(ThySistas.com) There is a version of me that lives inside certain records, and she is not sad. Took me years to catch on. For most of my grown life I figured heartbreak was the deepest place a song could take you. The playlist that counted, I believed, was the one you sobbed through at two in the morning after some man finally showed you who he was. We build whole collections around the men who leave, memorizing every lyric of the ache. What took me decades to understand is that I could score my own becoming with something other than grief.
I think about this now, sitting in my car in the driveway, letting a track finish before I go inside. The house can wait. My phone can wait. These three minutes belong to the woman I am trying to grow into, and she deserves her own accompaniment.
Confidence has a bassline. You know the walk, Sista. Stepping into a room where the doubt hangs before anybody opens their mouth. Could be a job interview. Maybe a meeting full of folks who already decided I was less than I am. I put something on first, in the car or at the bathroom mirror, and it stiffens my back before I ever reach the door. For me it might be Chaka reminding me I am every woman. It might be a horn section that struts ahead of me. The point is not the specific artist. What matters is that I refuse to enter my own arena undefended. A queen does not show up to her coronation in silence.
Peace runs on another channel, and I came to it late. Silence used to scare me. I stuffed every gap with noise, since stillness felt like it was pointing a finger at me. Now a soft gospel record on a Sunday morning settles something no doctor’s office ever managed to touch. Nina wrapping her voice around a slow blues while the coffee brews. A little Coltrane when my mind is loud and my heart needs a wider room. That kind of listening is not entertainment. It is maintenance for a spirit that carries too much.
And then there is prayer, which for me has never lived only in a pew. Some of my most honest talks with God have happened with a hymn playing low and my hands full of dishwater. Mahalia knew this. The mothers in my grandmother’s church understood that. A hymn will pray for you when the words won’t come, when the hurt sits too fresh to fold into any sentence. I hold onto a few of those for the nights I need God to hear me and my own mouth fails.
Work calls for a different pick than what plays on the couch. Deadline pressing on me, I want a groove that keeps my hands busy and stays out of my head. Instrumental, usually. Or some record I have run so many times it just hums along in the background. My mother cleaned houses to the radio, and she taught me that labor moves lighter when it has a pulse underneath it. I have written whole reports on the back of a good rhythm section.
Healing is trickier, and I will be honest about that. For a long time I thought the songs of my sorrow were the ones doing the mending, but they were mostly keeping the wound company. There is a difference between a piece that lets you feel the pain and a piece that walks you out the other side of it. Jill Scott showing me a body can be worthy of tenderness again. India.Arie reminding me that the things I once called flaws never had to become shame. I had to trade my crying records for growing ones, and that swap changed the whole trajectory of a hard season.
The gym wanted volume. Past a certain age I quit exercising to look cute in a dress and started doing it to stick around a while longer. My grandbabies move fast. These knees of mine have their own opinions. That kind of effort deserves drums. Give me something with enough beats per minute to argue with my tiredness. Hand me a defiant anthem that makes forty minutes on the treadmill feel like a protest against quitting. Bodies age. Spirits do not have to.
Driving alone is where I do some of my most important thinking, and the accompaniment matters most there. A long highway, no passengers, the volume where I like it and nobody to ask me to turn it down. That is church, therapy, and freedom folded into a single dashboard. I have solved problems on that long interstate that no meeting ever cracked. Some nights I sing so hard my throat runs raw and my troubles shrink by the exit. Every driver deserves a stretch of road that belongs only to her and whatever she needs to blast.
All of it, every category I have named, points toward the same quiet project. I am building a woman. Not the frantic girl my twenties threw together. She was never whoever the people near me needed either. The real one, steady and worn in and hard to shake, I am still putting together a little at a time. A soundtrack like that does not just decorate the build. It reminds me of the blueprint when I forget it, and it carries the memory of who I promised to become on the days I would rather give out.
So I have retired the breakup collection, or at least demoted it. It had its purpose once. But a grown sister needs a fuller catalog than the men who disappointed her. She wants anthems for her courage and lullabies for her weariness, prayer set to organ, joy set to horns, and rest set to nothing but her own steady breathing.
So tell me, Sista. What is playing while you build your life? I am always hunting for another sound to add to the woman I am still becoming, and I suspect you are too.
Staff Writer; Raven Jones
Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.