If you care about Iowa, community, and showing up as your full self — this one's for you.

Topics covered: authenticity in communication • Black women's activism, then and now • education and community engagement • the power of local events • political activism and voter engagement in Iowa • representation of Black culture in public spaces • challenges and opportunities in education • the role of community media and advertising

🎧 New episode of Unfiltered: 2BLKWomen Podcast — listen now.

Speaking of which, I have been down in basement this summer, in the thick of decluttering, and I learned something I did not sign up to learn: things hold energy. I was pulling out an item that no longer belonged to me, something I’d been dragging through years it was not even my stuff. Then I heard footsteps overhead. Like someone leaving. I knew I wasn’t losing my mind, because my friend who was helping me heard it too. We just looked at each other. Grabbed broom sticks and ascending upstairs. No one was there. Look into the garage, it was dark and empty with no person. Puzzled we looked at one another and retreated back to the basement to finish the task at hand.

I’ve been thinking about that moment ever since. How much are we all just standing in our own basements, holding onto things we should have released a long time ago? I’ve got a tote of size 8 jeans down there looking at me like, *girl, are you serious?* And the truth is, I’m closer to fitting them than I let myself believe. But at some point, if the space is needed, I have to let go anyway, whether I’ve arrived or not. Letting go was never supposed to wait for a finish line.

And then, in the middle of all that releasing, I found my stereo.

A five-CD changer. Double deck tape player. Radio. 17-plus years old and it still works. I sat there with a stack of CDs that still play clean, and I had this moment, equal parts nostalgia and disbelief, because right there in my pocket the whole time was a device that holds every one of those CDs, every tape, every radio station, and about a thousand other things, in something smaller than my hand. My iPod became my iPhone became my everything. All of it delivered through the air, no discs required.

So which one do I actually trust more? Either way I went and found my cds, more importantly my Salt-n-Pepa CD, because next week I will get to see them hit the stage with TLC and EnVogue. I am asking the universe now for cool weather and minimal insects. May my stomach tolerate some fair cuisine before I travel back to the ‘90s music era.

Back to the task of decluttering the basement because it made me sit with: I wasn’t just decluttering objects, I was decluttering my relationship with change itself. That stereo is proof that the old thing still works. It’s not broken, it’s not obsolete, it’s just been outpaced. And I think that’s true of a lot of what we hold onto. It’s not that the old way failed us. It’s that we’re scared of what it means to set it down and pick up something we haven’t fully learned yet.

Because that’s the real fear with technology, isn’t it? Not that it’s evil, not that the robots are coming for us. It’s that those of us who don’t learn how to use it get left behind. We watch our medical records move to an app, our news move to a feed, our music move to the air, and we have two choices: get in the game, or get boxed up like a tote in somebody’s basement, waiting for a version of ourselves that isn’t coming back the same way.

I didn’t get rid of the stereo, for what it’s worth. Some things you keep not because you need them, but because they remind you where the signal used to come from. But I also didn’t feel bad reaching for my phone right after.

Maybe that’s the whole lesson from that basement. You don’t have to choose between honoring what worked and reaching for what’s next. You just have to stop letting fear dress up as nostalgia, and be honest about what’s actually taking up space in your life. This can physically, and otherwise.

Now if only my teenager’s drop off schedule would clean itself out as easily as that basement did. That’s a different essay.

I am fully in my random-thoughts era, and I've decided that's not a flaw — it's a superpower. Being real and a little scattered is what keeps me flexible. And let me tell you, flexibility was not handed to me at birth. I had to learn that on my own.

I was raised in a house where Jim Crow wasn't history, it was reality. Black and white. Hot or cold. Heaven or hell. Even my Baptist upbringing came in two settings: saved or not saved, no dimmer switch. So you can imagine my shock, decades later, discovering that life actually runs on a whole spectrum. Nobody warned me. I had to learn nuance the hard way.

On Letting Dead Things Stay Dead

Somewhere on this trip home to Winston-Salem, NC, I made peace with a truth I already knew: some relationships are not sleeping. They are not "on a break." They are dead, and I have been performing CPR on a corpse out of politeness. Not anymore.

People don't love hearing me say that. But I've decided I'd rather protect my peace than protect somebody's feelings about a relationship (family or friend) that expired during Covid.

Here's my new favorite metaphor, and I will die on this hill: you know how sometimes you get an accidental butt dial? Normal people text back "hey, pocket call!" and move on with their lives. But some folks turn a butt dial into a full-blown investigation — who called who, why, what did it mean, was it a sign. Meanwhile the last real conversation we had wasn't even kind. So I'll just leave that there, wrapped in a bow, on the porch of a relationship I am no longer watering.

The lesson, and I say this with love: believe people the first time they show you who they are. Every time after that, you weren't fooled — you were just refusing the lesson.

And also — people don't have to like me and they can/will respect me. That's been my favorite quote since last year. The quotes is Free. Available. Try it on.

The Inheritance Nobody Puts in the Will

Let's talk about grief for a second, because apparently I contain multitudes. I've grieved a marriage. I've grieved having my son 100% of the time, back when I was a stay-at-home mom. I've grieved a career I spent years building, only to be the lone woman who pursued engineering at every family gathering. I'm a person who did calculus for money; I did so I could fulfill my dream of being an engineer.

But here's the thing that gets me every time: my mother wasn't allowed to be an engineer. She was a Black woman in a decade that offered her exactly two career options — teacher or teacher — and she chose math, of all the subjects to hand a room full of kids who'd rather die than do fractions. She taught me to love math anyway. And between her and my grandmother, known to me as granny, slipping me $20 a week in college — the woman who baked the best cakes and pies that I never had store bought pie until age 23, hard as a coconut on the outside and sweet as the filling on the inside — I became an engineer without ever really being told I could.

That's not a coincidence. That's generations of women quietly funding a future they weren't allowed to have themselves. I miss my Granny daily. She didn't always get her flowers while she was here, but I carry her curiosity-loving, cake-baking, coconut-hearted legacy every single day, whether I'm in knitting, gardening, cooking or adjusting my own attitude.

The good news: every generation gets to be a little softer than the last. I am not, contrary to what my son might tell you, a "gentle parent." But I've traded "who do you think you're talking to?" (asked rhetorically) for something with slightly less fear and slightly more negotiation. He doesn't have to read books in the summer. He does have to do house chores but he does his own laundry and cleaning up his own messes. He is allowed to have a little talk back with me…really a pinch, which — respectfully — was not an option when I was his age. Progress is not always a straight line. Sometimes it's just fewer repercussions for side-eye.

The Great North Carolina Homecoming (Airbnb Edition)

We rented an Airbnb for the trip home, and it continues to be the single smartest decision I make when I visit home. I used to hear people say "I never stay past four days" and think, how rude. Now I get it. When you go home, everyone assumes you're just going to slide into their schedule, when actually — I traveled this far, the least you can do is find me on your calendar.

So instead: my own space, my own coffee, and my son sharing a kitchen with me where the cinnamon rolls were from scratch and, notably, not the flavor I ordered. Did I complain? I did not. My cousin (Thank you Tya!!), baked them just for me and I loved every morsel I did not have to fight my teenage son’s appetite. I did have to share with my mom, her sweet tooth game is strong. The sweet pecan rolls were delicious (I really wanted the sweet potato), and sometimes life just hands you the flavor of something you “did not request” wonderful and you eat it with gratitude instead of a complaint form. Because, let me tell you…there was nothing left…just a pan and the parchment paper.

The one thing I didn't get to do was go see the troll. (Yes, there's a troll. It's NC. Don't ask, just trust the itinerary next time.) Between the weather and my own chaotic personal energy, it didn't happen. So now I owe myself a trip to a corner of Iowa that people who look like me apparently aren't expected to wander into. Which, frankly, is exactly the kind of invitation I can resist.

Living in Somebody's Wildest Dreams

Here's the part that actually gets me a little emotional, humor aside: I am living in my mother's wildest dreams. My granny's wildest dreams. Neither of them could have pictured this — a woman who looks like them, doing engineering in the Midwest, and running for public office twice. My cousin, Yaz, reminded me I was the first in our family to ever run for office. I was also, as far as I know, the first woman in our family to become an engineer.

I wanted a daughter to hand that torch to, and I wouldn't trade my son for anything in this world — but I hold onto the hope that the women coming after me get more doors, not the same two. My mother and my granny could have been anything. Mom was taught to be teacher. Granny was taught that black women worked when they are the oldest and so education ended at 8th grade. My cousin's mother could have gone into law. Nobody handed them that option; they built their own out of scraps and stubbornness. I'd love for this country to notice how much talent got quietly rerouted by gender roles that had nothing to do with actual ability.

So here's where I land: our words matter. How we encourage each other matters! I hope everything I say — to my son, to myself, to the version of me still healing from all of this — plant something that grows. And when it's his turn to take care of me one day, I hope I make it easy. I hope I'm still smiling. I hope I'm still, somehow, overjoyed. I hope I don’t eat all of the cinnamon rolls from him.

I never fitted into a box. Never. Just me, a 50 year old black woman navigating life by choosing words that uplift her and others along the way.

Got a relationship you've been performing CPR on? A granny’s whose recipes you still make? Tell me in the comments — I will read every single one.

Y’all, I need to tell you something about yarn.

Not the cute kind. Not the “I can make this queen size blanket in on month kind”, though God bless anyone with that kind of dexterity and patience. My carpal tunnel would be yelling at me during the day and whilst I am sleeping. I’m talking about the other definition — the one where somebody says “well that’s how yarn works” which means *buckle up, this is going to wander.* Because that’s where I live most days. My brain doesn’t produce thoughts in a neat little row. It produces one continuous strand that starts at “free books” and somehow, forty minutes later, ends up at “Kevin the ground squirrel is back on my porch for the 20th time today.”

This week’s skein started in Waterloo at the 1619 Freedom Read -In, where I got to meet Angie Thomas, and Jason Reynolds — yes, the Jason Reynolds, the one whose voice my son heard coming out of a Spider-Man who *looked like him* — and walked away with free books of both Angie and Jason, plus Renée Watson and Nikole Hannah Jone. This was a full-circle moment eight years in the making from when I went to see Angie Thomas discuss her book The Hate You Give in 2018. My full-circle moment is the good yarn. Soft, warm, the kind you want to wrap around yourself.

The next day, I am in my car, I turned on the radio for old time’s sake, and got handed a completely different strand — someone touting a book about Raising Conservative Kids “in a Woke City,” talking about the left being violent with words while somehow being the actual violence. And I sat there thinking: ma’am, I just came from a building full of free books yesterday, and children who finally get to see themselves on a page, and you’re out here treating literacy like a hostile takeover.* That yarn is scratchy. That yarn gives you a rash.

And see, this is the thing about yarn — you can’t just cut the pieces you don’t like and pretend the rest of the blanket still makes sense. It’s all one strand. Books, elections, radio, “who’s allowed to call you outside your name,” cyclospora in my lettuce, a safety class that got canceled without so much as a courtesy text — it’s all knotted to the same ball. I didn’t choose this pattern. I’m just the one holding the needles.

Somewhere in the middle of all that tangled thinking, I ended up at the grocery store instead of the safety class, because apparently that’s what a 50-year-old does when life hands her a scheduling glitch — she pivots and buys groceries because when having a growing teen son there is never enough food in the home. And somewhere after that, I ended up in my garden, staring down some genuinely ill-shaped cucumbers like they owed me money. One of them looked like it had given up on geometry entirely. And Kevin — the ground squirrel who has apparently claimed my front patio as a timeshare — was out there like he pays property tax.

Here’s my humor-forward public service announcement: if the world is going to hand you a week that includes banned books, nationalist radio hosts, and a canceled safety class, the least it can do is also hand you a squirrel named Kevin committing petty bird seed theft in broad daylight. Somebody has to be the comic relief in this yarn, and honestly, it’s not going to be me. I’m tired.

But that’s the thing about a tangled strand — you don’t have to untangle the whole thing in one sitting. Sometimes you just find one small, soft loop and you sit with that instead. For me this week it was a hot shower that revived me when the day had gone sideways. It was silence in the car with no scrolling. It was knowing I had therapy on the books and choosing to keep the appointment, because apparently I am not ready for artificial intelligence to record my sessions yet, and until I am, I’m keeping my very human, very patient therapist on speed dial.

I don’t have the blanket finished. I don’t even have the pattern written down. What I’ve got is one long, looping strand of books and ballots and cucumbers and squirrels and showers and prayers, and I’m choosing to believe that if I keep pulling it gently instead of yanking, it eventually makes something for warmth and comfort.

So no, I’m not going to sit here and pretend I know what’s coming next — for future legislation, for the media, for the economy, for any of it. But I know how to hold a thread. I know how to keep going even when the pattern doesn’t make sense yet. And I know that somewhere between the banned books and the ill-shaped cucumbers, there’s still a version of this story where we get to laugh, plant something, and call the people we love before the season changes.

That’s my yarn this week. Messy, honest, occasionally squirrel-adjacent. Thanks for sitting in it with me.

In this powerful episode of Unfiltered Two Black Women, hosts Lya Williams and Dana James tackle some of the most urgent issues impacting Black communities today—racial safety, online harassment, gun violence, and the realities Black families face navigating predominantly white spaces. 

The conversation begins with the importance of supporting community-focused journalism and the role outlets like Black Iowa News play in keeping communities informed and connected. From there, Lya and Dana share personal reflections on the fears and challenges of raising Black children in a society where race can directly impact safety and belonging. 

The discussion also explores the tragic case of Nolan, an 18-year-old whose disappearance sparked difficult conversations about racial dynamics, trust, and the unique concerns many Black parents carry. Lya and Dana speak candidly about the importance of open dialogue, awareness, and preparing children to navigate situations that may put them at risk. 

The episode further examines the rise of online bullying and racial discrimination, including the emotional toll of harassment and the challenges of holding social media platforms accountable. Finally, the hosts address the ongoing epidemic of gun violence, reflecting on recent tragedies, community impact, and the urgent need for collective action and advocacy. 

This honest and heartfelt conversation is a reminder that awareness, community support, and meaningful dialogue are essential tools for change. Join Lya and Dana as they share experiences, challenge perspectives, and encourage listeners to be part of the conversation. 

🎙️ Listen, reflect, and join the dialogue. Share your thoughts, experiences, and topic suggestions for future episodes of Unfiltered Two Black Women.

And there it was. One tomato. Freshly emerged, sitting quiet on the vine like it had been waiting for me to notice.

I need you to understand I am not a professional gardener. I am learning as I go, mostly by trial and a lot of error, and lately that error has come in the form of cut worms who decided my harvest was theirs too. They came for the my basil and then my dill. Now they're eyeing my cucumbers. I stood out there the other day actually debating with myself; do I water more, or do I let it dry out and just wait for the food-grade Sevin to arrive, because I've got cut worms to deal with, y'all.

It's a small, silly problem. But it got me thinking about something bigger.

Growing up, we're told that adulthood is the reward. Get there, and you'll finally get to do what you want. What nobody tells you is that you get there and it's still full of rules. Regulations. Flaws you didn't know you'd inherit. The only real free will you're handed is the choice to wake up and face the day anyway. Because life doesn't always hand you the easy version. Some days are simple. Some days are the hardest thing you've ever migrated through. And you show up regardless.

Regardless of what's happening in the world. Regardless of how loud social media gets. Even on the day you find yourself in a viral video, being called every name in the book except a child of God — you're still here. Still tending to something. Still able to be up and moving, which some days is the whole victory.

That's what the garden gives me. When I'm out there watering, that's mine. Nobody's policing that. Nobody's telling me what I can or cannot do with what I grow. I've watched people wave the First Amendment around like a weapon while having no problem policing a Black woman like me for existing too loudly. It's exhausting. But the tomato doesn't talk back. The bee that finally pollinated my cucumbers doesn't have an opinion about me. Out there, I'm just a woman tending to what's hers, and that is resilience. That is joy I built with my own hands.

I think about Kevin, the ground squirrel who checks in on my garden most mornings — thankfully hasn't dug up my pots this year, and I take that as a small mercy. I think about how every decade of life makes you restart. New aches. New thoughts you didn't order. Things you never thought you'd have the nerve to try, happening anyway. I find myself a little jealous of a simpler past sometimes, before technology convinced us that "more" was the goal. Technology will never tell you to go outside and be still. It just keeps asking to be fed. The garden asks the opposite of you. It asks you to slow down.

I'm trying to teach my child that same slowness — that when you're the only one like you in the room, you protect your own peace. You pay attention to what's actually happening to you, not what someone's dressing up as a joke to make it easier to swallow. I don't always understand why people do that to each other. But I'm grateful I've built a life around people who don't. And when feelings do get hurt, I believe in being big enough to say sorry and mean it enough to not do it again.

I have somewhere between six and eight potted tomato plants. I've given a few away already. And still, today, one lonely tomato showed up and reminded me why I started this whole thing in the first place. Planting seeds and watching them grow turned out to be the most honest therapy I've ever had. It's the granny-hobby wisdom none of us knew we needed such as gardening, knitting, bird watching, all of it quietly keeping us tethered to ourselves.

Some days won't mean much. Some days will hold the whole thing together. Today, it was a tomato. And I'll take it.

I woke up feeling the full weight of the week pressing down on me — and on top of that, I experienced my first viral moment. And not in my favor.

Never in my life did I think I’d be in a position…

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It’s been one of those weeks where I’ve been sitting with Big Questions. You know the ones. Who am I? Where am I going? Why are stores pushing self-checkout?

Deep stuff.

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It’s 3:27 a.m.

I woke up as if someone called my name. Not gently. Not gradually. Fully awake—like my alarm clock went off.

Which is ironic, considering how exhausted I’ve been since the weekend. Yet here I am. Alert. Restless. This, apparently, is my new normal.

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Today is going to be a great day. The sun is shining, the breeze is just right—and yet here I am, counting down to my half‑century birthday. That AARP envelope landed in my mailbox like a quiet accusation. I was not happy. It…

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My answer was unwavering: “An engineer.”

I announced this confidently at four years old and never once reconsidered. Why? Because obviously that was the logical choice. My mom’s two brother…

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For months, people have been asking me, “Are you a writer?” My answer has always been some variation of, “No, I’m an engineer.” But something shifted recently. I felt this pull to start writing on Substack, and the only prompt I needed was, What’s on your mind? The truth is, there’s always something on my mind. I’m a problem‑solver by nature.

Stepping in…

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