(ThySistas.com) There is a particular kind of accounting that Black women learn to do without ever being taught. We tally the people we believe we owe, and we keep that ledger open for decades. The job is on the list. So is the house, the mother who calls twice a day now, the blood pressure that keeps getting postponed to next quarter. Somewhere underneath all of it sit the women we came up with, and the unspoken rule that they are ours to keep regardless of what keeping them costs.
That rule deserves examination, because most of us have never once questioned it.
Consider what happens when her name surfaces in the phone. A small tug in the chest, guilt braided into relief, and then the thumb keeps moving. Life got busy on both ends, we tell ourselves. It is a tidy explanation and it lets everybody off the hook, which is precisely why we reach for it.
Sit with the thing honestly and something less flattering comes up. The longing is not for her. It is for who the two of you were together, back when everybody was broke and hopeful and sleeping on somebody’s floor after a party that ran too late.
Those are not the same thing.
We were raised on the idea that time served is the highest credential a person can hold. Twenty years. Since sixth grade. Since we were pregnant at the same time. Since her mama used to feed you when yours was working doubles. All of that is real, and none of it should be treated like nothing. History is a kind of intimacy. Somebody who knew you before your credit was good, before the degree, before the title on the door, holds a version of you that nobody else can access. That matters. It just does not settle the question of whether she still belongs in your Tuesday evenings.
Somewhere along the line we started treating longevity like it was proof of love. It is not. It is proof of time, which is a different animal entirely, and grown women are sitting in relationships that scrape them raw because walking away feels like turning your back on the girl you were at nineteen. So let me say the thing nobody said to us. Old does not mean well. A thing can last thirty years and still be lopsided, still leave you sitting in the car after brunch with the engine off, wondering why your jaw hurts.
Black women in particular carry a specific weight here, and I think we should be honest about where it came from. Black communities have long survived by holding on to one another. You did not put nobody out. You made a way for your cousin, your play sister, the girl from down the street whose house was not safe. Community was not a lifestyle choice. It was infrastructure. That instinct is beautiful and it kept us alive. But an instinct built for survival does not always translate cleanly into a life you are trying to build on purpose. Keeping everybody made sense when everybody was all you had. It makes considerably less sense when one of those somebodies has spent a decade making you feel small.
There is also the accusation, the one that lives rent free in the back of a Black woman’s mind whenever she considers stepping back. She think she better than us. Four words that have kept more sistas stuck than any lease ever did. We are terrified of being called bougie, uppity, changed up, brand new. So the phone gets answered at eleven at night. The same story about the same man gets a fresh round of listening. And when the joke comes, the one with our name in it, the one that lands harder than she pretends, we laugh. That is just how she is, we say, and we take another sip.
Try it from another angle. Declining to shrink is not the same as thinking you are better than somebody. Neither is wanting to spend your one Saturday in a room where people are glad you walked in. Anybody who needs you a little bit wounded so that they can feel level with you is not loving you. They are managing you.
You know the ones I am talking about. The woman who only surfaces when something has gone wrong in her life and vanishes when things go right in yours. The one who greets your good news with a joke about how you have been acting funny. The one who liked you better when you were struggling because your struggle made hers look like company. The one who has decided, somewhere in her own private hurt, that your progress is a comment on her.
Then there are the endings with nobody to blame. She thinks therapy is white folks’ business and you have been going every other Thursday since your father died. You stopped drinking and every plan she makes still starts at a bar. It took you decades to learn how to say what you actually mean, and she has spent those same decades getting very good at saying it sideways. Neither of you did anything wrong. You just grew into a woman with needs that girl from 1997 never had.
That is worth pausing on. Not every ending requires somebody to be the bad guy. We reach for betrayal narratives because they give us permission, and permission is what we think we need. Here is my argument. You already have it. Adulthood, real adulthood, means you get to choose who has ongoing access to your interior life. Not who deserves access based on past service. Who has it now.
I am not talking about disposing of people. I want to be careful there, because we live in a culture that is quick to cut, quick to block, quick to call every hard conversation toxic and keep it moving. Some connections are worth repairing. Some are worth an honest sit down where you say the uncomfortable thing out loud and give the other woman a chance to meet you. Plenty of relationships survive that. The ones that do come back sturdier than they were.
But some will not survive it, and you have to be prepared for that. Sometimes the release is slow, more of a drift than a decision, a natural fading that neither of you names. Sometimes it is a conversation. Sometimes it is just distance, kept respectfully, without cruelty, without a big announcement.
Grieve it. That is the part people skip. Triumph is not what shows up. What shows up is a hollow hour on a Sunday, a song that drops you into a summer from another decade, a piece of real news that would have gone to her first. Your thumb will hover over the name before the phone goes back on the counter. That ache is not evidence of a mistake. It is evidence the thing was real. Both can be true at once.
What you deserve, at fifty, at forty five, at whatever age you find yourself reading this with a cup of something going cold beside you, is a circle that fits the woman you actually are. Sistas who ask about your work and mean it. People who can hold your joy without flinching. People who tell you the truth kindly and receive yours the same way.
Wanting that is permitted. Building it is permitted. So is leaving behind the parts of your past that will not come with you, and doing it without apologizing to anybody for having grown into somebody worth knowing.
Staff Writer; Jada Williams
This sister writes about politics, money, family, and the issues that shape everyday life… Her work looks at how decisions made in government, changes in the economy, and challenges within our communities affect Black women and their families…
Feel free to email her at: JadaW@ThySistas.com.