a theory of safe love

Valentine’s Day has a way of putting love on trial. As if it can be proven with reservations, roses & a carefully cropped photograph where no one looks too closely at the eyes. Every year it asks the same quiet, loaded question: So — where are you at with love?

I’ve been sitting with an answer that arrived without drama … just the steady weight of truth: I have never truly experienced safe, healthy queer love. Not the kind that settles your body instead of activating it. Not the kind that doesn’t demand constant interpretation or emotional vigilance. I’ve known desire. I’ve known intensity. I’ve known love that felt like gravity & disaster in equal measure. But safety? Consistency? A love that doesn’t ask me to translate myself or brace for impact? That is something I’ve had to imagine more than remember.

And when I go looking for mirrors … on screens, in books, in the cultural stories we circulate … it’s bleak. Queer love, especially lesbian love, is so often written as fleeting or doomed or chaotic or unfinished. We get passion, but not peace. We get yearning, but not longevity. We get the buildup, the ache, the stolen glances … and then the story cuts to black. Like maybe it’s for other people. More healed people. Luckier people. It starts to feel like healthy, long-lasting queer love exists as a theory more than a lived reality. Something we advocate for. Something we hope for — but not something we’re encouraged to expect. And if you’ve been hurt, if your history with love is complicated or sharp around the edges, it’s easy to internalize the idea that maybe this kind of love is reserved for people with cleaner pasts & calmer nervous systems. Fewer survival habits clutched too tightly.

And yet … despite all evidence to the contrary … there is a part of me that refuses to let go. She is stubborn. She is foolish in the best way. She believes without proof. She believes in a love that feels like relief. Not dull, not muted — but steady. A love that doesn’t confuse anxiety with passion or volatility with depth. A love that doesn’t require me to earn safety through endurance. A love that doesn’t feel like a test I’m always one misstep away from failing. I believe this love exists because I do not believe harm is the cost of intimacy. I do not believe chaos is a prerequisite for connection. I do not believe we are doomed to reenact what hurt us just because it’s familiar. Here’s the quiet truth that keeps me anchored … while I haven’t known that kind of romantic love yet, I have known love that saved my life.

Platonic love has been the great, unsung devotion of my existence.

Friends who became family. Not through obligation — through choice. Through staying. Through showing up when I was unrecognizable to myself. When my life cracked open. When survival became my only real ambition. This love met me in the aftermath. On the floor. In the long pauses between sentences. In the nights where being alone felt too dangerous. My friends didn’t ask me to hurry my healing. They didn’t disappear when I became inconvenient. They didn’t require me to be charming or productive or easy to love. They answered the phone. They sat in silence. They held space without trying to fix me into something more comfortable. They showed me what consistency looks like when it’s real. What care looks like when it isn’t transactional. What love feels like when it isn’t keeping score. These loves recalibrated me. They raised the bar. They taught my body that love can be grounding instead of destabilizing. That it can feel like home instead of exile. And maybe that’s why I still believe so fiercely in romantic love. Because I’ve already seen proof — real, embodied proof — that love does not have to hurt to be true.

This Valentine’s Day, I’m not interested in measuring my worth against coupledom. I’m not tallying absences. I’m not auditioning my life for legitimacy. I’m choosing to romanticize what is already here. The way morning light enters my room like it knows me. The playlists that feel like private confessions. The rituals that keep me tethered to joy. The people who know my history & love me anyway. I’m romanticizing the patience it has taken to stay. The courage it has taken to believe again. The quiet faith that I am not late to my own life. I don’t believe I’m behind. I don’t believe I’m asking for too much. And I don’t believe that wanting safe, lasting love makes me naïve. Some loves arrive later because they require you to be able to receive them. Some loves take their time because they are built to stay.

And when that love finds me — because I believe it will — I will be ready to meet it as someone who is already full. Already rooted. Already fluent in what love is supposed to feel like.

Until then, I will keep loving my life. My people. My becoming.

And I will keep making room.

notes on being here anyway

Kendra said I need to write more personal essays. I said no. But then I remembered that I genuinely have no choice but to listen to her so like. Here the fuck we go I guess:

The first quarter of 2025 felt like wandering through a fog I didn’t know how to escape. Not a damn thing lined up, everything was heavy and I felt like I was moving through someone else’s life in slow motion. Mornings bled into afternoons where I barely noticed the sunlight or the smell of my apartment. Days stretched long & monotonous and nothing seemed to fit. Very important plans fell through. Opportunities evaporated. I was in a misaligned relationship where the ending left me dazed as all hell, cautious and incredibly reluctant to let anyone near me ever again. And I carried the residue of the life-altering depression I’d fallen into the year before.

Life existed. But it didn’t feel like mine.

I moved through the months observing myself from a distance: muted, reluctant, waiting for something I couldn’t even name. I followed advice I didn’t remotely agree with. I kept moving because the world moves even if you don’t. And in those spaces between, I felt the absence of myself. The part of me that had once created, noticed, wrote for joy was nowhere to be found. They had gone quiet … buried under habit, survival and hesitation. I would watch myself from the other side of my own eyes. Scrolling through my phone, thinking about what I should do, what I should want, what I should become. And I would wonder if I’d ever feel like I belonged inside my own life again.

Fast forward to August & I’m deadass on a plane to start new in New York City. Which really wasn’t much of a surprise for anyone who had spent longer than twelve minutes with me over the last twenty plus years. I didn’t move for fireworks or dramatic reinvention. I moved because the stubborn part of me that had been quiet for too long refused to stay in half-life any longer.

I arrived in a city that didn’t give a fuck whether I sank or swam and I was immediately aware of how much weight I’d been carrying. The streets were crowded and loud as all hell. And for the first time in a very long time, I wanted to be part of that pulse. I just didn’t know how. I walked for hours on end … tracing the lines of buildings & pavement, noticing the way sunlight slanted through skyscraper gaps, how steam rolled out of subway grates, how people passed by like they were moving through their own fogs. I let the chaos remind me that I was finally awake. It was terrifying & necessary, exhilarating & disorienting … and it felt like I had arrived at the place where I could finally meet myself again. It wasn’t until those first weeks — navigating unfamiliar streets, sleeping in a room with no history — that I remembered wanting to create for the sake of creating, noticing for the sake of noticing, making for the sake of feeling. The thrill of starting over hit me like a jolt.

So now it’s 2026. Which feels fake in the way only time can — accelerated, bruised, unmanageable. The world is loud with collapse. Everything feels provisional. There’s no clean slate waiting for me, no promise that staying present will make anything easier. If anything, it will make it harder. Feeling tends to do that. Attention tends to do that. Staying costs something. I don’t think this year will “fix me”. I don’t think it will fix anything. The machinery will keep grinding. People will keep hurting each other, on purpose and by accident. Systems will continue to fail the most vulnerable while pretending that’s just how things are. There will be mornings where dread arrives before coffee, where the news presses its thumb into my chest, where my old instincts — distance, numbness, retreat — start whispering again. I know myself well enough to know that dissociation has always been an option. A tempting one. It’s efficient. It dulls the noise. It makes survival look tidy. But it also erases me in the process. And I don’t want to live above my life anymore, watching it play out like a story happening to someone else.

I want to be inside it. Even when it’s ugly. Especially then.

I want to feel the weight of my body moving through the city, the ache of caring when it would be easier not to, the embarrassment of wanting things I can’t guarantee I’ll get. I want to feel the vulnerability of being seen without armor, without irony, without an exit strategy already planned. I want to make things that don’t rescue me, only reveal me. Work that doesn’t prove anything, but tells the truth as cleanly as I know how. I want relationships that aren’t spectacular but are durable. Where care is practiced quietly. Where love isn’t a performance or a promise made in the heat of the moment … but a series of small, steady choices. Chosen again when it’s boring, chosen again when it’s inconvenient, chosen again when fear would rather rewrite the story & leave first.

The world is terrifying. That part isn’t changing. It’s unstable, unjust and increasingly indifferent to who gets crushed in the process. Staying awake inside it isn’t noble … it’s dangerous. It means accepting that to feel joy, I will also feel grief, fear, rage and longing without any guarantee they will be evenly distributed or neatly resolved. I don’t want to survive by shrinking, by floating, by keeping myself just out of reach of my own life. I don’t want to watch myself diminish in real time and call it resilience. I’ve done that already. It kept me alive. It also cost me years.

If this world is built to exhaust me into silence, then I will live loudly, visibly and without permission until it breaks its teeth on my staying.

we don’t survive off being right.

It’s been a minute since we’ve done this, and there’s … so much I gotta tell you. Some updates loud enough to laugh about, others too tender to rush. Life has been moving, in that quiet but decisive way where you look up & realize you’re standing somewhere brand new. I’ve been adjusting. Building. Learning how to belong to my days again. Paying attention to what feels worth holding & what needs more time. Yadda yadda. We’ll get into that one of these days because today we’re getting into something that’s been sitting on my chest for a few weeks now.

Someone asked me a question recently that didn’t feel academic or hypothetical. It wasn’t asked to spark debate. It felt real in the way things do when you’re asking because you’re trying to live honestly & not lose yourself in the process. It went a little like this: How do we keep standing for something in a social & political climate that shows no mercy, gives no grace and seems invested in grinding people down? How do we keep showing up? Not out of obligation or panic … but with intention?

And I can’t even front … I surprised my damn self with how clear my answer felt.

While I (like most) am mad tired across the board of the bullshit we gotta deal with on the daily, I’ve learned how to name the biggest, most prevalent frustration underneath all of it. What I’m tired of is watching our energy get wasted. I’m tired of seeing care get flattened into content. Of watching people pour everything they have into arguments that don’t build anything, don’t protect anyone, don’t feel solid afterward. There’s a difference between being exhausted & being misdirected, and I think we confuse the two all the time. I don’t feel drained by resistance. I feel protective of it.

Politics, for me, has never been something I clock into every four years or whenever something especially horrifying happens. It’s always been closer than that. It lives in my day-to-day. In who I trust. In who I don’t. In who I make space for & who I move through the world with. It lives in the rooms I enter & the rooms I build when the existing ones weren’t made with me in mind. And being a black lesbian sharpens all of this in a way that’s hard to describe unless you live it. My relationship to politics has never been optional. There is no neutral setting. No off-season. No version of my life where the stakes disappear. My body enters rooms already politicized. My love does too. The way I move through the world, who I desire, who I protect, who I build with … all of it is read, categorized, judged, regulated. I don’t have the luxury of believing that change happens primarily through debates with strangers or perfectly worded posts that disappear down the timeline in twelve hours. I’ve watched too many people burn themselves out trying to be understood by systems & audiences that were never invested in their safety to begin with. I’ve learned that visibility without protection is not progress. Attention without infrastructure is a trap.

What keeps us alive — literally and historically — has always been community that knows how to move resources, not just language. People who understand that arguing with a stranger online about morality means very little if your neighbor can’t eat, if your friend can’t pay rent, if the people you love are one emergency away from free-fall. We don’t survive off being right. We survive off being connected.

For us, community has never been optional or abstract. It’s how we’ve passed information when institutions shut us out. How we’ve created safety when the state refused to. How we’ve loved each other out loud when the world tried to legislate us into silence. Mutual aid isn’t a trend … it’s inheritance. It’s memory. It’s strategy. And every ounce of energy we spend chasing strangers is energy we don’t spend fortifying the people who already have our backs. That’s why I keep choosing proximity. That’s why I keep choosing to invest where the return isn’t applause, but stability. Where the work looks like groceries, job leads, childcare, housing, rides, healing, rest. Where politics stops being theoretical & starts being practical again. History has made it very clear that people like me don’t get the luxury of disengagement. So when I talk about community, I’m not being idealistic. I’m being very very specific.

I’m talking about the reason I’m still here.

Kitchens. Living rooms. Group chats. Chosen family. The quiet intelligence of people who know the system is fucking violent & horrific & unstable and still figure out how to care for one another anyway. I understand the work that needs to be done because I live inside its unfinished business. There are atrocities happening every single day. Not in some distant, abstract sense … but in real time, to real bodies. Wars funded and televised & then quietly ignored once they stop trending. Children being buried before they’ve had a chance to grow into themselves. Entire populations starved, displaced, surveilled, policed, erased … often with the full blessing of governments that expect our silence in return. Laws being written and rewritten to make certain lives smaller, harder, more dangerous to live out loud. None of this is subtle. None of this is accidental. And pretending it’s just “how things are” is its own kind of violence.

I know this. You know this. We don’t need to catalogue everything for it to be real.

And I also know that staring directly at the scale of it, all the time, will hollow you out if you let it. Not because you don’t care, but because no one is meant to carry all of that alone. And that’s not failure … that’s just human limitation.

Which is why I keep coming back to the same place.

Community isn’t just a vibe to me. It’s where accountability actually lives. Not the public-shaming, cancellation-adjacent kind, but the kind where people know you well enough to challenge you & love you in the same breath. It’s where resources circulate instead of stagnate. Where care becomes habitual instead of exceptional. It’s people feeding each other, hiring each other, showing up for court dates and art shows and hospital visits. I’ve watched how much power we lose when we scatter ourselves chasing attention, consensus, or validation from people who are deeply committed to misunderstanding us. I’ve also watched how much power we gain when we stop chasing consensus & start strengthening the bonds that already exist. When we choose depth over scale. Proximity over performance. When we stop asking, how do I prove I care? and start asking, who am I actually responsible to?

So when I ask myself how we keep going — how we keep standing for something without burning ourselves hollow — the answer wasn’t dramatic. It isn’t louder arguments or better language or perfectly calibrated opinions.

It’s smaller than that.

Closer.

It’s choosing who I’m responsible to.

It’s tending to the relationships that can actually hold weight when the world feels unbearable.

I don’t believe the future is built by people who win every argument. I think it’s built by people who keep showing up for each other when things are bleak and unfair and unresolved. By people who understand that survival is collaborative. That care is active. That community is not a fallback plan — it is the plan.

My fight may never be over. I’ve made peace with that. What matters to me now is how I fight — and who I fight alongside. I fight in rooms where people know my name, my history, my limits. I fight in kitchens and group chats and living rooms, in relationships that stretch me and steady me at the same time. I fight with people who know the world is on fire & still decide to set the table anyway.

If you’re here, reading this, you’re probably already doing this work in your own way. Building something quiet. Keeping someone steady. Staying when it would be easier to bounce.

That matters more than you’ve been told.

Thank you.

y'all ... i cannot stand the 'let them' theory

This … is a truth I’ve been sitting on for way too long and I’m finally ready to say it out loud.

I fucking hate the “let them” theory.

There. I said it.

Some of y’all might think I’m just being a bitter hater (and sometimes I am). But this ain’t that. This is righteous.

Let me start by saying this … I agree with the you can’t control anyone but yourself aspect. You can’t force someone to grow faster, love you better or magically fix their bad habits overnight. Their path is theirs. Fine. But here’s the line they blur: releasing control is not the same thing as removing accountability. I can respect your autonomy and still name the ways your choices affect me. I can “let you” live your life and still refuse to absorb the fallout of your mess. The second we start calling silence and self-erasure “support,” we’re no longer talking about boundaries — we’re talking about abandonment of self.

“Let them” confuses boundaries with not giving a fuck. Healthy boundaries are active … you say the thing, you stand on it, you respect yourself in the process. “Let them” is basically a one-way to Avoidance-ville (I hate it there), where you play it cool while quietly rotting inside. That’s not emotional maturity. That’s emotional novocaine. And novocaine wears off ugly. People love to romanticize shutting up like it’s wisdom, but most of the time, it’s just handing someone permission to keep crossing your line. Again and again and again. And yeah — this applies to your best friend, your partner, your boss, etc. Life is messy. Stick around anyone long enough and they’re gonna fuck up — that’s part of being human. But that doesn’t mean everything should just be left alone. The “let them” theory skips over repair, growth and the magic of uncomfortable-but-worth-it conversations. You’re not powerless. You can say, “that hurt,” or “I need this to change,” without your whole world crumbling. Stop acting like a side character in your own damn life.

Here’s the real truth: detachment ≠ peace. Most of the time, detachment is just repression with better branding. Real peace is knowing you showed up fully — messy feelings, clear boundaries, all of it. Pretending you don’t care isn’t zen. It’s completely deleting parts of yourself.

Protect your peace? Always. But peace isn’t always quiet. Sometimes it’s saying, “hey, that was weird as shit … don’t do that again.”

Because “let them” doesn’t make you unbothered.

It makes you complicit while someone drags their muddy shoes across everything you swore you’d protect.

black spirituality & the audacity of white interpretation

At some point during the unraveling of a relationship with a well-intentioned white woman, she told me I used spirituality as a bandaid.

I damn near choked.  

Not because she was wrong about me being in pain … I was. But because the words oozed a cheap, unearned certainty. The kind brewed in the sterile comfort of distance. As if her commentary on my survival were anything more than voyeurism dressed up as wisdom. I didn’t find spirituality. I didn’t discover it like some hidden gem in a self-help book. It didn’t show up during a rebrand or a neatly packaged healing journey.

I was raised in it.  

I was prayed over before I knew what prayer was. My grandmother wiped down door frames with Florida Water like it was holy work … because it was. My mother spoke in tongues at night and didn’t always remember it in the morning. I had dreams that came to fruition before I even understood what they meant. This is the lineage I carry in my mouth, my bones, my blood. This is how I survived when therapy wasn’t accessible, when grief was too loud, when I didn’t want to be alive & no one picked up the phone. This is what held me when the world didn’t.  

And it’s what’s held so many of us.

Because let’s be so fuckin real … Black folks haven’t always had the privilege of professional help. Therapy wasn’t offered, encouraged, or even safe for many of our elders. Sometimes it still isn’t. But we had something else. We had altars in the kitchen. Midnight prayers that shook the walls. Psalms tucked into wallets like tiny shields. Chants passed down like heirlooms. Baths that weren’t just about getting clean … but about staying whole.  

This isn’t a replacement for healing. It is healing.  

So let me be very clear for anyone who thinks they have the language or license to critique how Black people cope, connect, or call on the divine:  

Don’t you ever — in your life — look at a Black person and call their spirituality a “bandaid.” 

Not when it’s the very thing that’s kept us breathing.

Not when mental health care is still a luxury.

Not when our great-grandmothers healed whole families with nothing but scripture, herbs, and pure, unrelenting instinct.

What we practice comes from necessity. From genius. From communion. And if you’ve only known spirituality as an accessory, you don’t get to critique the ways we survive. This is for the ones who light incense and pray with their whole chest. Who throw water on the ground before they leave the house. Who know spiritual hygiene is just as vital as the body’s. Who feel their way through the dark because someone on the other side whispered, “Keep going.”

If you’re Black and spiritual, know this:  

You don’t need anyone’s permission to stand in that power.  

It belongs to you.

And it always has.Confidence doesn’t always arrive with a bold entrance. Sometimes, it builds quietly, step by step, as we show up for ourselves day after day. It grows when we choose to try, even when we’re unsure of the outcome. Every time you take action despite self-doubt, you reinforce the belief that you’re capable. Confidence isn’t about having all the answers — it’s about trusting that you can figure it out along the way.

The key to making things happen isn’t waiting for the perfect moment; it’s starting with what you have, where you are. Big goals can feel overwhelming when viewed all at once, but momentum builds through small, consistent action. Whether you’re working toward a personal milestone or a professional dream, progress comes from showing up — not perfectly, but persistently. Action creates clarity, and over time, those steps forward add up to something real.

You don’t need to be fearless to reach your goals, you just need to be willing. Willing to try, willing to learn, and willing to believe that you’re capable of more than you know. The road may not always be smooth, but growth rarely is. What matters most is that you keep going, keep learning, and keep believing in the version of yourself you’re becoming.