By the end of 2019, I found myself in therapy because it felt like I was hopeless. With so much going on in the world, hearing no about fifty-eleven times, and trying to manage the responsibilities of everyday life, I was waking up feeling like the world was on top of me more than feeling on top of the world. I was used to being able to will things in my life to happen with sheer determination and ambition, but 2019 was a lesson in patience.

I couldn’t hear myself think. And it was because I was being bombarded with what everyone else thought via social media. Not that it was at the fault of anyone else, but my own scrolling hands. And well, there is something particularly odd about the suffering that we inflict on ourselves and that’s why I took the last month or so off from social media.

What does it mean for a Black woman to be presentable in the world? Most often it involves everything but the authenticity of what it means to actually be a black woman. Hair must be beat into submission with slicking gels, wet brushes, and tight hairbands. Or better yet, braided and completely covered up with hair from some other woman deemed more beautiful and more acceptable. Being presentable as a Black woman means buckshots are nowhere in sight, that your clothes don’t quite show too much of the curve of your round behind and that the loud and booming voice you possess is shushed into a more comfortable whisper. Yet, we would wonder why we often don’t feel seen. How can we be seen as black women when the very essence of who we are has been deemed, unacceptable?

Grief lives in the bones. That’s what I know to be true sixteen years after my best friend in high school passed away after a short battle with meningitis. Sometimes it still aches when I see anything reminiscent of the pain I felt that day whether on the big screen or in the news. It aches when I think of how one morning she told me she didn’t feel well and a few days later a friend of her family was knocking on my door telling me that Dena was gone.

It was one of those really hot days in the summer when they said you should keep an eye out for the young and the elderly so I went to visit my grandmother. She was at my aunt’s house alone and my schedule was flexible, so I’d likely had a random day off during the week.