This is for every part of me. The parts, the soul, the self, the spirit, the brain, and all of the parts of me I know and all the parts I do not know yet.

Where My Feet Are Planted

I used to think mindfulness meant being present in the moment, and I was not wrong, just incomplete. What I did not understand is that mindful means your mind is where your feet are planted. That can be on a treadmill. That can be in a seat in a place that relaxes you. That can be, for me, standing in the yarn aisle at Michaels with no intention of buying a single thing.

I am a crafter. When I walk into that store and see the wall of color, something in me lights up before I have decided to feel anything at all. For a long time I thought that feeling was just a preference, something small and personal, a little joy I kept in my back pocket. But I have come to understand it differently. When I am in a creative space, I am in a space of flow. And when I am in flow, I am aligned with myself.

I think that is what I have been trying to understand about myself: why different parts of me can want opposite things at the same time. Why one part of me feels ready while another part is afraid. Why my body can react before my mind has caught up. For a long time, I thought those contradictions meant something was wrong with me. I am learning now that maybe they are not contradictions at all. Maybe they are different parts of me trying to communicate.

I needed to learn that, because there are days when the creativity will not come and I get exhausted trying to figure out why. I never used to ask myself the real question, which is not why I won’t create, but am I in flow right now? What is my mind telling me to do versus what do I actually want to do?

That gap is where two parts of me start arguing, and the argument gets so loud that logic gets pushed to the back of the room. One part says let’s go. Another part says you can’t. And somewhere underneath both of them is a smaller, quieter voice that rarely wins, even though it might be the one telling the truth.

I have started thinking about these parts less like separate systems and more like different voices living in the same house. The brain asks, are we safe? The body asks, have we experienced something like this before? The mind asks, what does this mean? And somewhere underneath all of that is the quieter voice of the self, or spirit, asking, but what do we actually need, what feels aligned with who we are?

I want to be clear about something before I go further. I use self and spirit and soul interchangeably in this essay, and I do that on purpose. That is the part of me that feels the ease, the calm, the creativity, the flow. That is how I know I am in alignment with myself, when the flow comes, when the brain is at ease, and the alerts have been addressed. Not that there will be no alerts; there will always be alerts, but you name what the signal is, and the parts come into agreement about the decision to turn the alarm down, and you move toward ease together. That is what alignment actually looks like in practice. It ebbs, and it flows. It takes time. We do not always get it right, and honestly this probably happens a hundred times a day, this small negotiation between the parts, most of it too quiet to even notice.

The Architecture

I have been reading Britt Frank’s book on the parts of the mind, and she breaks it down in a way that finally gave me language for something I have been feeling for some time without naming it. The mind is the personality, all the things that make you you. The brain exists to keep you alive. And the self is the part that wants ease, alignment, peace, even though getting there means negotiating with the other two.

I kept asking myself, while reading, does all of this psychological language touch the biological? How does it show up in the body? And the answer I landed on was yes, it does, in a complicated way. The brain’s job is to alert you to danger, but it cannot always tell the difference between an email you are afraid to open and an actual physical threat. That used to scare me, honestly. How can something responsible for keeping me alive not know the difference between the two? But then I understood that knowing the difference was never the brain’s job. Its job is only to sound the alarm. Learning the difference is mine.

That learning takes time, and the time it takes is the thing I actually want to write about. The fear does not disappear. What shrinks, slowly, is the space between the alarm going off and you recognizing what it actually is. Every time you learn the why behind a reaction, that space gets a little shorter. It is like pulling a piece away from yourself and turning it over in your hands until you understand what it was trying to protect you from.

I also have to be honest that not every part can be named. Memories are living in my mind and body that I do not have language for yet, and some of them may not even be fully mine to understand; they come from somewhere further back, my bloodline, my ancestry, a life I did not live but still carry. We walk away from situations, but the body does not always walk away with us. It holds on to what we thought we left behind.

Some things you simply have to move through without knowing what to call them, and be gentle with yourself in that not knowing. Moving through something unnamed still teaches you: I have felt this before, I have survived this before, even if I could not tell you what this was. Naming what you can is one way of getting closer to yourself. It is just not the only way, and it is not always possible, and that has to be okay too.

Under the Table

I started noticing this pattern in moments when my reaction seemed bigger than the moment in front of me. The question changed from what is wrong with me, to what happened inside me that made this response make sense.

A couple of years ago I was in a hybrid work meeting in Lower Manhattan, not far from the World Trade Center. I was in the room in person. Someone Zoom-bombed the call and blasted a loud noise through the speakers, and before I had even registered what was happening, I was under the chair next to me. My coworkers looked at me like I had lost my mind. They laughed. What did you even hear? They said, it wasn’t that serious. I sat back down and finished the meeting, but I spent the rest of the day turning it over, humiliated, asking myself what was wrong with me. Why did I do something so extreme?

The woman sitting beside me, who did not flinch, was white, and I remember thinking that she likely has never had to carry what I carry into a room. I do not speak for every Black woman when I say this. I speak for myself, a single Black mother raising a child in an urban community, and I know that some of what lives in my body did not start with me. My brain was not overreacting to a sound. It was responding to something older than that sound, something the body kept a record of long before I had the language to explain it.

Looking back, I can see the different parts of me responding at once. My brain heard danger. My body moved before I had time to think. My mind tried to make sense of what happened and immediately turned toward shame. Then another part of me, the part I have been learning to listen to, started asking a different question: what if this reaction was not proof that something was wrong with me? What if it was proof that something in me was trying to protect me?

Looking back now, I understand more of why I went under that table. I live in an urban neighborhood, and violence has been woven into the fabric of that living in ways I do not always say out loud. Not long ago I was walking to work, and there was a blood-soaked patch on the sidewalk, dark red against the concrete, tissue scattered near it. No one was there. Nothing to call in, no one hurt in front of me, just the aftermath of something. I stood there scrolling through my phone, trying to figure out who to call, what this meant, what I was supposed to do with what I was looking at.

A week later, I read in the local paper that someone had been shot in that spot while walking, likely toward help. I carry moments like that with me even when I am nowhere near that block, even when I am standing somewhere that has never known that kind of harm. So when a loud noise came through a speaker in a conference room in Lower Manhattan, my body was not overreacting to that room. It was responding to every version of danger it has ever had to survive, stacked one on top of the other, whether or not the people around me could see any of that.

Britt Frank writes about shame, about how we cannot punish ourselves for the things we fear or the anxiety we carry, because the body knows things the mind has not caught up to yet. That day taught me something about grace. Not the kind of grace that excuses everything, but the kind that lets you look at yourself afterward and say, that reaction made sense, even if it looked strange from the outside.

Two Spaces At Once

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about a double consciousness, the exhausting work of seeing yourself always through two sets of eyes at once, your own and the world’s. I think there is another kind of double consciousness that happens internally too. The part of me experiencing the moment and the part of me observing myself experiencing the moment can exist at the same time.

I think about that meeting room, and I think that is exactly what happened. I was under a chair, reacting to something real inside me, and, in the very same instant, watching myself the way my coworkers were watching me, already ashamed before the moment had even finished.

I keep thinking about Audre Lorde too, about a line of hers I return to often, the idea that when a person finally dares to be powerful, using her strength in service of her own vision, the fear of being wrong or being judged starts to matter less. That feels like the answer to double consciousness, or at least the beginning of one. The two spaces do not merge into one. I do not think they are supposed to. But the more I do this work, the less power the second set of eyes has over me. I am not trying to stop seeing myself the way the world sees me. I am trying to let my own vision get louder than that watching, so that when I am under a chair or standing on a sidewalk that once held someone’s blood, I am doing the work for myself first.

Lorde also wrote about caring for herself, and she was clear that it was never indulgence; it was preservation, an act she understood as political. I think about that every time I catch myself feeling guilty for resting, for saying no, for tending to a part of myself that is not currently useful to anyone else. The part that needs rest deserves tending. So does the part that is still afraid, and the part that does not have a name yet. Caring for all of it is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and it is one of the only things that moves me away from shame. Shame wants you to believe that only the strong, put-together parts of you deserve attention. Self-preservation says every part gets fed.

Not the Word

Recently, a friend asked if I was ready for something I had been preparing to present, and I told her I was scared. She asked what exactly I was scared of. Was someone going to hurt me? No, I said. Was I going to be physically harmed? No. So what are you actually afraid of, she asked, and I sat with that longer than I expected to.

What I was afraid of was that people would not show up, and that if they didn’t, it would say something about whether I mattered, whether the work mattered, whether I was liked at all. That is not scared. That is something closer to worried, or afraid of disappointment, or bracing for a hit to my self-esteem. Scared is the word we reach for when we do not want to do the work of naming the real thing. And naming the real thing, it turns out, is the entire practice. It is mindfulness. It is parts work. It is the whole architecture of coming back to yourself.

Maybe that is what healing is, at least for me. Not eliminating every uncomfortable feeling, but becoming curious enough to ask what is actually happening. Not every alarm is a warning. Not every thought is a truth. Not every feeling needs to become a decision.

The Hierarchy

I brought all of this to my therapist recently, everything I am telling you now, and she reminded me of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Self-actualization, parts work, all of this naming- none of it is available to you if your needs underneath it are not met. You cannot hear your own parts clearly if your body is still fighting for physiological safety, for food, water, shelter, sleep. If those needs are not met, the brain is hijacked before it ever gets the chance to sit still and listen to itself.

I would be doing this whole essay a disservice if I let it sound like self-actualization is a given, something anyone can simply decide to do. It is not. It is a privilege to be in a space where your physiological needs are handled, where you have built some sense of safety for yourself, where you can choose to surround yourself with love and belonging, where you have the room to work on your self-esteem instead of just surviving the day.

I have that room right now, and I do not take it for granted, because I know how quickly it can shift. Nothing on that pyramid is permanent. You have to keep working to stay there. And as a Black woman, I work even harder to hold that space, because there is so much telling me, in small ways and large ones, not to love myself. Reaching toward self-actualization anyway, and staying there on purpose, is itself a privilege I do not take lightly.

Naming the Road

I think about how many people are sitting across from a therapist every week doing this exact work and could not tell you what it is called. I have asked friends, is your therapist doing parts work with you? Is it cognitive behavioral? Is there any EMDR happening, and so many of them just look at me. They know something is shifting. They know the sessions are helping. But the method itself, the name of the road they are walking, was never handed to them.

I only know these words because my therapist gave them to me. Without her, I would not have known there was a whole architecture behind what I was feeling, that other people had studied this, mapped it, given it language. Some people do not need the name. They just want the relief, and that is enough, and there is nothing wrong with that. But for the ones who are searching, who want to understand what they are doing and why, finding that kind of guidance is not easy, and it is not evenly available.

Being able to go to a therapist at all is a privilege. Staying with the same one for four years is another privilege stacked on top of that, and honestly something of an anomaly, because so much changes in four years: you change, life changes, therapists change.

I am coming up on four years with the same therapist now, and I do not take that relationship lightly. As a Black woman, I know what it means to be intentional about who gets access to me, who I let into the room where I am doing this kind of work, and I know that being able to navigate therapy this way, long enough to build trust, long enough to be handed language like parts and self and nervous system, is a privilege.

My therapist is also a Black woman, and there is a shorthand in that shared understanding I rarely have to explain, one that lets us get to the real work faster. It took courage to sit across from her the first time and say out loud, I do not believe in myself, and let another person help me put myself back together. I wish that experience for us, for every Black woman still looking for someone who can hold what she carries.

Not everyone has had the chance to sit with one person for four years and slowly learn the map. That does not make anyone less for not knowing it. It just means the terrain looks different depending on where you are standing, and some of us got a guide earlier than others. For what it is worth, I hope this finds you too, and if it has not yet, be gentle with yourself while you wait, because it can still happen.

Love Letter

I think that is what this is, in the end. A letter to my mind, my brain, and my self, telling each of them I see what you were trying to do for me, even when it looked like too much, even when it embarrassed me in front of people who did not have to carry what I carry. To every part of me still waiting to be named, I am not rushing you. To the part that went under that chair, I understand now, and I am not ashamed of you anymore. To the part that is afraid to say scared is not even the right word, I hear you reaching for something more honest, and I am proud of you for reaching.

I am learning to ask what my mind is telling me to do versus what my parts want and what my spirit actually needs, to sit in the space in between long enough to hear the quieter voice before the louder ones drown it out. I do not think the fear goes away.

I am learning that every part of me has a role. The brain is not my enemy. The body is not betraying me. The mind is not trying to make my life harder. Even the fearful parts are often trying to protect something valuable.

I am writing this while listening to Cléo Sol’s “Know That You Are Loved,” and I did not put that song on by accident. I am dedicating it to every part of me as I write, the parts, the soul, the self, the spirit, the brain, and all the parts I know and all the ones I still do not. Choosing this song, choosing to sit here and write instead of moving on to the next task waiting for me, is its own small proof of what I have been trying to say this whole time. My mind let me have this moment. It let me focus on this instead of pulling me toward everything else I could be doing. Right now, in this exact sentence, I am in alignment. That can shift in the next moment; it probably will, ebb and flow does not stay still for anyone. But right now there is creativity, there is flow, the self is present, and the alarms are taken care of. That is enough.

I think you just get faster at recognizing it, gentler with yourself while you do, more powerful in the service of your own vision, and a little closer to home each time.

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There is a moment when you realize there are versions of yourself you haven’t met yet. Not people you’re becoming, not some future self waiting down the road, but parts of you that already exist right now, showing up in your reactions, your rushing, your rage, your quiet, without you ever being properly introduced. I didn’t have language for that moment until my therapist handed me a workbook called family systems work. I remember thinking, this session is about me, not my family. I was ready to talk about myself, not the people I came from. But the family she meant wasn’t the one outside of me. It was the one living inside of me. The parts of my own mind that have to work together just so I can function. And I had to learn what it means to be kind to those parts, even the ones I hadn’t met, even the ones I didn’t like.

The Body Keeps the Ledger

There are parts of me that no one sees. Parts I don’t always see myself. When is the last time I looked at my own heart. I have never actually seen that thing, but I have felt it, felt it jump, felt it drop, felt it race. I don’t know what my circulation looks like, but I know what it feels like when inflammation stiffens my arms and legs from stress that traveled out of my mind and into my body, putting me into fight or flight over a threat that was never physical. The immune system floods the bloodstream with cells built for fighting or fleeing, and the inflammation that follows can wake things that were sleeping. That’s the biology. But what about the mind. What about the parts that need to stay together so I can get where I’m actually trying to go.

The Spinner

Picture a wheel. In the center is the self. Around it are the different parts, like a spinner in a board game, the kind you flick with your finger and watch land somewhere. Wherever it lands, that part shows up and speaks for you. But how old is that part. How strong is it. When is the last time you actually looked at it. Some parts of us carry different ages depending on how often they get used and what they get used for. I think about rage sometimes looking like a two year old screaming, and here I am, five feet tall, full vocabulary, degrees on the wall, wondering what is wrong with me. Nothing is wrong with me. Some parts just haven’t caught up to the rest. I’ve been reading Britt Frank’s Align Your Mind, and she writes about addiction in a way that grounds me. Part of you wants to quit. Part of you knows better. Part of you needs to be numb. Part of you knows you can do this tomorrow. Part of you knows you don’t have the strength today. All of it competing in the same breath, and the thing that brings silence wins. Not because it’s stronger than you, but because the part of you that needed to be strong hadn’t reached its capacity yet. There was more growth still owed to that part.

You Called Me a Child

I was floored when my therapist called the responsible side of me a child. I thought, how dare you. I pay bills. I raise my daughter. I care for my parents. I manage two households, cook dinner, do the laundry, handle every chore on the list before anyone has to ask. How is that not adult. But what she was seeing was someone who manages everything and has no boundaries, who doesn’t know how to let anyone else carry the weight so she isn’t drowning under it alone. How did she see that. I told her that most mornings, several parts of me are already screaming at once before I’ve even opened my eyes, hello, get these things done, now. And I know I will get them done. I always do. But I let the parts scream at me anyway and rush me into motion, when pacing myself is the thing I actually need.

Grace

I’m learning to talk back to them now. I see you. I know what needs to happen today. You don’t have to scream at me to get there. We’ll be okay if it doesn’t happen exactly on your timeline. I need to tend to other parts too. That talking back is grace, and I don’t mean grace for anyone else. I mean the kind you have to learn to extend to your own self, on purpose, over and over, because it doesn’t come naturally to most of us. We are taught to be gracious with everyone but ourselves. We forgive the coworker, the friend, the parent, and we go straight for the throat with our own reflection. Grace is sitting down with the part of you that is still small and still scared, and instead of telling it to hurry up and grow up, you ask it what it needs. You hold it the way you’d hold an actual child, patient, unhurried, without demanding it become something it isn’t ready to be yet. There are gentle parts of us we still don’t understand, parts we haven’t fully met, and they need that gentleness more than they need to be fixed.

Whose Voice Is This

That question, what part of me is talking, is the same one sitting underneath self-sabotage. I remember the early months of therapy, sitting with doubt that showed up out of nowhere, you can’t do that, you don’t belong here, and learning to stop and actually ask, what am I hearing, why am I hearing it, whose voice is this really. Someone in the middle of self-sabotage usually can’t tell you why they’re doing what they’re doing. But once you understand what doubt and old trauma can do, it stops being such a mystery. I know why I used to sabotage myself. There was a stretch of my life when I was told constantly that I wasn’t good enough, and that voice became the loudest one in the room. My therapist brought up Maslow, how self-actualization sits at the very top of that hierarchy, and how without it, it’s almost impossible to know whose voice you’re even hearing or where it first came from.

Two Minds, One Body

Here’s what I’ve learned to give that doubt some context for, because it isn’t only mine. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about double consciousness, the sense of always watching yourself through your own eyes and through the eyes of a world that was never built to see your full humanity, two selves trying to live inside one body without tearing it apart. Baldwin, talking with Audre Lorde, described something close to that same fracture, the danger of growing up Black in this country carrying a kind of built in split, part of you formed by a world that would have preferred you didn’t exist the way you exist. I think about that every time I catch myself overworking, taking on more than what’s mine at my job, moving before anyone else in the room has finished their sentence. I used to think that was ambition. Some of it is. But part of it is older than ambition. Part of it is a mechanism built for staying safe, staying alive, because for my ancestors it genuinely was life or death to think a step ahead of the person who held power over them. We were taught, and are still taught, that we have to work twice as hard just to be seen as adequate. That teaching didn’t start with us and it isn’t really about work ethic. It’s inherited vigilance, still running, long after the specific danger that built it has changed shape. Naming that doesn’t make the striving stop overnight. But it means I can look at the part of me driving so hard at my desk and say, I see why you’re doing this, and I also get to decide it doesn’t have to run the whole show anymore.

From Naming to Rewiring

I am not a therapist. I want to say that plainly before I go any further, because I don’t want anyone to mistake this for clinical advice. This is just a Black woman trying to make sense of her own mind out loud. But I can tell you the shape of what I’m learning, because I think it’s a shape worth having language for. It starts with what this whole essay has been doing, naming the parts, learning who’s actually talking when a thought shows up, understanding that the voice isn’t always yours even when it’s using your mouth. From there it moves into something closer to cognitive behavioral therapy, where you start to notice the pattern itself, the automatic thought, the behavior it produces, and you begin asking whether the story you’ve been telling yourself is even true, or whether it’s just old and loud. And past that, for the deeper wiring, is something like EMDR, where you’re not just talking about the old moment anymore, you’re helping your nervous system finally understand that the danger passed. That the nervous system can stop bracing for a threat that isn’t standing in the room today. You get to replay the old scene from a different seat, one where you’re not small anymore, one where you actually have what you need. Identify it. Understand it. Then, slowly, reprogram it. That’s not a quick fix and I’m not further along the road than anyone reading this. I’m just further along than I was.

A Love Letter to a Black Woman

I feel like I have to say who this is really for. It’s for the Black woman who has never once been given the time to sit down and ask her own mind why it does what it does, because the world keeps asking her to be everywhere at once, holding everyone else together first. Getting to know yourself like this is a privilege. I know that. Most of us were never handed the hours it takes. So if you’re reading this and you have even a few stolen minutes today, I want you to use them to ask one part of yourself a single honest question instead of rushing past it. When something goes wrong and the old voice shows up saying you’re not good enough, I need you to know that voice is not yours. It was handed to you the same way it was handed to me, generations of being told we weren’t enough, ingrained so deep it started sounding like our own thinking instead of something inherited. Let it go. Not today all at once, nobody does it all at once, but start the letting go. Those battles are some of the hardest there are, especially carrying everything else this world puts on us at the same time. I’m not pretending it’s simple. I’m just telling you it’s possible, because I’m in the middle of doing it myself.

To the Parts of Me

This is a love letter to my own parts too. To the part of me that wakes up already listing the day’s chores before my eyes are even open, I see you, and I know you’re only trying to protect me. To the part still flinching at criticism that isn’t even in the room anymore, I see you, you don’t have to hold your breath like that here. To the part that calls me a failure the second something goes wrong, I hear you, and I’m not going to argue with you anymore, I’m just going to remind you that you’re not the only voice in the room. To the part carrying a small iota of hope, easy to miss under all the noise, I see you too, and you’re the one I’m choosing to build on. We are not one whole steady thing pretending to be many. We are many things learning, slowly, on purpose, how to hold still long enough to be one home. That’s the family my therapist meant all along. Not the one I was born into. The one I’m still getting to know, one part at a time, with as much grace as I can manage on any given day.

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Today is Sunday, which means today is hair day.

Hair day is its own nine-to-five tucked inside the regular shift of cleaning and cooking and laundry. Take out the twists. Take out the braids. Wash it, treat it, stare at it, examine the broken parts of it, complain about it, admire it, oil it down, love it, put it back. There is no such thing as bedhead for Black girls. No waking up and shaking it loose and walking out the door with the hair flying every direction. Gravity doesn’t work that way for us. What goes up often stays up. That afro everyone loves, the one people flock to and want to touch, that is not a given. That is work. That is dedication. That is, sometimes, grief. Grief over hair that may never hold enough moisture to reach the sky the way you pictured it. Over edges you slick down to hide the kink you were taught to be ashamed of. Did you know that was part of it too, the slicking, the swirling, the taming? That was never just style. That was hiding.

The Apothecary

There’s a method. Moisture, then oil, then the cream that locks it all in, then the twist, then the waiting, then the hope that you wake up to the perfect twist-out. We are scientists in our own bathrooms. We are in the lab, mixing tea tree for the scalp, lavender to calm the inflammation, Jamaican black castor oil to thicken and repair and coax the edges back. We are running a whole apothecary out of our kitchens and bathroom cabinets, because our hair, like our bodies, like everything about us that has ever been asked to endure, needs to be soothed before it can grow in the direction we want it to go.

Let me teach you what’s actually in the mix, because none of it is an accident. Shea butter gets folded into the oils to seal the moisture in and make the hair easy enough to comb, mold, and shape into whatever we’re desiring that day. It’s the reason people catch a certain scent when they see us coming and think of us before they even see our face. That smell people call “the Black girl smell” is shea butter and oils on skin and scalp, and it has always meant one thing: love, applied on purpose, to every part of the body it touches. Then there’s pomade, the kind our grandmothers and great-grandmothers made and passed down, the one we still use to lay our edges into place. That same pomade did double duty on Sunday mornings when the hot comb or the blow dryer came out. It wasn’t just for shine, it was protection, a barrier against the heat, something rubbed carefully along the hairline so the scalp wouldn’t burn. Edge control came after that, the gel that keeps the swirls and baby hairs coiled exactly where we set them. And when we wanted our curls to drip and hold moisture without buying a thing, we made our own gel: chia seeds, water, and oil, boiled down into something that did the same job as anything on a store shelf, because we already knew how. Coconut oil sits in the cabinet doing all of it at once, hair, skin, face, body, because in our homes the line between a cooking ingredient and a healing one was never really there. The same jar that seasoned dinner moisturized a child’s ashy knee an hour later. That’s not resourcefulness by accident. That’s inherited knowledge.

But the biggest ingredient in all of it is love. Do you know how much courage it takes to want your hair to exist in its natural state, not the commercialized version the world applauds, but the one that’s actually yours? I remember the stage of loving the process more than I loved myself in it. Hiding inside twists and braids for months, letting the parts I hadn’t accepted stay hidden, thinking if I just kept pulling and re-braiding it would eventually reach the height of the afros I grew up admiring. I was wrong. My hair drinks moisture the way some people drink coffee. Fast, and then it’s gone, and then it breaks. Learning that wasn’t defeat. It was intimacy. It meant I had to touch my hair more, not less. Show up for it every two weeks instead of hiding it for a month at a time. Stop punishing it for not being a texture it was never going to be.

That whole-day process is scary in a way people don’t talk about. What if it doesn’t come out right. What if it doesn’t lay the way it’s supposed to lay before the world sees it. What if your hands are tired and your scalp is sore and it still isn’t done. You forgive yourself in real time, because you have to show up regardless. Gently grab what you have, style it to the best of your ability, and hold onto it until it carries you through the week.

None of this started with us, and none of it was ever just maintenance. Our ancestors turned this same ritual into resistance long before we had the language for it, passing recipes for oil and pomade down through hands instead of books, keeping a practice of self-care alive in a world that was actively trying to strip it from them. Every time someone sat between her mother’s knees on a porch or a kitchen chair and let those hands work oil into her scalp, that was a body being told it was worth tending to, even when the world outside said otherwise. That’s what I mean when I say hair day is a moment where we open our hearts to our hair. We reach for the earth to heal it, the shea, the castor oil, the tea tree, the chia, because the earth has always known how to hold us even when people didn’t. That’s not folklore. That’s a lineage of care, and every Sunday I’m still standing in it.

Well Put Together

This morning I sat with my Teaching for Black Lives study group, the way we do most Sundays, a room of us thinking together about how to actually show up for Black students. Today we landed on this question: what does a “well put together” student look like in a classroom, and who gets called that. We talked about the girls who walk in poised, hair laid, uniform crisp, smile ready, the ones adults love to point to and say she’s got it together. What nobody says out loud is what that girl survived the night before to arrive looking like that. Nobody asks what was behind the poised smile, or what it took to get those ribbons sitting just right. We talk about the school-to-prison pipeline, the way people look at a Black girl and say she looks so pretty without ever asking what it took to get her there.

Some girls are allowed to arrive unfinished. They’re given room to be messy, young, still becoming, bedhead and all, and nobody reads it as a failure to prepare. Black girls are asked to arrive already prepared. Already polished. Already proving they belong before anyone has heard a word out of their mouths. When our style changes, we get the look, the one that says this isn’t what we’re used to seeing from you, because nobody clocks the science happening in our bathrooms every week. Six hours of box braids reads as a new style I scrolled past. Nobody sees the part where the frizz creeps back in at the scalp before the day is even over, or the way we have to oil a rubber band before it touches our hair so it doesn’t rip a curl clean out at the root. Meanwhile someone else can wrap a scrunchie around theirs without a second thought and call it done.

The Politics of Neat

This isn’t a comparison, and it isn’t bitterness. It’s just true: the polished girl you see was never a five-minute girl. And this, this whole practice, is political. What is my hair going to say about me today. What is it going to cost me to let it say it.

Black women are the ones who teach girls these politics, even when we don’t call them that out loud. We teach the rules without ever fully naming them. How to sit, how to smile, how to keep the hair neat enough to be respected, because we already know our girls don’t get handed the easy road our counterparts get handed. We have to work twice as hard, and that starts before a single test is taken. It starts with how a girl’s hair looks walking through the door. I keep coming back to bell hooks’ idea that love is not a feeling you fall into but a choice you keep making, an action repeated on purpose. That’s what this is. Loving my hair, and teaching my daughter to love hers, is a decision I make over and over, and it is also political, because the world made it political first. School is her workplace the way a job is mine. And just like me, she has to walk in put together enough to be taken seriously before anyone even hears what she has to say.

Because here’s the other truth: we don’t all make the same decision. Some of us choose to cover it. Some of us reach for a wig, a protective style, a version of ourselves that lets the actual hair rest underneath while something else carries the day. That is not hiding. Or if it is, it’s a hiding we’re allowed to choose. Who do I get to be if this thing goes right? I want the versatility. I want the straight parts falling in layers across my face some days. I want the twist-out, vibrant, without needing to explain the science behind it. I want to braid it up and let it disappear for a while and still be loved underneath. I want it all: the long tresses, the shrinkage, the shine, the rest. And some parts of me will never be as long or as straight as I once thought they were supposed to be, and I am learning to be okay with that too.

Armor

The standard for us has always been too high to walk around undone. And that standard didn’t start with us. It started with our foremothers, with what it cost them to be seen as acceptable in a world that was never going to be gentle with them anyway.

I looked at my daughter’s baby pictures the other day. Fourth of July. Stars on her shorts, red-white-and-blue on her shirt, ribbons in her hair, sandals buckled, not a blemish on her. I don’t even care to celebrate that holiday, what it means, who it was actually made for, but there she was, dressed for it anyway, every piece of her woven together on purpose. That’s the part that gets me now, looking back. It was never really about the holiday. It was about a little girl standing in front of the world on any given day, and me needing every part of her put together so the world would extend her some respect it wasn’t going to offer for free. I ran a tight ship. There was no room, because I understood something she didn’t understand yet: that the world would judge her before it ever knew her. She just wanted to be a kid. But I had already learned that my experience in this world would become her armor, whether she asked for it or not.

In my family, looking put together was never about pretending everything was perfect. It was about refusing to let the world use our struggles as evidence that we were less worthy. I think about my daughter’s ribbons, and a teacher I remember named Ms. Washington who kept a ruler for misbehaving, and every Black mother who has ever combed a child’s hair too tight because tenderness felt like a risk she couldn’t afford. We discipline our girls because we know what happens to the ones who don’t fall in line. They’re not protected the way other girls are protected. They’re punished. So we tighten the rules around them, because our girls are a mirror of what the world has already taught us to expect for ourselves.

The Blue Bird

In class we were shown an image, a bird in a cage. Blue. Beautiful. Ready to fly. I sat with that a long time, because I know that cage. I carry it home from wherever I’ve been, and without meaning to, I build a version of it for my daughter. A cage I call protection, walls I call love, trying to keep her from the very cage I’m still standing in. I don’t want to build her a cage. I want to build her wings. But the world hasn’t made room yet for us to just be normal. The minute we get it wrong, we’re punished harder than anyone else caught doing the same wrong beside us.

And when you say out loud that Black women deserve to be treated better, really said, not just nodded at, the room goes quiet. Nobody wants to take that on. Nobody wants to ask why don’t I treat them better. So it stays in the home. It stays in the hair day. It stays in the ribbons and the ironed shirts and the tight ship, because there’s nowhere else for it to go.

Eye to Eye

I keep thinking about Audre Lorde’s essay “Eye to Eye,” where she writes about her mother. How a mother’s love and a mother’s silence can hand a daughter survival and isolation in the very same breath. Lorde names something I recognize: that we go looking for our mothers in each other, hungry to be fully seen by another Black woman the way our mothers first saw us, and then the world teaches us to turn our eyes away from one another instead. She writes about carrying old hatred in the body until it becomes something the body learns to live on, and how that weight can curdle into distance between women who should be each other’s safest place. She names a hunger, for Black women who won’t turn away from each other, even before all the words have been said, even when they don’t agree.

That hunger is the whole reason I wanted to write this. Because we love each other and we have also learned to turn on each other, sometimes in the very same breath, and both of those things are true, and both of those things came from somewhere honest.

Love Letter

So let me stop circling it and say it plainly.

To every Black woman doing her daughter’s hair on a Sunday she didn’t get back, I see you. To every woman who was combed too tight as a girl and is still working out what softness is allowed to feel like, I see you. To the ones who chose the wig, the braids, the twist-out, the silk press, the loc journey, whichever way she decided to show up today, I see you, and I am not going to ask you to defend the choice. To the ones who learned survival before they learned rest, whose mothers gave them armor because armor was the only love they had time to give, I see you, and I don’t think that was the absence of love. I think that was love wearing the only clothes it was allowed to wear.

I want us to stop turning our eyes from each other. I want us to look at each other the way our mothers looked at us before the world got to us. Like we were already whole, already beautiful, already worth the hours it takes to get it right, however right looks on you. Blue bird, ready to fly. I believe you. I desire so much greatness for you. Whatever this world has cost you to keep showing up polished and put-together and fine, I know. I’ve paid it too.

Hair is political. Hair is a decision to love. Hair is a conversation with my body I don’t always win, and some days I don’t even try to. It’s the ribbons and the wig and the twist-out and the science and the grief and the versatility of wanting it all at once. Straight and coiled, braided and loose, hidden and completely seen. It’s Sunday style and inherited history and the tension we carry toward each other and the love underneath the tension, all of it arriving together, the way it always does when we finally show up.

This is a love letter. Cocoa butter and soft light and Sunday afternoons. I love you. I see you. Fly right, but fly free.

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Yesterday I felt blue. When I think of blue I think of the rainforest, how beautiful it is, how much life it holds even in its shadow. That is the blue I mean. Not sad exactly. Blue like water. Blue like something moving.

I was grieving something with my body. Not because something is wrong, but because I am in a new process with it. My doctor felt something during a physical exam and asked how long it had been there, and I realized I didn’t know, I had never done a mammogram before to have anything to compare it to. So I went and did one, and an ultrasound after it. I learned I have dense breasts. I heard the word cyst again, a word I already knew from my fibroids, from the surgery that reset something in my body a year ago.

I am just over a year out from that now, far enough to look back at it instead of still standing inside it, and I know what it looks like when something disruptive turns out to work in your favor. Everything on this scan came back benign. I was told to come back in six months to check again, and when I did, everything was stable, steady, the same. Six months from now folds right into my regular annual. It is not an emergency. It is a new rhythm I am learning, one I have some practice with now.

Still, I have spent so much time doing the academic work of understanding the Black body, the misunderstanding of what it means to be a woman in the margins, the space folks don’t often explore because your body has been called an anomaly, called shame, called the thing that makes people not want to touch it or study it closely. And even with results that were fine, I found myself doing the same thing to my body that the world has done. I called my parts bad. Not because a doctor told me they were bad. I told me. Benign was the word on the page. I was the one who built a heavier story on top of it.

I wanted to curl into myself, knees to chest, and ask how did we get here. I wanted to trace the places that felt different, touch the parts that had been marked as part of the problem, sit them down and let the rest of me speak. Tell me your perspective. How are you helping me right now? I wanted a moment of anger with my own body. But another part of me said, wait, before that conversation, let’s ask something first. Were these parts ever bad on their own? Or did I only learn to call them that?

My therapist reminded me that my body hasn’t failed me yet. That I was letting a piece of paper narrate a story my body hadn’t finished telling. She asked me to slow down, moment by moment, and asked who is perfect. Who is that? What does that even mean?

I had just been reading bell hooks on the same question, how she describes perfection not as a place we arrive at and stop, but as something we refine, something continuous, a practice rather than a destination. We are always in the reaching. And I thought about the fibroids, the last imperfect moment that cracked something open and led me somewhere new, another version of me built out of what broke. What if this blue is the same kind of refinement? What if it is simply another way of learning to care for a body I am still getting to know.

This is where weathering lives for me, not as a clinical term but as something I feel in my chest. The wearing down of Black bodies under the weight of chronic stress, generation after generation, showing up in exam rooms as risk, as statistic, as one more test where someone like me ends up needing more images, more follow-ups, more six-month check-ins than someone else might not have.

None of that means something is wrong with me. It just means my body is asking for a different kind of attention, and it makes a kind of sense when you trace the line back far enough. I wrote an essay once called Health Is Not Mine, about the ancestors living inside me, the ones I’ve never met because they belong to a time before me, and how their hurt lives in my bones and my fiber and shows up on the exams I take today.

But I don’t want to only frame it as hurt, because they show up in other ways too. In the words they gave me to swim through the blue. In the dots they let me connect that lead back to land. In the certainty, somewhere underneath the fear, that I will be okay. They are the ones who put the roar in my chest, the one that comes out when the pressure gets to be too much, pressure that used to sit on them and now sits on me. I felt something like an ocean move through my eyes when I understood that.

I think about my grandmother, who never had the chance to read her way into a space of care for herself. My mother, who made it further than she did. And here I am, able and willing to do things for this body that were never made available to the women before me. Someone owned my grandmother’s grandmother. Social issues crushed bones, crushed minds, closed off whole lifetimes of the kind of care I get to choose for myself on an ordinary Tuesday.

I held my breast this morning and wondered which parts of me are being asked to refine themselves right now. Some part of me still wanted a perfect ten, wanted a body with nothing to track, nothing to name. But my brightness isn’t going to come from a body that never asks anything of me. It’s going to come from faith, and from choosing to exist with what I actually have instead of measuring myself against what I don’t. This isn’t the first time my body has asked for more attention, more love. I already knew that about myself before this. I just get to practice it in a new way now.

I went looking for blue flowers today and the store didn’t have any. I came home with light purple ones instead, a small lift instead of the exact color I had in my head, and somehow that felt right too.

I am not writing this because something is wrong. Everything came back fine. I am writing it because fine doesn’t erase the blue; it just changes what the blue is about. Not an ending waiting to happen, just a new process, a new rhythm of checking in with a body that is still, patiently, teaching me who it is.

I don’t think I am chasing an absence of anxiety. Any screening that has the word cancer anywhere near it deserves some feeling, and I would rather feel it honestly than pretend I don’t. What I am after is ease within the process, not ease once some finish line is past.

Ease while I wait for the six months to pass. Ease while I read a report and let my doctor, not my own fear, tell me what it means. I hope for ease moving forward. Ease knowing that some part of me is already standing on the other side of this blue, waiting for the rest of me to arrive.

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I am a person of many lights. I live a life of many intersections, and I am not ashamed of them. If anything, I am proud of them. But I will tell you the truth about intersections that nobody warns you about: people learn to be demanding of them. They see one part of you and mistake it for the whole of you, then come looking for that whole thing whenever it suits them, whether or not it is the part of you standing in front of them in that moment.

This has happened to me twice in one week, which is how I know it is worth writing down. I give my all, genuinely, but I have learned that giving my all requires me to make time and place for everything, because I know exactly how demanding this life can be. When I am at work, I am at work. When I am a mother, I am a mother. When I am a student, I am a student. I try to keep every part of myself in its own unique space, not because I am precious about it, but because that is what it takes for me to survive being so many things to so many people. I cannot be everything to everyone all at once. No one can, though we rarely say that plainly.

I was dressed for a Friday evening once, party dress, heels, the whole of it, heading out the door with my hands full. Someone stopped me right there and asked if I could take a donation. Not later. Now. I had just finished a graduation recognition celebration for children in my community, still in the glow of that work, and someone called me, and called me again, trying to corner me into an identity I had already set down for the day. Meanwhile, I am standing there thinking, my hands are full. I am walking out this door. What exactly do you think I am going to do with a donation right now?

This is not a complaint about generosity. I do the work. I show up for my community over and over, and I will keep doing it. The problem is the demand that I do it in every light, in every outfit, in every hour, regardless of what I am currently standing in. If you saw me in that party dress, you were seeing me going to a party. If you see me in pajamas, I am going to bed. If you see me in my work clothes, I am at work. If I do not respond to a text on a Thursday before a holiday, it is because I needed a moment, and I am allowed to need a moment. See me in the light in which you are actually seeing me. Do not conjure a different version of me to make your request easier to justify.

I say all of this in the kindest way I know how, but I also mean it. I am not going to answer every email. I am not going to answer every text message. I am not going to answer every phone call the second it comes in. You are going to be okay. The situation is going to be whatever it is. But you do not get to stress me out while finding that out. If I have shown you, over and over, that I follow through and do what I say I will do, then I have earned a little room to breathe between the identities I carry. I should not have to be chased through every hour of my own day to prove that I am still reliable.

I think about this with the parents I work with too. I tell them, when your child comes home from school, having survived a full day of all that a school day can be, do you really want to greet them at the door with more demands before they have even set their bag down? Of course not. We understand that instinct with children immediately. We forget to extend it to ourselves, and to each other, as adults. Before we go down the road of asking someone for something, we might take inventory first. What are we asking this person to do? What are they currently doing? Read the room. People should not have to narrate their whole day to you just so you can do the math and realize, oh, I can only imagine how full that role must be right now.

My silence, when I choose it, is not frustration. It is not shutting down. It is a pause I am taking on purpose, a little space between the identities I hold, because I need that space to keep holding them well. I am learning that this is not selfishness. It is the only way the many lights of me get to keep shining without burning out. And if that is hard for someone to accept, if they find themselves needing me to be endlessly available in every version of myself at once, then they have a decision to make. The decision is simple. Do not depend on the version of me that is not currently standing in front of you. Wait for the light you actually need, and I will meet you there, whole and ready.

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A note before I begin. What follows is an analysis of the first four chapters of All About Love only. There is more book left, and more framework left to build, but I wanted to sit fully inside this first stretch before moving forward.

I have been sitting with bell hooks this week, meditating over All About Love the way you sit with something that asks more of you the longer you stay in it. And what kept rising for me, reading it as a doctoral student, as someone who spends her days inside theory and frameworks and method, was watching her build something out of pieces that were not enough on their own. She takes the vague, flattened definition the dictionary hands us, the one that talks about strong emotion and deep affection and nothing about what any of that requires of you on a Tuesday, and she pairs it with an actual framework, Nathaniel Branden’s six pillars of self-esteem, and then she grounds the whole thing in lived, day-to-day experience and the other texts she is in conversation with. That combination is the work. The dictionary definition alone could not hold this. Branden’s framework alone was built for something else. It is hooks that bring them together and test them against real life that make this a framework of her own, not a borrowed one.

So I started reading the book not just as a meditation but as a structure. Modules, almost. Each chapter a different domain of love, a different piece of the equation.

She opens with clarity, arguing that we cannot move forward with this word until we share its definition. The dictionary will not save us here. It gives us strong emotion, deep affection, intimacy, passion, biological drive, but none of that tells us what love looks like on a Tuesday. None of it tells us what care actually requires of us day-to-day, or what it means when we say “I love myself” and we are trying to turn that admiration into something we can practice. hooks names our confusion as the real obstacle. We do not know what we are reaching for, so we cannot tell when we have it, and that not knowing is how people do harmful things to us and call it love. The parent who says, “You’ll thank me later.” The discipline that is really just control wearing a softer name. She is asking us to measure love by action, by accountability, by intention, not by the feeling that gets attached to whatever was done to us.

From there she moves into childhood, into the lessons we absorb before we have any language for what is happening to us. What we learn about being loved becomes the architecture we build adulthood on top of, whether we know it or not. She draws a hard line between love and domination, that the two cannot occupy the same room, and she makes a case I keep returning to, that the real labor of loving a child is the conversation, not the correction. That boundaries are not a withholding of love but one of its clearest expressions, because a child who is given boundaries learns how to build them for herself later.

Then she asks us to be honest, because if we cannot be whole with ourselves, there is no one left to be whole with. She traces how lying becomes a survival strategy along gendered lines, men learning to lie for power, women learning to lie about powerlessness, and how gossip becomes the back channel where the truth we would not say to a person’s face finally gets spoken. I had never thought about gossip that way, as displaced honesty. But the point underneath it is the one that stays with me: the farther we drift from our own truth, the farther we drift from love, because by then the self being loved or doing the loving is not actually us anymore. It is a version we constructed to get by.

And then commitment. Let love be love. This is the chapter that undid me a little, because it is where hooks insists that loving yourself is not selfish, it is essential, and that self-love is not a destination you arrive at but a practice you return to, one that cannot survive in isolation. She names how much of what blocks us was installed in childhood, the internalized harm that becomes the static under our self-esteem, and she draws on Nathaniel Branden’s six pillars of self-esteem to give us a way through it:

1. Living consciously

2. Self-acceptance

3. Self-responsibility

4. Self-assertiveness

5. Living purposefully

6. Personal integrity

I think it matters to name where these come from, so the reference point is clear and people can follow the thread back if they want to go deeper. Not a checklist. A practice. You move through your patterns first, you choose recovery, and then you do the work of each pillar, which is its own kind of accountability.

She admits this, chapter four, was the hardest chapter for her to write, the work of loving yourself, because we are so used to measuring self-esteem by how we look from the outside that we forget it is actually the foundation for how we are able to love anyone else at all. She talks about self-sabotage as a war between who you are and who you are becoming, and she uses Bill Clinton, of all people, as an example of what happens when you are handed an identity by your context that does not match the truth of who you are. You end up, in the words of Lauryn Hill, both walking away with scars.

Sitting with all four chapters together, I find myself asking what kind of framework this actually is, and I do not think it is only one thing. It is pedagogical, because she opens by telling us plainly that we do not have a shared definition, that we have to learn this collectively, the way you learn anything you were never taught. It is ethical, because underneath all of it is a question about doing right by people, about what we owe each other once we agree on what love requires. It is a Black feminist methodology, because it could only have come from her, from the particular way she reads childhood and domination and self-esteem through the lens of who gets to be whole and who has been denied that. And it is a praxis model, because she does not leave you with theory alone; she keeps showing you what this looks like in motion, in a household, in a choice, in a relationship. I think it lives in the overlap of all four of those at once, and that overlap is exactly what makes it durable enough to apply somewhere else.

What strikes me most, reading all of this as someone trained to build arguments, is that hooks built a framework and then lived inside the contradictions of it without flinching. I learned, somewhere in my reading around her, that she desired a child. That she desired to be in a loving partnership. And I think we forget that about Black women who theorize love for a living, that the theorizing does not mean the longing disappears. I think she was at peace with who she was, and I also think peace and unmet desire can sit in the same body at the same time. We do not talk about that enough. We let women write the blueprint and then act surprised when they tell us they also wanted in.

So here is where I land, for now. If I take her structure seriously- definition, then childhood, then honesty, then commitment to self- I do not think it is fair to call this an equation. An equation is closed; the same inputs give you the same answer every time, and nothing about love has ever worked that way for me. What hooks is actually offering is bigger than that. It is an epistemology, a theory of how we come to know love in the first place, which is a different question entirely than what love is. Define the term. Examine the conditioning. Tell the truth about what you find. Choose, deliberately, to do the work of loving yourself before you ask that love to move outward into anyone else. That is not a formula you solve once. That is a way of knowing you build and rebuild.

Two songs kept surfacing for me while I sat with this. Musiq Soulchild has that line about people invoking love’s name without actually knowing what they are calling on. And Lauryn Hill has spent two different songs asking variations of the same question: what does it take to get something back from someone; what would it mean for love to be returned in kind? I saw someone online compare that ache, the wondering why something that should be simple keeps turning into a battle, to the relationship between America and Black people. It could all be so simple, and yet. I think we say that about the people we love too. But sitting inside this framework changed how I hear that ache. What if the person you are asking for reciprocity from does not actually have a working definition of love at all? What if you are not failing to reach each other so much as you are working from two entirely different belief systems, standing on two different ideologies of what this word even means? What if you are at two different points in the same experiment without either of you knowing an experiment is even happening? You could be on step one of this process, examining your childhood for the first time, while the person across from you is already on step five, deep into the work of self-esteem and commitment, or the reverse could be true. Either way, you cannot expect reciprocity from someone who does not know there is a scientific method to this at all. That reframes the heartbreak for me. It is not always refusal. Sometimes it is just two people standing at different steps of an experiment, one of them unaware there even is one.

And the more I sit with it, the more it looks like the process I already know from my work, the process you use when you are trying to make systems change inside an institution, or honestly inside yourself. You start with a shared definition, because nobody can move toward the same thing if they are not even naming it the same way. Then you gather information. Then you hold that information; you sit with it; you do not rush to act on it. Then you make a decision, are we changing this or not, and once you decide to change it, the real work is reflection, which is where her six pillars live for me now. Acceptance, that things were not right. Responsibility, deciding what we are actually going to do about it. Consciousness, staying awake enough to read what is around us and take in the feedback we are given. Assertiveness, being willing to call a thing a thing. Purpose, moving with direction instead of just reacting. And integrity, remembering why we started this in the first place once we are actually in motion.

That is the part of hooks connecting work to love that lands hardest for me. Change, whether it is internal or institutional, is not a single decision; it is a process with a shape, and self-esteem is not a stop along the way; it is the engine. We do the work internally so that it can show up externally. That is the throughline I want to hold onto.

I have actually watched this shape play out in a change project I have been part of that is working to fight racism inside an institution, and getting to see it from the inside has been its own kind of education. We started where the framework says to start, with information. Listening sessions. People telling us where they had been hurt, where the institution had failed them, and we just received it. We let it land before we tried to do anything with it. Out of that, we reached a consensus: this is the work we are going to do.

But here is what nobody tells you about that part. The hardest piece was not the listening. It was the self-reflection that came after, the acknowledging that we had not treated people well, that we were not the institution we believed ourselves to be. People can do tasks. Tasks are easy. What is hard is sitting with the fact that you, or the thing you belong to, caused harm, and not rushing past that feeling to get to the fix. Everyone walks in with a version of themselves already built, already convinced they do not need this kind of work, and the internal reckoning is the part that version resists hardest. That resistance is its own pillar, even when nobody names it as one.

And then there is the part I think is actually the hardest, the in-between. Once the listening is done and the harm has been named, you are left with a choice nobody can make for you: whether you are going to keep circling the complaint or actually move into the doing. It is so much easier to stay in complaint and feedback and complaint and feedback, to talk about what people did or did not do, because that does not require anything creative from you. It does not require a decision. The moment you decide to move forward, to be innovative about what comes next, you have to be conscious enough to actually see clearly, and you have to choose, and choosing is exposing in a way that complaining never is. I think that is true for institutions and for people. We acknowledge the hurt; we feel it. Sometimes we rock back and forth in it longer than we need to, and the real work is finding a way to creatively walk yourself out of that place and into the next decision.

I do not have the next step yet. I am still in the part of the process where I am looking at my own childhood against her definition, trying to be honest about what I find there before I let anything else in. But I think that not having the next step is honest too. The framework does not collapse the questions; it just gives me a place to stand while I keep asking them.

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I am about to turn 40, and I have spent more of this year than I’d like to admit negotiating with my own body, wondering what it has been keeping score of without telling me. There is a particular kind of dread that comes with watching a number approach you, knowing that for Black women, that number carries weight beyond its arithmetic. We are taught, even if no one says it outright, that our bodies are clocks set to a different time than everyone else’s, that the wear shows up early and shows up loud.

As a Black feminist reader, I am intentional about what I pick up. I took Eleanor Bumpurs’s story out from my library on a whim, drawn in by the small overlap between us, Black and from New York City, and I don’t often come across stories of Black women in this city told the way hers was told. I wasn’t prepared for how much of myself I would find in her. I wasn’t only reading about a woman who died because she couldn’t pay her rent. I was reading about a body that had already been weathering for decades before anyone in a position of power decided her life was a liability to be managed rather than a person to be cared for. I think it is worth saying plainly that stories like hers matter precisely because they show us how society sees us as Black women, and how little distance there actually is between her life and mine. We are not as far removed from Eleanor as we would like to believe.

Eleanor was 66. She had diabetes. She had disabilities. She had mental health struggles that nobody around her seemed equipped to hold. By the time New York City decided the appropriate response to her unpaid rent was to send police instead of support, her body had already absorbed a lifetime of exactly the kind of stress Arline Geronimus named weathering, the slow biological cost of living inside a system that was never built to protect people like her. We don’t often look at the social context of chronic illness and disability. How often are you asked, in a doctor’s office, about the social dynamics weathering your body, the rent you’re behind on, the unsafe building, the years of stress nobody accounted for? The doctor focuses on the symptom in front of them. Then you go home to the very things that are breaking you down in the first place. By the time the city showed up at Eleanor’s door, she wasn’t a woman having a bad month. She was a body that had been weathering for a lifetime, inside a system that never once asked what was wearing her down, and its answer to that weathering was a shotgun.

I think about this because I am trying to understand my own weathering before it becomes a story someone else tells about me. Forty doesn’t feel like just a birthday. It feels like a checkpoint where I’m supposed to find out what these years of organizing, parenting, writing, and surviving have cost me. I think about how many nights I have stayed up past when my body asked me to rest because there was a tenant meeting to prepare for, a flyer to make, a notice to fight. I think about how normal it has become to push past my own exhaustion in service of a community that needed someone to show up. Nobody ever told me that showing up for other people, year after year, is its own kind of weathering. Nobody told me that the same stress chasing the people I organize for also chases me, just with a slightly longer fuse.

What unsettles me most is how the story tries to make Eleanor’s death about her family’s failure rather than the system’s failure, the same move I see happen constantly in my own community. We don’t ask what wraparound support could have kept her stable. We ask why her family didn’t manage her better. We don’t ask why a community has two sanitation pickups a week and three buildings worth of garbage. We ask why those people don’t keep things clean. The system creates the conditions for the body to break down, and then it has the audacity to act surprised, even punitive, when the body breaks down exactly as designed. Eleanor’s body broke down inside a system that offered her a shotgun instead of care. My body is breaking down slowly inside a system that offers me burnout disguised as community commitment, that calls it dedication when it should call it depletion.

I don’t say any of this to flatten the difference between what happened to Eleanor and what is happening to me. She lost her life. I am, so far, still here, still organizing, still writing, still raising my daughter, who has somehow made it all the way to college while choosing to stay home with me a little longer. But I think there’s something honest in admitting that weathering doesn’t only show up as a body riddled with disease in a dramatic final encounter with the state. Sometimes it shows up as a woman about to turn 40, taking inventory of her joints, her sleep, her stress levels, and wondering quietly whether she has been pouring herself into a community that was never going to pour the same care back into her. Sometimes, weathering is loud and ends in tragedy. Sometimes it is slow, and it just asks you, gently but persistently, what you have been giving away that you didn’t know you couldn’t get back. What I know is that the system cannot hold us, so we have learned to hold each other. My community shows up, we find bright spots together even in the middle of the hard stuff, and that has never been nothing.

There is real joy in being held by people who know what you’re carrying, and that joy touches the body too, the same way stress does. But even with that joy, there is still an accounting that has to happen, an inventory I have to take after the system has had its way with me at certain points in my life. About to turn 40, I find myself taking that inventory, my joints, my sleep, my stress levels, asking what the system has taken from me that my community, as much as they show up, were never resourced enough to give back. Sometimes, weathering is loud and ends in tragedy. Sometimes it is slow, and it just asks you, gently but persistently, what the system has taken that the people around you were never given the tools to replace.

-Sipping on tea and waiting on 40

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They say playing politics is dirty, and I don’t know if what I feel is the dirtiness or the heartbreak. I choose to participate anyway, to dip my toe in, and let me tell you, I woke up feeling something awful. Worried again. That old worry I come back to when I think about what Martin Luther King said toward the end of his life, that he feared America was integrating into a burning house, that the nation might be losing whatever moral vision it once had, that until this country committed itself to justice for the poor and disenfranchised, it would keep perpetuating the anger that tears at its own soul. I’m worried for my people, my community, but I know my worry is mine and mine only, and who knows, maybe everything is going fine, and there’s no need for it at all. My worry comes from not wanting to do the same thing over and over again, because it seems like, in politics, that’s the name of the game. Choose the same, not the different. God forbid change comes, because we may not know what to do with it. The masses might get concerned about why we’re doing it this way and not that way. So yesterday I spent an hour with the primary election results and watched close to six thousand people vote, and I was worried again. But talk about heartbreak. Have you ever heard the silence after election day?

I participated more deeply this time. I did the campaign, donated to someone’s run, wore the t-shirts, did my research on the candidate, and memorized the lines. I had a great time learning what it means to sit next to a strategist. I was the boots on the ground. As a community leader, I gave the candidate access to my community. They knocked on doors, and they tried to get people going. We were ready for the change. We thought it was coming. And once again, I go back to Angela Davis, what she said when I saw her in person: change doesn’t happen when we want it to happen; it happens when it is ready to happen. We are the ones we’ve been looking for, but sometimes you get tired of looking, and you become ready for someone else to show up. I’m joking, I’m always going to show up for me, but sometimes you want the world to show up and show out.

I love election day. That’s the day I show up for America. I come with my bright eyes and my ideas, happy and ready to go through the day, knowing change is around the corner. I went to work and said, y’all, it’s election day, did y’all vote? Of course, I looked crazy because no one takes voting this seriously. It’s like Christmas for me, a gift, and I’m sitting there wondering what we’re going to get. I remember when we got Trump 2.0. I woke up so hurt. I had gone to bed with hope, gone to bed early so I wouldn’t see the election coverage, because I wanted to see something new in the morning. I wanted to see the change. When I woke up, I was hurt. I remember screaming no. I wanted better, I wanted so much more, I wanted to start that day over, rewind it, try again, vote again, get it right. I no longer desired to see those results. I held that rage in tight. I had jury duty that week, and imagine walking into a courtroom ruled by the same country that had just put a harmful person into office. I walked in and hid the rage.

Fast forward to this year, when I tried again with my local election. The candidate I wanted to move forward lost. A Black woman. A woman I saw myself in. I saw her as the one. She was personable, she was new, she wasn’t part of the machine, she was willing to step out and challenge it, and her poise showed that willingness. When I woke up and saw the results, the rage was there again, but this time there was a somberness underneath it. I was tired. I wanted to sleep. I went to work feeling like a deflated balloon, just wanting to rest. I wasn’t sure if it was the election or the fatigue of campaigning the night before, the excitement that had held me together, gone the next day. My own community took away my joy. It hurt like hell, and I held fast to myself because I couldn’t hold on to the change anymore. I let go. I refused to let America have my heart in a chokehold and take my joy with it. I got caught up in the emotion, voted with my heart, when I was supposed to leave that behind, because the heart of a Black woman has never stood a chance in the hands of America.

The heart of a Black woman in a country that does not care for her. A country that tells her to be Black or be a woman, never both at once, never whole. Malcolm X said it plainly: that we are the most disrespected, the most unprotected people in this society. Imagine giving your heart to someone you already knew wouldn’t secure it, and watching them take it anyway, dangle it in front of you the way They Were Her Property dangles a history most of us were never taught. Imagine a country that took your breast and told you to feed a white baby that wasn’t yours, while your own child starved, because the woman of the house had gone on vacation and someone needed to nurse her baby in the meantime. When I read that, I felt violated for my ancestors, violated on their behalf, because not even their own breasts belonged to them, despite being assigned and attached to their beautiful Black bodies. This is the same country I keep trusting with my heart, and I weep at the tension of it, because I know I need to stay emotionally connected to the change I want to see. I am emotionally connected to the ballot. I always have been. I knew what it symbolized for my folks during Reconstruction, during the Civil Rights Movement, during the years of Obama. It meant something to me, and I had to bring that meaning to the polls. I have seen change with my own two eyes. I guess I just wasn’t ready for the version of this election where it didn’t come when I wanted it to.

This year is America’s two hundred fiftieth birthday, and I refuse to buy it a gift it doesn’t deserve, not the way it’s been acting, not the way it keeps taking my heart and tearing it apart. I am not going to the birthday party of this country. My heart is broken, and this essay is my weeping. I was sad when my candidate didn’t win. She was mine, she was me, she was the change I wanted, and I didn’t care what the machine wanted instead of her. I messaged her after and said switch parties, do it again, because meanwhile I can only imagine how her heart broke coming in fourth place in a Black and brown community. Imagine this world stripping everything from Black women and then saying we aren’t allowed to be in charge. It happened before, and it happened again. Why does it keep breaking my heart like this?

My community has a historical Black voting bloc, and even that bloc seemed to drop the ball. We have two hundred fifty-seven thousand, seven hundred fifty-nine people, and only about seven thousand voted. We had a real contest the last time this race ran, back in 2022, and there were more voters then. There could be a number of factors behind the why, but I honestly don’t want to go back and forth with the why, because America doesn’t ask that question either; it just goes with what it sees and keeps moving. This is the same community I’ve built hydro gardens with, held tenant meetings with, advocated for, and loved for years, and that’s what makes the disappointment so hard to sit with. I want this to raise awareness that heartbreak at the polls is real, and that this girl was in a space where she wanted change, but it took its time coming, and it took some shattering to remember that this is America.

I hate to break things into intersecting identities when politics is usually fueled by machines with lots of money and lots of power, forces bigger than me and my thoughts on America from where I stand. I just wish there were space for us. But I will protect my heart when I touch those polls again. I will hold on to it and make sure my mind is at the forefront, not my heart and its wishes for America.

Maybe I’ll be worried again next election. Maybe I’ll wake up hopeful again, too, bright-eyed, ready for Christmas morning, ready to believe the gift might finally be the right one. The thing about hope is that it keeps showing up, even after heartbreak, even after a burning house, even after a silence this loud. I am still emotionally connected to the ballot. I don’t know how to be anything else. So I’ll rest, and I’ll grieve, and I’ll let this one go. And when it’s time again, I’ll show up. Worried. Hopeful. Still here.

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I grew up in a working-class Black neighborhood in southeast Queens, the kind of place most people only hear about through headlines, never through the people who actually live there. Not in the exact building I live in now, but close enough that the streets still remember me. As a kid, I thought the sky was the limit. I didn't yet understand the red lines drawn around us, or that we'd actually benefited from an insulated community, a world where being surrounded by people who looked like us meant we never had to look outside it for anything. We were more than enough for each other. I didn't understand mortgage prices, or how a whole community's integrity could be hijacked slowly enough that nobody notices until all your childhood friends are gone and the block doesn't resemble itself anymore. I used to think we all just grew up and moved away, the way kids do, scattering the way families do. It took years of community organizing work for me to learn that's not what happened at all. There was support our communities needed and never received, and what looked like a choice from the outside was something much closer to displacement.

My father came to this country from Jamaica. My mother migrated into this same neighborhood from Brooklyn, just a borough away, but still a kind of crossing into unfamiliar ground. Two very different journeys, one across an ocean, one across a few subway stops, and yet they ended up raising their children in the same place, reaching for the same idea of what success was supposed to look like. They bought two houses over the years and eventually lost both of them, but for a while, they held that piece of the American promise that homeownership is supposed to represent. I think about that often, how neither immigration nor internal migration stripped them of the ability to reach for that dream.

A house, a sense of permanence, maybe even an unspoken picture of a white picket fence somewhere in the back of their minds. That desire seemed to transcend exactly where each of them started from. Maybe that’s a kind of colonial inheritance showing up in both of them differently. I genuinely don’t know. But it says something that two people from such different starting points, one from another country entirely, one from a borough that looks close on a map but still required its own kind of uprooting, both ended up speaking the same language about what mattering looks like. It pushes me to think more carefully about what migration actually means in its fullest sense: not just crossing a national border, but any movement away from where you were rooted, in search of something more stable.

For me, that same desire took a different shape. Unlike my parents, I don’t feel pulled toward homeownership, and I’ve made peace with that. What I want is a home that feels stable inside an economy that makes stability hard to come by, and that doesn’t have to mean a house with my name on a deed. I want something that holds space for me, physically and mentally. I want something that’s mine, even if what’s mine looks nothing like the dream my parents were chasing. Part of this is also about identity. As a single Black woman, I think constantly about what safety and stability look like for someone like me specifically: how to avoid being taken advantage of by a contractor, a landlord, or a system that was never designed with people who look like me in mind. Day to day, I’m mostly just trying to get through this economy and hold onto some sense of footing. A house is a lot to carry. An apartment, or even just a room that’s truly mine, already feels like enough to hold onto.

Recently, I attended a town hall in my neighborhood about flooding, the kind of community meeting where residents, city officials, and local organizers gather to talk through a shared problem and what should be done about it. The meeting was about building a real plan for flooding in our area, and I raised a point about geography. I live in what’s essentially a transportation hub: close to a major highway, near a hospital, near the public transit lines the whole community depends on. That positioning isn’t an accident. Land use in this country follows a pattern. The things nobody wants near their own homes, highways, hospitals, or transit lines tend to be placed in marginalized communities instead. I live where I live in part because it’s accessible to me, because I depend on these services in ways that not everyone does. Some people need to be centrally located near hospitals and transit. Others don’t. That difference isn’t a flaw in anyone’s character. It’s the result of care and access being distributed unevenly for generations.

My building flooded not long ago. A storm came through hard and fast, and water filled the basement level where residents store packages and building equipment. It’s a problem the original city planning clearly never accounted for. Flooding should have been near the top of the list of things to plan for, not an afterthought, but in most places it still is. At the town hall, I asked whether the city would start evaluating which areas are central to community safety differently, and whether streets near hospitals and highways would be monitored the way other infrastructure is. The street I live on is the only way in or out of the immediate area if something goes wrong. During the flood, it mattered that as few people as possible were out on that street so emergency vehicles could move freely. Around the same time, our neighborhood also got a new senior center, which makes sense, given that older residents need to be close to medical care rather than far from it.

Then, during the discussion, someone in the room said the area has many migrants and that renters, in general, think differently from homeowners. That renters come and go, don’t care about the neighborhood the way homeowners supposedly do. I had to take a breath before responding, because I am a renter. I was sitting right there in that same room. For a moment, that comment actually silenced me. I swallowed my own sense of belonging rather than push back in the moment. There are a million renters who weren’t even in that room, just as there are a million homeowners who weren’t either. None of us is a monolith. What makes anyone assume renters aren’t tied to their community? If anything, renters often have more to lose. Many of us don’t have anywhere else to go, and nothing is being held in reserve for us elsewhere. It felt like our whole livelihood got tossed aside the moment that kind of xenophobic framing entered the conversation.

Don’t we all want the same basic things? I rent my home, and I still want somewhere decent to live. I still want to be treated fairly. Who actually walks around hoping to be treated badly? I suppose some people have endured so much mistreatment that they’ve stopped expecting better out loud, but that’s not the same as not wanting it underneath. In that moment, sitting in a meeting that was supposed to be about flooding and collective community care, I felt the irony sharply. Someone in the room was still sorting people into categories of who deserves consideration and who doesn’t. It hit a familiar nerve, the feeling of being a Black person in a room hearing a version of the same old script: that people like us don’t value things the way others do, don’t care the way others care.

Of course, certain things are harder to attain when there are layers of unaddressed trauma sitting underneath the surface, the kind built up over generations from slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and colonialism, all stacked on top of each other. And for anyone in that room who came from another country and got lumped into that same word, like it was an accusation, I want to say clearly: you’re connected to this history too. Colonialism and the harm slavery inflicted didn’t stop at this country’s borders. It reached into the countries from which many people migrated, and into the countries connected to them across the world. Nobody in that room arrived untouched by that history.

The word “migrant” itself came up more than once, and the tone behind it carried a weight I recognized immediately. A few years ago, New York City went through what was widely called a migrant crisis, a period when a large number of people, many from Latin America and parts of Africa, arrived in the city seeking asylum or better opportunities, and public discourse around it often treated them as a burden rather than as neighbors. I don’t experience my own neighborhood as a “migrant area” the way that word was used at the town hall. I experience it as a place people move toward, just as people have always moved toward opportunity, work, transportation, family, or survival. My own ancestors migrated too, some by force, some by necessity, moving again and again in search of safety and a foothold. Migration isn’t inherently something negative. It’s a process, a basic part of how people build lives.

The actual definition of the word is straightforward. A migrant is simply someone who moves from their usual place of residence, whether across an international border or within their own country, for reasons that can include work, education, reuniting with family, escaping disaster, or economic hardship. There’s nothing shameful built into that definition. The shame gets added afterward, by people who want to use the word as a sorting mechanism, a way to decide who counts as truly belonging somewhere and who doesn’t.

I push back against that kind of framing every time I hear it, because as a Black person in this country, I understand on a deep level what it means to be treated as perpetually foreign and perpetually suspect, regardless of how many generations my family has actually been here. A person with Black skin is often treated as an outsider in this country no matter where they were actually born. I don’t even know precisely which region of Africa my own ancestors came from before slavery. So when I hear people use the word “migrant” as an insult, I can’t fully separate myself from it, because in every sense that matters, I am a descendant of migration too, just one that was forced, violent, and never chosen.

Around this same time, I came across an article reporting that Ghana is preparing to bring the issue of reparatory justice to a major international gathering, the first since the United Nations passed a landmark resolution on the topic, and that the country is positioning itself as a leading voice in pushing the world to formally name slavery as one of history’s gravest crimes against humanity. Reading that gave me a feeling I didn’t expect: something close to home. I have never set foot in Ghana. I don’t know which specific region my ancestors came from, and I don’t know whether the colonial structures still present there would even make space for someone like me, an unknown descendant rather than a recognized daughter.

But there’s something powerful in knowing that people in Ghana, who will never know my name, still in some way know my body. They know what it has carried. They know what it has survived. In that sense, I felt like a migrant finding my way back toward home, even without knowing exactly where home is. Maybe it’s the specific place my ancestry traces back to, wherever that turns out to be. Maybe it’s something less literal than that, a state of mind, a space where I’m known, accepted, and loved exactly as I am in this body, without having to explain or prove anything first.

That realization is part of what made the comments at the town hall sting more than they might have otherwise. The same logic that allows someone to dismiss renters as people who “just come and go” is the same logic, scaled up to a much larger level, that has allowed entire nations to avoid reckoning with slavery for centuries. It’s the logic of deciding whose humanity is worth accounting for and whose isn’t. A homeowner being granted more credibility in a room than a renter is a small, local version of the same disparity that exists globally between nations that built their wealth on stolen labor and the nations and descendants still waiting for any form of repair.

Why should the difference between owning a home and renting an apartment create that much distance between two people’s basic humanity? Why should today’s renter, or tomorrow’s so-called migrant, always be the one expected to prove they deserve a seat at the table?

I’m not interested in pretending everyone is the same, or that there’s no such thing as genuinely different values or different ways of living. We are not a monolith, none of us. But none of that gives anyone permission to strip away someone else’s humanity by deciding, in advance, what they do or don’t care about. My own ancestors were migrants long before that word carried the venom it does today. I think about a room full of people speaking about them the way that room spoke today, and I know we have to do better than this. Not someday, eventually. Now, in the actual rooms we sit in, about something as ordinary and as urgent as where the water goes when it rains.

Source: Ghana to advance reparatory justice at first major gathering since landmark UN resolution, The Guardian, June 17, 2026.

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Today is Juneteenth, and I want to talk about something a little different. Not the holiday itself, not yet, but the process of trying to write about it.

This morning started the way it usually does. I went to the gym. My arm has been hurting for a couple of days, nothing dramatic, just enough to make me notice it, and noticing it is something I have learned to take seriously. A song came on while I was working out, something about pressure and deliverance, and it cracked something open in me that I was not expecting. So I did what I always do. I sat down, and I wrote.

And I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote.

What came out was raw in a way I have not put on paper before. I started with addiction and somehow ended up somewhere much deeper, much more personal, much closer to grief than I intended to go on a random Friday morning. I am not used to taking my writing there. I have written about hard things before, but this felt different. This felt like a door I was not fully ready to open in front of an audience.

So here is what I want to name instead, because I think the act of choosing what to share is its own kind of honesty. I wrote something today that I am not going to publish. Not because it was not true, it was maybe the truest thing I have written in a while, but because I am not interested in handing my grief to the page in a way that takes over the page entirely. I still want light here. I still want this to be a place readers can come and find something that holds them, not something that leaves them standing in the middle of my unprocessed sorrow.

That does not mean grief does not bring its own kind of light. It does. There is healing in it, understanding in it, eventually. But not every piece of healing is ready for an audience the moment it happens, and I am learning that the writing itself can do its job privately before it ever needs to do a job publicly. Today’s writing did its job. It got something out of my body and onto paper, the same way the gym gets things out of my body when I move. I do not owe anyone the deepest version of that just because I touched it this morning.

What I do want to talk about is freedom, because that is what today is actually about.

I live in New York City, and Juneteenth has only been a citywide holiday for two years. It is still new here in a way it is not new everywhere else, and I think that is worth naming honestly instead of pretending we have always known how to hold this day. We are still learning what it means to mark freedom in a city that is still figuring out how to make room for it.

And I think we are still learning, period, what freedom actually requires. Not just the freedom that was legally delayed and then finally announced, but the freedom to be present in your own body, to actually hear what it is telling you instead of overriding it because the day demands productivity. I know what it is like to be disconnected from my own body because the systems and practices around me were never built to give me the time to listen to it. Most of us are moving too fast, carrying too much, to ever really check in with ourselves. Freedom, for me, is partly the practice of slowing down enough to notice an aching arm and ask what it is trying to tell me instead of pushing past it.

So today, instead of handing you my grief, I am handing you the process. I went to the gym. My body spoke. A song met me somewhere honest. I sat down and wrote something too raw for the page, and I let it be exactly that, mine, for now. And in its place, I want to leave you with this instead: that freedom is not only the big historical kind we celebrate once a year. It is also the small, daily kind: the freedom to listen to your own body, to know when something needs rest rather than force, to choose what you share and what you protect, and to trust that healing does not require performing every layer of it in public.

That feels like enough light for today. The rest can wait until I am ready.

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Eleanor Bumpurs was sixty-six years old. She lived in public housing in the Bronx. She was disabled, she was poor, she was behind on her rent, and the city of New York sent officers to her door to remove her from her home. She was killed during that eviction in 1984. The officer who killed her was acquitted.

I have been reading Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City by historian LaShawn D. Harris, and the question that keeps stopping me is not about the officer, not about the acquittal, not even about the city, though all of those things matter. The question that stops me is this: evicted to where?

Someone put pen to paper and created an eviction plan for Eleanor Bumpurs. Someone decided that she no longer belonged where she lived. And I keep asking, where was she supposed to go? Where does a sixty-six-year-old Black woman, disabled, on a fixed income, go when the city decides she is done? That is not a rhetorical question. It is a housing question. It is a disability question. It is a Black woman’s question. And I am beginning to understand that it is also an international question, whether we have been treating it that way or not.

LaShawn Harris raises the United Nations in this book, almost in passing, almost like a provocation: Does the UN understand the plight of Black people in this country? Who holds America accountable for what it does to Black bodies? I read that and sat with it for a long time. And then I realized I had been inside that building recently.

I want to be clear about the terms of my visit. I did not go as a scholar or a researcher. I was invited as a guest through my work, and I walked into that space as someone entirely new to it, still learning, taking everything in. That context matters. What I am offering here is a first encounter, honest and incomplete, not an expert analysis. But sometimes a first encounter is exactly where the most important questions live.

I went in already holding something. I had just finished Kimberlé Crenshaw’s memoir, and I carried with me the story of someone telling her she did not even understand the term she herself coined. Intersectionality. I thought about that as I sat in rooms at the UN and heard that word used, heard marginalized used, heard the language of overlapping identity and systemic exclusion move through conversations that felt, to me, like they were floating. Not grounded. Not located in specific bodies.

In America, when I hear the term “intersectionality,” I immediately begin locating bodies. Black. Woman. Disabled. Poor. The term was born from specificity, from Crenshaw’s insistence that you could not understand what happened to Black women by looking at race alone or gender alone, that the intersection itself was the site of harm. But at the UN, I heard it used as a kind of universal shorthand, and I kept wanting to ask people to name the intersections. Not because I thought they were wrong. Because I genuinely wanted to know: who are you naming? Who falls through the cracks where you live? What does this word hold in your country that it might not hold in mine?

That is the question I should have asked out loud. I am asking it now.

Because here is what I know from where I stand. I am a tenant organizer in Southeast Queens. I know what it looks like when rent increases faster than income. I know what happens when maintenance requests go unanswered for weeks, when hot water becomes inconsistent, when the city has to be called just to get an inspection that might warrant a repair. I know what vacancy rates look like and what they do not show. I know what displacement means, not as a statistic but as a neighbor who is suddenly gone, a building that has been emptied and renovated and repriced for people who did not build the community that made it desirable. I know what it means when people stay in uninhabitable conditions because there is genuinely nowhere else to go.

Eleanor Bumpurs stayed. She could not afford to leave. And the city came for her anyway.

I have had an obsession with water for a long time. Katrina and the levees. The way the storm came, and the water rose, and Black bodies drowned while the country debated whether to respond. Flint, Michigan, where the pipes were poisoned, and children drank lead, and it took years for anyone with power to call it what it was. The swimming pools in this country were drained rather than integrated, because white communities would rather have nothing than share water with Black bodies. And then there is my own building, where we went without consistent hot water, not for weeks, not for months, but even a day without it sits differently when you understand the history. When you know that water in this country has always had a relationship with race. When you know that if you want to understand a community’s health, you look at its water. Imagine an American president getting on television and saying plainly: the water is failing Black bodies. Imagine the response to Katrina looking the way a response to a crisis looks when the people in the water are considered worth saving. We do not have to imagine hard because we saw what happened instead.

Imagine if America’s housing crisis were treated as a human rights issue instead of a market issue.

That reframing is not mine alone. It is what the UN exists to make possible: a space where the way a country treats its people can be examined by the world, where accountability need not remain domestic, where a society cannot simply appoint itself the final word on its own conduct. America leans on its Supreme Court to adjudicate these questions, and we have seen, consistently, what that looks like for Black bodies. We have seen who gets painted as the problem. The UN is not a perfect institution, and I am not holding it up as a savior. But it is another forum. Another place to tell the story. Another avenue for raising the question of what it means when a government sends officers to remove a disabled, elderly Black woman from her home, and the officer who kills her goes free.

What I keep coming back to is this: we have been keeping our crisis in-house. Managing it inside systems that were not built to rule in our favor, and wondering why the rulings keep coming out the same way. I am not saying the UN is the answer. I am saying we have not fully explored what it means to bring our questions to a global stage, to let the world see what is happening here, to stop treating Black American suffering as a domestic matter that outsiders have no standing to address.

I do not know if the United Nations can solve the housing crisis. I do not know if it can answer the question of what happened to Eleanor Bumpurs. I do not know if it can fully account for the lives this country leaves behind. But I know the world is bigger than the systems we have been told are the only ones available to us. And I know that the UN building has been in New York City my entire life, and it took a job and an invitation for me to walk inside.

It was a beautiful experience. I want to say that clearly because I do not want the weight of these questions to obscure that. I sat in rooms with people from all over the world who were wrestling with hard things. I left knowing more than I arrived with. I left with more questions than answers, which is usually a sign that something real happened.

So this is my invitation to you. Learn about the United Nations. Learn what it was built to do, where it has succeeded, and where it has fallen short. And then ask yourself: what issues do you think we should bring there? What stories have stayed too local for too long? What would it mean for Eleanor Bumpurs’ story, for the housing crisis, for the water, for the communities being priced and pushed out of the cities they built, to be seen not just by Americans but by the world?

Where are we? We are here. We have always been here. The question is whether we are ready to let the world know it.

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I have always said it like a joke. That my love of summer comes from my people, from wherever they came from before they came here, from some cellular memory of warmth and water that I inherited without asking for it. I say it like a joke because I am not always sure I have permission to say it like a truth. But I think it is a truth.

I believe, somewhere deep and not entirely explainable, that water is part of my identity. That I was supposed to have a relationship with it. That my ancestors knew what it meant to exist inside that kind of freedom, to let the water hold them, and that something of that knowing passed through to me even across all the distance of history and displacement and concrete.

I love summer the way you love something you recognize. And every winter I feel the absence like a low-grade grief.

I used to want to live in Florida. The light, the beach, the way the water just sits there being beautiful like God made it on purpose. But then you think about what is happening on that land and you understand that beauty and ugliness are not opposites, they are neighbors, and sometimes they live in the same house. I think about what it means to fight for your right to exist in a place that looks like paradise and I wonder if I would go toward the water or spend all my time fighting to stay near it.

Here in New York City, we have beaches. That is a sentence I say with a kind of exhausted irony. We have them. I do not really go to them. There is always something, always a reason, always the sense that getting there is its own whole undertaking. And if I am honest with myself, as this essay asks me to be, the reason is not logistics. The reason is something that lives closer to fear.

Jasmine Man wrote a poem. She said we are the original Little Mermaids. When I first encountered that I felt it somewhere in my chest, that particular resonance of a thing you knew before you had the words for it. We were once part of the water. We were once able to exist within it. Imagine knowing that. Imagine carrying in your body the memory of a freedom you never personally had but that belongs to you anyway, through lineage, through blood, through whatever it is that makes certain truths feel like coming home.

I watch Katrina documentaries. I know that sounds like a strange thing to confess, but I do. I watch them because I want to hear what people say about water, about living alongside that kind of power, about what it means to be a community that knows the water and respects it and stays anyway because it is home. The people in New Orleans who talk about the levees, about the storms, about the way the water moves, there is something in their relationship to it that I recognize and have not yet earned. They are living in proximity to the thing I am only dreaming about from the shore.

We had a bad storm in my neighborhood not long ago. The kind that floods. And I stood in the aftermath of it thinking about water, about how it will always find its way, about how it does not negotiate with whatever structures we have built to keep it out. There was something in that I wanted to learn from.

But here is what I keep circling back to: I know what I want. That is not the problem. The problem is that every time I get close to it, every time I think about actually going, actually taking the vacation, actually letting my body rest in water somewhere warm and far from my regular life, capitalism shows up on the shore with a clipboard. It wants to know what I am producing. It wants to know if this is worth my time. It has built such a convincing case that my value lies in my output that I have started to believe I need permission to rest, and that permission never fully comes.

The shore I am standing on is not sand. It is an endless list of things I have not yet finished. It is the fear of what falls apart if I look away. It is the internalized language of productivity that has gotten so deep into my body that even wanting something feels like a distraction from something else.

I am naming this out loud because I think naming it is the first step to not letting it win.

I know what the water feels like. I have touched it. I have had moments when I just sat with that feeling and did not run, letting my body remember what it was made for before it was made into a worker. And in those moments, something relaxes in me that I did not even know was clenched. I want more of that. I want to stop treating it like a reward I have not yet earned and start treating it like what it actually is: a need, a right, a homecoming.

This essay is for the people whose minds are always drifting toward the water but whose bodies are pinned to the shore. You know who you are. You are the ones who close your eyes in the middle of an ordinary day, and for just a second, you are somewhere warm, you are in the water, you are not responsible for anything. And then you open your eyes, and you are back, and you tell yourself maybe someday, maybe when things settle, maybe when there is time.

I am telling you what I am telling myself: you are worthy of the water. The fear is real, but so is the desire, and the desire is older than the fear. The desire goes all the way back.

Maybe my ancestors were children of the water. Maybe that is exactly what they were. And maybe the least I can do, in their honor, in my own, is to stop letting capitalism convince me the shore is where I belong.

The water is calling. I am trying to learn how to answer.

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I did not pick up They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie Jones-Rogers on my own. Someone brought it to me, said they wanted to read books from the perspective of Black women, and I decided to take the challenge. I am glad I did, and also I have not stopped thinking about it since.

I read it right after Kimberlé Crenshaw’s memoir. That timing was not planned, but it turned out to be its own kind of lesson. Because this book is, in many ways, evidence for why intersectionality is not just a term academics defend at conferences. It is a framework that makes the invisible legible. Without it, you could read this history and still miss what it is actually saying about Black women, about white women, and about whose bodies were always at the center of everything.

The chapter on wet nurses broke something open in me. I say broke open because there is no softer way to describe what it felt like to read about Black women who were required to nurse white children while their own children went without. The labor of that is staggering when you sit with it. Not just the emotional labor, though that is real, but the physical. You cannot produce milk without eating. You cannot sustain a body in that kind of output without being sustained yourself. And these women were not being sustained. They were being used. Their bodies were doing the work of feeding life into other people’s children while their own bodies were breaking down, their own children receding into the background of a life they were not allowed to fully live.

What hit me hardest was a particular detail: a woman visiting from another country, on vacation, and a slave owner casually offering her an enslaved Black woman’s breast for her baby as though it were a service being provided. Like room service. Like an amenity. And somewhere in that offer was the whole architecture of what white womanhood was built on, which was the labor, the pain, and the body of Black women rendered invisible as persons and hypervisible as resource.

There is a moment toward the end of the book where you see some of these white women genuinely terrified when freedom comes. And my first instinct was something close to satisfaction, that cold recognition of justice arriving late. But the author does not let you stay there, and neither could I, because what you realize is that their terror was not guilt. It was dependency. They had built their entire existence around Black bodies, and now they did not know how to function without them. Some of them died. Some of them fell apart. Some of them simply refused to tell the people they were still enslaving that freedom had come, because how do you let go of the thing you have decided is responsible for your survival?

That is not innocence. That is complicity that ran so deep it looked like need.

And then she brings you to the image of these women raising children who grew up to participate in lynchings. People always ask, who raises a child like that? And I used to think that question was rhetorical, pointing toward some kind of failure. But reading this book, I understood it differently. There was no failure of values. There was a transmission of them. These women taught their children what Black bodies were worth, and their children learned the lesson. The author insists you hold that, and she is right to insist.

Intersectionality is why we can see this. Without it, you get a history of slavery that centers the experience of Black men, or a history of women’s struggle that centers the experience of white women, and neither version tells the truth. The truth is that white women were not passive bystanders in this. They were co-architects. They competed for power within a white patriarchal system, and they used Black bodies as the currency of that competition. Their wealth, their status, their sense of self was built on ownership. And when Crenshaw says that intersecting identities produce distinct experiences of oppression and power, this book is the receipts.

I want to say something personal here because I think that is where the real work of this essay lives. I did not breastfeed my daughter. It made me physically unwell, and I stopped. I carried guilt about that for a long time, the kind of quiet shame that does not announce itself but shows up when you least expect it. And reading this chapter, something shifted. Not because my experience was anything like what these women went through, I am not drawing that comparison, but because I realized the shame itself was connected to something larger than me. The history of Black women’s bodies being used, being harvested, being required to produce and perform and sustain regardless of what that cost them, that history does not stay in history. It moves through us. It shapes how we feel about what our bodies can and cannot do.

I think about body rejection a lot. How many Black women I know who struggle to love what they see, to feel at home in themselves. I used to think that was about beauty standards, and it is that, but it is also more than that. When your body’s history includes being owned, being commodified, being made to labor for someone else’s comfort and wealth and survival, how do you come back to it as yours? How do you love something you were told, in a thousand direct and indirect ways, belongs to someone else?

India Arie has a song where she talks about throwing a private party for herself, just her and her body, choosing to feel good in that moment no matter what the world has said. I love that song. And I also think about how much work it takes to get to that party, how much we have to unlearn before we can genuinely celebrate what we are living in.

I want to be clear about what this essay is and is not. It is not an accusation. It is not asking anyone to feel guilty for history they did not personally make. It is asking us, all of us, to look honestly at what that history produced, because it is still producing it. The disconnection Black women feel from their bodies. The ways we show up in workplaces and communities still doing the labor of sustaining everyone else. The way our work is taken for granted in the same way it always has been. These things do not come from nowhere.

Intersectionality gives us the language to name what happened and to trace its line to the present. That is not an academic exercise. That is survival. That is how we stop misreading our own pain and start understanding where it actually comes from.

This book is powerful because it gives vocabulary to a relationship, between Black women and white women, between Black women and their bodies, between history and the present moment, that most people would rather not name. But I have always believed that the things we do not name keep us. Naming them is how we start to get free.

So I am choosing intersectionality. I am choosing to validate the labor and the loss of Black women whose stories were never on the front cover. And I am choosing to say plainly what this book says plainly: there is no innocence in this history, and the least we can do is stop pretending there is.

The more honest we are about where we come from, the more honestly we can love the bodies we are living in now. And that is not a small thing. That might be everything.

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There is a version of Martin Luther King Jr. they do not put on the posters. Not the one with the dream. Not the one standing at the March on Washington with his arms open and his voice carrying across the National Mall. I am talking about the Martin who said he was worried. The Martin who was tired. The Martin who looked at this country really looked at it, and said: you do not know me if you think I will stay silent about what is happening to us.

That Martin showed up on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, when he stood before Riverside Church in New York City and delivered what would become one of the most radical speeches of his life. “A Time to Break Silence.” He named the Vietnam War not as a foreign policy misstep but as a symptom, a symptom of the same disease that had been eating Black communities alive for generations. Militarism. Racism. Materialism. He called them the triple evils. And he said you cannot fix one without confronting all three.

He lost allies behind that speech. He lost funding. He lost the comfort of being palatable to a country that preferred his dream to his concern. And he spoke anyway. Because silence, he understood, is never neutral. Silence is a choice. And Martin chose to ring the bell.

I think about that a lot. I think about it especially when I think about the day I walked into a New York City Rent Guidelines Board testimony hearing as a Black woman, looked around the room, and started counting.

Counting is something you learn when you have been taught that your presence is both necessary and rare. You walk into a room, and you do the math before you even take your seat. You clock who is there. You clock who is not. And that day, in that room, I counted a handful of us. Black women. Women who looked like the community whose fate was being decided in that very space.

I want to be careful here. I did not stand in that room and judge the people who were absent. I know what it is to be on the side of life that does not allow you to rearrange your schedule, take time off work, show up at a government hearing in the middle of the day to give three minutes of testimony about your right to stay in your home. I know what survival looks like. I know what it costs.

But I also know what Martin knew. That survival is not the same as living. When we are too busy surviving to participate in the decisions that govern our lives, we do not get to be surprised when those decisions do not go in our favor. When things happen, and we ask, “How did we get here?” The answer is often that we were not in the room. Not because we did not care. But because the policies that were supposed to serve us had already stretched us so thin that showing up felt impossible.

That is the concern. That is the worry. That is what Martin was talking about when he named capitalism as one of the forces tearing us apart — not as an abstraction, but as the daily reality of people who are working harder and harder just to exist, just to hold on, just to keep a roof over their heads in neighborhoods that are steadily pricing them out.

Here is what I saw in that room. I saw Martin’s dream. I saw people across differences, gathered together, showing up for something larger than themselves. White people, Black people, immigrants, elders, young organizers — all of them bearing witness to the same crisis. That part of the dream was alive.

But I also saw Martin’s worry made visible. Because when the people most directly impacted by rising rents, Black women, women at the margins, women from communities like Southeast Queens, are nearly absent from a room where their fate is being decided, that is not the dream. That is the concern. That is exactly what he was afraid of.

Someone told me: focus on who is in the room. You are there. That matters. And they are right. I will not discount my own presence or the presence of everyone else who showed up. I will not negate my privilege of having the community connections and the knowledge to even know this hearing was happening. Most people do not know. And that is not a failure of character, it is a failure of access. Those who have the privilege to seek knowledge know. For everyone else, the systems designed to inform them have already been stripped away or made deliberately inaccessible.

But holding onto the importance of who is in the room does not mean I have to pretend there is nothing wrong with who is not. Both things are true. I was there. And the room was not full enough. And that tension — that both/and — is where I have to live as a Black feminist thinker who refuses to flatten the complexity of what I witness.

I have been afraid to say this out loud. I wrote around it in my notes. I hedged. I said I was not trying to judge, I was not trying to point fingers, I was just sharing my experience. And all of that is true. But there is something else that is also true, something I kept flinching away from:

I am worried about us.

Not in a way that looks down. In the way Martin was worried. In the way Audre Lorde was worried when she wrote her essays, knowing most people would not read them, yet. In the way bell hooks kept writing, kept theorizing, kept building a body of work from the margins for the margins with the full knowledge that the machine was not built to hear her. They wrote anyway. They rang the bell anyway. Not because they had certainty it would change things. But because silence felt like complicity, and they were not built for that.

I am not built for that either.

So I am choosing to name what I saw. Capitalism is eating us alive and spitting out machines. It is turning us into fragmented versions of ourselves, overloaded, exhausted, running on circuits that were never designed to sustain this much weight. And when our circuits get overloaded, we do not have the bandwidth to show up to a rent hearing, to a council meeting, to a school board vote, to any of the spaces where our lives are being decided without us.

Someone at a council meeting once asked me if I could get more people. I felt the sting of it, the implication that I alone was not enough. And I sat with that for a long time. Now I say: I am not enough. One person is never enough. But I also refuse to let that truth become a reason to look away from why there is only one person. The absence is not random. The absence is a data point. The absence tells us something about what this system is doing to our people, about how much it costs just to keep your head above water, about who gets to participate in democracy and who gets priced out of it — literally and figuratively.

Every year on MLK Day, we play the dream. We pull out the excerpts. The children holding hands. The mountaintop. The arc of the moral universe. And I love all of that, I do. But we leave out the worry. We leave out the man who stood before Riverside Church and said enough is enough, I am calling a thing a thing, and what I see is that we are not doing well.

We leave out the Martin who chose to break his silence even when it cost him, and I think we leave him out because the worried Martin asks something of us. He asks us to look at what is actually happening. He asks us to be present enough to reckon with what we see. He asks us to ring the bell even when ringing the bell is unpopular, even when it risks the relationships we need, even when we are tired.

I sat in that hearing room, and I was sad. Not angry, sad. The quiet kind of sad that comes when you see clearly and you wish you did not. And then I thought about Martin. I thought about what he chose to do with his clarity. He did not look away. He did not soften it into palatability. He moved toward the darkness with a lantern in his hand, and he said: I will not stop speaking until something changes, and even then I will keep speaking, because this is who I am.

I am a Black feminist. I am a writer. I am a tenant organizer and an educator and a mother and a daughter of this community. And I have to be honest about what I see not to shame anyone, not to perform a politics, but because this is what I know how to do. I write. I witness. I ring the bell.

So if you are reading this and something in you stirs, good. That stirring is the beginning of something. Ask yourself: what are you seeing that you have been afraid to say out loud? Where are the rooms that need your presence? What would it mean to show up, not despite your exhaustion, but as an act of resistance to the systems that produced it?

Martin said he was worried about America. He said it out loud and on record, and he did not take it back. I am worried too. And I refuse to stay silent about it. Not because I have all the answers. But because the bell needs to be rung.

And I am here. And I will keep ringing it.

— Jay Tea

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There is a book sitting with me right now. They Were Her Property by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers. My advisor put it in my hands, and I have not been the same since. Not because it told me something I did not already feel in my bones, but because it named it. Put a document on it. Gave it a deed.

The book does something a lot of our history refuses to do. It tells the full, profane truth about white women and slavery. Not white women as bystanders, not white women as victims of a system their husbands ran without them. White women as owners. As investors. As people who fought, legally, to keep their black bodies. Jones-Rogers goes into the archives, and she pulls out wills. Inheritance records. Property disputes between husbands and wives about who had the right to beat their enslaved people and how. This is not a metaphor. These are documents. And reading them you realize that what you are really looking at is a ledger, and the entries are human beings.

What sits with me hardest is this: white men who had nothing would seek out white women who had enslaved people because those bodies represented wealth. Social capital. A way out of their own poverty. So they would court these women, marry into that ownership, and suddenly they had property. The property was us. Black bodies whose names came from those who auctioned them. People whose grief was invisible to them. People whose children were handed off as gifts to daughters and sons, to toddlers, to children who could not even dress themselves yet. That is the inheritance. That is the document trail. The thing that Jones-Rogers refuses to look away from, and neither can I.

White women in the antebellum South held more enslaved people than they held land. Think about what that means. Land was the currency of wealth and white women were outpaced in land ownership, but not in this. Black bodies were the investment. Black bodies were the portfolio. Black bodies were what you passed to your daughter before you passed her anything else. And nobody owned any of it. Not the land, not the body, not the name. Nobody asked us.

This is exactly what Kimberlé Crenshaw has spent her life trying to make us see: that when we refuse to hold the intersections, we miss the full experience of people whose lives exist at the crossroads of multiple systems of harm. Reading her memoir felt like coming home, watching this fierce scholar move through the world, testing her theories while simultaneously trying to find a place in it where her body could exist with dignity. She says call a thing a thing. And Jones-Rogers does exactly that. The intersection of race, gender, and ownership is not a metaphor. It was a legal structure. And legal structures leave residue.

The body keeps a different kind of ledger.

That is the thread running through all of this. The archive documents what was done. The body records what it costs. And I keep returning to that second ledger because it is the one nobody reads aloud in the history books, the one that shows up instead in blood pressure and inflammation, in a nervous system that does not know how to stand down, in the cellular evidence of what it means to have lived in a race-conscious world for generations without rest.

I was listening to The People’s Pharmacy on NPR, an episode featuring Dr. Susan Payrovi, an integrative and functional medicine physician at Stanford. She was talking about inflammation. About what happens to the body when the immune system receives a danger signal and never gets told the danger has passed. Western medicine, she explained, can be powerful at blocking what happens downstream, at managing the response once it has already arrived. But functional medicine asks a different question: what is upstream? What is the original disturbance? Why is the body behaving as if it is under constant attack? The goal is not just to manage the reaction. The goal is to send the body a message that it is safe.

I sat with that word. Safe.

Because the question I could not stop asking was: when was the threat supposed to stop?

I will be honest with you. Reading this book made me cry. Not a quiet cry. The kind that comes from somewhere old, from looking at your own hands and understanding for the first time the full weight of what it meant that they were not yours. That your body, this body, moved through the world at someone else's discretion. And then I look at my body now, at the chokehold it is still in, the way it has to exist in a certain shape, take up a certain amount of space, perform a certain kind of safety so that others feel comfortable. And I want to ask out loud: when does my Black body get to feel safe? Not managed. Not contained. Not performing. Safe.

Arline Geronimus spent decades documenting what she called weathering, the way Black women subjected to the cumulative weight of living in a race-conscious society experience accelerated biological aging. High-effort coping. Chronic vigilance. The physiological cost of constantly adapting to conditions that were never designed with your survival in mind. That burden does not stay abstract. It shows up in the cells. It shortens telomeres. It raises allostatic load scores. It is carried in the body the way documents are carried in an archive, as evidence.

And I know that evidence personally. I think about the hours I have spent writing letters, attending meetings, organizing neighbors, and advocating for services that should already exist. The emails drafted and redrafted. The follow-up calls. The waiting for a response. The constant, exhausting work of proving that a problem is real before anyone agrees to address it. I think about what it means to fight for sanitation in your neighborhood, to fight for the air you breathe, to fight for basic conditions of life that other communities receive without asking, and how that fight does not stay in the meeting room. It comes home with you. It sits in the body at night. It is there in the morning before you even open your eyes. Advocacy is labor. And labor carried in the body leaves a record. The ledger does not close just because the meeting ended.

So when I ask why our blood pressure climbs, why inflammation sits in us like a quiet fire, why our bodies are working so hard simply to maintain, the honest answer is that we are still in a fight. Not a metaphorical one. A physical, cellular, day-to-day fight to hold on to ourselves in a world that has a long history of deciding it has a right to us. The stress is not separate from the history. The stress is the history, living in the body, wearing a different face. Dr. Payrovi talks about the body needing a signal that it is safe. But what does it mean to send that signal when the environment has not changed? When the noise and the neglect and the exhaustion of advocacy are still present every single morning? This is the conversation we are not having inside most doctors’ offices.

And let me say something about those offices, because I think we need to go there.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that lives in a doctor’s waiting room. The fluorescent light, the clipboard, the intake form that lacks a box for what you actually need to say. You sit in that cold formal space, and the distance between what you are carrying and what the appointment can hold is enormous. And underneath the loneliness is something harder to name: fear. Fear of what they might find. Fear of what they might dismiss. Fear that your body, which has already survived so much, is going to be reduced again to data points on a chart, to a downstream problem to be managed, never a person to be understood. That fear is not irrational. We come from people whose bodies were passed between hands like property.

We come from a history where our healing knowledge was taken from us, delegitimized, buried, and the formal systems that replaced it were not built with us in mind. Is it any wonder that health feels heavy? Is it any wonder we stay away longer than we should? We are not making excuses. We are carrying a real thing. And we deserve to be given credit for how hard it is to walk into a space that commodified our bodies and still try to advocate for them.

But I need you to hear this too: you are not alone in that room. Even when it feels like it. Every Black woman who has ever sat in that chair with her blood pressure already elevated from the waiting, already exhausted from having to explain herself before the doctor even walks in, is in that space with you. We are all in it together, trying to exist in a formal system that was never designed to hold all of who we are. And knowing that, holding that, might not fix the appointment, but it is something to hold onto.

And then I think about what enslaved Black people already knew about healing. Not as a vague inheritance but as a specific, documented practice. The Gullah Geechee communities of the South Carolina and Georgia coastlands carried with them a sophisticated herbalism rooted in West African botanical knowledge, using plants like elderberry, sassafras, and wormwood for ailments that Western medicine would not attend to or did not understand. Black midwives, practicing across the rural South for generations, held the knowledge of how to support a laboring body through danger, how to use red raspberry leaf and blue cohosh, how to read a birth before a doctor would have called it a crisis.

African diasporic healers used bitter herbs to support digestion and reduce inflammation, understood the relationship between the gut and the body’s overall stability, and knew that food was not separate from medicine. This was not folklore. This was a system. It was built under conditions of deliberate deprivation, refined across generations, and then dismissed by the same institutions that are now quietly incorporating its principles under the language of integrative care.

That dismissal hurt us. It turned us away from our own knowing. And some of that hurt has never been spoken out loud, this particular grief of having your medicine taken from your vocabulary and replaced with something that does not always see you. We are allowed to name that. We are allowed to say it cost us something.

We were already there. We are coming back to what we knew.

Dr. Payrovi describes wanting medicine that uses the right tool for the right problem, sometimes Western and functional together, sometimes lifestyle medicine alongside what treats the acute crisis. The idea that you have to look at a person’s full timeline, their health events alongside their life events, and understand the relationship between them. That is not a new idea. That is old knowledge wearing a new credential. And I want to honor both, because we need all the tools, and we need to stop pretending our ancestors did not hand us some of them.

So here is what I want to challenge you to do. Nothing dramatic. Start small. Get some seeds. Grow something. Connect what you grow to your body and your life, because that act of tending is itself a signal, a message you are sending to yourself that you are worth tending to. Take a moment away from the thing that has your immune system wound up. Step outside. Go to the bathroom. Let your digestive system do what it was built to do. Eat some color. Let the bitter herbs in. Rest like it is your right, because it is. These are not small things dressed up as big things. They are the upstream work. They are teaching you to send the signal.

Our bodies have moved through so much. Slavery. Wars for freedom. Jim Crow. The civil rights era. The crack epidemic. The pandemic. And here we are, still standing, still tending, still showing up for these bodies with our flags still high. We are not starting from zero. We are starting from everything our people survived and everything they knew and passed down, even when the world tried to take it. We are validating what we feel. We are naming the inflammation. We are naming the living conditions that have our immune systems in spaces they were never meant to stay. We are not shying away from the herbs, the rest, or the hard conversation in the waiting room.

Ownership of the body is not a given. We learned that from the archive. We are living the long aftermath of a system that fought to hold every part of us, the physical, the mental, the spiritual. We got the legal deed a long time ago, and we are still, generation by generation, working out what it means to actually live inside that freedom. Learning to receive the signal that we are safe when the world keeps sending the other message. Learning to go upstream when everything around us is designed to treat the symptom and move on.

The body keeps a different kind of ledger. And we are learning, slowly, to write something new in it.

Coming home.

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I started the tenant association because of the hallways.

That is the honest answer. Not policy. Not politics. Not some grand vision of community transformation. I looked at the building I live in, the building I chose, the building that chose me back when choices were limited and this one said yes, and I saw trash in the corridors and dogs with no one accountable for them and neighbors who did not know each other’s names. I thought if I could just get people in a room, we could fix the small things. Clean up. Show up. Take pride. I believed that was the work.

I was wrong about what the work was. I was not wrong that it needed doing.

What I did not know then, what nobody told me, what I had to learn after the lease was already signed, is that you cannot fix the hallway without first understanding who owns the building. You cannot address the broken door without knowing who sits on the board that determines whether the rent goes up next year. You cannot ask your neighbors to care about shared space when they are quietly terrified about whether they will be able to stay.

I live in a high-rise in Southeast Queens that markets itself as sophisticated living. Quartz countertops, white oak floors, a yoga room, panoramic views of a skyline that has been rapidly transforming around people who did not ask to be transformed around. It is also a building that was constructed using public financing through the NYC Housing Development Corporation. The developer received tax abatements and below-market loans in exchange for keeping rents income-restricted. The public made an investment here. In us. In this community. And nearly all of the units are rent stabilized because that is the deal that was made so this building could exist.

I did not know any of that when I moved in.

What I have learned since I started doing this work is that the building contains multitudes and so does its vulnerability. There are neighbors who qualify for what gets marketed as affordable housing at the moderate income tier, people whose minimum qualifying income is over $92,000 a year. There are neighbors at lower income thresholds. There are people who will tell you they are market rate because that is what the language of their lease suggested and nobody corrected them. All of us are in the same regulated system. None of us are as protected as we think. And we are all, in different ways, living at the intersection of a promise the city made and a reality the landlord enforces.

This is what I mean when I say vulnerability does not only live at the bottom.

If you are in the moderate income tier of an affordable building, the rent break you are receiving can represent more than thirty percent of your household income. That is not a safety net. That is a wire. Lose that apartment and you are not stepping down to something comparable. You are falling out of the market entirely, because there is nothing waiting to catch you. Less than one percent of market rate units in New York City are currently available below $2,400 a month. The median asking rent on a new lease citywide is $4,120. You are not middle class with options. You are middle income with one option, and that option has a landlord.

And if you are at the lower end, if you are the neighbor I think about when I look at the eviction data, you are living inside a different kind of precarity entirely. One that has a number attached to it.

Since 2017, the landlord who owns our building has filed hundreds of eviction cases here alone. In a building that has barely crossed ten years old. One that exists because of public investment in this community. There were nearly sixty filings in a single quarter in 2024. Our building carries the highest eviction filing rate of any property in the entire multi-building portfolio this landlord manages. And yet the portfolio’s net operating income is growing. The landlord is not suffering. The tenants are absorbing.

I want to be careful here because I know that eviction filings are not the same as evictions, and I know that not every filing is without cause. But I also know what research on eviction patterns across this city and this country tells us. Black women are the most eviction-filed demographic in the United States. Black and Latino renters are disproportionately targeted even when you account for income. And when I look at who lives in my building, a majority Black and Brown community in Southeast Queens, and I look at those numbers, I am not looking at a coincidence. I am looking at a pattern that has a name.

Filing is a weapon. A court summons means missed work. It means fear. It means some tenants leave before a case is ever decided because they cannot afford to fight and they cannot afford to lose. That is not a byproduct of the eviction process. That is sometimes the point of it.

I hold monthly meetings. I want to talk about the Rent Guidelines Board, about the preliminary vote that just happened, about June 25 when the final decision comes down, about the fact that what the board decides will determine whether rent goes up or stays flat for nearly a million New Yorkers including the people sitting in the room with me. I want people to understand that three times in sixty years has the board voted for a rent freeze and each time it required both a crisis and organized people to make it happen. I want them to feel the weight of this moment.

Instead sometimes people want to talk about the neighbor who plays music too loud.

And I get it. I do. Because when you are living inside the daily texture of a difficult life, the music at midnight is immediate and the Rent Guidelines Board is abstract. I am not judging the impulse. I am sitting with the grief of it.

What I have learned is that the small things and the big things are not separate. The broken door does not get fixed in a building where tenants are afraid to complain because complaining might make them visible to a landlord who files evictions the way other landlords send maintenance requests. The hallway does not stay clean when people feel like their presence in the building is temporary and conditional. The culture of a place is downstream of the power structure of a place. You cannot change one without touching the other.

And yet.

In a building with hundreds of apartments, we have approximately 100 registered voters.

I am not saying this to shame anyone. I am saying it because I need us to sit with what it means. I need us to feel the gap between our numbers and our power. I need us to understand that registered voters are how politicians decide where to knock, what to promise, who to protect. When we did door knocking in this building we got twenty-five people. Twenty-five. And I stood there thinking about who decides whether to come here and advocate for us and I understood for the first time in a cellular way that you cannot wait for someone to come advocate for you in a building that cannot produce twenty-five warm bodies for its own future.

I started this work thinking it was about the building. I have learned it is about the body politic. About what it means to live in a place you did not fully choose surrounded by a system you were never taught to read. I learned who controls my rent after I signed the lease. I learned about the Rent Guidelines Board after I started organizing. I learned about HDC financing and tax abatements and eviction filing patterns and voter registration gaps because I was curious and relentless and because I refused to keep living inside something I did not understand.

Nobody told me. And I wonder every time I stand at the front of that meeting room how many decisions have already been made about the people sitting in those chairs by people who counted on them not knowing.

June 25 is coming. The Rent Guidelines Board will cast its final vote. It will be the first time in a decade that zero percent is on the table. For the first time ever, a rent freeze has been proposed for two-year leases. This is a historic moment and most of the people it will affect most directly are in buildings like mine, in communities like mine, trying to figure out if the music next door is too loud to sleep through.

I am not despairing. I am not done.

But I need us to know what we are living inside. I need us to understand that the hallway and the hearing room are the same fight, just at different scales. I need us to show up, to the meetings, to the polls, to the board hearings where our testimony can actually move a number, because nobody is coming to count us if we will not first count ourselves.

I started this work because of the hallways.

I am still here because of everything I found behind them.

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There is a particular kind of quiet that settles in when you are reminded that other people do things differently. Not a loud reminder. Not a confrontation. Just someone narrating what they see, the way you would describe the weather, and suddenly you are standing in the middle of your own life wondering if you have been doing it wrong. The thing is, different is not wrong. Your way might be the only way that makes sense for your life, and the work is learning not to let someone else’s version of right talk you out of what you have actually built. I had to remind myself of that recently, standing in my own apartment, listening to a teenager tell my daughter what she does not have.

She was not being cruel. She was being a teenager, doing what teenagers do, which is speaking the unfiltered truth of what she sees. You don’t have your own room. You don’t have your own space. She said it the way you say the sky is blue, and I stood there nodding like I had not already spent years making peace with the same facts she was naming out loud. My daughter, to her credit, did not flinch. I was the one who had to go somewhere inside myself and work something out.

We have lived in a studio apartment in New York City for seven years. We got it through the housing lottery, and I want to be clear about what that means, what it actually means, not just as a logistical fact but as evidence of something. It means I applied. It means I waited. It means when the opportunity came, I was ready, and I have held onto it because I understand what it costs to let go. In a city that will charge you a thousand dollars for a closet with a window, the ability to stay somewhere, to maintain your rent, to not be displaced, is not a small thing. It is the whole thing. I remind myself of this often, especially in the moments when I am tempted to measure my life against someone else’s floor plan.

My daughter is starting college and she chose to stay home. Part of me wanted her to go away, to have the full experience, the dorm, the campus, the clean break into a new version of herself. But she said something that reminded me she already knows herself in ways I sometimes forget to honor. She said this will be my first time back in a larger setting. She was talking about reentry, about the particular kind of courage it takes to walk into an institution when your history with institutions is complicated. She has special education needs. She has navigated spaces that were not always built for her. She knows what she is walking back into, and she chose to do it with me nearby. I am not going to pretend that does not mean something.

What I keep returning to is the question her friend put into the air without meaning to frame it as a question at all. What is more important, having the boxes checked or having the relationship? Because my daughter has not had her own room, but she has had me. Fully. Not divided, not rationed, not stretched so thin across competing demands that I come home and have nothing left. It has just been us, and that within itself is a kind of abundance, even when it does not look like abundance from the outside.

I have to work to remember that. I have my moments of doubt the way everyone does, except I have noticed that my moments of doubt are not random. They arrive on a schedule, triggered by specific kinds of visibility, or more precisely by specific kinds of invisibility. Lyndon K. Gill writes about this in ways that stopped me mid-page. His work on d’bi.young’s theatrical production benu asks a question that sounds like it is about theater but is really about who gets to be recognized as fully human: can a work be queer without a single LGBT character? His answer is yes, and the reasoning is what matters. Drawing on Cathy Cohen’s framework, Gill argues that queerness is not only about sexual identity but about a norm-contesting politics that governs who society chooses to see and who it does not. The margins are populated by anyone whose life does not conform to what the dominant culture has decided is acceptable, and that includes Black single mothers, whose public image is so thoroughly contaminated by the Jezebel myth and the welfare queen trope that our actual lives become almost impossible to perceive clearly.

What struck me about Gill’s move is not just the argument but the generosity of it. His framework is not about Black single mothers. He is writing about theater, about queerness, about d’bi.young’s artistic process. And yet he pauses long enough to say we belong in this conversation, that the same social logic that pushes queer people to the margins pushes us there too, that our erasure is not incidental but structural. How often does that happen? How often does someone extend their intellectual framework outward to include us, to say Black women, and specifically Black single mothers, are not exceptions to the analysis but central to it? I read that and felt something loosen in my chest, because it named something I had been carrying without language for it. We live inside a story that was written about us before we arrived, and that story does not include our competence, our love, our seven-year commitment to a housing lottery apartment, our daughters who know themselves well enough to choose proximity over novelty.

Gill’s work does not stop at naming the problem. In his writing on the gay community in Trinidad and Tobago navigating the HIV and AIDS epidemic, he shows how people who are pushed to the margins survive not by disappearing but by finding one another, by building community as a deliberate act of resistance and care. The boxes were not checked for them either. The systems were not built for them. And yet they created something that allowed them to exist, to sustain themselves, to keep going. I think about that when the doubt comes for me. I think about what it means that I have people, that my daughter has people, that we are not just two people sealed inside a studio apartment but two people embedded in something larger than the walls we share.

Kimberlé Crenshaw tells a related story from a different angle. She writes about being a Black woman in spaces that claim to see everyone and somehow consistently fail to see her, the way movements will take your energy and your ideas and your labor and then put someone else’s face on the front page. I think about the time I fought a busing issue for my child, connected with the press, got the story told, and when the coverage ran, my name was misspelled, my daughter was unnamed, and another family was centered in the frame. I was not surprised. I was not even fully conscious of it as an injustice at the time. That is how deep the conditioning runs. You become so accustomed to being the person who curates the space while someone else stands in the spotlight that you stop registering it as a pattern and start registering it as just how things are.

But it is not just how things are. It is a structure. It is the intersection of race and gender and class and motherhood producing a particular kind of erasure that looks, from the inside, like personal failure. I keep checking the boxes. I have the education. I have the job that comes with certain privileges. I am present for my child in ways that matter deeply and that will not show up on any ledger that the world keeps. And still I sit with the question of whether I am doing enough, still I feel the pull to take on a third job so I can give her a room, still I flinch when a teenager in my living room narrates what my daughter does not have. The flinching is not weakness. It is what happens when you are doing real work in a system designed to make that work invisible.

What I have had to learn, slowly and with considerable resistance, is that I cannot afford the guilt. Not because guilt is an indulgence, but because it is a tax I am already paying on top of everything else, and it returns nothing. I cannot afford to make myself small in my own story when the world is already doing that work with more resources than I have. What I can afford is clarity. I can afford to tell myself the truth, which is that my daughter and I have built something inside these four walls that no floor plan determines. We have built proximity and trust and the particular intimacy of two people who have had to figure out how to hold their full selves in a shared space, which is, if you think about it, exactly the skill the world most needs and least celebrates.

New York City in this economy is a study in staying put. COVID stripped layers off of everyone, and what it revealed, for those of us who were already close to the margins, is how little cushion there was to begin with. I am not here to perform resilience for an audience that will applaud me and then go back to a system that produces the conditions I am being resilient against. I am here to say that the doubt is understandable and the doubt is also a lie, and both of those things can be true at the same time. I am here to say to every Black woman who is checking the boxes and still ending up somewhere that does not look like what the boxes promised, you are not the problem. The boxes were never the whole picture.

My daughter is going to college. She is going to walk back into a larger setting with the full knowledge of what that means for someone like her, and she is going to do it from a studio apartment in New York City where she has never had her own room and has never lacked for someone who sees her completely. I am more than enough. We are more than enough. The evidence is right here, living proof, just the two of us, taking up exactly as much space as we need.

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The Anecdote That Started It

Earlier this week I sat in a room with a Black woman who has been advocating for her daughter for decades. Her daughter lives in a group home that New York State tried to close, and this woman fought like hell to keep it open. She talked about the lawyers, the injunctions, the organizing. She talked about Willowbrook and how Geraldo Rivera’s media attention eventually cracked things open, even if it didn’t happen the way or the moment people needed it to. She talked about the Young Lords, about living in El Barrio, about how geography determined who you allied with and who had your back. She connected with the Puerto Rican community around her because they were her neighbors, because proximity is its own kind of politics.

Minority’ Is Not a Dirty Word

There was another person in the room, someone outside that specific Black historical experience, insisting the language should chang. And this person was pushing the advocate, a 95-year-old Black woman who has been fighting her whole life, to move away from the word minority. Use diversity instead, she was saying. That’s the language now. And the advocate stopped her and said: I am Black and you cannot tell me about my experience. The brown person responded that she couldn’t speak to being Black but she could learn from her, that she doesn’t use the word minority in her own life. What struck me was not just the correction itself, but the instinct behind it: the instinct to absorb Black specificity into broader language until the people carrying the heaviest history disappear inside the category.

And that right there is the problem. That woman is 95 years old. She has lived every decade of this country’s relationship with Black people. She still feels like a minority because this country still treats her like one. And someone who has not lived that decided that her language needed updating. Decided that folding her into a broader category of diverse people was progress. It is not progress. It is erasure dressed up as inclusion. Black people are not a subset of diversity. We are not a chapter in somebody else’s story about who gets to belong.

The Message That Made Me Pause

I am holding onto that exchange because of what happened next. That same person, a few days later, sent me a message. They had seen someone online say we need to bring back the Black Panther Party, that the times are calling for it, that it is manifesting. And they sent it to me like it was good news.

The old me would have said yes, absolutely, this is what we need. But I am not the old me.

What I am about to say does not come from a place of dismissal. It comes from the same place James Baldwin came from when he said he critiques America because he loves her. I am a Black feminist woman. I have done the reading, but I still have a long way to go. And when someone says we need to bring back the Black Panther Party, I need them to understand what they are actually asking for.

Two Panthers, One Name

First, let’s get the history straight, because most people collapse every Black radical organization of that era into simply “the Black Panthers.” But the history was more complicated than that. There were ideological splits, regional tensions, and entirely separate organizations operating under similar names.

There was Huey Newton and Bobby Seale’s Black Panther Party in Oakland, built around armed self-defense, community survival programs, and the revolutionary image that would come to define the era in the public imagination. And there was a separate Los Angeles-based organization called the Black Panther Political Party, a smaller cadre group focused on political education, theoretical analysis, and building structure within the broader Black Liberation Movement. Both drew inspiration from the original Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama, whose symbol was the black panther, but they developed different political cultures and priorities.

That distinction matters more than people think.

Because popular memory tends to remember the leather jackets, the rifles, and the spectacle of confrontation while forgetting that liberation movements also required study, infrastructure, policy, literacy, discipline, and political theory. They required people thinking beyond the moment.

Elaine Brown herself wrote about illiteracy within the movement, about people drawn to the image of revolution without the educational foundation necessary to sustain it. The image was powerful. The infrastructure was fragile.

So when people say we need to bring back the Black Panthers, I need them to understand that even the history they are invoking was never singular. It contained competing visions of what liberation looked like and who was responsible for building it.

Angela Davis: The Woman They Could Not Contain

Angela Davis is often flattened into Panther iconography, but her political life was more intellectually and organizationally complex than public memory allows. In her autobiography, Davis writes about joining the Black Panther Political Party in Los Angeles while also organizing through SNCC and broader Black radical coalitions. She was drawn not only to resistance, but to theory, study, analysis, and collective political development. Even now, people remember the guns more readily than the study groups and political education work that women like Davis helped sustain.

She wrote that revolution was a serious thing, a lifetime commitment, not a fashionable club with newly minted jargon, not a social life made thrilling by risk. She meant that.

And when she eventually went to prison, it was because a gun registered in her name had been used in a crime committed by one of the Soledad Brothers. She did not commit that crime. She was not there. But the story of why she owned the gun matters.

In her autobiography, Davis recounts being threatened at gunpoint by a man affiliated with the Black Panther Party for Self Defense during a period of escalating conflict between organizations competing over the Panther name in Los Angeles. The man was later expelled and labeled an agent provocateur, but that designation does not erase what happened to her. She was already being hunted by the FBI and white supremacist violence. Then a Black man with a gun told her she could expect someone at her door. So she armed herself.

The woman the country framed as dangerous and radical was, in reality, someone repeatedly forced into survival. Someone who kept choosing analysis over spectacle, political rigor over performance, collective discipline over mythology.

The violence the media projected onto her was often the violence being done to her.

Read that again.

And it was not only physical danger. Davis writes about organizing a rally in San Diego and being told by men around her, particularly members of Ron Karenga’s organization, that she was doing “a man’s job.” Women, she was told, were supposed to inspire their men and raise children, not lead political struggle themselves. The bitter irony, Davis notes, was that the organizing work had fallen to her precisely because the men criticizing her were not doing it.

She identified this as a pattern: Black male activists who confused political engagement with performances of manhood, who interpreted Black women’s leadership not as an asset to the movement but as a threat to themselves.

That is what gets erased when we get nostalgic.

Davis moved through organization after organization searching for a political home capable of holding the full weight of who she was. Every space demanded fragmentation. She was expected to be Black but not fully woman, intellectual but not too visible, committed but never central. What she was searching for did not yet fully exist.

Black feminism had not yet been given the language that would later name the conditions she was already living.

The Newspaper vs. The Organization

The tension Davis lived was not unique to her. It was woven into the fabric of the entire organization. Scholar Linda Lumsden’s analysis of the Black Panther Party’s own newspaper from 1968 to 1980 found that the paper worked hard to frame Black women as empowered, as equals, as revolutionaries in their own right. The imagery was striking: women carrying rifles alongside their children, a mother teaching her son to shoot, illustrations captioned with the words until the day of liberation, protection for my child can only be guaranteed through the barrel of a gun. The newspaper was doing real work to counter the racist tropes the mainstream media used to diminish Black women, the welfare queen, the absent mother, the woman defined by her suffering rather than her resistance. Lumsden concludes that the newspaper’s positive framing of Black womanhood should be counted among the contributions scholars are only beginning to attribute to the Black Panthers.

That contribution is real and it matters. I am not here to erase it.

But here is the contradiction Lumsden’s analysis also makes impossible to ignore. The newspaper celebrated Black women on its pages while the organization subjected those same women to abuse, sexual exploitation, and abandonment behind closed doors. Sexual freedom within the party often meant sexual coercion, men pressuring women to have sex as part of their revolutionary duty. Pregnant women were frequently left to raise their children alone. And the newspaper stayed silent on all of it. Lumsden names exactly why: addressing sexual violence and abuse would have forced Panther editors to point fingers at themselves or their male readership instead of at external institutions. They could attack male chauvinism as an abstraction. They could not confront it in the mirror. The public image and the private reality were two entirely different documents.

The Birth Control Debate

And then there was the birth control debate, which tells you everything about where Black women actually sat in this movement’s priorities. For years the party resisted supporting birth control and abortion access because the leadership was more worried about being aligned with what they saw as a white feminist agenda than about the actual women in their ranks, many of them single mothers, who needed access to reproductive healthcare. It was not until 1974 that the party instructed members to practice birth control. It was not until federal rulings began limiting poor women’s access to abortion in the late 1970s that the newspaper finally editorialized in support of women’s rights to abortion. Years. It took years. While women in the organization were being left to raise children alone by the men who claimed to be fighting for Black liberation.

I keep thinking about what that means in plain terms. You will not take a position on birth control, but you will leave Black women to navigate welfare systems alone and then praise them for surviving it. You will celebrate a Black woman’s resilience on your front page and go home and put your hands on her. You will call her a good mother with a gun and refuse to fight for her right to decide when she becomes a mother at all. That is not revolution. That is the same contradiction that has followed Black women through every institution we have ever tried to call home.

Read Their Names

Read Elaine Brown. Read what it meant to be one of the first women in leadership in that organization. Read about the violence these women absorbed in the name of the movement. Read Eldridge Cleaver’s own words about sexual violence, including his admission that he practiced rape on Black women before assaulting white women, which he later framed through political logic. That is in the literature. That is the history. Brown herself wanted proximity to Huey Newton and that proximity came at a cost because that relationship was violent. Power in that organization was inseparable from violence, and Black women who moved close to it paid the price.

And yet. Elaine Brown ran the entire Black Panther Party while Huey Newton was in prison. She led it. She held it together. Ericka Huggins was a theorist, a poet, an organizer who did that work from inside a prison cell and kept doing it when she got out. Angela Davis called Huggins the strongest, most courageous Black woman in America. The party’s own newspaper gave Huggins equal billing with Bobby Seale during their 1970 murder trial, published her letters from prison, celebrated her resistance. And Huggins wrote from that cell to her toddler daughter: if I should return, I shall kiss you. If I should fall on the way, I shall ask you to do as I have in the name of the revolution.

A woman writing a contingency goodbye to her baby. A movement calling that martyrdom. A newspaper printing it as inspiration.

Assata Shakur was held in a men’s prison, her womb bleeding out from fibroids while she was incarcerated, her body paying a price the movement never adequately addressed. Elaine Brown could not mother her daughter the way she wanted because the movement came first. Ericka Huggins wrote farewell letters to a toddler. These are the women we call icons now. But the organization that needed them could not protect them, could not support their reproductive autonomy, could not stop the men in its own ranks from doing harm. The newspaper put them on the front page. The institution left them to manage alone.

70 Percent

The organization was 70 percent women. Read that number and then ask yourself why we talk about it like it belonged to the men.

The Change Only Happened Because of Women

Here is where I have to be honest about the full picture. Lumsden’s research confirms that the reframing of Black womanhood in that newspaper did not happen because the men in the organization decided on their own that Black women deserved to be centered. It happened because of vocal, resistant female members who challenged sexism from the inside. It happened because female editors gained influence. It happened because the Women’s Liberation movement created pressure from outside. And it happened most visibly when the guns were decentered and the men were being taken by incarceration and there was nobody left to run things except the women who had been holding everything together all along. That is when Elaine Brown stepped fully into leadership. That is when the infrastructure Black women had always been building became impossible to ignore.

And that is not the movement anyone is trying to manifest when they say bring it back.

What Nostalgia Erases

I cannot control what people remember. But I can be clear about what I know. You cannot say we need the Panthers back and then have no conversation about the men who walked away from their women and children. No conversation about the abuse that stayed private while the resistance went public. No conversation about how you can claim to be fighting white supremacy while practicing the same domination over Black women that you say you are resisting. How were we out here fighting for liberation and doing the same thing to our own women that the oppressor was doing to all of us? Silencing them. Leaving them. Refusing to fight for their bodies with the same energy we brought to fighting for the cause. That is not a movement. That is just power wearing different clothes.

I have to take a side. As a writer, as a Black woman, as someone who has done the reading, I take the side that Ida B. Wells took. The side that Anna Julia Cooper took. The side that Fannie Lou Hamer took. The side that Angela Davis was reaching for when she wrote that what she desired, more than any party or organization or collective, was a community that saw her beyond what society had already decided she was.

The Word That Came Later

What these women lived, the abuse and the erasure and the expectation that they be Black first and woman never, did not have a single name yet when they were living it. It took Kimberlé Crenshaw to give us the vocabulary. Intersectionality. The recognition that Black women do not experience race and gender as separate things that can be addressed one at a time, but as interlocking forces that compound in specific and devastating ways. Crenshaw gave us the word for what Angela Davis was living when she organized that rally and got told to go inspire her man. She gave us the word for what Ericka Huggins was living when she wrote to her daughter from prison. She gave us the word for what every woman in that organization was navigating when the newspaper celebrated them on the front page and the institution left them to bleed.

The word existed before Crenshaw named it. Black women have always known the feeling. They just kept being told that naming it was a distraction from the cause.

That is the cause.

Who Calls Their Names?

So when somebody says we need to bring this back, I need them to say whose name they are invoking. Say Elaine Brown’s name. Say Ericka Huggins’ name. Say Assata Shakur’s name. Learn what they built and what they survived and what it cost them. Understand that Black women are already doing the work, that we never stopped, that we do not need a party because we already are the party. Look at Stacey Abrams, who turned an entire state and then did not even win her own race. Look at the overwhelming percentage of Black women who continue to organize, vote, mobilize, and hold the line politically even when the country refuses to reward them for it. The question is not whether we need a movement. The question is whether people are willing to look at what Black women are already building and take it seriously instead of reaching for an image that historically required our silence to function.

Do not tell me what Black people need if you have not done the reading. Do not manifest an organization whose survivors are still alive and still talking. Do not ask Black women to step behind anything when they are the ones already out front.

Your good intentions and your bad history are not two separate things. They land in the same place: on Black women.

And the people who feel it first are the ones who always do.

Sources:

Davis, A. Y. (1994). Angela Davis: An Autobiography. International Publishers.

Brown, E. (1992). A taste of power: A Black woman’s story. Pantheon Books.

Cleaver, E. (1968). Soul on ice. Delta Books.

Lumsden, L. (1997). Gender, race, and the Black Panther Party: The newspaper The Black Panther and the construction of identity. Journal of Women’s History, 8(3), 95–118.

(If your instructor is strict, double-check journal volume formatting in your database — this is the commonly cited version.)

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.

Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.

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Happy Saturday.

I just want to talk about stuff. Not academic stuff. Not world stuff. Not smart stuff. Not hard stuff. Not easy stuff. Just stuff. The kind of stuff you can’t put a name to, but that sits on you heavy enough to make the whole day feel like wading through something with no name. That stuff.

I know. I know. Everything is supposed to have grace and intention behind it. But what if the intention today is just to release the stuff? What if that is the whole thing, the full assignment, the complete work? Because I have space in my life for all the other conversations — politics, academia, parenthood, womanhood, intersectionality, Lord knows there is room for all of that. But today I just want to talk about the stuff. So here I am. Unscheduled. Unbothered. Writing about absolutely nothing and everything at the same time.

The sun is out today. Kind of. It’s being blocked by clouds, which is one of those days where I’m standing there like, baby, try a little harder. But I also know there are days that call for in-between, and maybe that’s what the sun is doing, just being in between things. I wanted it in full swing. Wanted it so bright I had to shield my eyes from it. But today is just not that day, and the sun has apparently decided to mind its business about it. Maybe it’s trying to tell me something. Maybe today is one of those in-between days for me, too. Maybe we’re both just out here doing our best.

I woke up this morning, and I did my hair.

I know how that sounds. Bear with me.

I am a natural-haired Black woman, and if you know, you know. When I say I did my hair, I do not mean my basic style, which is usually two braids to the back, done, sealed, goodbye. I mean, I actually did my hair. The parting. The braiding. The moisture. The whole process. I had been avoiding it so long that when I finally sat down on Saturday morning and just did it, I looked in the mirror afterward and said, “Wow,” out loud. To myself. Alone in the bathroom. Because I did that. The labor was real. The output was real. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I realized, this is also the stuff.

Because here’s the thing about being a woman in your twenties and thirties. Your body is always becoming something. Always shifting between the version of yourself you just left and the one you haven’t fully arrived at yet. And sometimes you stand in the mirror, and you are genuinely not sure what phase you’re in, like, is this a beginning or an ending, is this bloom or shedding, what exactly is happening here? And instead of sitting with that question, you just put your hair in two braids and keep moving because the labor of really looking feels like too much on a Tuesday. On a Wednesday. On every day that isn’t Saturday.

But Saturday I looked. I did the labor. I said fuck the stuff and just did my hair. And it felt like a declaration. Like crossing from one side of something to the other side of something, even if I couldn’t name either side.

Because here’s what I’m learning, you are always going to be in between something. Always in the middle of becoming and leaving and arriving all at once. The question is not how to get out of the in-between faster. The question is can you be okay in it. Can you declare yourself right there in the middle of it, braids and all, and just keep going?

I think that’s what the stuff is.

I also listened to my Saturday health show that morning. Don’t ask me why I do this to myself every week. They tell you everything you should be doing for your body and your life and your future, and I sit there taking notes on things I fully intend to do and then do not do. This particular Saturday, they were talking about getting your paperwork in order. Medical stuff. End-of-life planning. And I laid there like as if I needed that on top of the stuff. As if the stuff was not already doing its thing. And I laughed. Not because it was funny but because it was just so perfectly, completely, exactly the stuff. The universe really said, “Let me add one more thing to her plate while she’s lying here trying to rest.”

And then I caught myself going somewhere I didn’t mean to go — a whole other lane, a different exit entirely — and I had to pull myself back. That’s the thing about the stuff. It will take you places. You start out just wanting to sit with it, and next thing you know, you’re three exits past where you meant to be, thinking about things that have nothing to do with Saturday morning, until you look up and you’re like, wait, how did I get here? So I redirected. Came back. Said no. Today is just about the stuff. Whatever that is.

And maybe that’s okay. Maybe the stuff is how I feel about my body right now. Maybe it’s the time it is taking me to write what I need to write for school, I do have a final to work on, just not today, today is Saturday, today belongs to the stuff and the stuff only. Maybe the stuff is not knowing whether I want a matcha from Starbucks or a coffee from Dunkin’, and somehow that small decision is carrying the weight of every other decision I can’t make right now. Maybe the stuff is that I genuinely do not know what the stuff is, and the not-knowing is exactly why it’s the stuff.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. The stuff is whatever is sitting between you and your full exhale. It is not dramatic. It is not a crisis. It is just present. Taking up space. Making it hard to focus on the day-to-day because your mind is too busy circling it, naming and renaming it, trying to find the exact right word for something that refuses to be exact.

And baby, this week was full of it. This was one of those weeks where every morning you open your eyes, and you think, do I call out or do I thug it out? And you thug it out. And then you do it again the next day. And the day after that. Until Saturday arrives like a small mercy and you just need — you need to get the stuff out of you. So you can breathe again. So you can be light again. So you can get back to all the things that are waiting patiently on the other side of the stuff.

That’s why I wrote this. Not because I figured it out. Not because I arrived at some clean, tidy conclusion about what the stuff is or what it means or what I’m supposed to do with it. But because naming that it exists — even when I cannot name what it actually *is* — feels like something. Feels like the first real breath after holding it too long.

It’s Monday now.

Saturday was the stuff. Monday is the thing. And I want you to know I could only get to the thing because I let the stuff be the stuff. I didn’t force it into a category, dress it up, or make it more presentable than it was. I just sat with it. I wrote about it in my bathroom voice, my Saturday morning voice, my I-don’t-have-to-be-smart-right-now voice. And somewhere in all that sitting, something loosened.

That’s the thing about the stuff. It doesn’t need to be solved. It doesn’t need a framework or a five-step plan or a whole Ted Talk. It just needs to be acknowledged. Named, even if the name you give it is just the stuff. Because you cannot move through what you refuse to see. And once you see it, once you just let it be what it is without making it mean everything, it starts to take up a little less room.

I still have a final to work on. I still don’t know what I want from Starbucks. My body is still somewhere in between phases I cannot fully name. The sun is still doing whatever it wants to do, regardless of my preferences.

And I am okay. Not fixed. Not arrived. Just okay. Settled in the in-between. Braids done. Breathing.

Doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t really matter at all, and that’s not defeat, that’s peace. That’s the place you get to when you stop fighting the stuff and just let it move through you. When you wake up on a Saturday and do your hair and laugh at yourself and write about nothing and everything and wake up Monday morning and realize you made it. Not because the stuff disappeared. But because you did not let the stuff make you disappear.

We made it through, y’all. The week, the stuff, the in-between. All of it. And that right there is the joy. That screaming, laughing, barely-holding-it-together, two-braids-to-the-back, Saturday-morning-health-show-taking-notes-doing-nothing joy.

Happy Monday. You’re still here. That’s the whole thing.

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I have been sitting with the word hope this morning and I do not entirely trust it.

I remember Barack Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope, and I remember thinking even then — audacity for what, exactly? Of all the things to show up with. People need rent paid. They need a job, an education, healthcare, housing, something they can hold in their hands and use. And you are coming in here with hope? I laughed when I thought about it. I laugh now. Because I am also sitting on a train on my way to work thinking about it, which means hope has done something to me that I have not fully accounted for yet.

I was walking down the street this morning and I saw a young woman from my community. She was screaming at her son. The kind of anger that has been building for a long time, that has nowhere else to go, that finally boils over in public because everything is boiling and the pot does not know or care who is watching. I know that anger. I know it from the inside, not from a distance. The way it lives in your body when the decisions are too many and the resources are too few and the kids are acting up and everything else is already going wrong and you just need one thing, one small thing, to go right. The pot runs over. It gets loud. It rumbles. And then the whole street can see it.

His face fixed into the anger too. He received it into his body, the way children do, and he wore it right back at her. I am mad too, his face said. I am mad for all of it.

I want to be honest about what went through me when I saw them. It was not fear exactly. It was something quieter and more complicated — who am I to enter this space. Who do I think I am, stepping into the middle of a moment between a mother and her child, trying to create some ground between them. What authority do I have here. Those are real questions and I sat with them for a few seconds. But then something grounded me that I will not fully explain here, I will only say that I know this moment from the inside, from a long time ago, in a different body and a different role. That was enough. Not confidence. Not a calling. Just recognition. And recognition made it impossible to keep walking.

You don’t need sainthood. You just need to recognize what you’re looking at because you’ve looked at it from the inside.

I went to her and I said, how are you feeling. She said it is hard. She said she wished he would just act right, that there is so much going on right now. I did not remind her that she had been angry. I did not offer a correction or a judgment or a lecture about how her son was going to carry this. I leaned in and told her I see you and I know it is not easy. And we started talking. I named some resources. We added some pieces to a board that had felt, for her, like it had nothing left on it. The child took a walk. She had a few minutes to breathe and receive something that could create a space between her and the frustration. None of it fixed anything. The rent is still what it is. Everything that was heavy when I found her was still heavy when I left her. Five minutes on a sidewalk does not undo what years of pressure builds up.

But I am going to call what passed between us hope anyway, because I do not have a better word for it. It was not monetary. It was not tangible. It was a road map sketched in five minutes — a small interruption of hopelessness. A suggestion that there might be a way out of no way. That is all hope is, I think. Not a solution. An interruption.

I have been studying Patricia Hill Collins long enough that her ideas have started to show up in my life before I can name them. She talks about community as something elastic — something that stretches to include rather than contracts to exclude. I did not think about that on the sidewalk. But I extended my rubber band that morning. I brought that mother inside a circle she may not have known existed, connected her to resources and to the sense that someone saw her whole situation and not just the moment of it. That is not charity. That is community functioning the way Black feminist theory says it should — expansive, unconditional, refusing to pick and choose based on who is presenting their best self on any given day. She was not her best self that morning. Neither have I been, on other mornings. Community is not for your best self. It is for all the other ones.

And then there is Anna Julia Cooper, who asked us to measure a society not by how it treats its most ideal members but by how it treats those at the margins — those in the hardest moments, those the world has already decided to look past. That mother in that moment was not presenting a version of herself that society tends to protect or defend. She was loud and overwhelmed and visible in all the ways Black women get penalized for being visible. And I made sure she was treated with dignity anyway. Not because I am exceptional. Because Cooper’s standard has gotten into me and now I cannot unknow it. When you learn the theory well enough, it stops being something you apply and starts being something you live. You do not reach for it consciously. It reaches through you.

I want to say something about her anger because I need you to hear it before you form a conclusion about what you just read. The anger that Black women carry is not a personality flaw. It is not a failure of composure. It is old. It is ancestral. It was forged in conditions that would have taken anyone’s mind and it has been passed down through bodies that had to survive those conditions to be here at all. That anger is powerful. It has kept us alive. And when our backs are against the wall and we come out swinging at a world that has never given us enough room, we are not being dangerous — we are doing what every living thing does when it is cornered and exhausted and has run out of softer options. The difference is that we are seen and judged for it in ways that flatten us into a single moment, a scene on a sidewalk, a woman screaming at her son, without any of the weight of context that made that moment possible.

I am not making excuses. I am asking you to stay in the complexity long enough to understand what you are seeing before you decide what it means.

I carry the same anger. I want to be clear about that because this is not a story about me rising above something. I am a single mother in a marginalized community, writing this on my phone on the train on the way to work, with my own tensions and my own weight and my own moments when the pot gets close to the edge. I have what I will call a privilege — not the privilege of money or ease, but the privilege of having made it through certain phases of this life with a semblance of my mind still intact, because these phases will take your mind right along with them if you let them. That getting-through is not a personal virtue. It is a combination of community, circumstance, and the grace of people who interrupted my hopelessness at the right moments. I did not earn it so much as receive it. And maybe that is why I stopped this morning. Because someone stopped for me once. Because I know what it means to be seen when you are standing at the edge of yourself.

The tensions don’t disappear. You just learn to name them instead of being consumed by them. And when you see it outside yourself, you name it there too.

That boy walked away still angry. I knew that too. I am not telling you this because I made a difference that will show up anywhere measurable. I am telling you because we all need someone to interrupt the hopelessness sometimes. Not to save us. Just to slow the spiral. To stand in the space between the frustration and the next thing and offer something — a resource, a glance that says I see you, a road map, a refusal to look away. That is available to all of us. It does not require a credential or a title or the absence of your own struggles. It requires only that you recognize what you are looking at, because you have looked at it from the inside, and that recognition makes it impossible to pretend you don’t see.

I did not plan to write this. I did not plan to stop on that sidewalk either. But she walked away with a small lift in her spirit. And I got back on the train and kept thinking, which is how this essay arrived. That is what I want to offer you: not a lesson, not a solution, just an interruption of whatever you might have assumed when you saw a Black woman screaming on a street corner. Offer hope. Offer that thing we don’t have a better word for. Interrupt hopelessness where you find it, even on your way to work, even when you are carrying your own weight, even when you are still figuring out whether you have any authority to enter the space at all.

Barack Obama called it audacity. I think I understand now. The audacity is not in hope itself. The audacity is in offering it. In believing it might do something. In stopping on a sidewalk with your own weight already on your back and saying — here. Take a little of this. What an absurd and necessary thing to do.

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