(ThySistas.com) There was a season I told everybody everything. New job, straight up it went. Found a good man, and up he went too, the two of us grinning over overpriced brunch beneath a caption about blessings. When Miss Josephine passed, an old family friend who half raised me, I had three tearful paragraphs typed before the funeral home finished its paperwork, waiting on strangers to leave those little crying faces underneath. That was me at thirty five. Fifty arrived, then slipped past, and something inside has gone quiet.
Maybe it comes with age. Could be it arrives after you get burned enough. Plenty of us who came up broadcasting our whole lives are stepping back now, and the odd part is how little it stings. More like setting down a bag you forgot you were hauling.
Consider what we did without blinking. Somebody proposes, the ring hits the timeline inside an hour. A raise clears and here comes the screenshot. Some cousin shows out at Thanksgiving, and by Friday the mess is a caption contest running forty comments deep. We ran our private days like open ledgers, every line available for review by folks who never once carried us a plate when the flu had us flat.
The cost showed up the year my marriage started wobbling.
He and I had been the couple everyone watched. Anniversary tributes, matching outfits, the works. So when we soured, there was an audience. People I had not spoken to since high school felt entitled to opinions. A woman I barely knew slid into my messages to ask, fake concern dripping off every syllable, whether we were “still good.” We were not. Now I somehow owed the internet an explanation for a wound I had not finished bleeding through.
Not again. When love found me a second time, I kept him mine. No debut. Skipped the soft launch, none of that noise. My closest circle met him over dinner, in the flesh, the old way. And Lord, the relief of loving somebody without a gallery of onlookers grading the film. Nobody tallying our anniversaries. Not a soul deciding, off a single photo, that we looked happier last April than we do today.
The hush spread to money after that.
Black women raised by careful Southern mamas already know this lesson, though the apps made us forget it for a decade or so. My mother would sooner tell you her weight than her salary. She bought a car outright once and mentioned it a week later, like it had slipped her mind. I used to call that old fashioned. Now I understand it clean through. The minute people learn your numbers, the arithmetic begins. Who owes what. What you can spare. Why you drove the pretty car to the cookout but claimed you were tight last month when auntie needed help with her light bill.
Got promoted last spring. A real one, corner office energy. Told exactly four people. My husband, my sister, my closest friend, my daddy. That was the guest list entire, and the celebration tasted richer for staying small. There is a particular sweetness in a victory nobody can water down by making it about themselves.
Scrolling used to leave me hollow in a way I could not name. Everyone’s kitchen was renovated. Every man surprised his lady with a gift in a velvet box. Each child made honor roll, each vacation happened somewhere I could not pronounce. Some of it was staged, some of it was financed, and none of it told the whole story. I know that now. Did not matter. The comparison did its slow damage anyway, one thumb swipe at a stretch.
Paid off the last of some debt in June that had shadowed me for eleven years. Standing in my kitchen with the confirmation glowing on the screen, I did the strangest thing. Told no one but myself, and I cried, and then I made coffee. The moment stayed mine, uncut and unliked, and it has never once lost its shine.
Family trouble taught me the sharpest version of this lesson.
We have all watched a Sista live tweet her breakup, or a mama put her grown child on blast over some inheritance squabble. Mid fury, the airing seems like justice. Like finally being heard. Then the argument ends, because kin usually reconcile, and now the entire neighborhood holds a transcript of the ugliest words your people ever hurled at one another. You made peace. The comment section did not. It kept receipts you would give an arm to burn.
Miss Josephine buried two husbands and raised somebody else’s babies alongside her own, and I could not tell you one detail of what that cost her. Not because she was cold. She grasped that certain grief belongs to you and God and maybe one trusted soul on a back porch, and nobody else has earned a chair.
That word, luxury, keeps circling back.
For a good while, holding anything close seemed nearly impossible. The pressure to perform ran heavy, on us most of all. Post the graduation, the natural hair chapter, the glow up, the healing, hashtag it all. Our joy turned into content. The ache turned into content too. A generation of brilliant Sistas converted their interior worlds into a scrolling exhibit for spectators who would never lift a finger after the exhibit closed. Somewhere inside all that confessing, discretion began looking like something only rich, protected folks could afford.
These platforms were engineered to pull it out of you, understand that. The little box asks what is on your mind because keeping you sharing, scrolling, and engaged is good for business. Your attention is the crop. The secrets are the harvest. Grasping that plain fact changed how I hold the phone in my hand.
Here is where I have landed, though. The genuine flex was never the reveal. It was the withholding. Knowing something wonderful about your own days and choosing, on purpose, to let it stay wonderful without a witness.
My friend Renee said it best over wine last month. She had gotten engaged and told none of us for six weeks. When I fussed at her about the delay, she just smiled and said she wanted to be a fiancée before she became a post. To live inside the good news before it hardened into a product with a comment section. That undid me some. How many moments had I converted straight into currency, cashing out the joy for a hit of applause that faded before the next sunrise?
None of this makes me a hermit. I still love a group chat. Still send my nieces embarrassing memes at midnight. What is different is discernment, a filter I did not own at thirty five. Some matters go out to the world. Most, the tender ones, the parts that actually add up to a woman’s whole existence, stay behind the door where they belong.
There is freedom in an unwatched life. Real, bone deep freedom. You quit editing yourself for an invisible jury. Weighing your marriage, your bank balance, your reconciliation against the highlight reels of strangers you will never meet, all of that just stops. You get to stumble without commentary. Rising without an audience becomes possible. Mostly you get to simply be, which our foremothers understood in their bones while the rest of us had to relearn it the hard way.
So no, I probably will not announce the next good turn when it lands. Not because I am hiding. Because I am finally at home inside my own business, and there is no caption on earth worth trading that peace for.
Staff Writer: Brenda Poole
BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…
Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.