Content note: This article discusses sexual violence at length. After my rape, I thought of my body as a series of open wounds and wounded openings sutured together. I had to learn how to rewrite the poems, the stories, the words I wrapped around my flesh. After certain types of trauma, sometimes the only way we can see our bodies is as spaces for harm, spaces for … [Read more...]
3 Ways You Might Change After a Difficult Thing Has Happened (And Why That’s Okay)
One day I called my best friend from high school and asked him, “Can you tell me who I was?" "Remind me how you remember me, please," I begged. "I can’t remember who I was, who I really am, who I’m supposed to be.” I experienced a trauma. It changed me in ways that made me unrecognizable to myself. I struggled with these changes, resented them, and ended up resenting … [Read more...]
Why I Refuse To Believe Being Femme Invalidates My Queerness
My femme identity is rooted in conjuring up as much softness and pleasure as I can. This world can be incredibly hard and harmful, especially for marginalized folx. Femme-embodiment is my magic of choice to help me navigate through it all. As magic as it is, my gender expression also prompts people to approach me with the “… but you look straight” comment upon "discovering" … [Read more...]
Black Folks Deserve Rest and Relaxation: 10 Acts of Self-Care To Exorcise White Supremacy From Your Black Body
A friend of mine recently asked me to close my eyes and imagine what Black liberation looked/smelled/tasted/sounded like to me. I told her: It smells floral; because I want Black folks to have flower gardens. It tastes like home cook meals; because I want Black people to have the time to cook if that’s what they into. It sounds like babies laughing; because I want Black … [Read more...]
Black Women Save America, but Who Rallies for Black Women? Why It’s Radical To Reclaim Self-Love in a Country Trying To Kill You
In the aftermath of the Alabama Senate election at the head of 2018, Black women have had to remind folks that our primary objective is not in ‘saving the country from itself.” Saving ourselves from this country is also high on our list of priorities and has been so for a very long time. Superficial social media praise juxtaposed against the harsh realities that Black women … [Read more...]
How Being a Black Child of Immigrants Complicates Your Relationship With America
I’m not Black. I remember being very young and my mother telling me this. She wasn’t defensive or upset that I had asked her the question. She was simply stating a fact. I’m not Black. I’m Jamaican. She had never even considered herself Black until moving to this country as a teenager and encountering the term on immigration papers and then soon after, encountering the reality … [Read more...]
Radical Accountability: Navigating the Abusive Habits We May Perpetuate Towards Ourselves
I often find myself thinking about folks who’ve never unraveled. I wonder what that must feel like – if they feel safe with/in themselves. I’m not talking about that human I just can’t seem to get my shit together right now unravel. I mean the seams of your world rip apart and you just slip right off the Earth unravel. I mean the rhythm of all those basic things involved in … [Read more...]
5 Intangible Ways To Make Your Friends Feel Loved
Our chosen family, our friends - they’re so important to surviving and thriving in this world. We have to keep tending, caring, swooning on, loving, holding close, cherishing and doting on them. Here are five ways to make that happen: Do The Things We bear intimate witness to our friends and their lives. We’re up close and personal to all their messes, their needs, their … [Read more...]
Practice Facing the Small Things: 11 Ways to Avoid Avoidance
One day a friend of mine who I had been meaning to call (but now felt anxious about how long it had been) got on the bus I was on. Instead of waving to him and saying, "So glad I ran into you!”, I literally ducked down, headed out the back exit and walked home... in the rain. This is just one of the so many ways my propensity for avoiding uncomfortable scenarios has popped up … [Read more...]
How Rage Is Radical
There’s so much in this world to be enraged about. Everyday there’s another video, another story, another harmful policy, another tweet, another lived experience, another injustice ... What are we supposed to do with all of it? Where are we supposed to put it? How do we breathe with all of it in our chest? This constant state of rage can leave folk feeling powerless, … [Read more...]
Worth and Desire: 3 Emotions I Still Work Through While Practicing Non-Monogamy
“Muriel and I talked about love as a voluntary commitment, while we each struggled through the steps of an old dance, not consciously learned but desperately followed … In those warm spaces of survival, love was another name for control, however openly given.” - Audre Lorde I return to this quote from Zami so often. It makes me think about the ways I have loved, do love, and … [Read more...]
5 Ways We Can Stop Erasing Undocumented Black Folks from Conversations on Immigration
“Stay away from Bobby’s department store over in Brooklyn. There are ICE agents over there rounding Caribbean people up.” Messages like this began circulating in my social media sphere around February of 2018. Legislators and police disproved those specific reports. However, the fear and anxiety that enabled these Facebook rumors to spread are very real. As the daughter of … [Read more...]
Radical Honesty: 7 Ways to Create Safe Space in Non-Monogamous Relationships
“Bae, wifey, partner, open, oh my…" Find and use language you connect with. This is about your intimacy practices, don’t settle for language you don’t love. I personally hate the word polyamorous. It sounds too clinical, too science-y to me, like polygon, polyester, polytechnic … I can’t connect with it so I don’t use it. (Also, heads up for those who do … [Read more...]
