(ThySistas.com) Mary J. Blige has spent her whole career putting private pain on record. On the August 19 episode of Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson’s podcast, she added a personal chapter to the pile and told the hosts why she chose not to have kids. The answer had nothing to ...
(ThySistas.com) Fame buys a person visibility, not ownership of her body. Somewhere along the way, folks confused a familiar face with public property, and now they act as though a celebrated athlete owes them a full accounting of whatever quietly ails her. On June 6, Simone Biles shared that she ...
(ThySistas.com) Watch how folks talk about a Black woman who has her act together. The word strong gets thrown at her the way you might describe a load bearing wall. She is the one who brings the casserole when somebody dies and stays late folding programs for the repast. I ...
(ThySistas.com) Angela Bassett got paid a compliment recently, the kind that always arrives wrapped in good intentions. You look incredible for your age. People mean it kind. Flattery, warm, handed over with a smile. But it snags on something in me every time, because way down under that nice sentence ...
(ThySistas.com) Somewhere between that first sleepless night and the fifth grade science fair, a lot of us quietly agreed to vanish. We handed over our names. Suddenly you were only somebody’s mama. Just the ride. The name they scribbled on the emergency card at school. Remember the girl who painted ...
(ThySistas.com) That lie got handed to us early, and a lot of us swallowed it whole. A woman is supposed to peak around 23, it says. Whatever shine she has then is the high point, and the years after just drain it out of her slow. Nobody announced this to ...
(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) Miss Josephine kept her copy of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings pressed right up against the Bible, and I didn’t take that placement for an accident. She carried a lifetime around in her, and most of it the folks two streets over never thought to ask about. ...
(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 ...