But the reality is, it’s not.

I have high days, ordinary days, and low days. Days filled with the loud laughter of my friends as we kiki the night away. Ordinary Tuesdays where Brooklyn Natives Creating New Memories is the soundtrack to my evening while I’m splayed out reading a good book. I have days where I book a last-minute trip to one of my favorite cities just to feel something.

I recognize the blessing in that, and I also recognize that it doesn’t take away from the low days. You know, the days when things feel flat. When everything feels gray. The opposite of my favorite color.

Those days always sit in juxtaposition to my blessings, and that contradiction is often hard to live with because even if your days are gray, and flat, and low, life is still asking things of you. To call your friend. To spend time with your family. To clock in to work. To clean your house. To raise your children. To fight against injustices. To finally stop dealing with that f/ck boy.

And usually, it asks this of us in the span of 24 hours. Like, how Sway?

But somehow, most of us find a way anyway.

Somewhere in all of this, my days became more gray than pink, and I found myself asking: what’s the point of all this if I’m still going to feel like this?

Despite creating, working, loving others, reading, dancing, despite watching pieces of my life come together, everything still felt dim.

But what I’ve been learning is that a lack of brightness isn’t equivalent to a lack of life. Maybe I’ve been defining a colorful life too narrowly.

The same sky that stretches blue and blushes cotton-candy at sunset and adorns us with stars come nighttime is sometimes gray, too.

Maybe gray was never the opposite of the colorful life I wanted. Maybe it’s already inside it, like it’s already inside my favorite shade of pink. The very color I love is created through muting. Why should the makings of my life be any different?

And maybe that’s why I love mauve so much. It’s pink softened, muted, complicated. A color made more interesting by what dims it—gray.

Gray holds flatness, uncertainty, neutrality, survival, routine, and muted joy. It also holds wisdom, rest, sophistication, tenderness, even beauty.

Maybe my life is more like the sky than it is the stars. Not something that endlessly sparkles, but something expansive enough to hold multitudes: the pink and the gray, the stars and the clouds, the vivid and the muted. How… expansive? Even more than that, how liberating.

If I’m the sky, then my favorite version of life is expansive enough to hold the stars and release the rain. The high and the low. The vivid and the muted. The days that make me feel impossibly alive and the ones I simply have to move through.

That’s when I realized that, though it may not be as bright as the other colors, gray is still a color. And it is still needed in the making of my life.

So I’m learning to honor all of my days. The vivid ones. The ordinary ones. The gray ones too. I’m learning that gray days aren’t meant to be survived, but experienced.

Because I meet a version of myself in each of them, and she still deserves to be seen as beautiful, even when the saturation is low and the color is muted.

Gray is still a color.

And maybe a colorful life was never supposed to mean living only in the brightest shades.

What makes Capri’s interior life and story delicious is that it’s a story of learning to want without losing yourself.

There’s romance, desire, domesticity, motherhood, hurt, movement, betrayal, friendship, danger, sexuality, and Capri is at the epicenter of it all. She exists in a sprawling web of Delgatos and the Infernos, corporate professionals, college friends, foes and children. Capri is multitudinous, simultaneously holding so many categories of female desire. Like she’s every woman, it’s all in her.

But this woman is spiraling and she’s trying to find footing. She’s trying to learn how to pursue love without abandoning herself; trying to learn who she is apart from her brothers’ shadows, her mom’s criticism, and her former lovers’ betrayal.

All of this leads to her solo trip. A year to heal, to learn to be alone, and to learn discernment since her desires are hers and aren’t going anywhere. A year to answer:

What do I do with how badly I want to love and be loved when love has repeatedly proven itself capable of hurting me?

Capri is big mama, yes. Big dawg? Yeah, we see how she gets down—she don’t play. Big Pri, not the little. But she’s also a lover girl, which led to all her… side quests.

She believes that to honor her desires, she has to satisfy them, like expeditiously.

She wants partnership, intimacy, companionship, desires many of us carry if we’re honest enough to name them. So when she feels the absence of those things, all while love is happening all around her, she becomes vulnerable enough to accept substitutes of the kind of love she longs to have, a love like her brothers, a love like her parents, a love like the ones we read in books.

And that’s when her loneliness and need threaten to swallow her.

The ache becomes existential.

Because it’s less “I don’t have a man,” and more, “Is this going to happen for me?” and “How many more times am I going to survive betrayal and disappointment before I give up on this desire altogether?”

Capri is love-centered. She knows when to leave. Eventually. But she’s ready to find someone whose love is worth staying for.

She spends a year alone. Proving to herself that loneliness is survivable. She learns how to separate desire from desperation. She comes back rejuvenated, remembering who she is: Capri Delgato make a nigga yell gahhdamn.

And after all of that? My girl still wants love. A man. Somebody to call lover, word to Janet.

Good.

Because the goal wasn’t to eradicate the desire, but to learn to live with it without losing herself. Cause big mama really ain’t have no business dealing with Naheim to begin with. That’s another story. Back to the matter at hand.

There’s this very contemporary idea of female empowerment that sometimes treats desire as a weakness we’re supposed to transcend. Learn to love yourself so much you don’t need anybody. Be complete alone. Stop looking for love. Become indifferent and then love will find you.

Capri basically says girl, no. I did the healing. I traveled. I learned to enjoy my own company. And I still want to be loved. Now what?

I don’t think Capri desired to be less of a lover girl, just a better lover girl. Because wouldn’t that be a tragedy? To deny yourself what you want because you’ve chosen badly before… and the time before that?

Capri’s failed relationships didn’t prove that her desires were wrong. They just proved that her choices were. Skill issue.

She has a fulfilling life, and wants love inside of it.

And that’s why we love Meercat.

“Until you return, Suga.”

He doesn’t turn her vulnerability into an opening; he provides a safe space for her desires to exist, land and eventually call home.

Meercat gave the woman who spent a year learning to be on her own, the woman who deeply wants, somewhere safe to say the most vulnerable thing:

INY.

many people get to ask at sixteen:

• what do i like?

• what music do i listen to?

• what clothes feel like me?

• what kind of future do i want?

alaia doesn’t get those questions until she’s twenty-six.

she never got an adolescence, at least not the kind we hope for our young girls: curious, hopeful, soft, sincere. an adolescence where she gets to discover, ask questions, be defiant, become. she didn’t lose herself and then find herself because she never had the luxury of building herself to begin with.

so her “coming back to herself” isn’t really a return.

it’s a first meeting.

as we’re meeting alaia, she’s also meeting herself. we get to watch her construct herself in real time.

that distinction is heartbreaking because it reframes every ordinary choice as something extraordinary. choosing what to wear. sleeping without fear. laughing because she wants to. falling in love because she chooses to, not because she’s been chosen for.

this story is less about her finding herself again, and more about finally getting the chance to introduce herself.

because of that, i think many of us, as readers, want to interrupt her choices and rewrite her life because they aren’t the choices we’d make. (guilty as charged, ha.)

in a perfect world, maybe alaia would save herself with no outside help. maybe she’d go to school, discover who she is, and then find cappadonna. but then maybe that wouldn’t be alaia’s story.

it would be my story for her.

the beauty of building your own life is that, in the making of it, comes the making of mistakes. the kind of mistakes we forgive at sixteen but extend far less grace for at twenty-six.

yes, there are more factors that alaia has to consider than the average sixteen-year-old. promise (who’s a little badass, respectfully), for one. but maybe that’s the point. promise gets to be a little badass because she’s safe enough to be one. she gets to be loud, curious, mischievous, and a little unruly because of the choices her mom makes.

her safety has become ordinary enough that girlhood can be, too. in many ways, promise is living the childhood alaia is only now getting the chance to experience for herself.

i’d be interested to see alaia ten years from now. not because i need proof that she “made it,” but because i wonder what kind of woman emerges after a decade of uninterrupted safety.

what decisions does she make when tomorrow finally belongs to her?

maybe the greatest story left for alaia is the one where she gets to keep meeting herself.

about a month ago, i saw an ad that said tracee ellis ross was appearing on broadway. impulse being a friendly companion to the decisions i make, i bought a ticket before i could blink an eye.

july 9th at 7 p.m. two days after she premiered on broadway. this gives her a few days to get some of the jitters out, i thought.

it gave me something to look forward to, and that’s something i’ve been doing a lot lately: finding things to look forward to. so much so, i created a summer bucket list, inspired by big girl blitz, because i have this unshakeable determination to have the best summer yet. as i made my way through the list, i realized it was less of a bucket list and more of a guide on how to live my life beautifully. it became an instruction manual on living.

fast forward to july 9th.

as i got myself ready to see one of my favorite people on broadway, i realized i didn’t even know what the play was about. i mentioned this to someone close to me, and she laughed.

“at this point, just go in blind.”

so i did.

dress circle. row A. seat 108.

i sat down with a cosmopolitan in one hand, a bag of seasoned pretzels in the other, and my pink clutch tucked securely beneath my arm. minutes later, there she was.

as i watched tracee perform, i found myself admiring her comedic timing and impeccable speech delivery. every word landed somewhere deep in the tight spaces of your bones, while her warmth somehow kept them from crushing beneath the weight of what she was saying.

“she’s brilliant,” i thought.

somewhere between laughing, participating, and watching, the realization of what this play was really about quietly settled over me.

it was about a child making a list of every brilliant thing.

the first passage that stopped me came during a conversation between the narrator and their father:

because if you were able to know everything then life would be unlivable. because then there would be no mystery, no curiosity, no creativity, no conversation, no discovery. nothing would be new and we’d have no need to use our imaginations. and our imaginations are what make life bearable. because in order to live in the present we have to be able to imagine a future that will be better than the past. because that’s what hope is, and without hope we couldn’t go on.

i realized i don’t think i’d ever thought about hope this way. to me, hope had always been optimism.

but here, hope becomes an act of imagination.

if we lose the ability to picture tomorrow as containing anything different from today, the present becomes a room with no doors.

another line sank its claws into me:

happiness scared me because it was usually followed by…

as someone who’s spent years in the ring with depression, i know all too well what it feels like to brace for impact the moment joy arrives. not because joy is dangerous, but because you’ve learned to expect what comes after it.

it made me think of me.

and because good stories have a way of returning us to ourselves, it made me think of verity from score, too.

i don’t want you to read this and think every brilliant thing is a play about suicide.

it isn’t.

or at least, not as much as it’s about breaking the silence that grows around it.

the list of brilliant things is almost a trojan horse. it gets everyone laughing about ice cream and roller coasters before quietly inviting us to sit together with grief.

it reminded me of kennedy ryan and her ability to use romance as a vessel for conversations that otherwise feel too heavy to approach head-on. somehow, when grief is placed beside love, desire, intimacy, and hope, it becomes something we can look at without immediately looking away.

but the line that stayed with me long after the curtain fell wasn’t about grief.

it was this:

i realized how much the list had changed the way i see the world.

the world doesn’t necessarily change when you begin paying attention.

you do.

the list wasn’t evidence that life had suddenly become better. it trained the narrator’s attention. and somewhere along the way, it began training mine.

the play never denies suffering, nor does it promise a happily ever after. instead, it quietly argues that attention is a creative act. what we repeatedly notice becomes part of the architecture of our lives.

when i decided to create my monthly r.e.p.o.r.t., document my outfits, archive memorable fmcs, and keep a running list of the new things i’ve experienced, no matter how ordinary, i didn’t realize i was making my own list of brilliant things.

it may not include ice cream.

though, to be fair, pistachio ice cream absolutely belongs on the list.

mine looks more like this:

• a broadway show on a thursday night.

• a pink-on-pink outfit because everything pinka.

• the terrace i thought i’d never use but has become my favorite haven. a place to sleep, dream, talk shit with my friends, have a drink, and waste away in the most beautiful way.

• winning the mara brock akil giveaway.

• discovering women, fictional and real, whose interior lives made me feel less alone.

• buying a ticket before i knew what i was saying yes to.

i wasn’t documenting my life because it was already extraordinary.

i was documenting it until i could see that it is.

paying attention awakens you to the world we live in. one filled with grief, malice, heartache, injustice, mortality, and disappointment.

but paying attention is also how we notice what’s brilliant.

and maybe that’s the difficult gift of being alive.

you don’t get one without the other.

every brilliant thing.

brilliant can be dazzling, but more often than not, it’s wonderfully ordinary. a conversation. a song. a book. an FMC. a stranger smiling at you without realizing you desperately needed that kindness.

there’s something beautifully circular about that evening.

we left the theater carrying a list that had already begun changing the way we saw the world.

and somewhere, on the 3 train back to brooklyn, someone noticed a brilliant thing they would’ve walked past yesterday.

perhaps a brilliant life isn’t one without grief.

perhaps it’s one that keeps making the list anyway.

xo,

your fmc apologist 🖤

i stopped writing. i stopped reading. i stopped making time for the things that once made me feel most like myself.

at the same time, i was standing at a crossroads, interrogating the religious beliefs i had inherited and the life i quietly wanted for myself. deconstructing my faith while trying to build a new one left me isolated. i felt like a woman carrying more questions than answers, more contradictions than certainty, and too many puzzles for one set of hands to solve.

for a long time, i thought i was lost.

last year, i finally sat down and read the midnight library. the idea of becoming a fig tree in my own life haunted me. not because i had too many choices, but because i had stopped choosing altogether.

i finished that book feeling a little more curious about myself and my future.

not long after, a friend introduced me to rhythm & blues by kimberly brown. i devoured it on a train ride from new york to d.c. then i stayed up all night reading reel, and somewhere between those pages, something came alive in me again.

it took ten years, two hundred books, four states, five cities, more apartments than i can count, too many tears, a mental health diagnosis, and countless lonely nights to find her.

or maybe… just maybe she’d been with me all along.

the more i read, the more i found myself.

the more i found myself, the more my passions trusted me again.

they trusted me enough to believe i wouldn’t neglect them this time.

when i finally came home to myself, i realized i wasn’t the only woman i’d misunderstood.

i started this page because i wanted to defend all the women who were easy to dislike.

then i realized defense is exhausting.

i’d much rather profile them.

i’d rather ask them the questions i wish someone had asked me. i’d rather sit with their contradictions than explain them away. i’d rather be curious than convincing.

maybe that’s because i’ve been every version of the woman i once thought needed defending.

the unlikable one.

the misunderstood one.

the naïve one.

the angry one.

the woman who was lost.

the young woman trying to mother wounds she didn’t cause in a role she’d never been taught how to carry.

every version of her led me here.

i wanted a place where i could witness my own becoming alongside the women who helped shape it, both fictional and real. women who resist easy categorization. women who make us work a little harder before we understand them.

i wanted to be in community with people who delight in the same things i do. people who believe books can change us, that getting dressed can be a form of self-expression, that playlists can hold memories, and that paying attention to the things we love is never a waste of time.

maybe my hope is that, after practicing that kind of generosity with fictional women, we become more generous with real women too.

i wanted a place where all of me could play.

a place where fashion, literature, culture, and womanhood could sit beside the ordinary moments of becoming.

and so i finally hit publish on an idea that had been patiently waiting for me.

i wanted to pay closer attention to my life, and this became the place where i could.

because i wanted to treat my life like something worth archiving.

here’s to the first of many monthly r.e.p.o.r.t.s.

until next month,

your fmc apologist 🖤

in big girl blitz, we meet jazmyn payne: a big girl with bigger dreams, a deep love for football, and a desire to be seen beyond what the world assumes about her. she wants to write. she wants to be heard. she wants a love that doesn’t ask her to shrink first.

at her core, jazmyn wants what so many of us want: to be accepted, held, desired, and celebrated exactly as she is.

maybe that’s why jazmyn’s story stayed with me.

nothing about jazmyn’s journey feels out of reach. the love, the growth, the becoming, it all feels possible. not fantasy in the distant, untouchable way, but fantasy close enough to be kissed by it. the kind that makes you look at your own life and wonder where you’ve been waiting for permission.

however, in this novel, the first great love story in big girl blitz isn’t lamar. it’s jazmyn and aunt addie.

and truly, we all need an aunt addie.

someone who sees us early. someone who calls us into ourselves before we even know there’s a self waiting to be called forward. someone who doesn’t just pour into us, but shows us through the way they live that life is meant to be lived fully, boldly, and without apology.

when aunt addie’s prognosis turns terminal, she creates a bucket list, or what i like to call a life list, of everything she wants to experience before the summer ends. and she encourages jazmyn to create one too.

what begins as something daunting becomes the very ignition jazmyn needs to come alive in her own life. because aunt addie isn’t just asking her to make a list. she’s asking her to want.

to name the dream. to chase the feeling. to stop treating life like something she has to earn access to.

and then… there’s lamar.

i loved lamar. his patience. his presence. the quiet, intentional ways he shows love. he isn’t written as a savior, but as a companion. someone who stands beside jazmyn as she both figuratively and literally writes her own story.

their relationship unfolds with care: friendship, banter, tension, passion. all of it sits in this beautiful balance that makes you root for them not only as a couple, but as two people making room for love while still becoming themselves. and what makes that love feel so grounded is the friendship underneath it.

and throughout this book, friendship feels like medicine.

you see it in aunt addie. in aaliyah and nina. and eventually, in lamar. it’s a reminder that love, in all its forms, should hold us, stretch us, and return us to ourselves.

that same care carries into the intimacy, too.

danielle allen doesn’t let you rush through those moments. she slows you down. makes you sit in them. feel them. experience them fully.

and yes… lamar? i, too, would like to be tied up and reminded of your love.

this book made me laugh. it made me cry. it made me reflective. it made me grateful. but more than anything, it made me feel alive.

i found myself starting my own life list as i read, thinking about who i was, who i am, and who i’m becoming. thinking about the ways i want to show up in my own life with more urgency, more tenderness, more appetite.

big girl blitz isn’t just a love story.

it’s a quiet invitation: to live, feel, and want more. to stop postponing joy. to become. and to remember that the right people, your aunt addies, your friends, your lovers, don’t complete your life.

they meet you in it.

i must admit, i wasn’t immediately invested in nikki rose when i first started this book. mostly because i felt distant from her interior life. the bits and pieces i received from the prose weren’t enough to satisfy my appetite for wanting to know more about her: her motives, her desires, her contradictions. but with each mistake came hard lessons, and with each lesson, i found my way into nikki’s interior life.

and nikki makes a lot of mistakes.

we’re introduced to her as this naive, bright-eyed, ambitious twenty-something who immediately finds herself entangled with a married man who also happens to be her boss and lifelong family friend. talk about MESS. and while the novel never fully absolves nikki of her choices, i found myself increasingly disturbed by the ways the adults around her failed her too. once i realized how young she actually was, the betrayal from alonzo and the emotional distance from her parents became that much more jarring.

from there, nikki continues making choices that constantly made me pause and go: “nikki girl… what is it that you want?”

she pursues men who threaten her sense of self, shrinks herself in relationships, compromises her values, prioritizes ambition over intimacy, then intimacy over discernment. at times it became difficult to root for her because she seemed deeply disconnected from herself. but ironically, that’s also what made her fascinating.

because nikki’s rebellion isn’t chaos for chaos’ sake. who she is, from her desires to her wants to her needs, creates an inherent rebellion.

throughout the novel, we watch her feminine archetype evolve. she begins as a babydoll archetype: hopeful, impressionable, desirous, eager to be chosen and validated by the worlds she wants access to. but slowly, through failure, humiliation, ambition, pleasure, and consequence, she evolves into something far more compelling: a rebel-warrior hybrid. the hottie-big dawg.

nikki wants everything. cultural relevance. luxury. romance. visibility. emotional fulfillment. professional power. softness upheld by power. and more importantly, she wants it publicly. that alone makes her provocative.

she doesn’t shy away from her desires either, both to her advantage and her demise. our good sis is trying to build a career, run a magazine, party with industry elites, fall in love, be desired, be respected, and figure out who she is all at the same time. and honestly? that tension is what makes her feel real.

what makes nikki compelling is that she exists in spaces where she constantly has to calibrate femininity versus authority, desirability versus respectability, Blackness versus corporate polish, authenticity versus strategic self-construction. but instead of choosing one, she continuously collides them together.

and eventually, she grows into the big dawg. not because she becomes perfect, but because she becomes aware. aware of the systems around her. aware of how power circulates. aware of how easily women, especially Black women, are punished for wanting too much while simultaneously being exploited for the very things that make them desirable in the first place.

there’s a quote in the novel where nikki says:

“i’m just… sick of being a pawn.”

and i think that line sits at the center of her entire evolution.

because by the end of the novel, nikki no longer wants to simply survive the game. she wants authorship over her own life.

that’s why i think queen bee lingers at the edges of her character by the novel’s end. not fully formed yet, but approaching. we see glimpses of a woman beginning to edit her life with intention. removing people who diminish her, protecting the people who believe in her vision, standing firmer in her convictions, and finally allowing herself to become visible to herself.

nikki rose fascinated me because she treats her life as if she’s the creative director, the ceo, and the author of it. because she is.

so did nikki rose rule the world?

yes.

impaired judgment, questionable decisions, blown-out press, hard lessons, sexual politics, ambition, vulnerability, and all.

she did it all in her christian loubs.

because ruling the world, at least for nikki rose, was never about perfection.

it was about authorship.

unruly yours,

your fmc apologist

There’s a line in Joliet by Rae Lyse that quietly becomes the emotional spine of the entire novel:

“Go put yourself back together, Lovie.”

And that’s what stayed with me long after I finished the book.

Because beneath all the yearning and romance and emotional intensity, Rae Lyse is actually writing about a woman rebuilding her relationship to herself. Love is simply the landscape where that reconstruction happens.

The recurring motif of Joliet is not romance.

It’s:

put yourself back together.

That line appears early, then echoes throughout the novel like a tuning fork. And what’s beautiful is that Lovie’s reconstruction is not about becoming colder, more detached, less emotional, less feminine, or “harder” in the way women are usually taught survival requires.

Instead, she learns integration.

That’s why this quote feels like the thesis of her entire character arc to me:

“You can have feelings and still be tough. Sometimes we need both ends of the spectrum to balance us out. We can’t be all good and all bad, or all hard and all soft. The balance makes us tougher.”

That’s Lovie Sinclair in one sentence.

She is baby doll and lover girl and muse all at once. She is soft and jealous and emotionally honest and self-possessed. She desires openly. She admits when she misses him. She begs sometimes. She aches. She yearns.

And somehow, none of it feels pathetic.

That’s the magic trick Rae Lyse pulls off with Lovie.

Because usually women in fiction are rewarded for restraint and punished for appetite. Especially Black women. Especially feminine Black women. Especially women who openly desire men.

But Lovie says things like:

“You wanted me.”

And:

“How much begging do I have to do to have you completely?”

And even in her most emotionally exposed moments, she never feels degraded by her desire.

Why?

Because Lovie’s yearning is written with agency.

She chooses it consciously. She stands in it fully aware of herself. She isn’t collapsing into love unconsciously like someone drowning. Even when she sounds desperate, she still sounds self-aware. That distinction matters.

There’s a difference between self-abandonment and devotion.

Lovie understands that difference instinctively.

And Rich’s perspective deepens her characterization even more because through his eyes she becomes almost mythic. Not in the manic pixie dream girl sense, but in the sense that she represents emotional possibility. Reinvention. A different life entirely.

“This is the woman I own.”

“My baby that thinks I deserve empathy, softness, and a life outside of hell.”

“She makes me feel like I can conquer the world when I’m with her.”

Lovie functions as a catalyst. She changes the emotional architecture of everyone around her simply by believing another life is possible.

That’s why the “muse” archetype matters here, but not in the passive sense. Not muse as beautiful object. Muse as force. Muse as disruption. Muse as emotional expansion.

Even her dialogue around travel reflects this longing for reinvention:

“It feels like I’ve been nowhere at all.”

That line wrecked me a little.

Because Lovie understands something many people don’t until much later in life: movement is not the same thing as transformation. You can board hundreds of planes and still never arrive inside yourself.

And then there’s Rich, this man who has barely left Texas, becoming the person she imagines an entirely different emotional geography with.

That plane conversation isn’t really about travel.

It’s about choice.

It’s about asking:

Will you choose another life with me?

Not fantasy.

Not escapism.

Choice.

And I think that’s why Lovie lingers.

She doesn’t feel like discourse bait or a flattened “strong female character” archetype. She feels lived in. Contradictory in the way real women are contradictory. Emotional in the way real women are emotional.

She’s not trying to perform emotional detachment as power. She’s trying to figure out how to remain soft without abandoning herself in the process.

And honestly, that feels far more radical.

Lovie Sinclair made me think differently about softness. Not as weakness. Not as passivity. Not even as romance.

But as a form of selfhood still intact.