Let's just get into it. When I was 15 years old, I was washing dishes in my 10th grade Home Economics class one day. Since I was barely passable during the cooking part, but bomb when it came to suds and plates, I was very comfortable at the sink. A boy in my class, Mario, …
how dare you guess my actual age?
Thanks to the African juices/genetics (thanks, Daddy and Ma), I have somewhat youthful features. When I was a teenager, I looked younger. When I was in my mid-20s, a woman at a hair salon once asked me if I was excited about Homecoming. Her shock when I explained that I was 26 years old--and not 15, …
#dreamgoals
This song came up on my shuffle last night while plugging away at the gym, and I was immediately reminded about why it spoke to me so deeply when I first heard it. Ah, this song. Not only that haunting melody and those vocals (those vocals, though), but the lyrics. Are the truth. Are my …
Salon/Stylist Stories.
Our intriguing, perplexing, awesome, mind-boggling, revolutionary, interesting, and life-changing relationship/journey began when I was 11 years old. This was when my mother took me to my first hair salon. It was owned by a Ghanaian woman who ran the salon from her apartment. I was terrified. No surprise there. If you know anything about me so far, …
Zones.
It's called a comfort zone for a reason: it's comfortable. My mom occasionally tells me the following: as a child, she would sit me in a spot and I would obediently stay there. Not fidgeting, not itching to move--glued to where I was placed and never giving cause to worry that I would disappear (unlike my …
Fall in Love.
I've talked about body image/self image on here more times I can link or number. It's an important thing to me. Having struggled for so, so long with a dangerous, damaging view of myself and my physical body (there was quite some mental/emotional toxicity going on, too), and having crossed to that other side where …
Before and After.
Happy to let y'all know that I contributed a piece for my good friend AB's new blog. I also hold the privilege of being the very first contributor for her new baby, which is awesome when you consider how much I love supporting my friends, especially when it comes to writing/blogging. Check it out here, …
Pictorials.
Or shall we say Fit-torials? Anyway, fantastic workout last night, folks. Let's walk through it, shall we? First: the requisite sweaty, social media shot. (Done for Snapchat, in case you're wondering. And no, I have no idea how it works.) A bit of a smug smirk, no? And yet that's the face you make when …
shopgirl?
I don't know what it is about entering a store and looking through racks of clothes and trying them on that fills me with pre-root canal-esque queasiness, fear, and disdain. Most of my friends hear my "I detest shopping" complaint and are shocked that my recent weight loss didn't translate into a complete change in mindset, …
“…the thief of joy.”
For the first official post of 2016, I wanted to highlight something I feel very strongly about. As an adolescent, as a teenager, as a young woman, I suffered from an insidious type of thievery: comparing myself to others. It was a sickness. I even, at times, compared myself to myself. As in sizing myself up and …
This Square Peg. 