Back from Hiatus - I Found the Words - TLY Part 1 Coming to You 7/28

Hello Friends,

I'm still using this reference, although I'm beefing with Eminem for taking a shot at Meg the Stallion for absolutely no reason. Can we keep black women out of our mouths for ten minutes? Please, she's been through enough.

In the past few weeks, I took a step back from writing. If you've been keeping up I've been working on a series called the Lost year to describe the experiences living as a black woman and a person living with PTSD. I feel like I spent a few years living in the Matrix, understanding myself as a cog in patriarchal white-centering machine. I'm using white-centering as a sub for white supremacist as to clarify how we create systems that center white experiences. The word white supremacy always elicits this Charlottesville Neo-Nazi imagery when in reality white supremacy is mundane and ordinary. It is a system, a collection of experiences, relationships, and situations in which whiteness and white points of view are prioritized and held to different standards than non-white ones. You do not need to be a neo-Nazi to practice it. In fact, you don't need to be white to either. But I digress.

In the microcosmic matrix of the last few years, I started to piece together an entire life of experiences navigating the discomfort of existence within these oppressive systems. When I look at this time in my life, all my experiences just seemed to be predictable outcomes of what happens to black women in this societal structure. It was overwhelming to look at it in me, in friends, in family, in black women on reality dating shows, in black women on the internet, and even to fucking BEYONCE. Mine is just a drop in the sea of many Black American Horror stories. I miss the lightness of my younger days, when I was young happy black girl, perhaps holding out a hope that being the good , palatable black girl, would help me evade what it meant to be a black woman in this world, to help me escape from the inevitable experience of being made into the angry black woman. But it did not. The respectability politics do not save you in a world that barely sees you as human. AND WITH THAT I HAD TO RETREAT. I recognize now that there is no honor in enduring pain for the sake of being able to say that you're strong. As a black woman, you have to exercise an ungodly amount of strength in order to survive this world and the way it treats you. But I don't want to be strong anymore. I want to be safe.

But, this week as July approaches, I feel so much of it coming back into my body, that it's time to push it back out away from me. And so, next week I will publish the first part of the "Lost Years" Essays. I think it'll be overwhelming to post all at once, and it feels like dragging it out too much to post chapter after chapter separately so this is my compromise with myself. The Lost Year Part 1, coming to you 7/28. My brain takes a lot of time to process things now and so it took me a long time to get here, but I've found the words. And I want to share them with you.

As for my fun updates :

I ran a 5K last week. I'm emotionally prepping for my incoming MSW course load. I published an essay anonymously for a women's magazine. My dog is cute. I'm planning a trip to Greece/Egypt/ Morocco and my escape back to Denmark. I saw Jamila Woods perform this weekend. She's perfect. Do me a favor and listen to her song "Tiny Garden". I've got some tiny essays on some media I've ingested over the past few months : I Saw the TV Glow, Baby Reindeer, Love Island US & Chappell Roan as a Queer Awakening that I'll be setting free soon and maybe a small teaser.

Sending you much love kindness and grace. And if you are a black woman or woman of color, sending you that twofold.