There are some things I’ve known since before I had words for them.

Like what it means to search for yourself in a world that doesn’t always hold up a mirror.

I remember holding dolls in my hands and flipping them over, looking for a face that looked like mine. Brown skin. Wide nose. Full lips. A full Black girl face.

My mama, Marcia, made sure I had that.

One Christmas, she drove all the way to Grand Rapids just to find me a Black Cabbage Patch doll. And listen, folks weren’t just hopping on the highway for anything back then. Lansing to Grand Rapids felt like a trip-trip. Gas money mattered. Time mattered. Effort mattered.

That was a big deal. That was everything.

She wanted me to see myself and love what I saw.

I didn’t realize it then, but my mama was giving me a mirror before I knew I needed one.

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I thought about that while watching Black Barbie: A Documentary on Netflix. The documentary was directed by Lagueria Davis and follows the history of the first Black Barbie, the women who helped make her possible, and the question that started with Davis’ aunt, Beulah Mae Mitchell: why couldn’t Barbie look like her? The film also honors women like Kitty Black Perkins, who designed the first Black Barbie, and Stacey McBride-Irby, who helped shape Barbie’s evolution after that.

Watching it took me right back to that doll.

Because representation isn’t a small thing. It’s easy for people to dismiss it when they’ve always had it. When every aisle, every shelf, every story, every toy box has already made room for you, you might not understand what it does to a child to finally see something that looks like her and feel her spirit say, there I am.

That’s why the doll mattered.

A Black doll in my hands meant somebody had imagined a little girl like me worthy of being held, dressed, carried, cherished, and chosen. It meant beauty could have my features. It meant my face wasn’t something to grow out of, explain away, or shrink down. It meant I could practice loving myself before I had language for what the world might try to teach me otherwise.

Because when we don’t see ourselves, we learn something too.

We learn who gets centered. Who gets fantasy. Who gets softness. Who gets adventure. Who gets to be the main character, the bride, the mother, the dreamer, the one with options. We learn what the world expects us to accept. We learn where we’re supposed to stand.

And before a child can argue with absence, she often absorbs it.

That’s why my mama’s effort matters to me so much now. She didn’t just buy me a doll. She went out of her way to interrupt absence. She made sure that in my own house, in my own hands, I had proof that a Black girl face belonged in the story.

That same lesson followed me from dolls to books.

Our bookshelves at home were filled with stories that looked like me. My parents made sure of it. I still remember being seven years old, checking Roots out of the school library. Yes, that Roots by Alex Haley. My teacher gently tried to steer me toward something else, something lighter maybe, but I was set.

I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but I knew I needed it.

So I took that book home and read it cover to cover.

I didn’t understand every detail, but I felt it. Sometimes, that’s enough.

That little girl with a book too heavy for her hands still stays with me. Reaching for a story before she fully understood what it would ask of her. Searching for language, history, herself inside the pages.

But even then, I knew when something mattered.

That same thread, that need to find myself in the story, runs through my life even now. It’s what led me to that bookstore back in 2017.

I walked in excited and headed straight for the section labeled Women of Color. And baybee, when I tell you I found dust and disappointment. The books I loved weren’t there. The writers I admired were missing. It felt like someone had thrown together a few titles just to say they did.

I remember standing there with that old familiar feeling, the one Black women know too well, when you realize a room has made a little space for you, but hasn’t truly imagined you there.

I left angry.

More than that, I left with an idea.

Over dinner that night, I said what I already knew: “I could build something better than that.”

A space where Black women could walk in and feel like the whole place was holding them. Where the stories weren’t tucked away in the corner, but standing proud in the center. Where our joy, grief, faith, brilliance, softness, beauty, questions, and becoming all had room.

And that’s how Socialight Society began.

With a feeling.

With a knowing.

I played with the name that night. SOC relating to people. LIGHT because we’re called to be light. Together, it felt like a place. A place for books, yes, and for the kind of belonging I’d been reaching for since childhood.

Now I can see it clearly. The little girl with the Black doll and the little girl checking out Roots were both already becoming the woman who would build Socialight Society.

I was learning early that representation isn’t decoration. It’s formation.

It shapes what we believe is possible. It teaches us what kind of beauty is worth protecting. It helps us understand that seeing ourselves clearly is part of becoming ourselves fully.

What started as a bookstore has become something bigger than shelves.

We’re still sharing stories. Still centering Black women. Still creating places where somebody’s daughter can walk in and recognize herself fully.

I think again about my mother driving to Grand Rapids for that doll. I wonder if she knew how much it would matter. I wonder if she knew she wasn’t just buying a toy, but offering me a mirror. I wonder if she knew that one day I’d spend my life trying to create mirrors for other Black women too.

Perhaps that’s how becoming works.

One person shows you that you’re worth seeing, and then you spend your life making sure somebody else knows it too.

Sometimes I think about that little girl sitting in the library with a book too heavy for her hands, searching for herself inside the pages.

I think she’d understand exactly what we’re building now.

A place where Black women are seen fully.

Some posts throughout this space may include affiliate links to books, products, and resources I genuinely love. Purchases made through those links help support Socialight Society, my love letter to Black women, storytelling, gathering, and the work of creating spaces where we can be seen fully.

And thank you, always, for being here.

Black women know how to save things. Recipes written on scraps of paper. Birthday cards tucked into Bibles. Photographs stashed inside old shoeboxes. Church programs from funerals twenty years ago. Half-used jars of grease near the stove. Stories passed around kitchen tables so many times they start sounding like scripture.

And of course, leftovers.

Baby, take a plate home.

One of the holiest phrases in the Black household canon.

And it’s not because anybody thinks you’re starving or thinks you can’t feed yourself. But love has always sounded like making sure people leave nourished. Love sounds like aluminum foil crinkling over warm dishes. Like somebody insisting you take more after you’ve already said “no thank you,” twice. Like aunties packing food into mismatched containers while conversations continue in the background.

We understand something the world forgets all the time:

good things need to be preserved.

Not just food.

Joy too.

Especially joy.

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I’ve been saving little things for a junk journal I haven’t started yet.

Movie ticket stubs. Receipts. Notes. A Trader Joe’s bag that once held flowers bought for me by a friend.

Tiny evidence that I was here.
That something beautiful happened.
That somebody loved me gently for a moment.

None of it looks important sitting by itself. Together though, it starts to feel like an archive of tenderness.

And honestly, I feel like, Black women have always known how to build archives from ordinary things.

We come from people who held onto goodness while living through hard times. Women who seasoned food while carrying grief. Women who braided hair and paid bills and buried loved ones and still found reasons to laugh loud enough to shake the whole kitchen. Women who knew life could turn difficult quickly, so when joy showed up, they honored it properly.

A while back, I wrote a poem called Leftovers:

baby, hand me the plastic wrap
mama needs to preserve this moment
tear me off a piece big enough
to cover up this smile
press in a bit,
careful not to rip it
we’ll feast on these good memories
over the days to come
been a while since we
ate like this
pray it keep, and
don’t spoil too quick
folks act like they hate leftovers
when most meals taste better
the next day, anyway

You probably noticed the poem isn’t abut food at all. It’s about preserving moments before life moved too fast to hold them properly. Trying to keep joy from slipping away unnoticed. About wanting tenderness to last a little longer.

Because there are moments you don’t fully understand while they’re happening. You keep moving through them. Keep mothering. Keep praying. Keep surviving. Then one day you look back and realize you were standing inside something sacred the whole time.

That’s what memory does.

It returns us to moments we were too overwhelmed to fully hold when they first arrived.

Remembering is holy work.

I watched In Our Mothers’ Gardens a few years ago, and Koko Zauditu-Selassie talked about how Black folks have to have a long memory.

We come from people who survived by remembering. Remembering recipes. Remembering family stories. Remembering warnings. Remembering songs. Remembering how God made a way before.

But whew… at 40, my memory ain’t as long as it used to be.

So I write things down.

I save evidence.

That receipt from dinner with a friend.
The movie ticket stub.
The note somebody wrote in my birthday card.
The Trader Joe’s bag.

The objects themselves aren’t all that important, but I know how easily beautiful moments disappear when nobody stops long enough to preserve them.

Forget not.

As if God already knew how easily people lose sight of grace once life gets busy again.

Forgetting happens quietly. Another bill shows up. Another responsibility. Another hard season. Before long, we stop honoring the ways we’ve already been carried.

So much of our lives gets spent making sure everybody else is fed that we barely sit long enough to taste our own joy before moving onto the next thing.

But memory asks us to pause.

To look again.

To say:
Wait.
That mattered.

The soft morning mattered.

The laughter mattered.

The friendship that held you together for a season mattered.

The prayer that carried you through the night mattered.

The quick trip to 7 Eleven in your fave green jumpsuit mattered.

The version of yourself that survived mattered too.

That’s why I think celebration is more than happiness. Celebration is archival. Celebration says this moment deserves to be remembered. Celebration says joy belongs in the historical record too.

People document Black pain constantly. The struggle. The statistics. The survival stories. Those stories matter.

But I also want somebody to remember the beauty.

The way we laugh until we can’t breathe.

The way aunties dance in kitchens.

The way church mothers wrap peppermints in handkerchiefs inside their purses.

The way we gather around tables after funerals because grief and food have always known each other well.

The way Black women keep making homes out of nearly nothing.

The way joy keeps finding us anyway.

Leftovers feel deeply spiritual to me.

They’re proof there was more than enough for people to gather around the table in the first place. Proof somebody cooked. Somebody served. Somebody laughed. Somebody stayed long enough to feel full.

Leftovers are memory with a lid on it.

Some things do get better with time.

In this season, I’m trying not to rush past beauty while it’s happening.

Trying to let tenderness stay awhile.

Black women have always known how to save what matters.

We wrap it carefully.

We carry it home.

We return to it when the days get difficult.

We call it leftovers.

We call it memory.

We call it grace.

Some posts throughout this space may include affiliate links to books, products, and resources I genuinely love. Purchases made through those links help support Socialight Society, my love letter to Black women, storytelling, gathering, and the work of creating spaces where we can be seen fully.

And thank you, always, for being here.

I’ve been thinking about how Black women are taught to survive so early that survival starts to feel like identity.

We learn how to carry things before we learn how to rest. We become fluent in endurance. We know how to keep showing up, keep mothering, keep praying, keep holding everybody else together while pieces of ourselves quietly wait their turn. Somewhere along the way, many of us become so skilled at making it through that we forget to ask whether we’re actually living.

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Lately, I’ve been paying attention to the quieter parts of my life.

The sound of my daughters laughing (and fighting) in the next room. A clean kitchen at the end of the night. Me humming while I fold clothes without even realizing I’m doing it. The feeling of driving with nowhere urgent to be for once. Catching myself smiling over something small and realizing the smile came naturally. These moments are easy to overlook because they don’t arrive with applause. Nobody hands you a trophy for finally feeling at ease inside your own body.

Still, I think there’s something holy about noticing yourself soften after years of surviving hardness.

This season of my life has been full of endings and rearrangements. I’m newly divorced. I’ve left two churches in the last two years. Friendships have changed shape so completely they now feel more like memories than relationships. There are conversations waiting to happen and goodbyes sitting quietly at the edge of my life. There are versions of me I loved deeply that I still had to release because I could feel myself outgrowing the spaces that once held me.

Transformation sounds beautiful until it starts costing you familiarity.

Some days this becoming still scares me. I miss what I thought my life would be. Grief still sits beside me longer than I want it to sometimes. The future feels wide open in a way that’s both freeing and terrifying at the same time.

And yet, underneath all of it, there’s joy.

Real joy.

The kind that sneaks up on you while making dinner or sitting in the car after dropping the girls off. The kind that settles into your house slowly until one day you realize peace lives there too. The kind that catches you laughing from your stomach instead of performing happiness from your mouth.

People who’ve spent years bracing for impact understand the sacredness of finally unclenching.

For a long time, my body moved through the world expecting something painful to happen next. Rest felt temporary. Ease felt suspicious. Even beautiful moments carried the fear that something could interrupt them at any second. I carried tension like inheritance. So many Black women do.

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We come from women who stretched meals, stretched money, stretched energy, stretched themselves. Women who carried grief quietly while still showing up beautifully pressed for church on Sunday morning. Women who kept entire households alive while nobody stopped long enough to ask what survival was doing to their bodies.

I think about them often these days.

I think about my grandmother and the way she could make people feel held without ever announcing how much she herself was carrying. I think about the women who taught us how to survive while secretly praying we might someday learn how to live more gently than they were allowed to.

Maybe that’s part of what healing is.

Learning that your life doesn’t have to feel like an emergency in order to matter.

For years, I believed holiness looked like self-sacrifice at all costs. Exhaustion felt righteous. Being needed felt the same as being loved. Shrinking myself seemed like the easiest way to keep relationships intact.

Now I think a lot of women disappear slowly inside lives that ask them to perform strength constantly.

Sometimes becoming requires leaving. Leaving relationships that require silence to survive them. Leaving spaces where your humanity is secondary to your usefulness. Leaving versions of yourself built entirely around endurance.

And whew… leaving is rarely celebrated while you’re doing it. Especially when you’re the woman everybody expects to keep holding things together.

Still, there comes a point where pretending becomes more exhausting than truth.

And truth changes you.

Black women know something about that kind of becoming.

People celebrate the version of us they can finally understand. The healed version. The accomplished version. The wise version. Very few people ask about the breaking open that happened before the blooming. Very few people sit long enough with what it cost us to become visible to ourselves again.

Everybody loves the butterfly.

Few people stay for the transformation.

That’s why this season feels sacred to me even while parts of it remain unfinished. I can feel myself returning to my own life. Softness is reentering places in me that survival once hardened. God is restoring parts of me I thought were gone forever.

A version of me I used to pray for is already alive in my ordinary life. She’s standing at the stove making breakfast. She’s answering emails. She’s buying books and flowers and imagining new futures for herself. She’s writing poetry again. She’s whispering “Thank You, Jesus” at the end of difficult days because she remembers when peace felt impossible.

And maybe that’s what blooming actually is.

Maybe blooming is finally allowing yourself to become all of you.

Whole enough to hold grief and joy in the same hand. Whole enough to admit disappointment without losing hope. Whole enough to stop apologizing for complexity. Whole enough to believe your softness deserves protection too.

Y’all know I carry Lucille Clifton like scripture:

“come celebrate with me that every day
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.”

I carry those words with me often because survival is part of the story, but it isn’t the entire story.

The deeper miracle is that after everything, beauty still finds me. Delight still finds me. Somewhere inside me, hope still believes there’s a future larger than endurance. Somewhere inside me, there’s still a woman trusting that God intended joy for her too.

These days, I’m practicing the sacred work of noticing.

Noticing peace when it enters the room.

Noticing when my shoulders relax.

Noticing when laughter comes easily.

Noticing when my home feels gentle.

Noticing the woman I’m becoming while she’s still here.

There are still unanswered questions in my life. Still transitions unfolding in real time. Still grief I’m learning how to carry honestly. But I no longer believe I have to wait until everything makes sense before honoring what’s beautiful.

Joy deserves to be acknowledged while it’s still warm.

And maybe that’s the real testimony.

After everything life has tried to take, I’m still here.

Still tender.

Still becoming.

Still in full bloom.

Some posts throughout this space may include affiliate links to books, products, and resources I genuinely love. Purchases made through those links help support Socialight Society, my love letter to Black women, storytelling, gathering, and the work of creating spaces where we can be seen fully.

And thank you, always, for being here.

I am Nyshell Imari, daughter of Marcia Sarah, daughter of Bertha Lee, daughter of Velma Lee, daughter of Mandie Lee, daughter of Elizabeth.

Alice Walker once wrote in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, “How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers’ names.”

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Marcia.
Bertha.
Velma.
Mandie.
Elizabeth.

And one day, my daughters will add my name to the list.

My people come from Brookhaven.

I come from women who prayed without ceasing and created without asking. Women who made a way when there was nothing laid out in front of them. Women who did not wait to be chosen.

I exist because of them.

Because they prayed, danced, worshipped, dreamed, travailed, birthed, nurtured, endured, and still found language for joy.

That is the lineage I carry.

There is a question I keep coming back to.

What does it mean for Black women to imagine ourselves in spaces that were never built with us in mind?

I ask it from inside the experience. Walking into rooms and feeling what is missing before anything is said. Noticing who the room was made for. Figuring out where to sit, how to show up, what to hold and what to release.

And still, I return.

Imagination, for Black women, has always been necessary. It is how we see ourselves whole when we are only recognized in pieces. It is how we claim rest, beauty, tenderness, and interior life in places that were not designed to hold us.

But before I had language for any of this, I had my grandmother’s table.

I love my mama. I do. But my mama’s mama, Velma’s daughter, was my heart.

I am the oldest granddaughter of Bertha Lee Black, and for the first seven years of my life, I was her only grandchild. I spent a lot of time at her house, even though I was raised in a home with both of my parents. My grandmother used to say she didn’t see any difference between her children and her grandchildren. She loved us the same.

I believed her because I felt it.

Her house was open. Not just to family, but to anybody who showed up. She had a way of making people feel chosen.

If you stopped by her house, expected or not, you were going to eat.

It didn’t matter if you had already eaten. It didn’t matter what time it was. You could try to say no, but she wasn’t going for that. She would look at you and let you know you were about to hurt her feelings.

And then, just like that, there would be a piece of homemade pound cake and a cold Pepsi in front of you.

That was her way.

Steady care.
A kind of everyday celebration.

But her table held more than food. It held stories. It held grief. It held laughter so loud it echoed through the house. It held side-eyes, warnings, prayers, and conversations that stretched long after the plates were cleared.

And it held secrets.

What was shared at her table stayed at her table. You could speak honestly there. You could tell the truth there. You could fall apart there. There was an understanding that what was spoken in that kitchen belonged to the people gathered around it.

But the lessons we learned there followed us everywhere.

Her table taught us how to love people. How to listen. How to pay attention. How to survive without becoming hard. How to make room for somebody else, even when life had not always made room for you.

I learned from her without realizing I was being taught.

She told me to use my own Black mind.
She told me laughing catches.
She reminded me that I wasn’t responsible for how other people treated me, but I was responsible for how I treated them.

So I learned to think.
To pay attention.
To move with care.

When I come back to that question about imagining ourselves into spaces that were never built with us in mind, I realize I had already seen the answer.

My grandmother made space.

She did it in the way she lived. The way she opened her home, fed people, and made room without deciding who deserved it.

She took what she had and made it more than enough.

In May of 2021, she became my ancestor.

And even now, I still hear her. I still find myself moving in ways she taught me, sometimes before I can name it.

Somewhere along the way, I found language for what I had already seen.

I live by that.

I have seen women carry everything and still find a reason to celebrate.

When I think about gathering now, about making space, about celebration, I know exactly where I learned it.

I learned it at her table.

In the way she made room. In the way she noticed people. In the way she made it clear that presence mattered.

So when I say,

Come celebrate with me,

I am continuing something.

I am honoring a way of living that taught me survival is worth marking, joy is meant to be shared, and people deserve to be seen.

And if you have ever been loved by a woman like that, then you already know.

There is always room for you at the table.

I didn’t know then how much I would need what she taught me. I didn’t know how many times I would find myself looking for a table.

And even now, we are still finding ways to make room for ourselves, and for each other.

Some posts throughout this space may include affiliate links to books, products, and resources I genuinely love. Purchases made through those links help support Socialight Society, my love letter to Black women, storytelling, gathering, and the work of creating spaces where we can be seen fully.

And thank you, always, for being here.