Cancer versus Crazy
...there just seemed to be so much immediate love and understanding that having cancer means every bit of strength you have goes to fighting cancer so your community steps up to help cover the other bases. Meanwhile here I was wishing for death in a mind that had fractured and what I got was “it’ll pass soon.” “Hang in there Jess” “sending love and light”. I don’t want fucking love and light, I need HELP. I need the same kind of help someone with cancer needs. I’m hurting too. I’m fighting too. I’m trying, too!
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Healing My Mother and Myself
You ever heard of epigenetics? If not, google it and fall into that rabbit hole all on your own. For now, a simple understanding of it is that just like traits and tendencies are passed down through our genetic DNA, so do our pains and our traumas.
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Obedience
Stepping into my truth. Hear what “a-ha” moments I’ve had, my proclamation of myself as a Healer and how my God sounds kinda like Lil Scrappy.
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Bare
Today my job broke up with me. I cried. Not in protest, but because I have never failed at anything so vital before. But since my diagnoses it seems like work for me is increasingly more difficult.
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Why I’ll never apologize for loving Sex...and the City
These women were revolutionary for the time. I didn’t care they were white. That their rent to income ratios didn’t make sense. That there were problematic tropes—nobody even SAID the words “problematic trope” in 1995. I don’t look for art to be perfect, I look for art to move me. And this show grew me and a whole generation of girls into women.
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Cunning Linguist
Remember back in elementary school when you got those progress reports with grades but also conduct scores? Well my progress reports my ENTIRE LIFE and Della can vouch always were straight A's with a "NI" needs improvement in the conduct area of "Controls Talking". I couldn't shut up. My whole life.
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Flashback
God’s gift to me was a level of fearlessness to share with y’all my journey. If there was something, anything, I’d want people to “know” me for? It’d be for self-care. More like self reverence because to love yourself is to love God. My video is raw. It’s real. It’s hard to listen to. It’s my truth and now that it’s out of me, it’s my contribution.
CW/TW: rape, self harm, eating disorders, anxiety, PTSD
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Commencement: Black and Hooded
I say to you graduates, congratulations. This is the time where you have just contributed new knowledge to your filed. Do not be afraid to keep spreading the word of your work. Final defenses are only just the beginning of you using your voice and speaking truth to power. You owe it to your participants and everyone who made your research possible to DO something with it. To create real, sustainable change. To examine that change with a critical eye and to refine it relentlessly. You have been given the tools to create the new and innovated and to have it substantiated by a group of your wisest peers. It's not the time to shrink into the shadows. This is your time to shine.
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The Freedom To Become
Immediately after finishing my dissertation, I took a writing hiatus. As someone who wrote every single day for the past decade and a half, it was a tall order. I did it because I’m scribing my research, writing had become transactional. It was something I had to do versus something that felt therapeutic. My hiatus was supposed to only last six months, but I haven’t written with any sort of regularity since then.
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Educated Black Rage: A Freestyle
I saw the article linked from a colleague, a fellow Black woman. "The don't really want to know" I commented. Wondering if I sounded too bitter, pausing only for a second before I clicked "post" I didn't care how I sounded. It was the truth of the moment.
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I want to live love
I was meditating just now and I was arriving at my usual “place”. It’s always this lush, verdant riverbank. I’m in white and when I get to that place I know I’m “locked in”. It’s where I can always hear the clearest.
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3 years a Survivor
I had tried everything. Smoking. Drinking. Smoking and drinking. My “in case of emergency” pill. Another. I cried. I screamed into a pillow. I writhed and wiggled about thrashing feverishly because nothing I did seem to ebb it one bit.
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I Quit
Today, I quit my job. At least I did in my head. In actuality, I simply gave myself a date. An arbitrary date set in the not-so-distant future where I would submit a resignation letter. A date by which I would have fully worked out at least a rough draft of how I was going to survive the next 365 days.
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My Dad Has Cancer
I stood on the side of interstate 75 examining my car that was just hit by a driver who did not stop. My dad has cancer. I hurried back in the car and immediately thanked God that it was not worse than what it was. Unsightly scratches and a busted taillight. My dad has cancer this was nothing in comparison.
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Leaps Of Faith
What does it mean to fully Trust myself? Well...I'm pretty sure it comes from real true faith in God. This year I'm working on taking more leaps and increasing my FAITH|TRUST capacity.
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My First Love
We met at work. He was the creamy brown-skinned guy with the perfect smile and hazel eyes and naturally, every girl and woman who worked with us delighted in attention from him. He was charming, handsome, intelligent, witty, and was athletic. He was the guy every girl wanted to be wanted by and despite my cool attitude, I was no exception.
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Did You Ask The Question?
Currently, there is a bit of an uproar at the institution where I earned my doctoral degree. The unrest comes at news that one of our seminal leadership courses will no longer be required, but will, instead, be offered as an elective. Days ago my email started to fill will threads from various other classmates (fellow alumni) who were shocked, saddened, and some piping hot about the decision made by our faculty. Among my most trusted friends I discussed the decision and shared my disappointment, but my admission that I was not at all surprised. In fact, nothing has surprised me in the world since November 9, 2016.
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Notes from Therapy
Slowly but surely I am making the transition to vlogging. Check out a very impromptu Facebook live session detailing some straight-up gems from my last therapy session.
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I’ve Gotta Have It
Anyone not wishing to know me most intimately, you have been warned. I came here to introduce myself and tell you my name. If you do not wish to know my truest form then from before to here you have been warned.
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My Title IX Training Triggered Me
As part of every job in education I have ever held, there is a requirement of staff, faculty, and selected student leaders to go through some sort of sexual harassment, sexual assault and Title IX training. So the alert that my mandatory attendance at the training for my new institution came as no surprise to me. What was surprising was my reaction to it. The statistics of women who report versus those that don't sent me right back into my living room curled up on the couch as two police officers asked me the intimate details of my own story.
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