moves up” or the one that still never made it out?

Both of the main characters, Niecy & Annie, are described as “motherless,” and they’re what you would call cradle friends—like you’ve known someone your entire life, not by blood, but closer than blood. And they share this identity around being motherless. It is the line that keeps them together throughout this book. The string connecting their two paper cups for telephone.

I’ve always had a mother, so I don’t know what it feels like to be without one. And that made me think, about what it’s like to be essentially fatherless in a society that tries to make it all of your identity. Though I have no father, I don’t know what it feels like to be fatherless in the way people describe it. My father’s absence was never something that felt like a loss to me. Out of sight out of mind, honestly. There has never been a deep desire for that relationship. My body has always protected me like that. The gift of knowing what was love and what was not. What to keep and what to throw back.

So seeing how deeply that shaped them really stood out. But also the people who stepped in to raise them. Because yes, people can step in and take care of you, but that doesn’t mean they loved you well. That doesn’t mean you felt loved. And I’m really glad the book made that distinction.

There is a point, the girls go their separate ways for the first time in their lives, and it really felt like that moment after high school when everyone goes off to different colleges. You’ve been with these people forever, and then suddenly, you’re not. And maintaining those relationships is hard, especially without phones or texting or any of that. So I really appreciated the letters. The back-and-forth of the letters while also having the back and forth of the perspectives in chapters made the pacing feel so natural.

“I struggled to decide if secrets and lies were twins, regular sisters, or just cousins.”

Even when years passed, it didn’t feel like years had passed. But I will say, I wish we got letters from the caregivers too. They were so important in the beginning, I wanted to know what happened to them. Or…is this how it was for families during that time? Do you leave your own family when you join another? What is that communication like?

There’s a part where one of the girls gets married and basically learns how to take care of a home. And I’m not even gonna lie, I was like… wait. Do I need that? Because I don’t know how to take care of a home like that. I’m still learning how to be a “well-kept” woman in my 20s—not in a rigid way, but in a “I was never taught this” way. And I think a part of that is having role models, having examples of what that looks like.

There was a scene where she literally follows the mother-in-law around learning how to clean. Now I’m not going to lie, it prompted my ass to get up and mop tf out of my floors. I’m not at the level of beating my pillows to get the hidden dust out but maybe next week. Though very tedious and almost a bit too overbearing, this also played in to “motherlessness” that Niecy carried around with her. She loved feeling loved by a mother.

Jones gave both girls mothers outside of the women who birthed them, and when who raised them. Each teaching different lessons to eat girl. Share through the letters over the years, the shared bits of lesson across experiences.

Niecy learned how to prim and proper and how to be wife to man and daughter in a family with a name that carried more weight than her maiden name ever could. Annie learned that the motherless could mother, even if she did tell her never to comeback to her.

Now Niecy and Joette… because yes, there’s a romantic relationship there. And I think it’s important. These stories deserve to exist. Women who loved women have always been in the background of the stories people choose to share. But I wanted more.

“If my body was the record, her gaze was the needle that made it sing.”

More space, more depth, more time. Because if this relationship is such a big point of conflict, why don’t we actually get to feel the love? Why is it always hidden, rushed, or cut short? Why was it so quickly chalked up to just sex? I want a story where that love just… is.

I could never be too delusional to think that they would run off into the sunset and live happily ever after in these pages. Not when Niecy was still attached to her friend that seemed to be in endless need.

I’d love a book where the women get to love.

Especially during this time where people like to talk like sexuality and gender identity are just now being popularized. Like the gaysss and the gworlssss haven’t been the back bone & meat & potatoes in our culture.

Joette deserved better. She deserved to be loved by the pure oxygenated blood that followed through someone’s body. No to save faces for families.

And the ending.

Up until the end, I was ready to give this book a 10. Like, locked in start to (not so) finish. Trying to pick my kindle up in any moment I wasn’t wrangling my toddler. In the car, in the bed, on the toilet. I needed to know how it was going to unfold this time.

This events that happened were similar to others in this genre so I wasn’t surprised at the route it took.

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But that ending felt rushed. After the “big moment,” I didn’t even want to read anymore. I was skimming like okay… what else could possibly be said after that? And I hate that feeling, because I don’t skim. But it just didn’t feel like there was enough buildup for how big that moment was supposed to be. It broke my heart—but not in the way I think it was supposed to. I felt like I didn’t get enough to make me cry like it should have.

and that is where my feelings about the book changed for me. me it was steady the entire way through until that moment.

But I rate books as a writer and the reader. I can’t shut either off. I’m constantly taking into consideration what might’ve been cut and labor each book I read exudes.

Overall, though, this was still a really good read. I genuinely enjoyed it. As a second time reader of Tayari Jones, the bar is high now. I’ll definitely be reading more.

“Love requires courage, but it fortifies you at the same time. I don’t know anything else in the world that yields the exact same treasure it demands.”

8/10. It could’ve been a 10… but that ending? yeah.

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What books are you reading? Next I’m Reading: The Art of Loving You (The Forever Falling Book 2) by Natasha Bishop & Big Girl Blitz (Curve Book 3) by Danielle Allen

I’d had boyfriends before, of course I’m a pretty girl, funny asf too—even though I be dead ass serious. Did I have phases of life where these boyfriends were on my mind wayyyy too much? Yes. Honestly, I don’t think that this time was any different. Except for the fact that, you know, we live together, had a baby, a sorta engagement, you know the regular things lol. A little largely committal.

I used to be a girl who told those boyfriends my favorite flowers were sunflowers. Shared no specific reason out loud, but every girl knows she just doesn’t want to be a cliche and say roses. The honest truth was I didn’t have a preference. While I have a warm thought about a few kinds of flowers now, my preference now is NONE.

After having to keep a tiny human alive all day, the last thing I want to have is another thing to take care of, so if you ever need to get me a gift just go get me a pothos plant. Them thangs never seem to get tired of me. They always perk back up to tell me they forgive me for abandoning them.

The yellow flowers are sitting in the entryway of our tiny little apartment in a mug I wanted to throw away (I left an old chai latte in it and it was sitting in the car for ages and it was FUNKYYY), still in the wrapper, stems uncut, packaging undissolved. Little bouquet of yellow roses. They are like the perfect size. I’m particular about those kinds of things lol.

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I think this is a new memory I hope never gets erased. If I could digitize my POV on some memories and burn them to a disc, I would pay an endless amount of money to do so.

As I sit now, I think about the month. things had become “exclusive” you let your hoes down and I’ll let mine down too (I ain’t have none buttttttttt she still a playa playa). I think he been out of town for business and tried to surprise me with a gift.

@herblackhandNew poem 🌹 #slampoetry #SeeHerGreatness #WomenOwnedBusiness #flowers #fyp #poetryslam #blackartist #blacktiktok #lovepoems #spokenword #openmicnight

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The Instacart lady knocked on my door and asked for my ID. He’d sent me a bouquet of roses and a case of Seagrams. I think we were even on the phone as I answered the door and I couldn’t help but laugh. Hair all over the place, I’m sure I had my dingy App State 3x size T-shirt on and I just know my feet were a little ashy, but I lived alone—who cared. In another time zone, a man that I just met (he still is a man that I just met) made sure that I literally woke up to something just because.

Four years later, he walked into our tiny apartment that we’ll probably refer to as “the one with the sunroom” one day (all the places we’ve lived have their own identifier lol) with Bojangles sweet tea in hand, a box of chicken and a biscuit, and a bouquet of yellow roses.

In my infant adult life, I’ve gained a lot of titles. Some that have felt like second nature, some that have left me feeling like I’ve never had a clue about anything, and some that have made me realize just how many things I’ve never experienced.

The last almost five years have been transformative for me, to say the very least, and I honestly think that I am putting that very lightly. I’ve experienced myself in ways I never have before. You know when you’re a kid, most years you just keep waking up day by day and we have those markers whether in our cultures, our families, or in our genetic design that usher us into new stages of life. There are very few markers that I feel I have ever truly experienced for myself.

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I remember the first time feeling like I was no longer a girl. I hadn’t been when I got my first nor second degree. Or when I joined the greatest sorority on this earth. Or when I moved to a completely new city not knowing anyone. Or when I got my first big girl apartment. All of these things were markers in life, yes, obviously if they’re being noted here.

But the moments after meeting this man in that very dimly lit room, the marker was pinned. It was like I closed an activity circle. Was it the girls sitting high or the heeled booties I couldn’t wait to pull out (even though they should have NEVER been paired with those jeans)?

Or the next night when I felt like I was having my rom-com moment as everything around us seemed to move in slow motion the moment I turned the corner off the elevator and caught his eye? Maybe it was a collection of a bunch of moments, but it happened. She was no longer a girl, she was a woman. And I think it’s because he’d always seen me as such.

And space allowed for me to see myself as such.

Immediately when I saw the yellow roses I was like oh how pretty, how sweet. And then of course homegirl in my head was like I wOnDeR iF hE kNoWs tHaT yElLoW mEaNs “fRiEnDs.” I didn’t say it out loud, girl don’t worry. He is just a heterosexual man, I’m sure the answer would’ve been, “I think you told me that before.”

But now that a few days have passed and I’ve walked past the flowers, I’m like I guess he is my friend. I have this thought often.

After you have a baby, the work you have to do to maintain a relationship is NOT talked about enough.

You go from being this fun girl with frills to feeling like overnight you’ve become this bundle of nerves and precautions. You hope that even in the long list of to-dos, he still remembers the girl you used to be as much as he’s experiencing the woman you’ve become. You hope that even though everything about you has changed, when no one is around in the privacy of his thoughts, he still sees the girl he saw for the very first time—uncomposed and unafraid.

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The last two years of adjusting to parenting together, honoring our individual parenting journeys, trying to figure out our places in our own lives, and all the other things has been work. Even on the hardest of days where it truly has felt like love has run out quicker than Cinderella with that glass slipper, I have never felt like he was not my friend.

And how special is that, to have found a friend in the one you choose to love.

And if you’ve been reading me, you know that I don’t have a surplus in that department, but the few that I have are dear to my heart.

Even though I told him don’t buy me no more damn flowers because they’re just going to die, I still enjoy the thought. Because just as I have changed, so has he. And the boy (he was a man technically, but that man was a boy) I met with a little bit of baby fat still on his face now has gray (okay I’m being dramatic—one gray) in his beard and a baby.

Chile, a babyyyyyy.

What I look like being with a man with a baby. I do not date men with kids.

We’ll never be as young as we were, but we’ll also never be as young as we are in this very moment. I may always let the flowers he buys me die, but I hope he always puts them in a mug he decided to keep clean because he never knows where my vases are. I hope that even if my first thought is why is this nigga buying me flowers, that my second is how sweet it is that he thought of me.

Either way, I still can’t believe I live with a man and we made a baby.

Okay bye.

I don’t regret motherhood, but I regret not recognizing the naivety I possessed before I labored and birthed.

There are days I look at the child that everyone calls a miracle, and I’m always wondering if I’m doing enough. If I’m being kind enough. Am I teaching him enough?

And when I look at myself in the mirror, what looks back at me is all that I am pouring out.

I watched myself disappear

While my baby was in the NICU, I literally watched myself disappear. I had no friends, no plans, no nothing. Just care times and a couple of secret kiki’s with the nurses. And even then, with a swipe of their badge and a disapproving look from charge nurses, I was reminded that they were not my friends—and that all I had left of me was the very thing causing all the monitors to beep.

“All I had left of me was the very thing causing all the monitors to beep.”

I looked so skinny, trying to carry around my new set of chi chi’s that continued to produce milk. I didn’t know it was possible to look smaller than when I was pregnant, especially after losing so much weight during pregnancy.

There was so much I didn’t know before I saw a confirmed “pregnant” on that test.

I thought I was lucky

Then, I thought that I was a lucky girl.

But ever since, I feel like I gave all my luck to my baby.

Through every trial in his life, he has glowed—and I took that glow as an agreement. He didn’t panic when threatened with ejection, so I didn’t either. He didn’t panic when they tried to foreshadow failure to thrive, so I didn’t either.

I poured every ounce of power I’d been granted in my suffering into him.

I think I’ve given motherhood all the glow I had, and I’m in so deep now I don’t know how to get it back.

And I’m too exhausted to really figure it out.

When was the last time I saw myself?

I look at my reflection in the mirror and wonder when the last time was that I’ve truly seen myself. Truly—when was the last time I looked at myself in the mirror? How long has my ponytail been crooked? Have my glasses looked this cloudy all day? And then the realization hits: I don’t think I’ve eaten a meal that wasn’t scraps of my child’s leftovers all week.

I don’t even think at this point I can cosplay as myself. And that’s the part of motherhood they thread into the “don’t do its.”

The parentified daughter

I never thought a woman was bitter when she said that, because I’ve had to sit in some decisions of my own. Not as committed as a child—but decisions.

I saw the occasional scraps my mom was able to pick up in her own life. An available grandparent for me—and when it became two, an available me, whose reward and payment was a roof over my head and three hots and a cot, allowed her these moments.

The parentified daughter tends to never want to mother.

I never wanted to mother. I was okay with my cat.

But the parentified daughter also desired love and companionship.

I’ve loved many—plenty of people—and still believe that I have many more to love.

But there was one day where my wants changed. My circumstances had changed. I’d been removed from that role of parentified daughter. I had lived enough life away from my body to allow itself to want.

I wanted to be a sister to my brother, but I know now too much time has passed and we were too far apart.

But a piece of me had shifted.

I felt ready to explore that want.

What I didn’t understand about my mother

I didn’t know that my mother had martyred herself for us.

I didn’t know the strength it took to leave a man who once claimed to love you and offer companionship when things turned bad.

I don’t know how many tearful showers she drowned out with gospel music—the same songs that roll off my tongue and bounce through the walls in my house at the most random moments.

Crying for help

I’ve become so unrelatable. So underwhelming.

And how many times can you cry for help before it becomes a dance that tries to imitate joy?

It feels like when you become a mother, you fall out of love with everything for a while.

It’s like your brain tells you that for now, it’s time to pour into this one thing.

And as a person with undiagnosed ADHD, focusing on one thing for this long is not a small feat.

But I am also an overachiever, and for so long I have attached my worth to what I could achieve—what I could produce.

And motherhood is not like that.

Motherhood is not for the version of me I was

The thought that often pops into my head is that motherhood is for the hopeful—and that ain’t me.

I don’t have an optimistic bone in my body. I don’t think the word “faith” exists in my vocabulary, unfortunately.

My brain needs facts, systems, and proof.

In this season of motherhood, I am a hard trier because I have to be. But I would be lying if I said that it has been evidently fruitful.

The work no one sees

It’s harder when you see other moms waking up to new milestones, and I have to work tirelessly at them with my child—or else I’ll have to answer to specialist after specialist.

I’d love to just set a plate of food on the high chair tray and say he ate what he wanted and it’s fine.

But instead, I spend so much time curating meals that have enough fats, protein, vitamins—whatever is needed—so the nutritionist and PCP don’t look at me like I don’t feed my child when his weight declines from the last visit.

I wish all it took was showing up. But it’s not like that for me.

Milestones come months after they’re “supposed” to, while I try to detach myself from these goalposts and tell myself that they’re right on time.

I’m counting calories, hoping they’re reflective on the scale—and not taking any for myself.

It’s being a SAHM not because you want to, but because you have to be—and still trying to find ways for him to play and be around kids his age.

The breastfeeding grief

It makes me think about my plans for breastfeeding before I gave birth.

I was going to be an exclusively breastfeeding mama, and if all had gone to plan, I believe I could’ve been successful.

But when my reality didn’t softly knock and instead whipped my boob out in a tiny postpartum corner in the 2am hour after 3 days of active labor and hooked me up to a hospital-grade pump without any food in my body, I quickly saw the rest of my plans fall into the bottles that began to fill by my third try.

I pumped for almost a year, and it was such a difficult decision to stop trying to bring my supply back up.

The support that I once had had trailed off. Pumping created more dishes in a home I was barely in. And caused more tiffs than I had time for.

Appointments and buildings never had private rooms for me to fill four bottles within 15 minutes.

So I pumped in the car on the way there, hoping not to spill.

I tried to get my baby to latch, but he couldn’t—and they didn’t know if he ever would. And I didn’t have the help I needed to support those tries, so they died in lactation consultants’ offices—hoping that one day I would believe them when they told me it was okay to stop.

When help doesn’t feel like help

I’ve poured so much into my family, but it feels like no one is pouring into me.

My friend Kiara said it best in her new Substack: “...I couldn’t tell the difference between a helping hand and a pointing finger.”

And I still can’t, if we’re being honest.

Which is why I hold so much in. Because people aren’t getting it.

I think our generation has become a bit desensitized to struggles and cries for help because everybody is self-diagnosing this or taking to the clock app with that.

Things just feel so common—but because we don’t know these people in real life, most times our empathy can only extend so far.

I think I’ve been one of those people in the lives of those surrounding me. I cry for help, and in response, it’s just another thing that I’m doing wrong.

“Girl, leave that baby with his daddy.”
“You can’t just holding him hostage.”
“You just have to make time.”
“You need to take time for yourself.”

In between the spikes of my cortisol, I try so hard to be gracious and kind. I try so hard to keep my sobs to my notebook. I try not to overexplain, again, for the billionth time, that shit is not sweet over this way—and it, in fact, does stink. And no, until XYZ changes, things will not be good for me.

The truth no one wants to sit in

As much as the world is concerned with mothers’ bounce back, I need them to be concerned for the mothers who are silently falling through the cracks—with an audience—but still trying to pull themselves up.

The encouraging words—that it gets better, that you’ll feel like yourself again one day—feel so out of reach.

So out of touch.

So paralyzing.

Becoming someone else

There is so much womanhood that has happened in tandem with motherhood for me—often making me think that I needed this to not remain the weak and naive girl I was before.

She did just enough to be okay, but she really wasn’t participating in her own life.

I shared a video while I was still in the hospital, sharing bits of what was going on with my pregnancy—not because I had fans, but because when I was looking for someone to relate to, I couldn’t find anyone who looked like me.

No one as young.

No one as Black.

And definitely no one as scared.

So I set my tripod up so that in my silent thoughts, I wouldn’t consume myself in shame. Because it didn’t belong to me. I hadn’t gone out of my way to allow such things to happen to me—even though when people talked to me, it was more questioning of my decisions. What could I have possibly missed?

These are similar to the conversations I have now.

Because things are very simple and plain when you only have one person to think about—when you haven’t gone through life-altering change times a thousand. But no one told me that you could love something so much and hate it at the same time. That everything could literally change in a matter of seconds.

The aftermath

I’ve spent the last two years of my life putting out small fires I didn’t cause. Patching up wounds I didn’t open.

And while I never thought that life would be an exact replica of life B.B. (before baby, lol), I never thought that after two years I would still be in the same lost place I was.

I’ll never regret my baby.

But I regret not knowing more.
I regret not acknowledging the privilege it was to not know.

And in the moment I remember this, I also remember that I’ve only been an adult for seven years, not even ten. So the majority of my life has been made up of what somebody else wanted it to be, what somebody else wanted me to do. And though at the end of that period I started to do things my way, have a say, or— you know, defy, reject—all the things people associate with bad behavior in those teenage years, only then did I start to feel like I was in flow with myself. But in seven years, there has been a consistent feeling in every phase:

loneliness.

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Year one: I just wanted to get out of my mama’s house. I was miserable. That was college. I came in with an associate’s degree, so I didn’t have the regular schedule of people who came in with me, but I still somehow managed to make friends. I graduated college for the second time, which was also not a common theme amongst the people I was surrounded with.

While everybody was entering their COVID year, coming home for the winter break and going remote, I was applying for jobs, trying to figure out how life was supposed to work.

They told me if I went to school, got good grades, did the internships, did everything right—that once I graduated, I’d have an opportunity for a better life.

I found myself working at Lush in the mall across town, only to work a second job at JCPenney Portraits at another mall across town. Then COVID paused everything, and I was somewhat laid off.

Eventually, I entered my first big-girl job in a city with not that many people who looked like me.

That year was pivotal. It showed me I love being away. I love having my own space. I love doing life. But in the coming years, one emotion continued to pop up:

loneliness.

And as I sit here now and think about it, I realize I’ve never really been lonely.

I’ve always been surrounded by people. But up until recently—the last two years, really—that loneliness was always tied to the lack of the right person.

The lack of the people who motivate me, who share my interests, who want to travel to see me as much as I travel to see them.

That reciprocity.

I always associated that loneliness with romantic relationships. Like,

And at the end of those relationships, there’s always that time of sadness. And in that time, I think, “You can be sad about it, but also remember where they had you fucked up.”

Motherhood has shown me a different kind of loneliness, though. It has made me acknowledge that a lot of people are rich, where I am poor.

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Not just financially, but in spirit—they have people. People who will come for them, attend events when invited, check in when needed. And I don’t.

Developing relationships, I try not to focus on the parts that feel isolating. I focus on making connections, not letting my only connections be rooted in shared suffering. But it’s isolating trying to act like the suffering isn’t there.

When people talk about their babies sleeping through the night and then immediately slap a sticker of gratitude on it, it doesn’t create a safe space for me. Yes, I am grateful—but can we also sit in the shared feeling that we just shared? Why brush it off so quickly? That is where connection stops. That’s where the candle is put out too soon.

And that is exactly where they want us. They want us to not connect deeply they want us not to share these experiences, to get to the root of the feelings that we are having.

Many moms I interact with have lives that look so different from mine.

Transitioning into a FT stay-at-home mom has been a shift—though I worked from home FT before, I also had two more hands in my home at the same time. Now, with one person working in-office and me at home all day, connection with other moms has become hard.

But I still desire it. I still crave it. I still need it.

Even when I try not to compare myself, I find myself reaching across the table hoping someone sees my exhaustion—not just the kind of tired from a night of little sleep they acknowledge after not seeing me for a while, but the deep, persistent tired from doing it all alone.

Can we sit in that moment and acknowledge that our experiences are different, that the level of tired is not the same, and that gratitude and suffering can coexist? Can we acknowledge that though we have differences we can still relate?

Motherhood has prompted me to realize that romantic relationships were never going to sustain me. The advice to “marry your best friend” is true in spirit—because for me, my “romantic” relationship feels like friendship. Parenting has altered it, choice has strengthened it, and the choice to maintain that friendship has made it sustainable, long-lasting, and warm.

True romance.

Because truthfully, the only difference between romantic and platonic, to me, is sex.

The emotional depth? The desire to be known? The way I want to share my life?

That exists in friendship too.

But still, I look around and realize: I don’t have people.

Not in the way I want.

I have family—they exist—but they don’t exist in my orbit.

I relocated young. I built my life in isolation. So now, as an adult, I have to work overtime to talk myself into friendships. Talk myself into showing up. Talk myself into being open. Essentially, I have to double down—put effort into friendships, relationships, and connections because I’ve existed so long without them.

I’ve always been friends with people who already have lifelong friends.

And if you know, you know.

You’re friends with people who have their lifelong people—so you’re constantly wondering:

Am I becoming that for them?

Or am I just… here?

It’s a constant struggle of showing up fully when people already have people.

So to look now—seven years into adulthood, and really maybe three or four years into true womanhood—I know that life is ever-evolving, ever-changing, ever-growing, ever-expanding. Because to be a woman is to expand, to multiply, to be multidimensional.

I’ve truly been able to sit with all the things I want, say them out loud, prepare the space for them, prepare the table for them as if they are already here—even if that is next to my suffering, even if that is next to things I’ve had to exit, whether that be jobs, friendships, romantic relationships, or family relationships that are not aligned with the version of life I am actively working toward every day.

I’ve always held the biggest place, I think, for romantic love for much of my life because I thought that it would be the thing that ignited me, the thing that got me out of whatever situation—subconsciously—that I was trying to escape. Romantic love meant I could start my own family. Romantic love meant I could disassociate from the family I felt did not love me, did not serve me, did not care for me.

But the most love—the warmest, most comforting love—I have found has been in friendship. Friendship has given me a place to be my full self. It has given me a place to explore things I would rather journal about than speak aloud. It has given me space to speak my truth about things I have otherwise been conflicted about, worried about—carried alone.

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At 25, it’s not that I’m learning community is needed. I need it now more than ever, and I’m struggling to acquire it.

I ask myself: is community now transactional? Is it something that can be bought when you have no people? I don’t want that to be my reality.

So I’m figuring out how to make space at my own table—how to welcome myself fully and authentically to the tables of others. Because this version of life—isolated, being told to “just be grateful”—is not the life I desire.

What are your thoughts?

How do you feel about community? Did you ever prioritize romantic love over friendship? And what does that look like for you now?

Share in the comments, and if you want to support me on this journey, tip or subscribe. Just a girl figuring it all out.