(ThySistas.com) There is one photograph on my phone I keep returning to, more often than I would care to admit. My daughter took it a couple summers ago, up on a ridge in the Blue Ridge Mountains, my arms thrown wide and my hair pushed off my face. You can ...
(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 ...
(ThySistas.com) There is a certain look a woman gives you when she thinks she has figured out your whole interior life from the outside of your head. I have caught it in break rooms, in the produce aisle, across the pew on Sunday morning. Her eyes travel to the lace ...
(ThySistas.com) Something shifts in a person the moment they decide your appearance is theirs to narrate out loud. I have caught it at cookouts. In the break room at work. Three rows deep at church while the choir was warming up. Even down the phone line, from folks who love ...
(ThySistas.com) For a great many Black women, professional advancement arrives bundled with a quiet tax that has nothing to do with competence and everything to do with the hair growing from their own scalp. A particular fatigue settles into the shoulders after years of explaining oneself to colleagues who were ...
(ThySistas.com) There is a particular kind of tired that lives in the bones of a woman who has spent years trying to earn what should have been offered freely. You know the one I mean. Let me sit with you a minute, because somebody has to say this plain. You ...
(ThySistas.com) There comes a season when a grown woman looks over her life and sees that nearly every fix she reached for fell short, while the one thing left on the shelf stayed quiet, waiting the entire time. I’m talking to my Sistas now. The ones running on empty, carrying ...
(ThySistas.com) Emotional isolation rarely announces itself in an empty room. Most times it moves into a household stacked with noise and laundry and folks who would swear on a Bible that they adore you. This goes out to the wife who feels more like a co manager than a partner ...
(ThySistas.com) For generations, Black women have inherited a quiet instruction that no one ever wrote down yet everyone somehow learned to obey, the idea that we must run ourselves to the edge of collapse before we are permitted to lie down. I saw that instruction lived out most clearly in ...
(ThySistas.com) There is a specific hush that falls over music criticism once an artist becomes too important to fail, and Beyoncé crossed into that territory years ago. The proof arrived on the Fourth of July, when she released a track called “Morning Dew (Donk)” as a surprise offering to the ...