2020 has been a year already and we have not even touched September at the time of this writing. For me personally, I started this year in frustration and grief about my body. I started off healing from a surgery without noting the toll it would take on my mental health to not be able to move the way I wanted to move and to be in a different consistent pain.

Looking back, this sounds like a foreshadowing of the year ahead.

Have you ever been going through something mentally or emotionally and felt like you should be able to get over it in a couple of days? You told yourself that healing shouldn’t take long, so you’re confused when you’re still upset weeks later.

This beautiful baby girl with hair that looked to us to be unkempt by Eurocentric standards of beauty, had us up in arms and ready to fight. As far as I can tell, whether or not we were ready to fight the folks at H&M for being seemingly disrespectful or ready to fight other Black folk for seeming to admonish this girl, it all seemed a trauma response to me. 

It is #minoritymentalhealthmonth!…Politics of respectability is a phrase that was coined by Evelyn Higgenbotham in 1993. The idea here, is that one monitors and presents oneself in an acceptable, pure, chaste, respectable, albeit Eurocentric, way.

I remember my time like it was yesterday. I was a sophomore in college, attending my school’s all nighter. I was super excited and went to meet my boyfriend for a night of dancing and fun. As I was cuddled up with my boyfriend, during a slow song, someone smacked me on the behind and kept walking. I immediately left my boyfriend’s arms to confront the person who did it, when he stopped walking and met up with his friends, I realized the anger I felt was laughed at by 6 big men, over 6’2, waiting for me “to say something”. I don’t know what would have happened to me if my boyfriend didn’t drag me to the car.

The same feelings of humiliation, anger, and even rage that came over me that night were the same when I heard about Shana Fisher. It was the same rush of emotions when I realized that the world must hate women and the realization that our culture is complicit.

Since Black Panther came out, there have been so many articles talking about it, critiquing it, and praising it. But one thing remains almost steadily true, almost none of those articles talk about the main character, T’Challa. T'Challa is seen as not being interesting because some say he doesn’t “do” much. But that is where people are wrong. I see him as a hero for the introvert-- or at least the introvert that lives within me.

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A clean house can be transformative to life. Not seeing clutter in our living areas can give us a whole new perspective of our homes. By creating super-easy habits, we can take away a lot of the stress that mess creates.

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