Sometimes I think we’re all falling, metaphorically speaking, and our suffering comes from the fears and anxieties this world conditions us with about our experience.
I’m starting to believe that it’s incredible to fall!
Read More
One less in your face stereotype goes back to Queen. She seemed flat at times, maybe like she wasn’t connecting. The more I thought about her I realized, I could actually relate to her. It was hard to tell how she felt most of the time. This is what we do as black women, we fight ourselves to keep it together and hardly (if ever) feel there is space held for us to be vulnerable. When that space is made available, we don’t trust it.
Read More
I remember being both terrified and excited by the way the room was spinning. It was a relief, something else to feel, something new, something better than the way I felt my whole life up until that moment.
Read More
The proliferation of memes and quotes that speak to flaking out on plans, and canceling people appear to be symptomatic of a growing unwillingness to build meaningful relationships or venture anywhere outside of our comfort zones unless of course there’s a check being cut or clout being amassed.
Read More
I’ve learned that it’s not actually about feeling completely confident all the time. You can start something feeling a little less than ready and sometimes in the middle of it or at least after, feel a little more capable than you did at the start. The trick is you have to start. We have to sit with that uncertainty and let it be a shadow as we move forward anyway.
Read More
There was a time I didn’t feel supported at all. This was in large part due to the fact that my home environment didn’t offer much in the kind of support I needed at different stages of my life.
However, my part in perpetuating this dynamic was taking this storyline into my life outside of that environment and running the script over and over.
On a deeply subconscious level, I would write myself into the lives others in a perfectly comfortable and unsupported environment.
Read More
With everyone being in possession of a personal brand (you) coupled with a litany of platforms to present that brand (aka your actual face mostly), I’m not sure we’ve ever been more beauty obsessed as a society, which is saying a lot because we’ve always been pretty obsessed.
Read More
We were like two meteors crashing into each other. Between us was a mind blowing collection of childhood traumas, insecurities, and unresolved issues.
It started with honesty and trust but it ended with short circuiting my relationship to my own intuition, to myself and me not wanting to be in any relationship ever again.
Read More
One night I came home so sick. I was in the bathroom losing my lunch, dinner and myself. My grandmother heard me, came into the bathroom and said “you better not be pregnant” in Kreyol. Her tone of voice was one of fear and frustration. I was kinda busy, so I didn’t even respond. I was too depleted to react.
By 18 I had hit my stride I guess you can say.
Read More
Once I got aquatinted with the business my confidence started to take a beating.
The music industry is full of fear mongering, power hungry, broken and desperate energy. It’s rotten at its core.
It will try to get into your head if you’re too close to the center. The message is always on some level that you aren’t enough or you need to be different somehow. It’s so impossible to know and love who you are to survive it with your dignity and love for music in tact.
Read More
Several factors lead me here.
It’s likely that I’ll come back and edit this but for now it felt urgent to get this out.
Keep a pillow close to hold against your incision when you need to cough, or sneeze.
Use the spirometer. You don’t want to end up with pneumonia on top of all this.
Also take special care, getting in and out of bed. Try to resist hunching over, and walk every day.
These things helped me get through it. I hope you find them useful.
Read More
Ok Universe, haven’t we built enough character this year? It’s only August.
Somehow I do feel the worst is behind me but then I wonder, is that my Sagittarius optimism or my intuition?
Sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart.
Read More
It’s almost religious to work in silence, and reply “I’m fine” when asked how you’re doing. Never ask for help, never share your struggles, or doubts, wake up early, go to sleep late, hustle & build. Repeat.
Vulnerability is generally saved for the online persona, used as an aspect of brand building but hardly experienced IRL.
It’s treated like an asset to be rolled out solely through social media channels to advance an agenda.
Read More
Grown men started trying to talk to me when I was maybe 12.
A family friend went from safe to scary when he invited be to his “weekend lover”.
Our building’s super tried to hook up with me when I was 13. I remember looking at him and telling him my age. His response? “Oh I thought you were 16.”
What?!
Read More
I promise not to turn this into a place where all I talk about is my myomectomy but it’s so fresh and it’s hard not to think about it as I’m just shy of 4 weeks post op.
There was a bit of an emptiness I felt coming home from the hospital, experiencing something like that and coming home without a baby.
It’s not that I was planning on it or expecting.
I think knowing that the experience is so similar to delivering a baby through a c-section, and having the scar and not the baby is so strange.
Read More
The realization that eating foods designed to cut me off from the intuition I rely on to guide what I consume was scary and needed healing, fast.
I incorporated more clean plant based foods, eliminated most soy products, ate less vegan junk food and began cooking as many of my meals as possible.
Whenever possible I carried a BPA free water bottle, switched over to glass Tupperware and started taking different supplements.
Read More
I keep looking over at my laptop, my mic and audio interface thinking this would be a great time to work on producing or writing songs, but I just don’t have it in me.
Looking around the apartment, I’m taking note of all the things to get rid of knowing I won’t be able to do any of it safely until next month.
This is how I occupy my mind when I feel helpless.
Read More
I believe the general silence around this issue is surely linked to the limited research and resources for something that touches the lives of 80% of black women and 70% of white women.
Many women are asymptomatic (meaning they experience no symptoms) and can go through life never noticing them. The rest of us are not so lucky.
Read More
We can be real without being destructive and toxic.
We can be optimistic considering all the facts, not jus the convenient ones.
We can be honest about hard truths with love helping to guide our words and actions.
Read More
When I find myself back in my old neighborhood on my way to smorgasburg or some local vinyl shop or a free concert in the park, it’s still strange.
It feels like a bond was broken.
I barely recognize the place. The people look at me like I’m the stranger, which I guess I am now.