Black

I'm tired, I am tired, I am absolutely fucking exhausted of being made to carry my black like it is a burden.

And there is no respite.

If you are black, you know how I feel and you understand that this rant will be the only break I can catch in this ongoing torrent of violence against my melanin.

I am writing this at half-four in the morning breastfeeding my one year old and I silently cry wondering what the fuck have I done bringing my son into this shit. I look at him sleepily nursing and weep at all the shit he will get flung at him mercilessly as he grows. 

I'm crying because of the agonising decisions my husband and I are trying to make when deciding where we want to live next. Stay outside of London in a more rural town like we are where now. Where our son is the only ethnic minority in his nursery and the parents dodge us like hot doodoo during the school plays. But the state schools here are 10 times what they are in London. Go back inside London where our precious black children are being disregarded by the same education system and being buried in increasing number. Do we go back home to Ghana where everyone looks like us, but the constant rape of the land means the healthcare system is less than what it's people need. The leaders are all scrabbling for self because their greed operates out of a mindset of lack? 

Can't win.

All because of black. Black. BLACK

I'm tired yo.

I go to work, where I can count the number of black people on one hand. I swallow microaggressions daily to put food on the table, then when my stomach can't hold anymore I'm labelled the bully, the angry black woman. "Calm down you're talking too fast, I didn't mean it like that, my mind didn't get a chance to catch up with my mouth" but I should smile working alongside them with internal disgust at the knowledge of what's overflowing in their minds.

I'm only 32 and I am completely fucking tired.

Rose

Be Decisive - Intuition is Bae

I used to think I was really good at making decisions. I'd find myself at a crossroads, look around, pick a lane and be on my merry way. I’ve never felt the need or paid attention to how I’ve made my choices. Recently, I’ve been stuck at a heavy, heavy crossroads and trying to decide which yellow brick road to travel down hasn’t been as easy. When I have had to make big decisions in the past, I’ve written my list of pros and cons, used my mental crystal ball to peer into the future and see which outcome I preferred more. My intuition is my mental crystal ball and though I have wavered in my faith or it being true, it has never failed me. I’ve then proceeded to google, tweet, call, WhatsApp and ask my way out of my intuitions advice and end up flat on my back.

I didn’t realise how much the external had an influence on my decision making. From asking trusted advisors their opinion to reading amazon reviews, I didn’t realise how much I used the external to prop up my internal crystal ball. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, not at all, I’m thankful that when I’m stuck I have external options for helping me to see if I’m making the right choice. That being said, when it comes to monumental decisions that need to be made I’m stuck.

There are times when nothing external can give you the right answer. I think it’s because when we use external influences to decide what to do, and it doesn’t work out, we can place the blame of that outcome outside of ourselves. We followed someone else’s advice and it was wrong. When a decision is truly our own, that responsibility rests firmly on our own heads and that can be a bitter pill to swallow.

Going for your dreams requires more leaps of faith than we are comfortable with. Making big dreams a reality requires us to often step into unknown territory and there isn’t a trustpilot review in the world to tell us which option will land us in the emerald city. Maybe that’s why the higher you get the less information there is on how to get there….but we’ll save that topic for another day!

I say all of this to say (to myself) the decisions I make for me, affect me primarily, therefore the influence of the outcome should come from me, primarily. I shouldn’t be afraid to trust my intuition, nine times out of ten she knows something on a subconscious level that I’m not consciously aware of and she’s always working in my best interests. I say all of this to say (to you) decision making is one of the pinnacles of “adulating” when we know deep down the way to go, but we hesitate out of fear, how we will look to others, or the simple acceptance that taking this road will be the first step of many hard ones to the top.

I’ve seen that those steps, those experiences are the beginnings of wisdom, and I think we’d all love a bit more of that.

Rose
xx

Find Your Tribe - Love Them Hard!

It's instinctual for me to emotionally hold everyone at arm's length. It's the classic story, early twenties, get broken hearted and then think "Fuck the world, I don't need you." Except in my case, my broken heart wasn't because of a guy, it was my closest girlfriend that betrayed me in a way I could never imagine. She was the one I had given my all to, and she flung my all in a blender. After that, is when I decided that I didn't want to get too close to people anymore. I distinctly remember telling myself, I didn't want to ever have a best friend ever again.

Since that time it's gone from a conscious effort to not get close to people, and now it's become an unconscious habit. Moving out of London in 2016 made it even easier "Out of sight, out of mind" I told myself, but in the long run it's harmed me and not helped me. I've known for some time now, that this attitude isn't healthy (I'm working on finding a therapist), yet I don't know how to undo this mindset. I try to contact the people I would consider friends more, but I stop myself thinking that I'm hassling them. Everyone has shit to do, who has time to listen to my waffling in addition to that? Then when they call me back I just stare at my phone in shock and horror. I don't know why.

In the ideal world in my mind, I'd have a tribe of girlfriends that I was a part of, in real life I tell myself (I'm now aware that I lie to myself a lot) that everyone is already 'clique'd' up and doesn't have room for one more. It's seen as there's something wrong with you if you don't have a tight circle of friends. Meme after meme celebrating cancel culture, and making your circle smaller and smaller are funny/sad to me. I can't make my circle smaller - I don't have one! *Face palm emoji*

The easiest way for me to start working on that has been via social media. Sounds completely mental, but I think it's working.  I'm learning that even in the midst of another betrayal, that all people aren't evil monsters out to destroy me - they are people. The emotional feeling of being enveloped in comfort has been unexpected and really moving. My next challenge is to move these newly formed friendships from the social media realm to the real world realm, and to concoiously make the effort to draw closer to the existing loved ones in my life. I'm still scared, but trying to embody my word "Fearless," I'm determined to find my tribe and love them hard.

Rose
Xx

Ashamed Instead of Shameless - Why is Self Promotion so Hard?

Picture this, I need to record my next YouTube video. I know the topic and roughly what I want to say, the camera battery is full and I just need to put on a light touch of makeup to be ready. I get up from my laptop to go upstairs, start setting up, then a thought crosses my mind, I sit down again and aimlessly scroll through Twitter for the next hour. The thought I had was "If I do this video, I'm gonna have to make a trailer for it to promote it, I've already put out a blog post this week, I'm sure people are sick of seeing me, forget it." (I know there's a pattern of behaviour emerging, but writing is therapeutic and medicinal, so bear with me.) 

In 2012, Maya Washington (a.k.a Shameless Maya) set herself a challenge to shamelessly promote herself for 365 days and see what would happen. Today she has over 1 million subscribers and 250k + followers on Instagram, she has achieved more than she imagined possible. From working with Prince (RIP) on his album cover to amassing over 80milliom views on YouTube, she's done incredibly well and shows no signs of slowing down. I'm telling this  story to ask, why are we so afraid of putting ourselves out there? My friend, if you are not part of this collective, I take God beg you, let us know in the comments how to be more like you!

The more I go inside myself, trying to shake out the chaff, the more I discover how much I undervalue myself. I've always thought of myself as confident, and I believe generally most people that know me would agree. That being said, it's shocking how much I hold myself back. The quote that says we are more afraid of success than we are of failure was one that I thought of as corny. I mean come on, who is really afraid of success? The more I am working on being my best self, the more I see how true said quote is.

It's part of the reason why I set my own challenge to be fearless this year. Everything that terrifies me, I'm going for it. I could be quacking in my jeans and telling myself to stop internally, but my feet will keep moving. Cos the irony is that once I do the feared, I'll come out the other side loving it. Ain't that always the way?!?

Rose

Xx

Be Your Damn Self!

A.K.A Be really silly with a twig in the snow!

I have struggled with the concept of being myself a lot, I still do. I think it's not noticeable from the outside, maybe it is.

I'm self conscious about the way I talk, always have been. I'm loud, I couldn't hide the fact that I'm from South London if I tried. Slang flows off my tongue so easily, it's like speaking my native language and getting the accent juuust right. Madison gets called "Bruh" at least twice a day (Don't judge me, dude's really trying my patience with this climbing malarkey. Can he walk though?? Jesus be a landing mat!) Even my "work voice" has the south London twang and I have a few select words and phrases that I permit myself to use. I mean, if I get annoyed, they all think there's a shank in my pumping bag, but oh well.

I guess from the outside, I look really confident in who I am and how I sound. The thing is, I'm very aware of how the black people I aspire to be like sound. They don't sound like me. Most have managed to balance en pointe sounding like a BBC broadcaster, but allowing a hint of their postcode to show through. Others I wouldn't recognize if I were to hear their voice over the radio.

Now we could talk, colonialism, assimilation and all the rest, but most likely you're black and know this shit already. The reason I want to talk about it is because it's been another reason I've used to lie to myself, I've told myself "Rose, if you want to do this, you gotta fix the way you talk. No one will listen to you if you sound like a roadman" I've recorded whole YouTube videos and scrapped them because I've watched them back and told myself "You sound too ghetto" or "You swear too much"

Bold face LIEEE! I know it's a lie, a lie from the pit of hell! But my trusty friend, comparison is really good at making me believe nonsense. Well I saw a comparison about 20 minutes ago that made me feel a whole lot better and I wanted to bring it to OUR attention, because I know for sure that I'm not the only one dealing with this. I don't know if you know of a woman on Instagram called Raynell Stewart a.k.a @Supa_Cent founder and CEO of The Crayon Case. She is a lot of what I aspire to be like. Unapologetically black, her new Orleans accent is thick-k-k. She doesn't front for the gram and have perfect pretty insta pictures all day long. She is 100% her authentic self and her fans love her for it. She may not be your cup of tea, but I recommend visiting her page and taking a big whiff of what her brand of genuine smells like, it's delicious! By being herself, she's now a boss that can make a million dollars in 1 hour! What an achievement, she's inspiring women and men all over the world to be their best authentic selves and that's what is flying off her shelves like hotcakes.

I've told myself from this year onwards, I'm not second guessing myself in this area anymore. My word for 2019 is "Fearless" and I can't own that word if I won't even allow myself to speak freely. I have spoken this way for 30 something years and by now y'all are gonna like it or not, but to get to where I want to go I'm going to have to be a lot more confident than I am now, and with much thicker skin. Seems like a good starting point right?

Rose
xx