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.

Here is what the data says out loud. We opened 2025 with a jobless figure sitting around 5.4 percent. By December that same measure had climbed to 7.3, a level that exposed how sharply the labor market had turned against us. Diplomas did not save anybody. Among Black women, sisters holding bachelor’s degrees watched their footing slip more sharply than every other education group, and the federal government by itself shed 277,000 roles, with an estimated 95,000 of those losses falling on Black women. By early summer of this year, the headline had eased toward 5.7. Good news, supposedly. Except that softer number did not necessarily mean more of us were bringing home a check. The labor force itself had shrunk, leaving fewer Black women counted as working or actively looking for work. Some likely got tired and stopped searching. Others stepped away for reasons the headline rate cannot tell us.

I want to sit inside that stillness for a moment, because that is where the ache actually lives.

Think about who tends to give up the search. Not the one who never tried. No, the one who wore herself down to the nub trying. She rewrote that resume until the words stopped meaning anything. Sat through a webinar on personal branding during her lunch break. Rehearsed answers at six in the morning to a bathroom mirror, half of which never got asked. Bought the ring light because somebody’s cousin swore it read more professional on camera. And after the fourth no, or the twelfth, or the interviews that just went silent, which somehow cut deeper, something in her clicked off. That closing does not register anywhere official. There is no line item on a government spreadsheet for a spirit that got tired.

So let me name what I keep watching happen to grown, accomplished women I love and respect.

A friend of mine, fifty-one, twenty years in nonprofit management, got walked out of her building on a Tuesday. Nine years at that organization. She had a corner desk, a plant she named, a reputation people trusted. The travel got frozen first. Then her email login stopped working. Then a stranger from HR read her a paragraph off a laptop. By Thursday it was finished. A master’s degree, a kid in the fourth grade, and that whole weekend she spent apologizing to me, to her mama, to herself, like she had done something wrong. She hadn’t. The floor moved. She only happened to be standing on it.

That is the piece the charts miss.

When the paycheck vanishes and you did nothing to cause it, the brain goes looking for a reason inside you anyway. Strange as it sounds, that hurts less than the alternative. Own the mistake and at least there is a lever to pull, something to correct by Monday. Accept that the whole floor tilted under everybody at once and there is nothing to grab, and that thought will keep you up at two in the morning. So we reach for the version that hands us a lever. We tell ourselves we should have networked harder, spoken up less, spoken up more, worn the other blazer, stayed later, smiled bigger. We audit ourselves into the ground.

And the promotions. Lord, the ones that never come.

Here is a cruelty nobody warns you about. Do everything they told you to do. Earn the credential. Mentor the young ones. Volunteer for the committee nobody wants. Make your manager look brilliant in the meeting. Wait your turn, patiently, professionally, and then watch the title go to somebody who golfs with the director. Not once. Over and over, across years, until patience curdles into something quieter and more corrosive. Then the wondering starts, whether maybe the problem is you. Your voice. Your hair. The way you push back in a room. That wondering is expensive. It taxes a woman in a currency that never shows up on any pay stub, and she pays it every single day.

Economists and labor analysts keep using a phrase for us. Canary in the coal mine. Bellwether. They mean that when the wider economy begins to rot, Black women buckle first, because we sit stacked at the exact intersection of everything fragile. Public sector employment. Care work. Retail and service floors. Households where one income holds up a lot of people. When the system catches a cold, we get pneumonia, and we get it early. Research has estimated that more than one in five Black women in the labor force work somewhere in health care, another field where policy shifts and budget pressure can hit hard. So the pressure is not slowing down. It is loading up.

I need the Black women reading this to hear the next part plainly.

A layoff is not a verdict on your value. A stalled title is not proof you fell short. Ninety applications out, three replies back. That math is the market breaking down, not some hidden truth about you finally surfacing. Whatever is squeezing us got set in motion way before your name ever showed up on a layoff spreadsheet, and it grinds on no matter how clean your last review looked. A person can be excellent at the work and still land on the wrong side of the cut. Both are true at once, ugly as that sits.

The joblessness itself is not the part that scares me. We have survived lean stretches before. Our grandmothers wrote the book on it. What gnaws at me is the quiet shame underneath, how a sharp, qualified woman slowly trims her dreams down to fit whatever scraps are left, and calls it being realistic. That is not wisdom. It is a slow surrender with better manners. I have watched brilliant Sistas take themselves out of the running for jobs they had every right to chase, because one more no felt like one more than they had left in them. That is the wound that outlasts any recession. It keeps bleeding long after the economy technically recovers.

So what do we do, sitting here in the middle of it. Tell the truth to each other, for one. Quit performing fine over brunch. When a friend loses her post, nobody should rush to fix it or spin it bright. Let her be furious. Remind her, more than once if she needs it, that the ground moved and it was not her doing. Hold onto your own records too, the emails, the wins, the receipts, so that on the bad mornings there is something solid to press against the lie in your head.

And we carry two truths at once, which is a thing our people have practiced for generations. Yes, this economy is taking more than it gives, and that is real, and naming it out loud matters. And also, no market on earth gets to decide what we are worth. Our value was never up for a vote, never printed on a stub, never contingent on some director’s mood in a budget meeting.

The figure will rise again, or fall again, and the papers will make a fuss either way. Meanwhile we stay breathing and hold each other. Staying ready is the move, not because the door is fair, but because when it finally cracks open, I intend for us to be right there, degrees in hand, unbroken, and still entirely our own.

Staff Writer; Jada Williams

This sister writes about politics, money, family, and the issues that shape everyday life… Her work looks at how decisions made in government, changes in the economy, and challenges within our communities affect Black women and their families…

Feel free to email her at: JadaW@ThySistas.com.

This goes out to the wife who feels more like a co manager than a partner in her own marriage. The mama running three schedules besides her own belongs here too. So does the daughter sorting her mother’s pill organizer on a Sunday evening after service, and the sorority sister, the usher, the coworker everybody phones when the department catches fire. You are surrounded. Somehow you are also, quietly, on your own.

Here is what nobody prepared us for. Being needed and being known are two separate accounts, and most of us are wealthy in one and badly overdrawn in the other. Your family knows what you do. They can locate the good scissors because you told them where they live. Insurance renewals, birthdays, and the awkward phone call to Aunt Ruth all land on your side of the ledger. What none of them could tell you is what frightened you last month, or why you sat in the driveway for eleven minutes before walking inside.

Somewhere between our grandmothers’ kitchens and our own, competence became a costume nobody taught us to remove. Strength got confused with silence. We were praised for carrying, so we carried, and the applause taught us that setting anything down would cost us the only identity anyone had ever celebrated in us. Now we are pushing fifty, everybody leans, and nobody checks.

Marriage can go quiet without going bad. Two decent adults wake up one morning speaking fluent logistics. Pick up, drop off, did you pay it, who is driving. Affection survives in the shape of a gas tank filled without anyone asking. Nothing is broken enough to fix, which is exactly why it never gets fixed. Meanwhile you are starving at a table set for two.

Children love you the way weather loves a mountain, constantly and thoroughly and without ever wondering how the mountain is holding up. That is developmentally appropriate. It is also isolating in a way that surprises women who waited years to become mothers. A teenager can hug you each day of her life and never ask one question about who you were before she arrived.

Then comes the calendar, our most respectable hiding place. Book club Tuesday, board meeting Thursday, bridal shower Saturday, choir rehearsal in between. Show up smelling good, laugh in the right places, hug forty necks, drive back to an address where the ache sits waiting like a cat. Attendance at events is not intimacy. We have been confusing the two for decades.

Ask any of us how we are doing and watch scripture turn into armor. Blessed and highly favored. Can’t complain. God is good. Every word true, all of it lovely, and each one deployed at the exact speed of somebody who decided long ago not to be a burden to anyone. Testimony was never meant to function as a muzzle.

Social media offers a counterfeit so convincing you can go years without noticing the swap. Two hundred birthday messages. Thirty laughing emojis under your niece’s graduation post. A group thread that pings from morning until midnight. Then a Tuesday arrives when your mammogram comes back needing a second look, and you scroll through every contact in that phone unable to decide who deserves the call. Right there is your diagnosis.

Researchers have spent the last two decades documenting links between chronic disconnection and higher blood pressure, poorer sleep, inflammation, and cognitive decline. Our bodies can carry stress our mouths refuse to name. Black women already face disproportionate burdens of hypertension and short sleep, and chronic loneliness may be one part of the larger stress load behind the numbers our doctors read back to us.

Now for the uncomfortable portion. Some of the invisibility we resent, we trained. Each occasion when somebody asked how you were doing and you handed them a commercial instead of the truth, you taught them that the question was rhetorical. The friend who offered help and got girl please, I got it in return eventually learned to stop offering. I have done this myself. Last spring, in fact. My oldest friend since college found out through Facebook that my father had a stroke.

So what does a grown woman actually do, starting this week.

Say the sentence out loud to one human being. Not a caption, not a prayer journal, an actual face across an actual table. I feel unseen and I cannot remember how long that has been true. Notice that the ceiling stays right where it is.

Request something specific. Vague sorrow gets vague responses, while instructions get results. With your husband, try twenty minutes on the porch, phones inside, and two questions that have nothing whatsoever to do with the children. Ask your grown son for a phone call on Sundays that centers his life rather than a box he checks.

Choose one friend and get consistent. Same day, same hour, no agenda, no potluck, no theme. That kind of ordinary reliability builds trust that a beautifully catered brunch simply cannot.

Retire from auditioning. The role of Woman Who Never Struggles pays terribly and the run has no closing night. Let somebody see you tired. Whoever exits was audience rather than family, and honestly you needed that information.

Consider therapy, particularly with a professional who understands the cost of performing excellence while grieving. Many of our mothers had far less access to that option, and plenty of them paid for it in ways we watched up close.

Learn the difference between solitude and abandonment. Sitting alone on your patio at six in the morning with coffee and zero obligations is medicine. A den crowded with relatives where you feel like furniture is a wound. One of those you choose. The other chooses you.

None of this makes you difficult or ungrateful. Loving your husband and missing the way he used to court you can occupy the same afternoon. Pride in your children coexists easily with mourning the person you were before they showed up. You can cherish your church, your line sisters, your job, and your mother, and still need one soul on this earth who knows precisely what frightens you.

A full residence and a full heart are separate accomplishments. Wanting both does not make you greedy, and saying so out loud does not make you weak. Say it anyway, at fifty two, standing in your kitchen, to somebody who will actually hear you.

Start there. Tonight, if you can manage 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.

My family kept a version of one story on damn near every branch of the tree. One aunt paid a light bill eleven years running on hair money and a night shift, and every time her husband resurfaced after another disappearing act, she fixed him a plate and asked him nothing. Nobody called that dysfunction. They called it standing by your man. Somewhere between the church pew and the beauty shop chair, endurance turned into evidence of devotion, and a sista who survived the worst of it earned a crown no one else could see.

Crowns like that get heavy.

Before anybody files this under bitterness or some imported theory that supposedly has nothing to do with our community, understand that bell hooks documented this exact wound decades ago. She did it without painting our brothers as monsters or our daughters as fools. Her writing came from tenderness. It also came with receipts.

In All About Love, she borrowed a definition worth taping to a bathroom mirror. Love, properly understood, is a deliberate act of extending yourself so you or another person can grow. Feeling alone does not qualify. Intention counts. Behavior counts. Measured against that standard, plenty of what gets celebrated at bridal showers falls apart on contact. She argued plainly that cruelty and affection cannot share an address, no matter how long the lease has been signed.

Then came Salvation, where she turned directly toward our households and made an argument that still stings. Generations raised under domination absorbed warped blueprints for intimacy, and healing would require naming what got broken instead of decorating it and calling it culture. Suffering was never our inheritance. Survival was. Somewhere along the way we confused the two.

Sisters of the Yam went further into the psychology, examining what happens to a sista trained from girlhood to be unbreakable. Strength stops being a quality you possess and becomes a costume you cannot remove. You perform capability in public, cry in the car, and answer “I’m blessed” when somebody asks how you are holding up. Nobody checks on you because you have made yourself impossible to worry about.

Her book on masculinity, The Will to Change, deserves mention too, because it explains the other half of the equation. Boys get taught early that feeling anything besides anger makes them soft. By the time that boy becomes somebody’s husband, he has been emotionally disarmed since boyhood, and the person who married him inherits the job of feeling everything for both of them. She interprets his silences. Apologizing on his behalf becomes routine. His moods get translated for the children in her voice. That labor goes unlisted on every anniversary card.

Which brings me to what actually happens inside these arrangements we keep romanticizing.

Emotional absence gets rebranded as personality. He does not communicate, does not repair after conflict, goes quiet for four days behind an argument, then walks back through the door like nothing occurred. Meanwhile she has spent ninety six hours reading his silence like scripture, wondering which verse offended him. Girlfriends tell her she is patient. What she actually is, is exhausted.

Money supplies another layer nobody enjoys discussing honestly. Investing in a partner during a rough stretch makes sense. Real partnership includes a season where one person carries more than half. Six years is not a season. When rent, groceries, insurance, and his phone bill all come from your direct deposit while he chases a vision that has yet to file a tax return, that is not belief in a dream. That is subsidy. The difference between the two lives in whether he is building anything at all or simply comfortable being carried.

Infidelity carries its own mythology, and honestly this one makes me tired. Men will be men. All of them do it. At least he comes home. Aunties said it, cousins repeat it, and somewhere in there a young sista learns that betrayal is weather rather than choice. Forgiveness gets treated as spiritual advancement, proof she has grown past pettiness. Genuine reconciliation requires repentance, changed behavior, and transparency he offers before being caught. Absent those things, pardoning him is just the shortest route back into that bed and that same lie.

Control might be the most cleverly disguised item on this list, since it arrives wearing the clothing of protection. He wants your location out of worry. Finances land in his hands since you are supposedly bad with numbers. Your friends are messy, your sister is jealous, your mama stays in your business. One relationship at a time, your world contracts until he is the only voice left with an opinion about your life. Then somebody at the salon calls it passion and everybody nods.

Social media turned all this into competitive sport. Scroll long enough and you will find a scoreboard where devotion gets measured in tolerance. She stayed during the incarceration. Three outside children arrived and she stayed. Years passed while he refused therapy, refused work, refused accountability, and still she stayed. Comment sections crown her. Reality television pays her. Nobody films the anxiety, the lost sleep, the doctor visits, or the daughter who is quietly memorizing all of it as instruction.

Hardship shared is not the identical animal as hardship imposed. That distinction is the entire argument. Two people broke together in a studio apartment, each working, each contributing, each aimed at one horizon, that is struggle, and there is something beautiful in surviving it side by side. One person depleting so another can consume, that is extraction. Calling those two arrangements by the same tender name is how we lost track of which was which.

Church language complicated matters further. Long suffering became an instruction manual for staying, and submission got quoted at sistas by pastors who skipped right past the verses aimed at husbands. Patience with people who are genuinely trying is holy work. Permanence inside harm is something else entirely. Grace was never designed to function as a hostage negotiation, and no scripture obligates you to be somebody’s ministry until your health fails.

Reaching midlife changes the math. At twenty five, three wasted years feel survivable, almost educational. By forty seven, you count differently. You calculate how many good decades remain, what energy remains, whether you want to spend your fifties still auditioning for basic decency. That arithmetic makes you honest in ways your younger self could not afford.

None of this argues that our brothers are disposable. The late cultural critic never made that case, and I refuse to either. Plenty of Black men show up completely, do the interior work, apologize properly, handle their business, and deserve every bit of the loyalty they receive. Her point, and mine, is that we need language precise enough to distinguish those men from the ones performing the role while draining the woman beside them.

So read her. Start with All About Love because it will reorganize your thinking, then move through the rest as your spirit allows. Read her with a highlighter. Pass the copy along to your girlfriends. Read her especially if you recognize yourself in these paragraphs and feel defensive about it, because that reaction is usually information.

Devotion should require effort from you. It should never require your erasure.

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.

Let me clear up something before we go further. Nobody here is telling sistas to hunt for a man with a fat portfolio. Plenty of us built our own, brick by brick, while working a job and raising somebody. The point is protection. Notice the patterns while options still exist, while your name has not yet been stitched onto somebody else’s mess. Our community asks so much of us already. Many of us hold down a household, send a little something to mama every month, cover a nephew’s registration fee, and still try to fund a retirement nobody ever bothered to teach us how to build. A partner who quietly drains that foundation is not offering romance. He is offering erosion.

Start with hidden debt. Not debt in general, mind you, since almost everybody I know carries something, whether it came from a degree we were promised would change everything or a car note that quietly got away. Owing is ordinary. Concealing is not. When a man refuses to say what he owes after a year or two together, after conversations about a future, that refusal is itself the answer. Watch his face when the subject arrives. Vagueness is one response. Another is watching the topic swing right back around to your spending, as if the question were an accusation. Some men simply chuckle and say they have it handled. Handled by whom, on what schedule, with what plan?

A colleague of mine discovered eleven thousand in collections three weeks before closing on a house. She had spent two years saving that down payment while being told his credit was fine, just a few old things from college. Because they were applying together, those old collections helped sink the loan. She bought the place eventually, alone, and she carries real pride about that, though the grief of it lingered a long while. She kept saying she should have asked more questions. My response was that she asked plenty. What she never got were straight answers.

Gambling has shifted so much in recent years that many of us no longer recognize it. Once upon a time it meant a casino weekend or a man at the barbershop taking bets. Now it lives inside a phone, dressed up as paid fantasy contests, sports betting apps, speculative crypto plays, and high-risk trading platforms that can turn rent money into entertainment. Pay attention to whether his mood tracks a scoreboard. Does agitation arrive every Sunday? Is he elated one week, withdrawn the next, with nothing else in his life explaining the swing? Are there transfers to apps nobody in the house has heard of? A man chasing losses will insist he is about to hit big, that he is up overall, that the strategy is too complex for outsiders. Believe the statements, never the narrative.

Financial control deserves its own conversation, because it hides inside behavior we were trained to admire. A man who says he wants to handle everything so his woman never has to stress can sound like a gift from above. Sometimes he genuinely is. Other times he is constructing a cage with very soft walls. Access is the test. Can both partners view the shared accounts, statements, and household records? Does each person have legitimate access to jointly held money without having to ask permission? Is spending from the household budget possible without filing a report afterward? A woman earning her own income who still needs purchases approved is not in a partnership. She is under supervision. Notice how fast anger shows up when any of it gets questioned, because control always protects itself.

I think often about the older women in my family who never knew what the household actually held. They were told not to bother themselves with such things. Then a husband died or walked out, and a sixty year old woman sat at a kitchen table learning what a beneficiary designation was. Sistas, we deserve better than inherited helplessness. Knowing your own figures is not disrespect toward a good man. Dignity has never been an insult.

Unpaid bills tell on people. Lights that flicker off for a day over an oversight. Insurance that quietly lapsed. Taxes that keep getting pushed to next month, then next quarter, then never. Everybody hits a rough stretch, and grace matters in a relationship, so look instead at whether the pattern repeats and whether he owns it when it does. A grown man with steady income who cannot keep utilities current is telling on his own priorities. Take him at his word. And please, sistas, think carefully before letting your name become the solution. Putting service in your name because his credit will not allow it can become a trap dressed as kindness. Cosigning carries the same danger, because the lender can hold you responsible if he fails to pay. Paperwork has no interest in your good heart. It records only who is liable when things fall apart.

Constant borrowing wears a woman down by inches. Rarely does it start big. Forty dollars until Friday. Then a hundred for a tire. Then dinner again, because the card got left at home again. What makes the habit dangerous is not any single amount. Trajectory is the issue, along with the accounting. Repayment without a reminder would tell you plenty. So would hearing him call it a loan at all, rather than treating your paycheck as communal while his stays entirely his own. That imbalance is the whole tell. Trouble has already arrived the moment guilt shows up for simply keeping track.

Everything described here sits underneath one larger problem, which is secrecy. Separate accounts make perfect sense, particularly for women who have been burned before. A locked phone every single time a banking app opens is a different creature. Mail that gets intercepted, a second address, income he will not disclose, a job change discovered through his cousin at a cookout, none of that belongs in the same category as privacy. Boundaries and motives are two different animals.

So where does all of this leave us? Get curious before getting committed. Have real conversations about earning, owing, saving, and giving, and have them early enough that walking away still costs almost nothing. Watch behavior across months rather than promises made in a moment. Keep your own accounts, your own credit, your own emergency fund, and offer no apology for any of it.

A man building something honest will welcome the questions. He might even exhale, relieved that somebody finally asked. If he cannot, Sistas, then the answer has arrived, and you get to leave with your credit score and your peace fully intact.

Staff Writer; Jada Williams

This sister writes about politics, money, family, and the issues that shape everyday life… Her work looks at how decisions made in government, changes in the economy, and challenges within our communities affect Black women and their families…

Feel free to email her at: JadaW@ThySistas.com.

Somewhere along the road we swallowed a cruel piece of math. Take care of the children. Put out the fire at work. Check on your mother. Answer the group text before somebody feels ignored. Fix the plate for everybody else, then eat standing at the counter. Run the meeting nobody else wanted. Only after all of that has been handled, stamped, and approved does anyone whisper that you might close your eyes. Peace becomes a coupon you cash in once every obligation is done, and since the obligations never truly finish, neither does the waiting.

I want to say plainly what I have come to believe. Slowing down is not the prize at the bottom of a hard day. It is not the gold star you get for surviving the week. Your body does not run on a system of merit where sleep must be purchased with suffering. You breathe because you are alive, and stillness belongs to you for the same simple reason, no performance required.

The trouble is that many of us were raised inside a story we did not write. Our mothers carried it. Their mothers carried it before them, under conditions I can barely stand to imagine. The strong one. The backbone. That woman who never cracks, never asks, never lets them see her tired. That figure was born out of necessity, and I honor the women who became her because they had no other choice. But necessity and truth are not the same thing. Just because our foremothers had to earn every ounce of quiet does not mean we are required to keep paying a debt that was never really ours.

Think about how the pattern actually plays out in a life. A crisis lands. You handle it with a competence that would make a general jealous. The moment it clears, instead of sitting down, your mind starts scanning for the next thing that needs you. There is always a next thing. A sick relative, a leaking roof, a friend in a hard season, a project that will fall apart without you. And so the reward you promised yourself keeps sliding just out of reach, like the horizon on a long drive. You are chasing a calm that will never arrive because you built it on a condition that can never be fully met.

I know that feeling in my own bones. For years I treated a full night of sleep like something I had to justify. I would lie there running the ledger of what I had accomplished, deciding whether I had done enough to deserve to close my eyes. Enough for whom? Nobody was standing at the foot of my bed grading me. I had become the accountant, the judge, and the exhausted defendant all at once. That is the sneaky part of this belief. Once it settles in, you do not need anyone else to enforce it. You police yourself for free.

Here is what changed my thinking. I started watching how other people around me handled their own limits, and I noticed something that stung. Plenty of folks who accomplish a fraction of what we do feel entitled to their downtime without a second thought. They take the vacation. Saying no to the extra task comes easy to them. When their bodies say it is time, they go to bed. No one audits their own worth first, and nobody calls them lazy for it. So why do we hold ourselves to a standard that would break an ox? Somewhere the culture decided our value lives in our output, and too many of us agreed without ever being asked.

Let me be honest about the cost of this arrangement, because it is real and it is measured in more than tiredness. Chronic stress and too little sleep can contribute to high blood pressure, anxiety that hums under everything, and a short fuse with the very people we love most because there is nothing left in the tank by the time we get home to them. We are giving away the best of ourselves in the marketplace of usefulness and bringing the scraps to our own dinner table. That is not strength. That is a slow leak we have learned to call devotion.

So I am asking us to try a different frame, one where slowing down is maintenance rather than a medal. You do not wait until the car breaks down to put oil in it. You do not skip the doctor until the situation is dire and then congratulate yourself for finally going. We understand preventive care in every other corner of life. Why do we make an exception for the vessel carrying us through all of it? A nap on Tuesday afternoon is not a confession of weakness. It is basic upkeep on the one instrument you cannot replace.

None of this means abandoning the people who count on you. I am a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend, and I have no intention of walking away from the ones I love. What I am learning is that pouring from an empty pitcher does not actually serve them. My children do not need a martyr. They need a mother who is present, patient, and here for the long haul. The most generous thing I can offer the people in my life is a version of me that has something left to give, and that version does not exist without regular pauses that come with no strings attached.

There is a freedom on the other side of this, and I want us to reach for it while we still have the years to enjoy it. Imagine putting your feet up in the middle of an unfinished day and feeling nothing but ease. No guilt tapping you on the shoulder. No ledger. No sense that you are stealing something you have not paid for. Just a grown woman choosing peace because peace is hers by birthright and by God, not because she filled some invisible quota.

My grandmother waited almost a lifetime for permission that should have been hers all along. I refuse to hand that same waiting down to the girls coming up behind me. Let us break the arithmetic now. Sit down before you are forced to. Close your eyes before the world decides you have done enough. You already have.

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 rule deserves examination, because most of us have never once questioned it.

Consider what happens when her name surfaces in the phone. A small tug in the chest, guilt braided into relief, and then the thumb keeps moving. Life got busy on both ends, we tell ourselves. It is a tidy explanation and it lets everybody off the hook, which is precisely why we reach for it.

Sit with the thing honestly and something less flattering comes up. The longing is not for her. It is for who the two of you were together, back when everybody was broke and hopeful and sleeping on somebody’s floor after a party that ran too late.

Those are not the same thing.

We were raised on the idea that time served is the highest credential a person can hold. Twenty years. Since sixth grade. Since we were pregnant at the same time. Since her mama used to feed you when yours was working doubles. All of that is real, and none of it should be treated like nothing. History is a kind of intimacy. Somebody who knew you before your credit was good, before the degree, before the title on the door, holds a version of you that nobody else can access. That matters. It just does not settle the question of whether she still belongs in your Tuesday evenings.

Somewhere along the line we started treating longevity like it was proof of love. It is not. It is proof of time, which is a different animal entirely, and grown women are sitting in relationships that scrape them raw because walking away feels like turning your back on the girl you were at nineteen. So let me say the thing nobody said to us. Old does not mean well. A thing can last thirty years and still be lopsided, still leave you sitting in the car after brunch with the engine off, wondering why your jaw hurts.

Black women in particular carry a specific weight here, and I think we should be honest about where it came from. Black communities have long survived by holding on to one another. You did not put nobody out. You made a way for your cousin, your play sister, the girl from down the street whose house was not safe. Community was not a lifestyle choice. It was infrastructure. That instinct is beautiful and it kept us alive. But an instinct built for survival does not always translate cleanly into a life you are trying to build on purpose. Keeping everybody made sense when everybody was all you had. It makes considerably less sense when one of those somebodies has spent a decade making you feel small.

There is also the accusation, the one that lives rent free in the back of a Black woman’s mind whenever she considers stepping back. She think she better than us. Four words that have kept more sistas stuck than any lease ever did. We are terrified of being called bougie, uppity, changed up, brand new. So the phone gets answered at eleven at night. The same story about the same man gets a fresh round of listening. And when the joke comes, the one with our name in it, the one that lands harder than she pretends, we laugh. That is just how she is, we say, and we take another sip.

Try it from another angle. Declining to shrink is not the same as thinking you are better than somebody. Neither is wanting to spend your one Saturday in a room where people are glad you walked in. Anybody who needs you a little bit wounded so that they can feel level with you is not loving you. They are managing you.

You know the ones I am talking about. The woman who only surfaces when something has gone wrong in her life and vanishes when things go right in yours. The one who greets your good news with a joke about how you have been acting funny. The one who liked you better when you were struggling because your struggle made hers look like company. The one who has decided, somewhere in her own private hurt, that your progress is a comment on her.

Then there are the endings with nobody to blame. She thinks therapy is white folks’ business and you have been going every other Thursday since your father died. You stopped drinking and every plan she makes still starts at a bar. It took you decades to learn how to say what you actually mean, and she has spent those same decades getting very good at saying it sideways. Neither of you did anything wrong. You just grew into a woman with needs that girl from 1997 never had.

That is worth pausing on. Not every ending requires somebody to be the bad guy. We reach for betrayal narratives because they give us permission, and permission is what we think we need. Here is my argument. You already have it. Adulthood, real adulthood, means you get to choose who has ongoing access to your interior life. Not who deserves access based on past service. Who has it now.

I am not talking about disposing of people. I want to be careful there, because we live in a culture that is quick to cut, quick to block, quick to call every hard conversation toxic and keep it moving. Some connections are worth repairing. Some are worth an honest sit down where you say the uncomfortable thing out loud and give the other woman a chance to meet you. Plenty of relationships survive that. The ones that do come back sturdier than they were.

But some will not survive it, and you have to be prepared for that. Sometimes the release is slow, more of a drift than a decision, a natural fading that neither of you names. Sometimes it is a conversation. Sometimes it is just distance, kept respectfully, without cruelty, without a big announcement.

Grieve it. That is the part people skip. Triumph is not what shows up. What shows up is a hollow hour on a Sunday, a song that drops you into a summer from another decade, a piece of real news that would have gone to her first. Your thumb will hover over the name before the phone goes back on the counter. That ache is not evidence of a mistake. It is evidence the thing was real. Both can be true at once.

What you deserve, at fifty, at forty five, at whatever age you find yourself reading this with a cup of something going cold beside you, is a circle that fits the woman you actually are. Sistas who ask about your work and mean it. People who can hold your joy without flinching. People who tell you the truth kindly and receive yours the same way.

Wanting that is permitted. Building it is permitted. So is leaving behind the parts of your past that will not come with you, and doing it without apologizing to anybody for having grown into somebody worth knowing.

Staff Writer; Jada Williams

This sister writes about politics, money, family, and the issues that shape everyday life… Her work looks at how decisions made in government, changes in the economy, and challenges within our communities affect Black women and their families…

Feel free to email her at: JadaW@ThySistas.com.

Let me be clear about where I stand before going further. My love for this woman’s catalogue runs back most of my life, and what follows comes from devotion rather than spite. That distinction matters more than it once did, because somewhere in the last ten years or so we quietly lost the ability to talk about her as if she makes songs instead of miracles. Play “Morning Dew (Donk)” with clean ears and you hear a pleasant, minor, slightly dated groove that any of a dozen artists could have released to a shrug. Fine, is all. A B side, no more. Yet the apparatus around her cannot process fine, so fine gets translated into triumphant, and an old unreleased song becomes evidence that the reigning queen has never once wavered.

Think about the last time you read a genuinely searching review of her work. Not a rave. Not a takedown either. Something in between, the kind of writing that sits with a record for a week, admires the audacity of the thing while admitting the second half drags, or that one feature never earns its place, or that a concept got announced louder than it got executed. I have to reach back years to find one, and when I do, I remember the pile on that followed. The writer’s mentions turned into a courtroom. Their whole taste went on trial. Every motive got read like tea leaves. And the lesson every music writer absorbed, whether they say it out loud or not, is simple. You praise, or you stay quiet.

The machine that enforces this is famous enough to have a name. The hive shows up fast and it shows up organized, and I want to be careful here because there is a lazy version of this complaint that treats fandom itself as the villain. It isn’t. Passionate listeners are the whole point of making anything. What has changed is the temperature and the reach. A three out of five used to be a defensible opinion. Now it reads to a certain corner of the internet as a moral failing, an insult flung at a Black woman who has already given more than the culture ever thanked her for. And that framing, the one that turns a middling score into an act of disrespect, is where the honesty starts to drain out of the room.

Here is the part that keeps me up, though, the part the cynics skip. That protective instinct did not come from nowhere. Black women in this industry have been robbed in slow motion for a century. Their sounds get borrowed and repackaged and handed to prettier, whiter faces who then get called geniuses for it. The wins arrive delayed, questioned, asterisked. You can watch a woman dominate a decade of popular music, reshape what an album even is, and spend years watching the biggest prize remain out of reach before Cowboy Carter finally broke that pattern. So when her people close ranks, I do not roll my eyes. I get it in my bones. The defensiveness is a scar, and scars form for a reason.

But a scar can grow over a wound that already healed. The tragedy of the current moment is that the shield built to protect her from an industry that undervalued her now protects her from the one thing every serious artist actually needs, which is a listener willing to tell the truth. Somewhere the logic flipped. Loving her stopped meaning engaging with the work and started meaning defending the work, and those are not the same act. A bodyguard and a critic want different things for you. One wants you safe. The other wants you great, and greatness has never come from a room full of yes.

None of this is helped by how thoroughly she has mastered the art of the event. The surprise drop she pioneered, the visual album, the rollout so meticulous it feels less like a release and more like weather moving in, all of it reframes each record as a cultural occasion rather than a collection of songs. And you cannot review an occasion. You can only attend it. When the discourse arrives before the download finishes, when the think pieces about what it means for the country are already queued up, the humble work of listening closely and deciding whether the bridge on track nine lands starts to feel almost rude. Small. Beneath the size of the thing. So critics reach for the language of significance instead, importance, moment, statement, reclamation, and that vocabulary is a beautiful place to hide. It lets you say a lot without ever saying whether the record is any good.

Take her country turn, which I adored and will defend to anyone. That record was a genuine act of reclamation, a Black woman walking back into a genre her ancestors helped invent and got shut out of, and the sight of it moved me. But watch what the conversation became. So much of it centered on the gesture. About Nashville and gatekeeping and history, all of it real and worth arguing over. What received less attention was the actual sequencing, the moments where the album’s ambition outran its focus, the tracks that felt as though they were there to prove a point rather than to be lived with. Those observations existed. They just could not compete with the weight of the story, and so they got whispered, if they got said at all. An artist that big absorbs criticism into her mythology. Every complaint becomes proof of what she is up against. Every doubter becomes a character in her comeback.

And I have not even reached the loneliest corner of this, which belongs to critics who look like her. A Black woman writing honestly about the biggest Black woman alive walks a wire nobody stretched for anyone else. Praise her and you are accused of bias. Question her and you are accused of betrayal, of handing ammunition to people who never wanted her to win in the first place. I have felt the second one personally, the flinch before you type a mild reservation, the internal negotiation about whether the truth is worth the cost to your own standing in your own community. That is not artistic freedom. That is a tax, and it gets levied hardest on the people best positioned to write about her with real understanding.

So can she still be reviewed normally? My honest answer is almost, but not quite, and the gap is widening. The infrastructure that should make honest assessment possible, editors willing to run a lukewarm take, writers willing to sign it, readers willing to sit with disagreement instead of treating it as an attack, has gotten brittle around her specifically. Other enormous artists get the occasional rough review and the world keeps spinning. Around her, the stakes got tangled up in something bigger than the music, in race and legacy and a very justified exhaustion with how this industry treats women who look like us, and once those wires cross, ordinary criticism reads as something it was never meant to be.

She does not want this, for what my reading is worth. The woman is a documented perfectionist. She reportedly reworks, rejects, rebuilds until the thing is right, which means she must know, better than her most devoted defenders, that adoration and improvement live in different houses. You do not sharpen yourself against applause. Somewhere she has to feel the difference between a room that loves her and a room that will tell her the truth, and I suspect the second room has gotten very quiet.

The kindest thing we could do for an artist that magnificent is remember that a mixed review is not a slur. It is a form of respect, maybe the highest one, because it assumes she is an artist and not a monument, capable of a weak song, capable of growing past it, worthy of being met with a whole mind rather than a raised fist. We used to give her that. I would like us to try again. Not because she has fallen off, but because the woman I have followed my whole life deserves listeners, not just guards, and honest music has never had anything to fear from an honest ear.

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.

Oprah Winfrey got her start in broadcasting at a Nashville radio station while still in high school. Television news followed, first in Nashville, then Baltimore. On paper that was the arrangement, and it was supposed to hold. A young woman with a strong voice lands a seat, and the seat is a desk, a camera, and words some producer handed her. She didn’t fit it. Talk television came next, and she took an ordinary afternoon slot and made it a place where people finally said out loud the things they had been carrying alone. Their weight. Marriages coming apart at the seams. The shame around money. Grief they had never once named to another soul. After that she acted, and the film work brought her serious recognition. Producing came next, her name and her money thrown behind stories the studios were too nervous to touch. A book club followed, with the power to lift an unknown writer out of nowhere and change that person’s whole life inside a week. A magazine came after that. There was a school she built for girls in South Africa, and fortunes she gave away without making noise about it. A network carried her name. When the culture moved toward podcasts and streaming, she moved right along with it.

Look at that trajectory and tell me where the lane was. There wasn’t one. She kept driving over the lines because the lines were never real to begin with. They were suggestions dressed up as rules, and she treated them exactly the way suggestions deserve to be treated.

I want us to sit with something uncomfortable, because I think a lot of us need to hear it. The boundaries around our talent are usually not enforced by strangers. They get enforced by the people closest to us, and they get enforced by us. A job tells you what you are. You are the reliable one at the office, the person who handles the crisis, the manager everybody leans on. That identity feels good because it comes with praise and a paycheck. So you pour yourself into it, and slowly the version of you that writes, or paints, or wants to open a business, or dreams of running for office, that version gets folded up and put in a drawer. Not killed. Just stored somewhere you stop visiting.

Family runs the same play, and here is the hard part. They usually mean well, so you can’t even be clean angry about it. You’re the mama, the daughter who always answers the phone, the auntie whose door never closes. Everybody in the house has already decided who you are to them, and they need you to stay her, because your being dependable is part of what holds them all upright. Reach for something larger and you feel it fast. That tug in the chest. The voice asking who you think you are, wanting more, when there are folks right here counting on you. I know that tug well. I have stood in my own kitchen past midnight, wondering whether wanting a bigger life made me a selfish woman.

And then there are friends. This one stings because we do not expect it. Sometimes the people who have known you the longest are the most invested in you staying the same. Not out of cruelty. Out of comfort. If you grow, the friendship has to grow too, and not everybody is ready for that work. So they laugh a little when you mention the new plan. They remind you of who you used to be. They call it keeping you humble. What it really does is keep you small, and small is easier for everyone except you.

Oprah could have listened to all of those voices, and she had plenty of them. She was told she was too emotional for news, too invested, too much herself on air. That so called flaw became the foundation of everything she built. The thing they wanted her to shrink was the thing the whole world was starving for. That should stop every one of us in our tracks. What if the part of you that people keep asking you to tone down is the exact gift you are here to give.

There is a specific load on us as Black women, and I won’t sit here acting like there isn’t. Be strong, they tell us, and hush about what the strength takes out of you. Be thankful you got a seat at all. Somewhere in there the thankfulness hardens into a chain, and next thing you know you’re apologizing for reaching toward the thing you want. Stay in your place. Do not ask for more. You already got further than most. That messaging is everywhere, and it is designed to keep us performing one function instead of living as full human beings with layered gifts and wide curiosity. A woman can be an engineer who also sings. She might run a hospital ward and still write poetry that cracks a reader wide open. Raising children, building wealth, mentoring, traveling, starting fresh at fifty and again at sixty, all of it can sit inside one life.

The refusal to stay put is not arrogance. I need us to understand that clearly. It is honesty. When you accept that you contain more than one calling, you are simply telling the truth about your own design. The arrogance, if we want to locate it, belongs to the idea that a person should be flattened into a single useful shape for the convenience of everybody around them.

Here is what I have watched happen when a woman finally decides to stop asking permission. The first thing that goes is the apology. She quits explaining why she wants what she wants. The shrinking falls away too, that old habit of making her ambition small and easy to swallow so nobody at the table feels threatened. That shift alone changes her face, changes how she walks into rooms. The second thing is that she starts losing the audience that only ever clapped for her smallness, and gaining the audience that was waiting for her to rise. That trade feels frightening before it happens and feels like oxygen afterward.

Oprah gave us a map, whether she meant to or not. It does not say become a billionaire. Most of us will not, and that was never the point. What it says instead is that the number of things you’re allowed to become is not fixed by your first job, your family’s expectations, or the imagination of the block you came up on. You get to keep expanding. You get to be a beginner again at an age when everyone expects you to be settled. You get to disappoint people who preferred the old you, and survive their disappointment, and find that the world did not end.

So I am asking the women reading this to do a hard and holy thing. Go find the part of yourself you folded up and put away. Take it out. Look at it honestly. Maybe it is a business idea you have carried for a decade. Maybe it is a return to school. Maybe it is a whole second act that has nothing to do with who anybody thinks you are. Then ask yourself who told you that you could not, and whether that person had any real authority over your one and only life.

They did not. They never did. The lines on the road were painted by people who were scared to cross them, and you are under no obligation to honor their fear. Drive.

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.

Consider the family cookout. Somebody looks you over, tilts their head, and says with a grin, “Girl, you got real small, you sure you eating?” Everybody laughs. Of course you laugh too, because the only other option is to name the thing sitting underneath that sentence, and naming it would turn a pleasant afternoon into something nobody came prepared to have. So you let it slide. But you felt it. Just a little pinch that had nothing to do with your plate and everything to do with hers.

Long as I have been on this earth, I have watched that same move happen in a hundred rooms. Kitchens. Church pews. Baby showers. Some group chat going off at eleven at night. Break rooms where the coffee is always burnt. And the pattern almost never changes. A remark rarely lands where it pretends to be aiming. Any woman who has truly made peace with her own body does not spend her energy studying yours. Someone settled and safe inside her own marriage does not need to ask, loud, in a full room, why you still not married at your age. That question is a mirror she is holding up to her own reflection and turning toward you so nobody catches where she is really staring.

Take the weight talk first, since it comes wearing so many costumes. Lose a few pounds and suddenly they worried about your health. Gain a few and, would you believe it, they concerned about your health. Either direction becomes an opening, if you pay attention. The body is just the doorway. What walks through it is a woman comparing her reflection to yours and coming up short in her own private math. She would rather hand you that discomfort than sit with it herself. So she wraps it in “I’m just saying this because I love you,” which happens to be the phrase people reach for right before they say something they know good and well is not loving at all.

Marriage remarks cut a specific way, and Black women my age know that cut intimately. “You too picky.” “You gone be alone with all them degrees.” “A man don’t want a woman who make more than him.” Now listen close to who is really speaking there. Too often it is a sister who settled, or who is holding a union together with prayer and duct tape, watching you move through the world unbothered and unowned. Your freedom reads to her like a bill she already paid and cannot get refunded. She is not warning you. She is grieving. And grief, when a person refuses to look at it directly, has a way of coming out sideways and landing on whoever stands closest.

Money brings out something even uglier, because it touches how people were raised and what they believe they deserve. Somebody sees your new car, your little vacation, the closing on your house, and the very first words out of their mouth are not congratulations. They are “must be nice.” Two small words carrying a whole freight train. Or here they come, curious real fast about how you afford all that, as though your success requires an explanation and their own struggle requires none. Watch closely and you will spot a person who cannot celebrate you because your ordinary win is quietly indicting a choice they made, or a fear that kept them small. None of it is about you. It never once was.

Hair. Lord, the hair. We could write volumes on how sisters police each other’s crowns. Go natural and somebody sighs about how you “just gave up.” Wear a wig and here comes the whisper that you “trying to be something you not.” Loc it, relax it, shave it clean, and there is always a mouth ready with an opinion nobody requested. Underneath every last one of those little comments sits a woman who has not yet forgiven herself for her own choices, so she reaches for the closest scalp to referee. Free women do not do that. Anybody at peace with her own head lets you keep yours in peace.

Clothes work the same. “That’s a bold choice.” “I could never wear that.” “Well, it’s different.” Each one is a soft blade, said sweet, meant to make you second guess the mirror you already checked before you left the house. Then there is education, which might sting worst of all, because so many of us fought so hard for those letters behind our names. “You think you better than us now.” “You talk white.” “College made you funny acting.” None of that is you changing. Somebody just feels left behind and would rather trip you than ask themselves why they never got up and ran.

Careers close the whole circle. Land the promotion and here comes “must be who you know.” Start the business and here comes “hope that lasts.” Climb a little and somebody in the family, or somebody who calls herself a friend, cannot manage a clean “I’m proud of you.” Instead they hand you a compliment with a hook buried in the middle of it, hoping you swallow the whole thing before you notice the barb.

Here is the part I really need us to sit with, because it would be too easy to read all this and cast every other woman as the villain while crowning ourselves the eternal target. The truth is harder and more useful than that. We have all been on the throwing end. Every one of us. More than once I have caught myself ready to say something small about another woman’s choice, and when I got honest in that split second, the ugly little feeling was never actually about her. It lived in a place in me that felt uncertain, unfinished, unseen. Insecurity is not a character flaw reserved for the pettiest sister you know. It waits inside all of us for a soft moment to speak.

So what do we do with all this. First thing, we get quiet enough to hear ourselves before we open our mouths. When something rises up about another woman’s body or her ring or her paycheck or her hair, pause and ask the honest question. What in me is uncomfortable right now, and why am I about to make it her problem. That single beat of self examination is where grown women separate from mean girls who simply got older.

When it gets thrown at you, remember this and let it settle all the way down in your bones. Nobody was ever really reporting on you. They were confessing about themselves, whether they knew it or not. You do not have to catch what somebody throws just because their aim was good. Let it fall right on the floor between you, step around it, and keep going exactly as fine as you already were.

Sure, some of that shade is real dislike. But so much more is just fear wearing a smile, hoping you will not notice, praying you will shrink so it can finally feel tall. Do not give it the satisfaction. Stay standing. Stay soft where it counts and unbothered where it matters. And whenever you can manage it, hold a little grace for the ones still fighting a battle inside themselves that has absolutely nothing to do with you.

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.