I Owe You Some Stories - "Not Me Too, All of us" "Springsteen & I" "A Year of Women Telling the Truth" "What would Mama Say" and more.

I think I owe you an explanation reader. I meant to make this space a home for a bunch of sort of journalesque regular update through recovery sprinkled in with takes on topics in the zeitgeist or in movies and music I love. I wanted to reclaim words and narrative as some sort of step to freedom from an experience that I would deem 0/10 stars extremely dehumanizing, shitty, and very ghetto. But as a part of that, much of this year has been plagued with not only the perils of complex PTSD, a lot of cognition and memory issues, and miscellaneous physical health issues. And while much of that blocked the consistency I'd hoped to develop, I'm decided to break from shaming myself for lack of progress/cohesiveness. I've decided to start afresh.

Last year, I tried to force my accountability by creating draft posts that with an auto-publish date. The logic here being : You must write to completion or else these unpolished fragments will be pushed out into the ether! But despite holding that metaphorical gun to my head, that deadline for completing these was oft missed sending out draft posts out into the wild. So I decided to opt into writing a list. I chronicled many mini essays in the draft section of the WIX site and in the Notes App of what I've learned, or topics that had come to me in a 2 AM fit of inspiration. There were may recurring themes around blackness womanhood and the intersection of both that took up much of my time year. And so there's a lot of pieces I'm excited to share with you. I'm hoping that finishing these will give me something slightly less serious to worry about as I wait for my CT scan results to come back. So here's a tiny list of working titles that I'm posting these to keep me some level of accountable. Some of these essays may swallow one another, but in some shape or form you'll see the following :

• Not Me Too, All of Us

• Slave Play & Dating the Oppressor

• Springsteen & I (Reflections on the All American Girl Next Door)

• A Year of Women Telling the Truth

• What Would Mama Say? - Mothers & Morality

• The Patriarchy is You & Me - Barbie - I actually would love to write an entire series on the Barbie movie. I'll never be able to describe how validating and how on the nose this film is. It has become my most talked about movie of all time, with Promising Young Woman, and Minari as a close seconds.

• Conversations from the Lost Year

• Unconventional Freedom from Sexual Trauma - Burlesque & Beacon

• 2 Girls, 2 Blogs, 1 Wild Ride

• The Grief of Losing Your Mind
  

A few months ago, my memoir teacher asked me why I write. And I told her to make meaning out of bad things. A lot of these things, I will never be able to make sense of. But perhaps in the fashioning of words to craft something minorly insightful, I'll be able to grapple with the mishegoss. I hope it'll help you too.

I'll end with some gratitude that was much needed these last few months. I'm grateful to storytelling circles at Mo's and The Branded Saloon, which for some reason I always call the Black Bear Saloon. I'm grateful to all black women with "no power" who make art out of struggle. I'm grateful to a community of friends and family, for Glazed Over Beacon, for Bailey the best service dog and tiny animal companion a girl could ask for. And for my mom, for being strong for the both of us and ending our calls with "I love you. God loves You. Bailey loves you. You have to get better." And I'm grateful to you for always

Keeping Tabs.