The woman says she is the greatest, and the hardware backs the claim. Flint raised her, she owns two Olympic gold medals, and undisputed status has been hers across three weight classes. Still, the reaction from certain corners is not applause. It is a raised eyebrow paired with a quiet wish that she would please tone it down. The skill draws no real argument. What bothers people is her mouth, her strut, her flat refusal to shrink so the rest of the room can breathe a little easier.

Sit with that a second.

I have watched this same movie play out my entire life. A sister accomplishes something rare, and almost on cue the talk drifts off her achievement and onto her manner. Too aggressive, they say. A little too much. Could have phrased it nicer. Where is the humility. Why won’t she carry herself like the athlete who smiles sweet, thanks the Lord, and never lets you catch her wanting it. That comparison gives the whole thing away. The demand was never really about greatness. It was about obedience.

We hand our daughters a script before they can spell. Be excellent, but never brag on it. Win, and then apologize for having wanted the win so badly. Take up space, then quickly make yourself small enough that nobody in the room feels the least bit threatened. A grown professional who has bled for every belt gets treated like a girl who forgot her manners at Sunday dinner. And the folks doing the correcting rarely notice they are begging her to be worse at the very confidence that turned her into a champion.

Here is what I keep circling back to. A whole spectrum of human personality exists, yet we behave as though our Sistas only get to live on the sweet, soft, agreeable end of it. A man can be cocky and we call it charisma. He talks reckless and we praise him as a competitor with fire in his belly. Let a woman do the identical thing and suddenly she needs a talking to about class. That double standard is old, it is exhausting, and Claressa did not invent it. Playing along simply is not in her, and the refusal makes certain folks itch.

Let me be honest now. Everything Claressa says does not get a co-sign from me. A few of her interviews had me shaking my head at the television, muttering baby, why. Some of it lands messy. A couple of those beefs, I would have walked a different road entirely. She has growing left. Join the club. Not one of us out here has arrived.

Watch this next part closely, because this is where plenty of us lose the plot.

Disagreeing with a Sista is not the same as degrading her. I can side eye a comment and still refuse to drag anybody’s upbringing into the conversation. I can wish a different word had been picked without ever questioning whether the woman is feminine enough or ladylike enough for somebody’s approval. Her flaws do not make her smaller. They make her human, same as the rest of us who stumbled and kept moving anyway. A woman who laced up gloves, or picked up a pen, or stretched a thin check across a long month, she carries dents. Everybody worth anything does.

Here is where it goes wrong. Somebody says she needs to act right, harmless enough on its face. But wait a beat. Soon that same person is throwing Flint in her face, snickering at her voice, floating the idea that no real lady would carry on this way. That is not feedback anymore. That is disrespect wearing a nicer coat. And our Black women eat it first, on account of us always ending up at the bottom whenever the ugliness starts sliding down.

Flint made her. That city keeps getting used as an insult in these conversations, as though a hard place cannot produce a queen. I reject that notion clean and simple. The grit some people criticize is the identical grit that carried her off those streets and onto an Olympic podium not once but twice. You cannot cherish the medals while despising the hunger that won them. Choose one.

This is the beating heart of the entire matter, so hear me plainly. Sistas do not have to be perfect before we decide they are worth defending. Nobody waits until a sister has scrubbed herself into somebody’s tidy fantasy of grace before saying let her be. We stand up for her messy, mid growth, still learning, still loud. And we do it precisely because the world has never once demanded perfection from the men it showers with love, and we are finished accepting a harsher rule for our own.

Consider who actually profits when we pour our energy into policing each other. Not us. It is never us. While we bicker over whether Claressa came off too brash in a post fight interview, the systems that have historically undervalued women’s boxing and underpaid many of its stars keep humming along, untouched. The respectability trap works exactly like this by design. It keeps us busy grading one another on manners while the real fight goes unfought.

I am not asking anybody to worship her. Worship belongs somewhere higher. What I am asking for is something smaller and far harder, which is the plain decency of letting a person be fully human without making her audition for her own dignity. A woman can be brilliant and abrasive in a single afternoon, then dead right about her talent and flat wrong about her tone inside the very same breath. Both truths fit within one body, because that is simply how anybody actually moves through a life.

Next time you catch yourself about to correct a sister into somebody’s picture of a proper lady, pause and ask who painted that picture, and who it was ever meant to serve. I promise you it was not drawn with her in view. It was not drawn with any of us in view.

Let the champion talk her talk. That microphone got paid for in sweat and busted knuckles. Brash is her right, earned in full. Flawed too, if that is who she happens to be on a given day. And gloriously, unapologetically herself, without some committee signing off first. When the pile on begins, and it always begins, plant your feet on her side. Not because she is spotless. Because she is ours.

So the question is not really about Claressa at all. It is about whether we protect our own before the world says they have earned it. I already know where I stand. The only thing left is where you land.

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.

She turned 68 today. Sixty-eight, that is. Been showing up on screen most of my life and she still walks into a shot and the whole thing organizes itself around her. Remember Tina. She didn’t play her. She disappeared and left Tina standing there. Or Ramonda in Wakanda, back straight, carrying grief and a whole country at once, that same tired muscle I watched my own mama use stretching one check across a month of bills.

Now notice what happens when people discuss her today. The chatter rarely lands on the work. It circles her face instead. How does she do it. What is her secret. She does not look a day over 40, folks swear. Sounds like praise. Sit with it a second though and you hear the real question humming under all of it. How has she managed to dodge the crime of getting older.

That part right there is what gets me.

We have taken the natural arithmetic of a life and turned it into something a woman is supposed to outrun. A birthday becomes a threat. Silver coming in at the temple becomes a confession. And the highest honor we can hand a grown woman, apparently, is to swear up and down that she has somehow cheated the calendar. Say it plain and hear how strange it lands. We praise her most for looking like she has not lived the years she actually lived.

Bassett herself has pushed back against the whole fixation. Over time she has made it known, in her own steady way, that age is not something she intends to let define or limit her. She takes care of herself, but she has also spoken about the value of staying healthy, vital and present as the years move forward. That posture matters more than she probably knows. When a woman that visible refuses the panic, she loosens the collar around the rest of us.

Here is a thing my aunties never got to say out loud. The pressure lands different on us.

Sistas have been handed a peculiar inheritance. Black don’t crack, folks say, half pride and half prophecy, and there is real love inside it. Our grandmothers kept smooth skin deep into their 70s and we wear that like a family jewel. But flip the coin. If we are expected to stay forever unbothered and forever unlined, then showing our years starts to feel like a personal failure, like we let the side down somehow. A wrinkle turns into evidence that you slipped. That you did not moisturize enough, pray enough, hold it all together enough.

I have watched women I love shrink away from cameras. Sistas who ran departments and raised children and buried parents and walked through more storms than they ever advertised, suddenly skittish about one photo because the flash caught the truth of 60 years sitting on their neck. Somebody trained them to read their own faces as proof of a mistake. That training did not fall out of the sky.

Turn on a television. Scroll for 10 minutes. The message barely shifts. Youth is the currency, and a woman past a certain point had best convert every last dollar into serums and procedures and whatever a good filter can fake. Men get to ripen into something distinguished. Silver reads as wisdom on them, gravitas, a chair at the head of the table. Let a sister go gray and the whispers start about whether she has quietly given up.

Angela never got that memo, or she read it and set it right back down.

What she offers, without ever climbing on a soapbox about it, is the radical little notion that a grown woman gets to look grown. She shows up with presence where an apology is expected. The years are on her, sure enough, and she carries them like somebody who earned each one and would not trade a single chapter to pass for a stranger in her own skin.

Think about what that permission would do for the girls watching.

A 12 year old is soaking up every signal we throw off about what a female life is worth as it moves through time. If everything she sees insists that a woman peaks around 22 and spends the rest of her days in slow, desperate retreat, what exactly are we preparing her for? Terror. A lifetime of it. We would be handing that child a countdown clock and calling it beauty advice.

Now flip to the other lesson. Picture her instead watching grown women glide into their 50s and 60s still creating, running a room the way they always ran one, turning heads for reasons that have nothing to do with pretending. Bassett hands her that vision. So do the Black women in our own families who never saw a red carpet in their lives yet taught the identical class with nothing but their ordinary days.

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. Nobody has to abandon looking good. Care for your temple. Wear the bold lip, keep the gym appointment, do the small rituals that make you feel like yourself in the mirror. Vanity is human and Lord knows I have my own. This is no scolding aimed at any sister who colors the gray or swears by her serum.

The trouble was never the mirror. The trouble is the dread underneath it, that quiet belief that a woman’s clock is her enemy and every visible year is a defeat she owes the whole world an apology for.

So maybe we drop it. Instead of promising a sister she doesn’t look her age, like her actual years were some embarrassment we’ve agreed to be polite about, we could reach for something that costs a little more. Tell her she looks like she has lived. Been through the fire and she is still here, still upright. We could say her face holds a whole story worth reading slow. We could let looking 68 be a perfectly fine thing to look, no qualifier bolted on, no little clause tucked underneath about how she almost got away with it.

Sistas deserve to grow old the way the rest of the world takes for granted. Out loud. On purpose. With gray hair and laugh lines and the deep, earned satisfaction of somebody who is not fleeing a single day she was given.

Angela Bassett is getting older. Every last one of us is too, if we are lucky enough. That is not the tragedy we keep getting told to treat it as. The real loss would be reaching those good, ripe years and still believing we had to hide them, still apologizing for the sin of staying alive long enough to change.

So let her ripen. Let your mother do the same. Let yourself do it too, right out in the open, unafraid. And the next time somebody swears a woman has not aged a day, ask them gently why on earth we ever decided that was the finest thing we could think to say.

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.

We handed over our names. Suddenly you were only somebody’s mama. Just the ride. The name they scribbled on the emergency card at school. Remember the girl who painted on Sunday afternoons and danced till her feet gave out, the one with loud opinions on everything from Coltrane to whatever nonsense the city council was pushing through? That girl folded herself down small enough to fit inside a diaper bag. And nobody clapped for that disappearing act, seeing as the world had already decided this was simply the tab a good woman ran up for having babies.

Pull up a chair on that porch with me a minute, since I have lived every bit of this myself.

Loving your kids fierce is holy work, and nobody in this room needs me lecturing them about sacrifice. We come from women who handed over everything they had and were told to be grateful for the scraps. Our grandmothers made dignity out of whatever was left over in the scrap basket. They fed a whole house on faith and neckbones. That inheritance is real, it lives in us, and I would never talk down on it. Still, somewhere the message got twisted around. Real devotion turned into pure self erasure, and we handed that lie straight down to our daughters, teaching them a mama with dreams of her own must be a selfish one.

None of that is true.

Took me years to swallow this next part. Your child does not actually need every part of you surrendered to motherhood. What that child needs is a whole, breathing person out here living a full one. When a little one watches her mama chase a passion, laugh with friends, read poetry in the bath, that kid absorbs something no lecture could ever teach. Being grown, she discovers, does not mean being buried. Quietly, permission to become takes root in her.

We all know a sista who disappeared clean into that household. Every conversation with her loops straight to the young’uns. What the teacher said about somebody’s grades. Which child broke out in hives from a new detergent. Who has practice on Tuesday and who outgrew their cleats again. Try asking how she herself is doing, and she cuts her eyes at you like the question came out in Portuguese. Girl, when did you last make anything with your two hands? Chances are she cannot even tell you. Make no mistake, she would walk through fire for those little ones. Truth is, she lost track of the lady she used to be, plain and simple. There was a time her name meant plenty in a room where nobody knew her from Eve. Ask what she has been reading lately, or the last record that kept her up past midnight, and she comes up empty, since whoever used to rattle those answers off got boxed up and set on a high shelf ages ago.

That kind of forgetting is not free. Our children wind up footing part of the bill for it.

A kid raised to believe he is his mama’s entire reason for breathing carries a strange weight. He becomes the emotional center of gravity for a grown adult, which is far too heavy for small shoulders. Later, that same boy can struggle to leave the nest, wracked with guilt for wanting a life. Some of us are watching it happen right now with our young adults, wondering why they cannot cut the cord, never realizing we tied the knot ourselves.

Now let me talk about the parts of you the world tries to bury first.

Your sensuality did not evaporate in the delivery room. You are still a grown woman who deserves to feel desire, to wear the dress, to be touched like you matter beyond the labor of caretaking. Somewhere a lie circulates that mamas should be soft, sexless, endlessly available saints in house slippers. Reject it. When your partner only ever clocks the caregiver and never once the lover, he is missing the bigger part of who you are. You deserve a lot better than getting loved in pieces.

Friendships matter too. Those women who knew you way back before the stretch marks, who still remember exactly how you laughed in college, the ones who will look you dead in your face and tell you the truth when your life is a hot mess, that circle right there is oxygen. Do not let it get smothered under carpools, homework, and everybody’s schedule but your own. Text the sistas. Show up for the girls’ trip. Sit somewhere loud and grown and cackle until the knot in your chest loosens.

And your ambition? Please. That degree, that business idea scribbled on a napkin, that novel half finished in a drawer, none of it died when you gave birth. Having career goals does not mean you are choosing ambition over your kids. A daughter watching her mama go build something learns more from that than from anything you could ever sit her down and preach. All the while she is taking notes on how you chase a life of your own. That lands a lot harder than any stack of motivational speeches ever will.

Now hold on, I can already hear the pushback, on account of it lands in my lap most every time I bring this up. Some sista out there is shaking her head at the screen right now, thinking must be nice for you, thinking a bunch of us just do not have that kind of margin. I mean the single mamas pulling double shifts. Grandmothers who find themselves raising grandbabies all over again in their sixties. Sistas already stretched thinner than a communion wafer with no relief in sight. I see every one of you, and I am not up here preaching some fantasy of spa days and self care most folks cannot afford.

What I am asking costs nothing but permission.

You are allowed to keep a sliver of yourself sacred. Fifteen minutes with a book. One long phone call with an old friend. A song that drops you straight into who you used to be before the world started stacking its expectations on your back. None of that is indulgent. Remembering yourself in small ways is how you survive, and it makes you easier to be around for the very kids you would lay down your life for. Nobody thrives beside a martyr, least of all the small people studying how you treat yourself.

Black mothers especially have been fed a poisonous script. Be everything. Need nothing. Bleed quietly and call it love. That script got written by a culture that has always demanded our labor while ignoring our humanity, and it is long past time we tore it up.

Your young ones may not remember whether you made it to every last practice. What they will also remember is the woman they experienced at home. They can feel the difference between a house with a living, laughing lady in it and one where the lights stay on but she checked out years back, running on fumes and old resentment. A joyful parent tends to raise little ones who grow up believing joy is on the menu for them too.

So take up space again. Reclaim the name that existed before anyone called you mommy. Pick the hobby back up, dust it off, and do it badly if you must, since joy does not require excellence. Call the friend. Book the class. Say those dreams out loud in the car, in the mirror, wherever you are, and keep on saying them until they quit sounding like a confession.

Here is the part they always leave out. You can pour into your family like it is breathing and still keep a firm grip on who you are underneath all of it. There is plenty of room in one heart for the two. The finest mothering I have witnessed came from a mother who flat refused to vanish, the kind who taught her family just by living out loud that a person gets to love hard and stay stubbornly, fully herself.

Go find her again, and know she has been waiting.

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.

There is a particular grief in helping clean out a loved one’s home and finding the finest belongings untouched. Tags still hanging off the blouse she bought for a trip she kept postponing. Candles burned down maybe half an inch, then set aside for some rainy day that never actually came. A scarf folded up so many years the creases would not fall out anymore. You stand there holding evidence of a woman who believed the reward was always somewhere up ahead, never here, never now, never on a plain Tuesday when nothing in particular was happening.

Somewhere along the way we absorbed a strange arithmetic. Beauty gets rationed. Pleasure has to be earned through suffering first, then doled out in tiny approved portions. The soft robe stays in the drawer until company comes. That lipstick that makes you feel like yourself waits for an event worthy of it. And the event, being imaginary, tends not to show up.

Sistas, I want to talk plainly about who taught us this.

A whole lot of us grew up watching women hold everything together with two hands and no applause. They gave and gave and rarely kept a single lovely thing for themselves without feeling guilty about it. So we learned that our own comfort was optional, that pleasure was frivolous, that a woman who lavishes nice things on herself might be vain or selfish or getting above her station. That lesson sank into the bone. Now here we are, grown, financially able to buy the perfume, and still spritzing it once a season like it might run out before the apocalypse.

It will not run out. And if it does, they make more.

The dishes are the part that undoes me most. Consider how many family dinners passed on ordinary stoneware because the beautiful ones were saved for a company that stopped visiting years ago. Consider the birthdays, the plain Sunday suppers, the random weeknight your child said something so funny you nearly choked on your food. Those were the occasions. Those were the whole point of the thing. There was never going to be a fancier version of your one wild life waiting in the wings.

My friend Denise lost her husband young. After the funeral she told me she kept opening cabinets and finding items the two of them had been saving. A bottle of fine bourbon waited for an anniversary that never got old enough. Wine glasses sat boxed in their cardboard. She poured herself a drink in one of those glasses that night and cried, not only from missing him but from the sheer waste of it, all that postponed sweetness gathering dust while they ate off paper towels on the couch and told themselves the real living started later.

Later is a con. It has been picking our pockets our whole lives.

I made a decision a while back that shifted something in me, small but real. I started using the beautiful stuff. Wore the good earrings to the grocery store. Lit the pricey candle while doing nothing more remarkable than folding laundry and watching a rerun. Ate breakfast off the rosebud plate on a random Wednesday, just me, just coffee, just the pleasure of a morning that belonged to nobody else. Nothing terrible happened. The plate did not shatter under the weight of an unearned meal. The wax did not judge me. I simply felt, for a moment, like a person worth the nice version of things.

For generations, many Black women have lived under expectations to be strong, self-reliant, nurturing, and willing to put everybody else’s needs ahead of their own. We are told to hold on, to make a way, to sacrifice now for a payoff that may or may not materialize down the road. Endurance like that keeps families standing and communities alive, and I would never wave it off. But somewhere in all that holding on, we quietly agreed to postpone our own joy, as though joy were a luxury tax we could not yet afford. That agreement is overdue for revisiting.

Joy is not the prize at the finish line. It is the fuel. Think of it as the thing that keeps a body upright through the long haul, and hoarding it does not preserve it. Hoarding it just leaves you tired and unadorned in a house full of pretty untouched objects.

So burn the candle. Wear the dress out even if the reason is merely Thursday. Break out the china for the grandbabies and let them eat their macaroni off the plates edged in gold, and if one gets chipped, so be it. A chip is proof the thing got loved instead of entombed. Spray the perfume on a walk to your mailbox. Put on the silk. Drink the fine bourbon while the person you cherish is still across the table to clink glasses with you.

Sistas, the someday you keep waiting for is a mirage that recedes as you approach it. It always will. The good moment is not en route. It is the one you are standing in, unnoticed, plain and quietly perfect, right this second with the light coming through the kitchen window and the coffee going cold in your hand.

Miss Everlyn stays on my mind, her and that locked cabinet both. This was the woman who showed me how to season a pot and stand up straight and talk back to people who tried to make me small. She gave me plenty. But she could not manage to eat one regular dinner off her own nice china, and that has stuck with me more than most of what she meant to teach. So I went and bought my own set. I actually use mine. Those dishes have held more birthday cake and weeknight spaghetti in two years than hers held in thirty behind that cabinet glass. Setting the table, I feel her close by. Part of me hopes she approves. Part of me wishes somebody had told her all this back when she still had time to do something about it.

Stop saving your best self for a stranger called Someday. He never shows. And if he somehow did, you would just cook up one more excuse to keep him standing at the door.

Live now. Pour the wine. Wear the good coat. You are the special occasion you have been dressing up for all along.

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.

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.