am going to start by being honest: I am prone to being stressed the fuck out. I know I barely have things to stress about (relatively speaking) but in retrospect, I have seen some of the signs: stress eating, too much sleep, mismanagement of my time resulting in disappointment and intense procrastination. Plus, climate change has 2018/2019 feeling like coldest winter ever (on top of the 365 day long hunger games, also known as 2018) which is the perfect time for my seasonal depression to set in.… It has taken me a while to come to terms with the fact that I battle depression and anxiety, even after my homegirl Dr. Donna Oriowo hinted that my anxiety may be something I want to NOT gloss over, (which I kind of did any way)… But in a weird way I found comfort in realizing that I’m just one of the billions of people on earth dealing with what could either be intersectional oppression or my bad habit of giving too many fucks about things I cannot control, like Donald Trump being President.

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I feel like there is a constant whirlwind lately where I talk about Blackness and beauty. Where I think about, discuss, and consider the lightness and darkness of skin and how that is read by others based on eye color and hair texture and hair length. It’s funny to me that this should feel like my life, when this WAS my life when I was in the midst of writing my dissertation almost 3 years ago. It seems like I’ve run a full circle of not having to think much about it, in the academic sense, to coming right back into thinking about in the mental health, relationship, sexuality sense...which I guess is all academic anyway. 

Blac Chyna is right now, the base of jokes, and name calling, and head shaking….

While I’m writing this blog post I’ve got Michael Jackson dancing in my head from his post where the ravens would talk all that smack. My boy couldn’t win, and you can’t either, unless you change your mindset. (If you didn’t know, I am talking about the Wiz. smh)

What do I mean?

Over the last two weeks, there has seemingly been a theme among my clients and friends. It seems that folk are ready to break up. But of course, there are lots of barriers in the way to doing it right, because people are usually scared of the process. For those who don’t know, breaking up does NOT mean ghosting, hitting someone with the slow fade, making them mad enough to break up with you, or talking about how you need time to grow and that one day you might come back. When we break up, we do it right, we do it clean, and don’t leave false hope, or tarnish our character in the process.

I feel like I have been talking and attempting to write about the Netflix movie Nappily Ever After a lot lately. In the Sex Talk After Dark, Shayla Tumbling and I discussed the movie and the impact of hair on sexuality. I am glad to have had the discussion, but I have also been wondering why this movie is so hard to write about. For those who have seen it, feel free to proceed. For those who haven’t and are okay with spoilers, you do the same. IF you are NOT into spoilers in anyway, it might be time to hit the “x” in the upper left hand corner because spoilers are definitely ahead!

Often when we think of self-esteem, we think it happens on an personal level and that nothing interferes with it. Believe it or not, self-esteem is a concept that must be taught and is taught unintentionally and intentionally. The unintentional teaching of self-esteem usually teaches us how to have the lowest self-esteem possible. As a teen, this is happening on a variety of levels in every environment they enter.