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.

I am well past 23 now, and here is the flat truth. Whoever drafted that script never once sat across from a woman over 40 who had finally figured out what she actually wanted. Follow the money on that story for a second. Who gains?

Youth sells things. It sells creams and diets and a low buzzing panic that keeps a woman spending, adjusting, apologizing for time doing exactly what time does. A frightened woman is a good customer. She will chase a version of herself she is supposed to already be losing. Meanwhile the actual gifts of getting older, the ones nobody advertises, arrive quietly and go unmentioned in the sales pitch. Nobody makes money off a woman who has stopped auditioning for approval.

My twenties were loud and mostly unsure. Let me be honest about that, because there is a temptation to trash your younger self to feel better about the mirror. That is not the point here. Parts of being young were a genuine joy. The stamina alone was a marvel. Still, plenty of energy went toward trying to be legible to people who were never going to read me correctly no matter how the pieces got arranged. Rooms made me shrink. Laughing at things that were not funny became a habit. There were a couple of men who treated my patience like a renewable resource, and love was what I called it, because the difference between being chosen and being tolerated had not landed yet.

Confidence back then, when it showed up, was borrowed. It depended on somebody else confirming I was worth the space. Now it comes from a deeper place, and it does not ask permission.

There is a particular kind of clarity that can show up later. You start to know your own mind, and you stop treating that knowledge as something to hide so nobody feels threatened. A younger sista often bends toward what the room wants. She reads the temperature and adjusts. Some of that is survival, and Black women learn that survival math early, in classrooms and workplaces and at family functions where an aunt has opinions about your hair. But there is a version of that reading that becomes a cage. You get so good at anticipating everyone else that you lose the thread of your own preference.

Age loosened that grip for me. Turning down a dinner invitation used to cost me a whole essay. These days I just say I cannot make it, and the quiet after does not send me scrambling to explain. Selectivity. That is the word I keep landing on. Not bitterness, which is where people jump the second a woman gets choosy. A woman who quit and a woman who raised the bar to match her worth are not the same creature. My time turned precious in a way it never was back when it felt endless. Guilt stopped running my calendar. I stopped keeping people around because we had history, when the history was the only thing still holding us together. That kind of pruning hurts. It also clears the ground for something better to grow.

Look at the friendships I have kept. Fewer, stronger, honest. My circle is small and it is real, and every sista in it has walked through her own fire and come out with something to say about it. Nobody performs for anybody. We show up rumpled and unbothered by it. Being known that far down means you skip the part where you explain yourself. A song comes on and cracks you open, and the woman next to you already understands why.

Fulfillment gets sold as a grab, something you snatch inside a shrinking window before it slams. Grab the man. Grab the body. Grab the photo that proves you were wanted, and clutch it, because the window is shutting. What a small way to imagine a whole life. As if we were pieces of fruit with firm dates stamped on us.

My aunt Renee did not hit her stride until her fifties. Back to school she went the year her youngest left home. Driving came at 51, after depending on other people her whole married life, and I watched her pull out of that driveway grinning like she had stolen something. She had. What she stole back was her own mobility. At 60 she was more herself than the world ever let her be at 25, and anybody who filed her away as a faded copy of some younger woman just was not looking.

What we forfeit by treating the early years as the summit stays on my mind. Girls get taught to fear the exact thing that could set them free. We hand them a countdown instead of a horizon. A young woman staring down that ticking clock cannot possibly relax into becoming, because becoming takes years, and the story tells her she does not have them.

So here is what I would say to a sista in her twenties reading this while quietly bracing for decline. It does not have to be a decline. The mirror will change, yes, and I will not insult you by pretending otherwise. But your judgment can sharpen. Your voice can steady. The things that rattled you at 25 can shrink down to footnotes. The question stops being whether you are enough for the room. It becomes whether the room is even worth your while, and that turn changes everything.

Room to age on our own terms is something Black women have rarely been handed. The world hands us a script that praises us young and pushes us to the margins the moment we stop being ornamental. I am done reading from it. My best years were never sitting back there at 23, watching me go. That woman was out front the whole time, taking her time, letting me close the distance. Eventually I reached her. And the story that swore she was already behind me can keep itself.

Peak is the wrong word entirely. Some of us are still climbing.

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.

I came up believing some places wore signs you could not actually see. Not the ones bolted to walls back in Jim Crow, though my grandmother remembered plenty of those firsthand. I mean the sneakier kind, the ones that set up shop in your head. They murmur to a little brown girl that camping is a white folks’ thing. That hiking is a pastime for people with trust funds and four hundred dollar boots. The beach was fine for a cookout, but that wilder stretch of coastline further along? Meant for somebody else to enjoy. Not one soul ever said it to my face. The message reached me all the same, slipped into commercials and glossy magazine spreads where the peaks came pre stocked with families who resembled mine not one bit.

Most of my grown life, I took that setup at face value and never poked at it. A vacation was a city, or a cruise, or the family piling into a rented hall for a reunion. Sleeping in a tent out under some pines? That felt strange to me, almost silly, like squeezing into shoes a size too small and pretending they fit fine. Then everything turned over at once. The marriage ended. My kids grew up and scattered into their own busy lives, and the house went so still it started leaning on me. One afternoon a coworker asked if I wanted to tag along on a hike near a state park. I nearly turned her down. Some worn out corner of me, sick of shrinking, said yes anyway.

That first walk pried me open. My lungs burned. My knees filed complaints. Out there as the only brown face on that entire trail, I felt each glance land on me, real or imagined. By the second mile, though, the self consciousness just lifted off, the way morning fog gives up once the sun climbs, and underneath was something clean. Birdsong I had strolled past my entire life without ever hearing. Moss on a wet rock, greener than I knew that color came. A forest hush so thick it asked nothing of me and still handed over the world. I cried some on the drive home. Could not have told you the reason if you paid me.

Here is the piece I finally worked out. Representation, the word we throw around so loosely, means faces on a screen or bodies filling a boardroom. Hardly ever does it mean who feels at ease beside a mountain lake as dawn breaks. That second sort of belonging sinks just as far into a person, maybe further. My folks go far, far back with the land, a bond that got twisted and stolen and steeped in hurt. People in my bloodline worked soil they had no right to own. They wore their bodies down in fields no human should have to. Then emancipation came, and generations later, even many public parks and recreation spaces were shaped by segregation.

That wound goes down deep, and it never healed on its own. A lot of the national treasures we brag about took shape during years when Black families faced segregated facilities, restricted access, or outright exclusion from public recreation spaces. My grandmother could sit you down with stories. The leftover of that shutting out still hangs in the shared memory, all these years past the laws changing. It turns up as a hesitation, as the hunch that the trail is not really for us, as the quiet choice to just stay home where the welcome is a sure thing.

But the ground is shifting under all of it, and I am glad to be part of the push. Sisters everywhere are lacing up boots and hauling kayaks down to the water and bedding down beneath stars somebody once swore were not theirs to sleep under. Groups have sprung up, names that put us and open country in the same breath. Folks meet for hikes, plan camping trips, take themselves off on slow weekends by the water and dare anybody to say they don’t belong. They post the pictures online with a joy that borders on defiant, and every last shot says the same thing without a caption. We are here. We belong here too. We are through asking permission.

There is a kind of healing I find out there that I have never found anywhere else. Black women haul around a staggering amount. We are meant to keep the family stitched together, fight our corner at work, choke down the little insults and grin through them. Stay strong, forever strong, long past where the strength quits being a gift and hardens into a cage we cannot climb out of. A wild trail could not care less about any of it. The ocean has no clue what your job title is, or which colleague spoiled your Tuesday. I have waded out waist deep into a cold lake, watched the light shatter across the top of it, and felt the entire load slide off me. Rest, at last. Space to go soft. And freedom, that word my ancestors bled over, becomes a thing your own two hands can hold.

Some folks will read all this and wonder why it even needs saying. Just go outside, they figure. If only it worked that easy. Feeling at home in a place gets built across generations, handed down parent to child like somebody’s guarded recipe. When your line got shut out of that handing down, you end up building the ease yourself, brick by brick, hike by hike, telling your daughters and your nieces and every young woman watching you that these mountains belong to them by birthright. Nobody passed us the key. So we are cutting our own.

These days I keep heading back out. Twice now I have caught the sun coming up over sand dunes and slept next to a river loud enough to wash my worries clean out. I have stood at the base of redwoods older than this whole country and, wouldn’t you know it, felt bigger rather than smaller. Each campground I settle into, every peak I reach on these creaky middle aged knees, chips away at an old lie. I am telling the world, and even more the woman in the mirror, that the wild gorgeous corners of this earth were made with me in mind too.

If you are a Sista and your chest leaned toward this while you read, do not let yourself argue out of it. Find a trail near where you live. Bring somebody with you, or head out solo with a full water bottle and plain nerve. Get to the spot where the treetops open onto sky and let yourself take up all the room you want. The wilderness is patient. It has been saving us a place the whole time, and every bit of it is ours to breathe.

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.

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.

That is the thing about a life. Somebody is always going to describe it. The only question that matters is whether the describing gets done by the person who lived it or by a stranger who watched from across the road and decided they already knew the whole shape of things.

For so long, the shape of us got decided elsewhere. In minstrel drawings, in advertisements for pancake mix, in sociology papers written by men who studied our neighborhoods the way you might study weather patterns, from a safe and clinical distance. We became a set of masks. The mammy who lived to serve and asked nothing back. A temptress with no inner weather at all. The bitter one, mouth perpetually twisted, furious over nothing anybody could name. None of these were portraits. They were storage. Somewhere for the country to set its guilt and its fear so it could go on about its business.

Angelou understood the quiet part of all this. A cartoon doesn’t just insult you. Given enough repetition, it takes your place. Folks meet the flat version so many times that the real woman, standing right there in all her contradiction, starts to look like the exaggeration. You go in for a job interview and the man across the desk is already halfway into a version of you that you never got a say in. Try speaking up in a meeting, put a sharp idea on the table, and watch it come back to you as an attitude problem instead. Whatever they had decided about you got there ahead of you. It was shaking hands and pouring the coffee while you were still finding a chair.

I have felt this personally more times than I care to count. Years ago I sat in a doctor’s office describing a pain that had kept me awake for weeks, and I watched the physician nod without hearing a single word. Later I learned that research has repeatedly documented racial disparities in how Black patients’ pain is assessed and treated. My pain was real. His picture of me was more real to him than I was. The chart he carried into that room had been drafted long before either of us was born.

This is what happens when the pen belongs to somebody else. Not just misunderstanding, which any two souls can stumble into. Something heavier. A whole architecture of assumption that you have to dismantle brick by brick every single day, in every new room, before anyone will grant you the ordinary dignity of being complicated. Of being a full person with contradictions and tenderness and a bad temper on Tuesdays and a gift for making people laugh at funerals.

Maya refused the container. That refusal is her great inheritance to us, larger even than the poems. She sat down and wrote her childhood as she remembered and understood it, including the parts that decorum begged her to leave in the dark. The assault she survived at eight. Her muteness in the years afterward, when she was convinced her voice had killed a man. A lesser writer, or a more frightened one, would have sanded those edges smooth. She did not. What she knew was that a testimony with the shameful parts removed is not really a testimony at all. It is a performance of respectability, and respectability has never once kept a single one of us safe.

Here is what the sanitizers fail to grasp. When you speak the hard thing plainly, you take its power. The silence around that little girl in Stamps, Arkansas was doing violence to her long after the original wound had scabbed over. Saying the thing out loud, in language that belonged to her, was how she clawed back the years shame had been parked on top of. And she put it in print, out where a stranger could trip right over it, which meant the work wasn’t only about setting herself loose. Every reader stuck in that same hush got handed a way out. A good many of us had been shut up in that room, and each one figured she was the only tenant.

And the sound of her sentences carried as much as the content, maybe more. She wrote the way the older women on my block ran their mouths on a Saturday, that slow unhurried roll that could make a grocery list ring like the book of Psalms. Nobody sat her down and taught her that. She built it herself. It was hers, drawn from the church pew and the porch and the beauty shop, all those spaces where we sistas have always narrated ourselves to one another when the official record had no place for us. Every time an outsider tried to translate that music into flat academic prose, something essential leaked out. The truth of a people lives in its particular sound. Strip the sound away and you are left with a report, accurate maybe in its facts and dead wrong in its soul.

Testimony carries a weight that argument cannot. Anyone can debate a statistic. You might wave away a study, claim the sample was too small, insist your cousin’s situation proves the opposite. What you cannot easily do is argue with a person standing before you, saying this happened to me, here is exactly how it felt, here is the smell of the room and the color of the sky that afternoon. First person closes the escape routes. It takes the big vague argument and pins it to one body, one afternoon, one kitchen, and now you can’t wave it off or fold it into some trend piece. A woman telling the truth about her life, flat out, moves something in a reader that a whole stack of think pieces leaves cold.

Which is exactly why we get talked out of the telling, sometimes sweet, sometimes with a real edge underneath the voice. Keep it to yourself. Don’t air dirty laundry. Be strong, meaning be silent, meaning carry it alone until it wears down a piece of you that nobody will ever have to see or answer for. The pressure to perform an unbothered strength is its own kind of gag. We have put too many aunties in the ground and stood there at the repast praising them for how well they held everything in. Some of them might still be here if they had hollered about it good and loud, and started years sooner.

So I catch a young sister today putting her unvarnished truth online, no polish on any of it, the mess sitting right next to the glory, and I know precisely what she is carrying forward. She is doing what the poet did on the printed page. The definitive version of her life, she insists, will issue from her mouth and no other. That insistence is not vanity. It is survival dressed up as plain expression.

The narrative about us will keep getting written whether we participate or not. That much is certain and always has been. The powerful will keep composing their tidy summaries, and the culture will keep reaching for its worn old masks whenever it needs somewhere convenient to place its fear. None of that is within our control. What sits in our hands, the same thing that sat in Angelou’s, is the refusal to let their draft stand as the final word.

Tell it yourself. Say it crooked and true, in the rhythm your people gave you, with the shameful parts left in and the tender parts protected. Speak because the alternative is letting a stranger decide who you were. Miss Josephine did not write a book. But she read that one until the spine came apart in her hands, and I believe she knew, more surely than any critic could, that a life shaped like hers had at last made it onto the page and come out true. That is the whole gift, and it is why we sistas can’t afford the quiet. The caged bird sings, Maya told us, and not because the singing bends one bar of the cage. She sings because the sound itself is proof that some part of her was hers alone, not theirs to buy or to break.

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.

I want to sit with that assumption a while, because it has trailed us Sistas for generations and it deserves a real answer instead of a defensive one.

Here is how the accusation usually runs. A Black woman covers her natural hair, so she must be ashamed of it. She spends four hours in the chair getting a weave sewn to her scalp, so plainly she wishes she looked European and has turned her back on the coils God handed her. People float this gently, tucked inside pretty words about pride and consciousness. Peel those words back and it is the same tired reflex, one more set of hands reaching to manage what sits on our own bodies, and I quit being polite about it a long time ago.

Start with the past, because nothing about our bond with what grows from our heads happened in a vacuum. During the slave trade and slavery, many Africans had their hair traditions disrupted, while enslaved women often covered their heads for labor, protection, or because of rules imposed upon them. In colonial Louisiana, authorities even required women of color to wear tignons. Those controls stripped away styles that had once told the world their nation, their age, their marital standing, their wealth, and their place within the community. What we grew was called wild, unkempt, wrong. So the Sistas who came after learned to move through a country that had already decided our texture was a problem before we opened our mouths. Every choice made since then carries that weight, whether we cover up or wear it out. Faulting a woman for one option while praising her for the other ignores that both roads run through the same painful ground.

Now walk into any shop on a Saturday and watch how it actually plays out. A teacher sits down worn out after a week of thirty children and asks for something low fuss so her mornings belong to her again. A nurse pulling doubles wants a properly installed protective style so her real strands can rest from the friction of daily combing and heat. Somebody fresh out of chemo, whose scalp went bare through no fault of her own, finds a piece that lets her recognize the person in the mirror again. A widow on a fixed income wants one good unit that saves the cost of weekly salon trips. Where, in any of that, is the self loathing? I see resourcefulness. I see Sistas managing full lives with the tools within reach.

The medical angle alone should end the argument. Alopecia does not care about your politics. Neither does the thinning that arrives with age, with stress, with the hormones that shift as we cross into our fifties. A lace front is not vanity for the one covering a bare edge. It is dignity. To look at her and whisper that she despises herself is not consciousness. It is cruelty wearing a righteous mask.

Then comes the plain matter of freedom. I can wake wanting a short honey colored bob and go to bed dreaming of waist length curls, and a good install lets me be two different women inside a single week without touching a relaxer or a hot comb. That is not fleeing anything. That is play. That is artistry. My grandmother pressed her edges over the stove and my niece orders lace online, and both of them are doing one identical thing across the years, which is deciding for themselves how they want to show up in the world.

People forget how much of this comes down to survival in rooms we did not build. There are still offices where our natural hair gets read as sloppy, where a locked crown or a puff invites a remark about looking polished. That bias is not some grievance we cooked up. Lawmakers pushed the CROWN Act through state by state because the same discrimination kept surfacing in hiring rooms and school hallways. So a Sista who pins a sleek unit down before a job interview is not sitting in that chair hating her own coils. It is a calculated move in a game somebody else rigged, guarding a hard earned paycheck while the culture slowly drags those buildings toward fairness.

What troubles me most is when the accusation comes from inside the house. Somewhere along the way, parts of the natural movement I love hardened into a ranking system, a means for some of us to measure who is truly enlightened by how little help our style requires. Wash and go at the summit, a full weave near the bottom, everybody else scrambling to prove their consciousness by their part line. I understand where it came from. After decades of being told our texture was ugly, claiming it loudly felt like release. But that release curdles the moment it becomes one more rule about what a worthy Sista is allowed to put on her head.

Loving your natural coils and enjoying a fresh sew in are not enemies. I have deep conditioned my own strands on a quiet Sunday and installed a unit that following Wednesday, and my regard for the hair growing out of my scalp never wavered once. The two live together easily in the same person, because the covering was never a rejection. Some seasons it meant wanting a change, other times it was just a mood, and more than once it was nothing deeper than a plain Tuesday when I did not feel like fighting my kitchen.

The real mix up, I think, is deciding that being your true self has to mean going without. No one tells a woman to wipe off her lipstick to prove she is at peace with her face. Nobody reaches over and pulls the hoops from her ears to test how she feels about them. She gets to color it, pin it, add to it, and change her mind by Friday, and we file all of that under personal style. Somehow the top of the head is the single spot where a small bit of enhancement gets read like a confession under oath. A choice turns into a diagnosis. That says far more about the eyes doing the judging than the one they think they have pegged.

None of this means every choice floats free of the wider world. Of course some Sistas carry wounds about our texture that were planted early and deep, and healing those is genuine work worth doing. But you cannot diagnose that wound from across a room. Since when did not rocking your real hair around the clock become anybody else’s business to referee? Nobody drags a man who grows a beard in winter and shaves it clean come spring, so I fail to see why our heads invite a running commentary his chin escapes entirely. The only honest response to somebody you do not know is respect, not a verdict.

Resist the whole story your mind wants to build the next time you notice fresh length that was not present before, or catch the shine of synthetic curls under the sanctuary lights. Perhaps she is shielding fragile edges. There could be loss underneath that lace. Or the swing of it simply makes her grin in the mirror. Whether the covering is shame or a busy morning met with something quick, that interior belongs to her, and a covered head has never been a confession.

So let me hand it over to you, because I have had my say. What is the truth you carry about weaves and wigs, the one you might not speak on out loud? When a Sister walks in laid from ear to ear, does your spirit say good for her, or does some old voice you did not choose to plant start whispering that going bare would have been the braver thing? Sit with that first little flicker, and let it tell on you louder than anything resting on the crown of a Sister busy minding her own gorgeous business.

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.

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 me and cannot help themselves. A cousin squints at my plate. An auntie tilts her head and says I’m looking a little thick lately, or a little thin, depending on the season. Somebody at work asks when I’m due, and I am not expecting anything but a paycheck. Each time, the assumption underneath is the same. My frame is a topic. The figure I carry is an open forum. Everybody gets a turn at the microphone.

For a long stretch I smiled through it. Smiling is the training, handed to those of us raised to keep a table easy no matter the cost. You learn it young. Swallow it, pass the potato salad, keep the evening moving. But somewhere in my forties I got tired of performing ease while a relative dissected my shape like it was a group project.

Let me be clear about what these remarks actually are. They are not concern. Concern is quiet, and it asks permission, and it usually comes from the two or three folks who have earned a seat close enough to say hard things. What most of them offer is not that. It is commentary dressed up as care, and the dressing is thin.

My weight is the one they reach for first. Gain a few pounds and out of nowhere a cousin is a nutritionist, a life coach, and a prophet all at once. Girl, you filling out. You need to watch that. Meanwhile you might be grieving, or healing, or simply living in a season where food brought comfort and you are not ashamed of it. Or you dropped some pounds and here comes the whisper, are you eating, you look sick, everything okay at home. Nobody wins that math. Bigger, smaller, either way your figure becomes a scoreboard strangers feel entitled to read aloud, like a box score in the Sunday paper.

The pregnancy question deserves its own reckoning. Please, I am begging, stop asking women when they are due unless a child is literally crowning in front of you. You have no idea what that soft middle holds. Fibroids. Bloating. Loss she has not spoken about. Medication that changed her whole shape. Maybe a belly she has made peace with after years of war. When you guess, you are not making conversation. You are pressing a bruise you cannot see and calling it friendly.

Aging loosens tongues in a way that catches me off guard. You look tired. Getting some gray up top, huh. Is that a new wrinkle or was it always here. As if the years arriving on my skin are a problem I forgot to solve. I earned every line, every silver strand at my temple. Growing old is something I survived to do, which is a privilege plenty of the people I loved never got. Do not stand in front of me acting like time is an insult.

So what do we do with all of it. Because keeping quiet was not working, and I know I am not alone in that fatigue.

What I first released was the urge to explain. For years I believed I owed people a paragraph. No, I have not gained anything, well actually, let me tell you about my thyroid. That reflex had to die. Refusing to justify yourself is a whole sentence on its own. Now when a relative comments on my figure, I might say, that is a strange thing to bring to me, and let the silence sit and do its work. You would be surprised how fast a person deflates once their remark has nowhere soft to land.

Kin get handled a little differently, because a stranger and your mama are not the same animal. With family I name it plain. Ma, when you talk about my shape like that, it hurts me, and I need it to stop. No lecture trailing behind it. Just a line drawn clear, and drawn again if I must. Real love makes room. The ones who keep pushing after you have asked them not to are showing you who they are, and I have learned to trust what they show.

Hardest of all, and I say this with some shame, was catching myself doing it to other women. We fuss about being measured, then wheel around and size up the next sister who comes through the door. She let herself go. Bless her heart, she getting old. Ooh, she must be expecting. If I want a world where my looks are nobody’s open business, my own gavel has to come down too, quiet as it is kept. That kind of change starts at home, in my own mouth.

Coworkers are their own animal. The office is not a family reunion, and yet the same nonsense finds you at the copier. When a colleague remarks about your figure at work, you have every right to be cool and brief. I would rather keep things professional, and pivot right back to the spreadsheet. You do not owe a colleague warmth about your changing appearance. Half the time a flat, bored answer does more than any speech could.

I think about my grandmother a lot in this. She spent decades apologizing for the space she took up. I can still see her tugging that blouse down over the hips at the dinner table, folding herself smaller to fit whatever the room wanted. That inheritance is not one I want. My nieces are watching how I carry myself, whether I flinch when a cousin pokes at my looks or whether I hold steady. That is legacy too. The quiet lessons stick.

None of this means I have gone cold. I still hug my kin. Still laugh loud at the function, still fix a plate for the elders first. But my form is not the town square, and I am done letting folks hold meetings in it. Grace lives in a firm no. Dignity lives in refusing to hand a stranger the map to your softest places just because they asked with a smile.

So the next time an auntie squints, or a coworker guesses, or an old friend decides your appearance needs a review, you are allowed to close the floor. You can be kind and closed at once. Loving hard and refusing them entry can happen in one breath. Your skin, your shape, your years, all of it belongs to you and you alone. It was never up for a vote, and it is certainly not up for discussion.

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.

Nobody warned me when I was young. You assume the hard part will be the styling, the wash days, the long evenings in somebody’s kitchen with a hot comb hissing over the stove. Then you grow up, earn the degree, land the position you studied half your life for, and discover the actual labor has almost nothing to do with product or patience. It has to do with translation. You spend years turning an ordinary morning into something a room will accept without a flicker of surprise.

Think about what that costs. A colleague reaches toward my twists like I am a petting zoo, fingers already moving before the question forms, and I am supposed to smile. One manager calls my locs a bold choice during a review where nobody mentioned my numbers, which were good. Somebody in orientation slides me a dress code that says neat and polished, and everybody in the room understands, without a single honest word passing between us, whose texture the sentence was written to police.

Straight becomes the quiet standard. Nobody announces it. There is no memo declaring bone-straight the official look of competence, yet the message arrives anyway, through raised eyebrows and careful compliments and the promotions that seem to favor women whose edges lie flat. You learn the grammar of it fast. Blow it out for the interview. Bun it up for the big presentation. Save the Afro for a Friday when the executives are traveling and only your work friends will see.

I earned my seat through the same grind everyone respects on paper. Late nights. Student loans. A master’s I am still paying off. And still, a slice of every week goes to managing how my scalp reads to strangers who assume their own reflects nothing at all, no history, no politics, no announcement. Their ponytail is just a ponytail. My cornrows are a whole conversation I did not ask to start.

Here is what wears on you. It is not one comment. A single remark you can shrug off, laugh past, file away for the group chat. What grinds is the accumulation, the daily arithmetic of deciding whether today holds enough energy to be a curiosity. Some mornings you do. Plenty of mornings you would rather just work.

CROWN Act protections exist because this is real and measurable, not a feeling a few sensitive women invented. Thirty states have now enacted protections against race-based hair discrimination, including bias involving natural texture and protective styles, precisely because Sistas have lost jobs, lost offers and been sent home from school over braids, puffs and Bantu knots that grow from our heads the way they always have. When a thing needs a law, you can quit pretending it lives only in somebody’s imagination.

And notice the framing baked into all of it. My roots get called a statement. A declaration. Something loaded, deliberate, meant to provoke. But I did not wake up choosing a manifesto. I woke and my curls did what curls do. The politics were assigned to me, handed over at the door of every building where somebody decided that the way hair grows from my scalp is a position I am obligated to defend.

You will notice who never has to mount that defense. The lady with the sleek blowout is simply well-groomed. Her straightness reads as effort, as care, as a person who has her life together. My coils read as a mood the room must interpret. Same time in the mirror, wildly different verdicts, and the gap between those verdicts is the whole rotten point.

I have watched younger women in the office learn the choreography I learned. A brilliant analyst, sharp as anybody on the floor, quietly retired her Afro after a season of jokes the office let slide. Week by week the flattening set in, until her reflection matched the picture. And I felt something close to grief, because I recognized the trade. Peace, bought with a piece of herself, and the register never stops ringing.

Here is the plain thing. A texture is not an argument. My protective style is no debate I owe my coworkers before lunch. Locs don’t lecture anybody. Braids aren’t a petition. They are simply the way a great many of us walk through the world, cared for and chosen and entirely ours, and the demand that we keep justifying them is the actual imposition, the real disruption, the thing somebody else ought to be explaining.

Being asked to hold a seminar about my own reflection has worn me down. Some of that weariness I carry for my nieces, who deserve to walk into their first real office without the choreography already loaded in their bones. The rest belongs to the young mother two cubicles over who imagines nobody notices the price she pays to look acceptable by four in the afternoon.

None of this begs for special treatment. What it asks is the ordinary courtesy already extended to everybody else, the freedom to show up as grown and fully capable without a footnote stapled to your scalp. Let the flat iron and the wash-and-go stand as equals. Treat neither as a cause. Retire the assumption that one look is the human default and the rest are variations somebody has to squint at and forgive.

My grandmother pressed her edges before church and softened her voice before white folks and swallowed a hundred small indignities so mine would be fewer. They are fewer. I will grant the years that much. But fewer is not gone, and too many Sistas my age still spend their Sundays coaching daughters through the same hush. I refuse to hand it down.

Some call it gorgeous. Others see nothing worth a second thought. Fine. It grew from this head of mine, on its own terms, and it was never yours to approve. Save the questions for something that truly needs one, and let a grown woman get back to work.

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.

Let me sit with you a minute, because somebody has to say this plain. You are not an audition. And this thing is not some trial run you pass by staying sweet and agreeable. Yet too many sistas treat a whole relationship like an unpaid internship. Put in the late hours. Figure out what he likes before he thinks to ask for it. Cook as though a judge is sitting in the kitchen. All of it chasing a title nobody ever wrote down anywhere.

I have sat across from women who gave every bit of that and walked off with empty hands. Plenty of them.

A grown woman meets a man. He is fine, sure. Maybe funny. Kind of easy to be around, smells good, tells you what you want to hear whenever he needs something. So she gets to work. She learns his mama’s cornbread recipe. His apartment ends up cleaner than her own place. When his check comes up short, hers stretches to cover the gap, and she calls that love. Months roll into years. She is still cooking, still cleaning, still covering, and that ring she keeps picturing never shows up on her hand.

Here is the truth nobody wanted to tell her.

You cannot labor your way into somebody’s heart. Effort is not attraction. Sacrifice is not a strategy. A man who genuinely wants to build forever with you should not require years of demonstrations while offering little certainty or effort of his own. He is not sitting there tallying your casseroles, waiting for you to hit some invisible quota before he commits. That is not how desire works.

I think a lot of us learned this the wrong way. Somewhere along the line we got the message that a good sister proves herself. Somehow proving it got tied to how much a person was willing to lose. Our grandmothers kept whole households upright on faith and stubbornness and barely a thing beyond that. We honor them, truly. But some of what they shouldered, they shouldered because the world handed them no other door, and we went and picked it up as if it were an inheritance. Aching over him got treated as evidence that you cared. Endurance turned into a badge.

But endurance for whom?

Sit with that a second. Somebody you have to talk into staying, what is it you think you are really holding on to? A brother who has you paying his light bill for two years while he decides whether you are wife material has already told you everything. He decided. Made that call way before you came around. The auditioning is happening in your head, not his. He is comfortable. Fed. Housed. Financed. Why would he change an arrangement that costs him nothing?

That part stings, I know.

Let me speak on the money for a second, since so many sistas have handed it over as if it were tuition. You loaned him rent that spring and he has yet to pay it back. Cosigned on something you had no business cosigning. Covered his phone so his mama could reach him. Somewhere in your mind, every dollar was a down payment on a future the two of you were building. He saw it differently. To him it was a sweet arrangement, and a selfish man rarely walks away from a deal that keeps arriving on schedule. Generosity is beautiful. But when it is aimed at a fellow who treats you like an ATM, it turns into slow heartbreak with a receipt.

Now let me be clear about the disrespect too, because here is where it gets dangerous. Patience got dressed up as a virtue, even when it was pointed straight at a fellow who had not earned an ounce of it. Your birthday slides past and he claims he lost track of the day. You cover for him anyway. At the cookout he calls you his friend, right there in front of his people, and rather than fix it on the spot, you feel it settle somewhere in your chest and go quiet. Three days pass before he texts back, and you thank God he bothered at all. Baby, that is not patience. That is negotiation with somebody holding every card, and you keep folding a winning hand.

You were not put here to shrink.

I need the younger sistas reading this to hear me, and I need the ones my age to hear me too, because plenty of us are still doing this dance at fifty. Worth is not a thing you earn through service. You do not become valuable by being useful. A refrigerator is useful. So is a dependable employee. You are supposed to be chosen and wanted, not just kept around because you handle the kitchen and rarely say a word.

Real commitment, the kind worth having, tends to move different. It shows up. Plans ahead. Introduces you correctly to the people who matter. Grown Black men who mean it do all of that without keeping a scoreboard. It does not require a woman to audition for a role she was born qualified to fill.

Now somebody is going to read this and say, well, don’t I have to put in effort? Of course you do. Partnership takes work. But hear the difference. What two people build when they both show up is a garden they tend together. Meanwhile the picture I keep seeing is one woman out in the dirt by herself. She plants. Drags the hose across the yard with nobody helping. Waits on something to break through the soil. And him? Up on the porch with a full plate, eating what her hands set into the ground. Call that partnership if you want to. I will not.

Ask yourself something the next time you catch yourself performing. Who is pouring into me? When was the last time this person did a thing for my comfort without being asked, without a reward attached, without it being tied to whether I stayed? If no answer comes, you already know.

I am not saying love should be effortless. My point is that it should not feel like a job interview that never ends. You should not have to reapply for a position you already hold in your own heart.

Some of you have been holding on so long you forgot what it feels like to be pursued. To have a person plan around you. A partner who checks on you when the weather turns bad, who wants your opinion, who says your name to his people with pride. That feeling is not a fantasy sold in movies. It is available. But you will never taste it while you keep offering yourself at a discount to a man who had no intention of paying full price.

So put the apron down for a minute. Stop rehearsing. The right one is not looking for a performance, and the wrong one will let you perform until the curtain closes on your best years.

You are not somebody’s tryout. Never were, and it is well past time you started moving through this world already sure of it.

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.

I’m talking to my Sistas now. The ones running on empty, carrying everybody’s mess and swallowing their own. You already know if I mean you.

We got smart. Real smart. Diplomas on the wall. Titles we bled for. A group chat loaded with opinions, a counselor on speed dial, some little app pinging us to inhale and exhale like we forgot how. And I bless every piece of that. I mean it. Yet somewhere down the road we started treating Heaven like a hotline you only ring once the roof is already on fire.

Be honest. When did you last pray before the bottom dropped out? Before the biopsy, the pink slip, the day he left or the checking account hit zero. Most of us hold out until we’re flat on our backs with nowhere to stare but the ceiling. Then we act surprised the calm never shows up.

My grandmother lived another way. That woman prayed over grits. She’d whisper a few words waiting on the bus downtown, then catch you by the stove and pull you into something holy before you even knew you were hurting. Her faith was not a spare tire in the trunk. It was the engine under the hood. And Lord knows she hauled more than her share, raising children who weren’t hers, burying folks too soon, scrubbing floors in homes she’d never own. Even so, she glowed with a peace no trouble could touch.

We let some of that slip. Not all of it. Some.

Look at how we move now. A rough week hits, and the first call goes to the girls. Second call, the wine. Third, a scroll through everybody else’s highlight reel until two in the morning. We’ll try affirmations. Maybe a spa day, a fresh man, a new set of nails, a bold lip. All of it fine. None of it wrong. But notice where the quiet time with Him lands on that list. Dead last, if it lands at all.

I say this as somebody who fell off. Hard.

For a stretch there my Bible collected dust on the nightstand while I stayed busy being competent. Being the strong one. That crown we wear, the Strong Black Woman, will run you straight into the ground if you let it. Because strength with no source dries up. You cannot pour and pour from a cup nobody ever fills. I learned that the exhausting way, snapping at people I love, crying in parking lots, faking fine in every meeting.

What pulled me back was small. No lightning, no choir. Just a Tuesday and a knot in my chest that would not loosen. I sat on the edge of the bed and said out loud, plain as anything, I can’t do this by myself anymore. That was the whole thing. Not eloquent, not King James. Just true. And something in the room shifted.

That’s the part we forget. He isn’t waiting on pretty words or grading the performance. So many of us grew up thinking you had to dress it up, get the tone just so, sound like the mothers of the church. No. You can come raw. Come mad, even. Tell Him you’re worn thin and you don’t understand and you’re scared. That counts. It’s the realest conversation you’ll have all day.

Now hear me. I’m not selling you a fairy tale where you kneel down and the bills vanish. That’s not how any of this works, and you’re too seasoned for me to lie to you. Rent still comes. The son still worries you. Your body still aches in new spots every year. What changes is the woman facing it. You quit carrying the whole planet on those shoulders because you finally hand a little of it over. There’s rest in that. A rest no vacation sells.

And can we talk, Sista to Sista, about what happens when a room of us decides to seek Him together again? Something wakes up. I’ve watched it. Ladies who could barely lift their heads start standing taller. The auntie grieving her husband finds a reason to bake again. A young one drowning in student debt catches her breath. It ripples. Our mothers and theirs built whole worlds on this, kitchens and porches and back pews full of women who took their burdens upstairs ahead of taking them anywhere else. That was the secret sauce. Not the hats or the fans. The seeking.

We inherited that. Then we got busy and set it down.

So here’s my plea, and I’ll keep it plain. Move it back up the list. Do not wait until every other answer has failed. Bring prayer back into your life early, and let it walk alongside the wise counsel and professional help you may need. In the morning, first thing, when the coffee is still brewing. Two minutes. A murmur in the shower. Even a word at the red light. It doesn’t require a sanctuary or a robe. Just you, honest, showing up.

Start small if you have to. One sentence a day. Thank You for waking me. Help me hold my tongue with my mama. Give me what I need for this shift. Watch a habit like that build over a month. Over a year. You’ll look up some afternoon and realize you’ve been leaning on something steady all along, and the leaning got easier because you did it before the storm instead of during.

I’m not asking you to be perfect at this. Heaven knows I’m not. I miss days. Get distracted mid sentence and end up planning supper. He meets me anyway. And He’ll meet you too, right where you stand, dishes in the sink and all.

We are tired, sisters. I see it in your faces. And this world keeps handing us more. But there is a quiet, mighty thing our grandmothers understood that we’ve been too proud or plain worn out to reach for. It costs nothing. Available at three in the afternoon and three in the morning. And it has been patient with us this whole time.

So let’s stop treating prayer like the alarm we yank only when everything’s already broken. Let’s go back. Not out of fear. Out of love, and out of memory, and out of a bone deep need for the kind of peace no app can hand you.

Come on now. Let’s start again.

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.