The house smelled different when we came home.

We’d only been gone a few days, but the air had grown heavy. Before we left, there’d been a water issue. Wet towels sat too long, and repairs were still waiting for time, money, and attention.

After opening the windows, I gathered the laundry and started moving through the rooms.

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Coming home brought me face-to-face with everything I’d been postponing. Each repair required a decision. Every decision carried a cost, another phone call, or a problem I didn’t yet know how to solve.

The truth is, I’ve been overwhelmed by the work of fixing everything.

People love me well. They show up, pray for me, offer their hands, and ask what I need. Their care has held me through a year that changed the shape of my life.

Even with that support, I’m still the one deciding what gets handled first. I have to consider what can be afforded, what needs immediate attention, and what must wait. Some mornings, the responsibility is already sitting on my chest before I get out of bed.

Overwhelm collects quietly. It settles beside the unopened mail, the room that needs organizing, and the number I keep meaning to call. Ten completed tasks can still leave me feeling accused by the eleventh.

That’s how unfinished work becomes shame.

A broken thing starts to feel like evidence. A delayed decision begins to sound like judgment. Soon, the house is carrying a story about my ability to manage my life.

I don’t want to keep telling myself that story.

I return to Lucille Clifton the way I return to scripture.

Her poems ask to be read slowly. I sit with a line, carry it into the day, and let it question me. Over time, her work has become part of my study practice, a place I go for language, instruction, and witness.

In “won’t you celebrate with me,” she asks, “what i have shaped into / a kind of life?”

That question stays with me because shaping a life is holy work. It asks us to notice what’s here, what’s missing, and what can still be made from what remains.

Clifton gives me a way to look.

Through her, I’m reminded that a life can be shaped in the middle of uncertainty. We begin with the materials within reach, use what we know, ask for what we need, and learn while our hands are already moving.

On some days, that means making the phone call. On others, it means opening a window and letting the room breathe. Accepting help without apologizing may be the work. Resting while the list stays unfinished may be the work too.

This is what I’m learning about return: it can begin before everything is resolved.

Prayer is still available when my mind is crowded. Writing is still available when dishes are waiting in the sink. My body, dreams, and imagination are still there, even while questions remain unanswered.

The undone work doesn’t disqualify me from beginning.

So here’s the invitation I’m carrying into this next season: choose one place where your life needs your attention.

Open the window.

Send the message.

Make the appointment.

Ask someone you trust to sit beside you while you face what has felt too heavy to hold alone.

There are still repairs waiting in my house. Some will be handled soon. Others will require patience, help, and resources I’m still gathering.

For now, I’m refusing to let everything unfinished keep me from tending to anything at all.

What’s in front of me is enough for a beginning.

Fresh air can move through these rooms.

This life is still being shaped.

Poetry was one of my first languages.

I’ve been writing poems for as long as I can remember. I’ve written chapbooks, performed spoken word, and stood behind microphones reading my life into rooms full of people. Before I knew how to carry a thought through an essay, I knew how to put a feeling inside a line.

Poetry gives me somewhere to put things.

That’s why it scares me when the words don’t come.

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When my grandma died in 2021, I decided I would never write again. I couldn’t understand how someone so broken could still have words. My life had been shattered, and writing required me to remember. How could I remember her that way when remembering hurt so much?

I didn’t know how to make language from the thing that had taken language from me.

There have been other moments when grief has made me wonder whether I’ll ever write again. The ideas don’t come. The words feel far away. I know creativity moves at its own pace, but that knowing doesn’t always comfort me. Writing has been one of the ways I’ve understood myself for most of my life. When I can’t reach it, I feel trapped.

There has to be a release.

Often times that release is prayer. Sometimes I collage, make something with my hands, or let myself rest until my body catches up with what I’ve been carrying. I sleep. I take a nap. Give myself permission to be still. And sometimes the release is a poem.

Lately, I’ve been in my poetry bag.

I have whole poems, unfinished poems, and pieces that fit together in different ways depending on how I arrange them. I’ve collected all of it, though I don’t know what it’s becoming yet.

Perhaps it’s a book. Maybe some of the poems belong in a zine, beside photographs, or inside a larger body of work I haven’t named. A few of them will never see the light of day just because I needed somewhere to place what I was feeling that day.

A poem might get me to the altar before a sermon does.

I’ve read poems that felt like prayers I didn’t know how to pray. They’ve made room for grief, doubt, praise, memory, and God without asking any of it to arrive neatly.

That’s part of what draws me to Lucille Clifton. She says what she came to say and trusts the words to carry the rest. Her poems leave room for a whole life without explaining it away.

Reading her has me thinking about the language that has carried me for most of my life.

I still don’t know where the poems I’ve collected are going. I only know that I need them. I need the remembering, the listening, and the moment when something that has been sitting inside me finally finds its way onto the page.

Perhaps that’s the release I’ve been asking for.

A Few Poetry Books I Keep Close

I couldn’t write about poetry without sharing a few collections I love. This isn’t a complete list, just a few books I’ve returned to, underlined, carried around, or told somebody else they needed to read.

Black Girl, Call Home by Jasmine Mans

I come back to this one all the time. Year after year, it still finds me. If you’ve ever had to think about home, your mother, your body, Black girlhood, or the parts of yourself you’re still trying to gather, start here.

Good Dress by Brittany Rogers

Baby, this book has Detroit, church, Black womanhood, pleasure, family, class, and a whole lot of nerve in it. Brittany writes with so much life on the page. I love a book that knows exactly where it comes from.

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire

Warsan Shire will have you sitting with a line long after you’ve closed the book. This collection is beautiful, painful, and full of memory. It says so much about girlhood, family, migration, and what the body keeps.

I Am the Rage by Dr. Martina McGowan

This is the book for when you’re angry and tired and need somebody to say the thing plainly. It gives language to the grief and rage that come with being Black in America.

Magical Negro by Morgan Parker

Morgan Parker is sharp, funny, strange, smart, and not interested in making Black womanhood easy for anybody. This is the kind of collection that makes you stop, reread, and then sit there for a minute.

Vulnerable AF by Tarriona “Tank” Ball

You already know Tank can tell a story. These poems are honest about love, heartbreak, wanting, self-worth, and all the ways we can lose ourselves trying to make something work.

Wild Beauty by Ntozake Shange

Anything Ntozake Shange touches feels alive. This collection carries beauty, grief, politics, womanhood, and the body with so much rhythm. You can hear the poems even when you’re reading them quietly.

Anything by Maya Angelou

I mean this exactly as written: anything by Maya Angelou. Pick up a collection and begin. She knew how to write with dignity, humor, faith, grief, and authority all at once. Her voice will meet you wherever you are.

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.

Today would’ve been my thirteenth wedding anniversary.

My divorce was finalized in March of this year, which means the news is still new to some people. Every so often, I run into someone who hasn’t heard. Their face changes while they take it in, and then they offer the response people have been taught to give.

“I’m so sorry.”

I usually smile and say, “Oh no, congratulate me.”

That tickles me every time, but I mean it.

I understand the instinct to offer condolences. Divorce wasn’t what we intended when we stood at the altar thirteen years ago. It wasn’t what I imagined for our marriage, our children, or the family we were building. There was grief in accepting that the life I had planned wasn’t the life I was living.

Still, the ending doesn’t feel recent to me. I grieved the marriage while I was still in it.

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Long before anyone filed paperwork, I was already coming to terms with what had changed. I mourned the future I thought we shared and spent years trying to understand what could be repaired. I asked hard questions about the marriage and about myself. Eventually, I had to accept the answers.

My healing began before March.

I’d been in therapy, praying, examining my choices, and paying attention to the patterns that shaped my life. I was learning to trust myself and take responsibility for what belonged to me. I had to become honest about what I needed, what I could change, and what I could no longer carry.

And maybe that’s why I’m still surprised when other people are surprised. They’ve only just received the news. I’ve been living with the truth for a long time.

There are details about my marriage and divorce that I won’t share publicly. We’re raising children who may one day read what I write, and I want them to encounter care in these pages. Some parts of the story belong to my girls. Some belong to their father. Others belong to me, God, my therapist, and the people who held me close while I found my way through.

Privacy doesn’t require me to erase myself from my own story.

I’ve returned to that sentence often because it reminds me that truth doesn’t require exposure. I can honor what’s private and still speak clearly about my own life.

I was married, and now I’m divorced. I’m raising my girls across a new rhythm of weeks and homes. I’m still their mama every day, including the days they aren’t sleeping under my roof. I’m doing well. I’m parenting, creating, laughing, loving, and living a life that feels honest.

There’s no shame in that.

You can’t shame a woman
who’s unashamed.

I know that now.

I’m not ashamed that my marriage ended. I’m not ashamed that the plans I made changed. I’m not ashamed that I chose my well-being or that I’m grateful for the life I have now.

I don’t regret the woman who said, “I do,” either. She was hopeful. She loved her family and believed in what she was building. She made decisions with what she knew at the time, and I can honor her without asking her to remain in a life that no longer held her.

That marriage gave me three of my girls, and they remain one of its greatest gifts. I get to love them, learn who they’re becoming, and help them understand their own lives. Our family is finding its rhythm, and there is still joy here.

Last year, I realized it was the first anniversary when I wasn’t disappointed. I didn’t have any expectations left for the day, and that realization brought me peace. I’d stopped asking an anniversary to prove something about a marriage I was already grieving.

Today, I feel the same peace.

I don’t know what June 29 will mean to me in the years ahead. It may always make me pause, or it may quietly become another date on the calendar. Today, it holds thirteen years of history and the closing of a chapter that shaped much of my adult life.

That closing deserves to be acknowledged.

So yeah, when someone tells me they’re sorry, I receive the love behind their words. Then I ask them to congratulate me.

Actually, come celebrate with me.

Perhaps you know what it is to reach the end of something and discover that your life is still waiting for you. There may be a date, a place, or a version of yourself that you’re learning how to hold with new meaning. I hope you give yourself room to notice what survived.

Today, I’m not holding a funeral for the life that ended.

I’m bringing flowers to the woman who lived.

Before Come Celebrate With Me had a shape, it had a phrase.

A line from Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me” kept opening every time I returned to it:

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

Those are the words that found me.

Come celebrate with me because I’m still here. Because the story kept going. Because there are days when being alive feels ordinary, and there are days when I know better.

When I first read those lines, I recognized something.

She was telling the truth about survival and still calling it celebration. She wasn’t waiting for the story to become pretty. She wasn’t pretending nothing had happened. Something had tried to kill her.

And failed.

That’s a testimony right there.

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Her words found me a few years ago, during a season when I was carrying the fear of a breast cancer scare and the grief of losing my grandma. My body felt uncertain. Home felt different without her in the world. I was trying to keep living while death felt close enough to touch.

So when I read, “come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed,” I didn’t hear a clever line. I heard permission.

Permission to tell the truth about what I was afraid of. Permission to grieve what I had lost. Permission to notice that I was still here.

That’s what opened the poem for me. The honesty of it. The nerve of it. The decision to celebrate while the truth was still standing in the room.

So often, we save celebration for the end of the story. We wait until everything settles down and we can speak without our voices shaking. Until we’ve healed enough, forgiven enough, and figured out what it all meant.

Meanwhile, life is happening now.

Sometimes celebration is crying in the bathroom, washing your face, and walking back out because your children need you. Sometimes it’s laughing from your belly after a season when laughter felt far away. Sometimes it’s putting on your earrings, catching yourself in the mirror, and realizing, Girl, you are still here.

There’s wonder in that.

There’s history too.

Joy has had to find some of us in the middle of things. She’s sat beside us while the dishes soaked and the bills waited. She’s slipped into the car through an old song. She’s met us in the kitchen while we were fixing a plate.

Sometimes she arrived quietly enough that we almost missed her.

That’s the kind of celebration I want Come Celebrate With Me to hold. A celebration that can tell the truth. One that makes room for the life we’re living now, with its questions, its laughter, its losses, and the parts we haven’t found language for yet.

The poem taught me that celebration doesn’t require a finished story. It can happen while we’re still finding our way. While some things remain tender. While we’re learning how to live inside a life we didn’t plan for.

We can tell the truth about what happened and still honor the woman who came through it.

We can thank God for survival without calling the suffering good.

We can celebrate because something tried.

And failed.

That’s where this work begins.

With a poem.

With a life that survived.

With an invitation to come close enough to notice.

I’m still learning what those words can hold. Maybe I always will be.

Come celebrate with me.

The story is still unfolding.

A Small Lucille Clifton Reading List

I’m reading Lucille Clifton in a season when I’m learning how to begin again without pretending nothing happened. I’ve closed some doors, returned to parts of myself I had set down, and found my way back to poetry as one of the places I know how to tell the truth.

Her work feels right for this season.

Here are a few places to begin if you want to read alongside me.

Book of Light
This is where I’m starting. It includes “won’t you celebrate with me,” the poem that gave this work its name and keeps teaching me how celebration can hold survival, grief, and the fact that I’m still here.

Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980
A gathering of her early poems and prose. I’ve read this before and find myself returning to it, wanting to spend more time with the questions she carried about womanhood, family, the body, and becoming.

Next: New Poems
Poems about memory, aging, family, and staying alive long enough to understand your life differently. That feels especially close to me right now.

How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton
A good place to begin if you’re meeting her for the first time and want to move through poems from across her life.

Generations: A Memoir
A small book about family history, lineage, memory, and the stories that survive because somebody chose to keep telling them.

I’m not trying to rush through her work. I want to read slowly, underline what finds me, and pay attention to what her words open in my own life.

That’s a big part of this season too: returning to the writers who help me recognize myself.

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.

Some of the richest theology I know began with somebody leaning back from a plate and saying, “Now let me tell you what really happened.”

That kind of sentence changes the room. Chairs shift. You hear a quiet, “Mhm,” before the story gets good because we already understand that what’s being shared matters. Truth doesn’t always arrive with a microphone. Sometimes it comes while cornbread is being cut, hot sauce passed, plates wrapped, and lemonade poured.

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Growing up, what was said at the table belonged there. That wasn’t secrecy. It was responsibility. If you were sitting close enough to hear the story, you had been trusted with it. You didn’t get to carry somebody’s life into rooms where the people weren’t present, prayerful, careful, or invited.

Gossip wants the story loose. The table asks for care.

A story might be shared because someone needs wisdom, witness, correction, or enough room to finally tell the truth. Being close came with responsibility. You understood that every story wasn’t yours to carry out. And if you didn’t understand, the table would teach you.

The most honest conversations I’ve heard happened around food. The truth came out about a marriage. Someone admitted she was tired or scared. A relative finally named what the family story kept leaving out. Nobody called it theology, but it shaped how I understood grace, mercy, forgiveness, endurance, discernment, and the God who meets us in real life.

A table gives people somewhere to place their hands while memory finds its way out. It lets a person decide the room is safe enough for the truth.

I think often about Shirley Chisholm’s instruction to bring a folding chair when no seat is offered. I honor the women who forced rooms to reckon with their absence. Still, Lord knows there’s a different kind of exhale when you don’t have to fight for your place. When the leaf is already in the table, chairs have come up from the basement, and someone says, “Sit here, baby,” because the gathering had you in mind before you arrived.

That’s the table I keep imagining. One where laughter and grief can sit close. Where questions are welcomed before they become polished. Where a woman can be brilliant without performing, tired without apologizing, joyful without explaining, and honest without becoming a lesson.

Black women have long understood the table as a place of thought and possibility. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press took its name from the place where women worked, talked, organized, argued, dreamed, and made things happen. The name honored what institutions often refused to recognize: knowledge was already being made at home.

A kitchen table can hold plates, bills, homework, prayer requests, grief, and a manuscript that might change somebody’s life. It can hold the first telling of a truth and the silence that follows when the room doesn’t collapse beneath it.

That’s womanist wonder to me. Wonder sturdy enough to sit beside the everyday. Wonder that can hear the Spirit in “girl, let me tell you,” because sometimes that’s exactly where the truth starts.

Knowledge doesn’t always come dressed like knowledge. It can sound like a correction, a recipe, or somebody saying, “Don’t let nobody make you feel crazy.” It can sound like, “You can leave,” or, “Eat something first.”

A hungry body listens differently. A guarded body speaks differently.

Sit down. Eat. Breathe. Now tell me what happened.

What did you do next?

Who was there?

Did anybody help you?

What do you know now?

What do you need?

Those questions can become a kind of ministry when they’re asked with care. They don’t rush to fix the story. They give it room to unfold.

Recently, during my annual review at my nine-to-five, my supervisor named listening as one of my strengths. She often compliments my emotional intelligence too, but I digress.

Her comment made me think about where I learned to listen. I don’t remember practicing it on purpose. It feels closer to an inheritance. I learned to hear where a story catches and notice what’s being said alongside what’s still being protected. Listening isn’t waiting for your turn to speak. Sometimes it’s knowing the right question. Sometimes it’s knowing when to keep your mouth shut.

The table had been teaching me all along.

Belonging isn’t passive. You don’t get to sit close and remain careless. You don’t get to receive the story and mishandle the person.

The table can be generous, but it also asks something of us. There are things you leave right there. The world doesn’t need every story from the room. In a time when anything can become a post, quote, clip, or brand, I need the reminder that a story can matter deeply without becoming public. Some stories do their work because they were kept.

So I’m asking myself now: what kind of table am I building, and who becomes safer, freer, fuller because they were invited to sit there?

I pray my table doesn’t require perfection or polish before somebody feels welcome enough to sit down. I pray it’s a careful table. A generous one. A table with room for the story, the question, the silence after the question, and the wisdom that rises when nobody is rushing to turn somebody’s life into something useful before they’ve had a chance to breathe.

I made a zine.

I’ve made and printed things before, so the paper itself isn’t the revelation. What feels different is seeing the work line up.

For a long time, I had essays over here, book ideas over there, photographs in one folder, archival projects in another, and questions I kept circling without knowing exactly where they belonged. None of it was random, but sometimes it felt scattered. I could see the individual pieces without being able to explain the larger shape they were making.

Now I can.

I’m building a body of work.

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Come Celebrate With Me is part of it. Socialight Society is part of it. The essays, books, archives, gatherings, photos, and questions I keep asking are beginning to speak to one another. Womanist Wonder is part of that conversation too.

The phrase came from one of my writing instructors, who used womanist wonder to describe my work. It stayed with me because it named something I’d already been reaching toward. I followed it into a literary zine.

The first issue is called Gathering Ourselves. It holds an essay about returning for the parts of ourselves that life may have scattered. It pays homage to women who have shaped my thinking… some up close and personal, others through the books, sermons, lectures, poems, and questions they’ve so graciously shared with the world. There are photographs, womanist thought, pieces of the archive, and a dedication to my grandma, Bertha.

This is one of several projects I’ve been sitting with for a while. Perfectionism will have me waiting for the whole idea to reveal itself before I make the first thing. I’ll keep revising the plan, changing the name, and convincing myself I’m still working on it.

While researching zines, I kept coming across the word experimental. It stuck with me because experimental feels like permission. I can try something. I can make what’s in my head without knowing exactly where it’s going. The first version can simply be the first version.

After carrying the idea around, revising it in my head, and waiting for it to feel fully formed, I finally made the thing. Everything I create doesn’t have to arrive ready to change the world. Sometimes I can make something because it’s interesting, beautiful, or fun. Sometimes finishing the thing is enough to show me what comes next.

This Saturday, Socialight Society is setting up a booth at a Juneteenth weekend festival, and the first copies of Womanist Wonder will be there.

I’m excited to see it outside of my own head. To watch someone pick it up, turn the pages, recognize a name, pause over a sentence, or decide they want to keep it.

And now I’m wondering about you.

What have you been waiting to do? What idea have you been sitting on until the timing feels right, the plan feels complete, or you finally feel ready?

Maybe the first version doesn’t need all of that.

Maybe it just needs you to start.

I turned 40 in January, and I’m learning that my life is something I can study with care.

Paying close attention to other people has always come easily to me. I underline their sentences, trace the questions they carry across books and interviews, and notice the themes that keep returning throughout their work. I can make a syllabus out of a woman’s life and call it research. Now I’m learning to bring that same attention home.

Lately, I’ve been sitting with the choices I’ve made, the rooms I’ve entered and left, the language I keep circling, and the women whose work helps me name what I’m seeing. What do these patterns know about me? What has God been showing me through the life I’ve already lived?

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We’re quick to study other people. We know their influences, their rituals, their turning points, their heartbreaks, and what they created from the pieces. We build reading lists, timelines, and mood boards around their becoming. Then we look at our own lives and say, “Girl, I was just trying to get through.”

Entire years get packed into “That was a lot.”

But what if “a lot” is also a text?

What if the years I thought I was enduring were teaching me how to see? What if the closed bookstore is a chapter instead of a conclusion? The shelves, the conversations, the children sitting on the floor with picture books, the hard decisions, the debt, the joy, the goodbye, and everything that has grown since. I want to understand what that season placed in me.

What if I stop treating my life like a pile of loose papers and start treating it like an archive?

Scripture has given me some practice. I’ve spent years reading the lives of women whose experiences held revelation: Hagar naming the God who saw her in the wilderness, Hannah praying with such honesty that her anguish was mistaken for disorder, Mary Magdalene carrying resurrection news before anyone understood what had happened. Their choices, bodies, grief, courage, and encounters with God have shaped how I understand faith.

The women I return to in books have done the same. Lucille Clifton. Toni Morrison. Audre Lorde. bell hooks. Alice Walker. My grandmother is one of my north stars too—her whole life, her faith, her knowing, the way she gathered people and made belonging feel possible.

These women have taught me how to read a life closely. The challenge now is learning from them without disappearing into them.

Admiration can become a hiding place. It’s possible to spend years studying another woman’s courage while overlooking where courage has appeared in your own life. I’ve recognized somebody else’s vision and dismissed the things I saw before I had language for them, calling her work worthy of an archive while rushing past my own evidence.

I want to gather it.

The old flyers. The bookstore photographs. The essays I almost didn’t publish. The notes app fragments. The sentences that found me before I understood what they were trying to say. The ideas I kept returning to because they knew the shape of the work before I did.

I want to look at these things and say: this counted.

I’ve always believed we don’t go through things for ourselves alone. That belief has made it easier for me to share parts of my life that other people might hide. The unwed pregnancy. The depression. The anxiety. The divorce. The seasons I couldn’t name while I was living through them. Somewhere along the way, what I survived might help somebody else keep going.

When I share, I’m often thinking about the woman standing where I once stood, wondering whether her life has gone too far off-script to become beautiful. I’m thinking about the woman ashamed of the very thing God may use to steady someone else.

Studying my life asks me to go deeper than recounting what happened. I want to understand what an experience taught me, what it changed, what it revealed, and what I’m meant to carry forward. Testimony still needs wisdom. Every story doesn’t belong to everybody, and every memory doesn’t have to become a lesson before it’s ready. Some stories can be shared from the altar. Some belong at the table. Some stay with the people who’ve earned the right to sit close.

Looking back used to feel like an inventory of everything I should’ve known. Younger versions of me seemed ready with questions: Why did you stay? Why did you start? Why did you trust? Why did it take so long?

Those questions rarely lead anywhere good.

I’m trying to ask better ones.

What were you trying to protect? What did you know in your body before you could explain it? What kept calling you back? What did you build without a model? What did that version of you make possible for the woman you are now?

These questions let me revisit my life without putting myself on trial. They help me notice the table, the shelf, the garden, the archive, the poem, and the woman who keeps finding ways to begin again.

The questions I’ve carried through my work have been shaping me too. What does it mean for Black women to imagine ourselves in spaces that weren’t built with us in mind? What happens when we stop waiting for those spaces to recognize us and begin building from what we know?

For a long time, I thought I was answering those questions through the bookstore, the gatherings, the book drops, and the essays. Now I can see how the questions have been answering me. They’ve shaped my theology, my feminism, my writing, and my understanding of what celebration can hold.

So this is where I am now: gathering the evidence of my own becoming and paying attention to what it reveals.

My life has a syllabus. Some lessons came through beauty, some through loss, and some through closing a door and realizing the story was still alive. Others came through Scripture, the women who wrote before me, my grandmother, and the Spirit whispering, pay attention, even here.

And at 40, I’m listening.

I tend to count Black women everywhere I go.

At conferences, bookstores, readings, film festivals, academic spaces, and museums, my eyes scan the room before I even realize I’m doing it. How many of us are here? Were we invited with intention? Are we part of the conversation or just near it? Are we being centered, studied, listened to, protected, remembered?

Some may call this paranoia. I think it’s practice.

When you’ve spent enough time moving through places that weren’t built with you in mind, you learn to read a room before you fully settle into it. You notice who’s missing and who gets named. You notice whose work is displayed at eye level and whose story gets tucked into a corner like somebody remembered at the last minute. Presence has a texture, and so does absence.

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Museums bring that feeling up in me in a particular way.

I should tell the truth here: I haven’t often walked into a museum and seen Black women honored in the way I’m imagining.

I know those exhibits exist. Black women artists, curators, archivists, historians, and cultural workers have been making sure our stories aren’t erased. Somewhere, there are rooms where Black women’s lives, faces, work, beauty, grief, brilliance, style, and imagination have been given space.

But I haven’t encountered enough of those rooms myself.

What I know more intimately is the looking. The scanning. The slow walk through a museum while wondering where we are. I know the quiet hope that maybe around the next corner there’ll be a portrait, a photograph, a dress, a letter, a name, a voice — something that says: we were here, and not only as labor, as background, as somebody’s unnamed mother, maid, muse, or witness.

I’m longing for Black women to be honored with fullness.

I want rooms that understand us as worthy of study, reverence, preservation, and wonder.

That matters because institutions teach people what deserves to be looked at carefully. Museums show us what a culture has decided is worth preserving, funding, labeling, protecting, studying, and remembering. They tell us what deserves silence, awe, wall text, archival gloves, public programs, climate-controlled rooms, and whole exhibitions.

Black women deserve to be
remembered with care.

Not only for what we endured or carried. Not only for what we made possible for other people. Our lives belong inside beauty too. Inside theory, softness, intellectual life, and wonder. Inside rooms where people are asked to slow down and look closely.

That last part matters because the world often looks at Black women too quickly. Quickly enough to assume. Quickly enough to dismiss. Quickly enough to misread our tone, our bodies, our hair, our faces, our rest, our joy, our anger, our boundaries. Quickly enough to decide what we are before asking who we are.

At their best, museums ask for slowness.

They ask you to stand still. To look again. To read the card. To consider the texture, the context, the hand, the material, the life behind the work. They ask you to believe there’s always more happening beneath the surface.

Black women have always deserved that kind of looking.

When I walk through museums, I often think about the women in my family. Their lives taught me how much brilliance can live in ordinary rooms. Around kitchen tables. In church pews. On front porches. At family gatherings where somebody was laughing too loud, somebody was wrapping a plate, and somebody was telling the truth with one eyebrow raised.

Nobody called them theorists.

Nobody called them curators.

Nobody placed their wisdom under glass.

But they were building archives the whole time.

They remembered who brought what dish, who needed prayer, who was acting brand new, who’d survived what, who belonged to whom, which child needed watching, which story needed repeating, and which silence said more than words ever could. Entire worlds lived inside them, and so much of that brilliance moved through history without being properly documented.

I imagine that’s part of why museums stir something up in me. They make me wonder who got preserved and who got passed over. Who was studied and who was simply used. Who was photographed with dignity and who was captured without consent. Who had their name written down. Who got called “unknown woman” when a whole family somewhere knew exactly who she was.

There’s grief in that.

There’s imagination too.

Black women have always made rooms for our fullness. Bookstores. Reading circles. Salons. Archives. Classrooms. Digital platforms. Gatherings that begin with “girl, let me tell you” and somehow become theory before anybody reaches for a notebook.

We know what it feels like to search for ourselves and come up short, so we build. Our beauty needs room. Our references need room. Our softness needs room. Our brilliance needs room. Our becoming needs room.

That’s the womanist wonder of it for me.

Black women don’t only belong in museums. In many ways, we’ve always been museums.

Living archives. Walking exhibitions. Keepers of memory, style, language, recipe, rhythm, warning, laughter, faith, critique, and imagination.

We carry what official records missed. We preserve what the world tried to make disposable. We make beauty out of what was never supposed to hold us.

And sometimes, when I see photographs of myself in a museum, I feel the whole thing happening at once.

I’m looking at the art while standing inside the institution, aware of the room and aware of my body in the room. I’m thinking about who’s been invited to look and who’s been trained to look past.

And still, there I am.

Floral jumpsuit. Black blazer. Red lip. Gold jewelry. My mama’s brooch pinned close like a small declaration. Standing in front of a green wall because I didn’t come to disappear.

That image does something to me.

A Black woman standing inside a museum, looking at art, while also being art.

Not as an object, display, or something to be consumed. Living artwork, in the sense that my life has form. My choices have texture. My clothing tells a story. My face holds generations. My gestures are full of inheritance. Even my presence carries the women who taught me how to survive, how to pray, how to dress, how to leave, how to begin again, how to make a way out of no way and still put on a lip.

That deserves more than a passing glance.

It deserves a room. A wall. A whole exhibition.

I’m dreaming of more exhibits dedicated to Black women. More portraits, retrospectives, archives, and acquisitions. More Black women curators, critics, educators, docents, directors, and museum presidents. More little Black girls walking into galleries and expecting to see themselves, not as a seasonal program or diversity initiative, but as part of the permanent collection of the world.

They should know their faces are worthy of framing. Their thoughts are worthy of study. Their lives are worthy of preservation. Their joy is worthy of documentation. Their softness is worthy of protection. Their imagination is worthy of investment.

I want them to walk slowly through beautiful rooms without wondering if they’re allowed to take up space there.

Because they are.

We are.

Black women have always belonged in museums. The world is just still learning how to look closely enough to see it.

And maybe I am too.

Maybe every time I walk into a space and start counting, I’m doing more than looking for who’s missing. Maybe I’m also looking for what’s possible. For evidence. For language. For the proof that we’re not imagining our own importance. For the reminder that our lives aren’t only meant to be endured, but studied, celebrated, protected, and beheld.

So yes, put Black women in museums.

Put us on the walls, in the archives, in the budgets, in the leadership, and in the story with our names spelled right.

And when we show up in the gallery wearing floral jumpsuits, red lipstick, gold jewelry, and a face that says we already know we belong, understand that the exhibit has already begun.

Yesterday, I went to dinner with my sister and my parents.

My sister and I got there first and stood near the hostess stand waiting to let them know we were a party of four. There was an older Black couple waiting too. A few minutes later, they were seated ahead of us.

At the time, I don’t even think we paid much attention to them.

Not in a rude way. They just looked familiar. Like people we’ve seen our whole lives. A Black couple out to dinner after church on a Sunday afternoon.

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Then I felt somebody tap my shoulder.

An older white man standing behind us nodded toward the couple and said, “You people sure can dress.”

And whew.

Silence.

My sister’s mouth dropped open immediately. Mine probably did too.

I looked at him and said, “Wow. Us people?”

Then came the laughing. His, not ours.

One of those little laughs people do after saying something they know they shouldn’t have said out loud. Like maybe if he laughed first, we would too.

We didn’t.

And honestly, the whole thing happened so fast I don’t even remember what he looked like now. I just remember the feeling of it. The weirdness. The interruption of it all.

Actually, that’s not true.

I remember the hat.

I could almost guarantee he voted for that man. His hat was burgundy instead of red, but close enough.

Because we were just standing there waiting for dinner.

That couple was just standing there waiting for dinner.

And somehow this old man managed to turn a completely ordinary moment into a reminder that there are still people walking around dividing the world into “us” and “you people.”

Eventually my parents got there and we started telling them what happened. That’s when my sister said, “Baby… they were casket sharp.”

And listen.

She was absolutely right.

The woman had on a beautiful dress and matching hat. The man wore a suit with the slightest shimmer to it when he walked. Just sharp. Put together. Like they cared about leaving the house.

I think what’s stayed with me most is that my sister and I didn’t really discuss what they were wearing until after the interaction happened. We noticed them differently once somebody else made them into “you people.”

Perhaps that’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.

How quickly people tell on themselves.
How quickly an ordinary moment can shift.
How exhausting it is that some folks still move through the world seeing themselves as separate from everybody else.

And still, that couple sat down to dinner looking beautiful anyway.

There’s something there.

I don’t fully have language for it yet, but there’s something about Black people continuing to show up fully as ourselves in a world that keeps trying to reduce us to categories. Something about softness and dignity and shimmer and matching hats on a random Sunday afternoon.

Something about us continuing to be human in public.

I didn’t give him some brilliant response after that. I didn’t need to.

In the words of my grandmother, “Lord forgive me if I’m wrong…”

…but that man is one foot in the grave anyway.

I keep returning to Lucille Clifton because she didn’t give us celebration as something cute. She gave us celebration with a backbone.

There’s a difference.

The kind of celebration I’m talking about isn’t only balloons, flowers, good food, pretty dresses, and a room full of people clapping for the version of you that made sense to them. I love all of that. I love a gathered room. I love a reason to dress up. I love a table with intention. I love the moment when laughter starts moving through a space and everybody remembers they’re allowed to feel good.

But Clifton’s invitation carries another kind of weight.

When she writes, “won’t you celebrate with me,” she’s not asking us to ignore what happened. She’s asking us to witness what survived. She’s standing inside a life she had to shape without a model and telling the truth: every day something tried to kill her and failed.

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That line keeps finding me because I know what it means to have a life that didn’t come with a clean blueprint.

I know what it means to build while grieving. To keep showing up when the map is missing. To look around at your own life and realize you’re standing in the middle of a story you didn’t plan, wearing a strength you didn’t ask for, trying to become a woman you’ve never fully seen modeled.

Some of what tried to kill me had a name.

My grandmother’s death tried to kill me. She wasn’t just somebody I loved. She was my person, my safe place, and one of the first tables where I learned what it felt like to belong. Losing her felt like losing a language I’d been speaking my whole life. It felt like the house got quieter in a way nothing could fix.

Divorce tried to kill me. People talk about the legal ending, but there’s also the spiritual and emotional undoing of a future you thought you were building. There’s the grief of no longer belonging to a life you organized yourself around. The very strange work of introducing yourself to yourself again and realizing you are both familiar and brand new.

Church hurt tried to kill me. Leaving two church homes shook something in me that I’m still trying to name carefully. When you’re a Black Christian woman who has served, prayed, believed, interceded, submitted, hoped, and built parts of your life around ministry, church pain reaches deep. It can make you question your discernment, your belonging, your voice, and the way you hear God.

Closing the physical space for Socialight Society tried to kill a dream I had touched with my own hands. I know the business is still alive. I know the work is still becoming. Still, there was grief in releasing the room people could walk into. There was grief in packing up shelves that had held my prayers, my labor, my creativity, and my belief that Black women’s stories deserved to be easy to find.

Friendship shifts tried it.

Depression tried it.

Anxiety tried it.

Financial pressure tried it.

Burnout tried it.

Survival mode tried it.

The pressure to keep being strong when I wanted to be held tried it too.

And I’m still here.

That sentence is doing more work than it looks like.

I’m here with new language, new boundaries, new grief, new joy, and a deeper understanding of what Psalm 118:17 means when it says, “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.”

That verse doesn’t say, “I shall not die, but live, and act like nothing happened.” It says live and declare. There’s a testimony on the other side of what almost ended us. There’s language after survival. There’s a story that belongs to the life that made it through.

That’s why Come Celebrate With Me has become more than a title for me.

It’s a spiritual practice.

It’s a creative practice.

It’s a way of telling the truth without handing the whole microphone to the wound.

I don’t want to build work that only circles what hurt. I don’t want my writing to become a museum of almost-endings. I don’t want to turn my pain into a performance just because people know how to gather around Black women’s suffering faster than they know how to honor our joy.

I want to name the thing and then name the victory louder.

That feels important because Black women are often expected to survive without making people uncomfortable about what survival required. We’re praised for being strong and punished for being honest about the weight. We’re admired for resilience while folks quietly benefit from the conditions that demanded it. We’re called inspiring when many of us are simply tired, faithful, resourceful, and trying not to fall apart in public.

I used to hear Audre Lorde’s words mostly as a call to rest, boundaries, and choosing myself. I still do. But now I also hear something deeper in them: the right to remain alive in my own life. For me, self-preservation has looked like telling the truth, leaving what I couldn’t stay in, choosing peace even when it came with paperwork and loss, and learning that my pain doesn’t have to become useful for my healing to matter.

That is part of what informs my work now.

When I write, curate books, gather women, or build Socialight Society in its next form, I keep circling a few questions: What does it look like for Black women to be witnessed in the fullness of our lives? What does it mean to imagine ourselves in spaces not built with us in mind? What have we survived, and what has carried us through?

I don’t only want to talk about what we carry. I want to talk about what carries us too. Books have carried me. Prayer has carried me. My grandmother’s memory has carried me. Black women’s words have carried me. The Holy Spirit has carried me when I didn’t have language, strategy, or strength.

That is why celebration matters here. It gives me a way to honor what carried me without pretending I didn’t almost collapse under the weight. It lets grief and beauty sit in the same room. It reminds me that joy is not denial. Joy can be evidence that God kept something tender alive.

Come Celebrate With Me is the language I use for that kind of witness. It is the name of this space, but it is also the posture of the work. It is how I remember what God has carried me through, how I honor the women who taught me to keep living, and how I make room for Black women’s stories to be read, remembered, and celebrated with care.

So come celebrate with me.

There is still life here.

There is still story here.

There is still room at the table.

In true bookseller fashion

In true bookseller fashion, let me place a few books on the table that continue this conversation.

If this is one of your first times pulling up a chair here, this is a good place to begin. Think of it as a small stack for the work we’re building together: books to hold close, underline, return to, and reach for when you need language for the life you’re trying to name.

The Book of Light by Lucille Clifton
This is where the invitation begins for me. Clifton lets survival be holy, complicated, plainspoken, and miraculous all at once. “won’t you celebrate with me” is the poem I keep carrying because it reminds me that celebration can tell the truth and still leave room for glory.

A Burst of Light by Audre Lorde
This one is for the woman learning that staying alive in her own life may require more honesty than she expected. Lorde’s words on self-preservation feel different when you’ve spent years functioning through what needed care. She reminds me that care can be soft, firm, disruptive, holy, and deeply necessary.

The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison
Morrison is for sitting with language, memory, responsibility, and the sacred weight of telling the truth. Her essays remind me that writing asks us to pay attention, honor what we know, and protect the imagination from anything trying to flatten it.

Add them to your TBR. Read when you’re ready.

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 thought I was building a bookstore.

That was the easiest way to explain it, especially in the beginning. When people asked me what Socialight Society was, I could say, “It’s an independent bookshop that celebrates Black women and Black literature,” and most people understood that quickly enough. They could imagine shelves and book covers, new releases on display, tote bags near the register, and somebody behind the counter who knew exactly what to recommend when a reader walked in and said, “I want something good, but I don’t know what I’m in the mood for.”

That answer was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth.

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Socialight Society began in 2021 as an independent bookshop created to celebrate Black women writers, Black literature, and the sacred feeling of seeing ourselves clearly. I started it because I knew what it felt like to love books and still walk into literary spaces where Black women’s stories felt too hard to find. I knew what it felt like to scan the shelves, search the tables, and wonder why the books that had carried me, challenged me, raised me, and helped me understand myself weren’t always treated like essential reading.

I didn’t have a perfect business plan when I started. I had a conviction. I had a deep love for Black women’s words. I had grief, imagination, prayer, and the stubborn belief that if I kept wishing a space existed, maybe I needed to stop waiting and build it myself.

I know she was talking about writing, but I’ve always heard that quote as an invitation to create whatever is missing. When there’s a room you keep needing and no one has made it yet, you may have to build it. When there’s a shelf you keep searching for and it’s never full enough, you may have to curate it. When there’s a table where you long to sit and see women who look like you being honored with care, you may have to pull out the chairs yourself.

That’s what the bookshop became for me.

It was the bookstore I kept hoping to find. It was the shelf I wanted to stand in front of. It was the room I wanted to walk into without having to shrink, translate, or explain why Black women’s stories mattered. It was my way of saying that our books deserved more than a corner, more than a seasonal display, more than a temporary moment when the world suddenly remembered we had something to say.

From the beginning, I wanted abundance. I wanted Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, bell hooks, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Jasmine Mans, Jesmyn Ward, Tarana Burke, and so many others taking up space like they belonged there, because they did. I wanted Black women who looked like me to walk in and feel seen before they ever had to ask a question. I wanted our stories to be easy to find, and I wanted the shelves to say what the world hadn’t always said plainly enough: we’re worth reading, remembering, studying, and celebrating.

At first, the work looked like what people expect a bookstore to look like. I ordered inventory, made displays, recommended books, hosted events, packed bags, posted online, carried boxes, created graphics, tracked sales, showed up at pop-ups, and learned in real time how much labor hides behind something beautiful.

And baybee, it was a lot.

I was the bookseller, the buyer, the marketer, the event planner, the customer service department, the display team, the delivery driver, the cleaning crew, and the woman standing in the middle of the store trying to remember if she’d eaten anything that day besides a snack and vibes. I prayed over numbers, moved the same stack of books six different times because the colors weren’t speaking to each other correctly, and tried to make the work look effortless when I knew good and well my back hurt.

People saw the pretty parts, and I loved making the pretty parts. I loved a table that felt intentional. I loved a stack of books that looked like it belonged in somebody’s Sunday afternoon. I loved a cover that caught the light just right. I loved when somebody walked in for one book and left with three because the shelf started talking to them.

What I didn’t always know how to explain was that the beauty was part of the ministry. The curation was part of the care. The way the books were placed, the way the room felt, the way women lingered between shelves, and the way conversations opened up because a title had named something somebody was carrying all mattered to me.

Somewhere in the middle of building the bookstore, I started noticing that the books were doing more than selling. They were making room for memory. A woman would pick up a title and tell me about her mother. Somebody else would find a book for her daughter and start talking about what she wished she’d been given as a girl. A reader would stand in front of the shelf and say, “I needed this,” and suddenly the bookstore felt less like retail and more like witness.

That’s when I began to understand that the work was about what books make possible.

Books can open a conversation that people didn’t know they were ready to have. They can become mirrors, maps, warnings, invitations, and witnesses. A book can sit on a table and quietly call someone back to herself. It can remind a woman that she isn’t the first one to grieve, dream, rage, pray, begin again, or tell the truth. It can give language to the thing we’ve been feeling in our bodies but couldn’t yet say out loud.

That’s why the bookshop became more than a place to buy books. It became a gathering place, a cultural space, a soft place to land, and sometimes, whether I said it that way or not, a sanctuary. People came for books, but they also came for recognition. They came for the feeling of being surrounded by Black women’s words. They came for story time, book fairs, pop-ups, conversations, and the kind of table where books could lead us into faith, grief, hair, grandmothers, church hurt, joy, recipes, and what we were making for dinner without anybody needing to pass out an agenda.

That’s the culture.

That’s the archive.

That’s the work.

So when I closed the physical space, I had to grieve more than a business decision. I had to grieve a version of the dream I’d touched with my own hands. The shelves weren’t just shelves to me. The displays weren’t just displays. The room held my hope, my creativity, my prayers, my exhaustion, my belief in Black women’s stories, and my desire to make something beautiful and useful at the same time.

Closing the doors didn’t mean the work was over, but it did mean I had to tell myself the truth about what was changing. I had to release the version people could walk into and trust that the mission would still live beyond that room.

That sounds much cleaner now than it felt at the time.

When you’re in the middle of change, it rarely feels like wisdom. Most of the time, it feels like fear with a little bit of paperwork. Like packing boxes, making announcements, answering questions, and trying not to take every ending personally. Feels like wondering if people will still understand the work when they can’t physically step inside it. It feels like standing in the middle of what you built and admitting that the next version will require you to loosen your grip on the one you knew how to explain.

Honestly, that’s been the theme of my life in this season.

I’ve been releasing what I thought would last forever. A marriage. A church home. A physical bookstore. Versions of myself that knew how to survive but didn’t always know how to be free. I’ve always known how to start over in the small ways. I can cut my hair, archive an Instagram feed, rearrange a room, change the whole plan, and move like nothing happened. I know how to pivot. I know how to make something out of what I have left.

This season has required something deeper than a pivot. It’s asked me to stop treating every ending like evidence that I failed. It’s asked me to trust that God can still be present when something changes shape. It’s asked me to believe that peace is worth the unraveling, even when the unraveling is uncomfortable, inconvenient, and humbling.

The bookshop has been teaching me that lesson too.

For a while, I thought closing the physical space meant I was losing the bookstore. Now I believe God was helping me see the work more clearly. The bookstore was one expression of the vision, and I’m grateful for everything that expression taught me. The shelves mattered. The room mattered. The people who walked through the door mattered. The events, the book tables, the story times, the conversations, and the little moments between customers who became community all mattered.

The work is still about books, and I don’t want to move away from that. Books remain the doorway, the language, the invitation, and the offering. What’s become clearer is that the books were always leading me toward something wider. This work is also about memory, gathering, celebration, Black women’s stories, and the belief that what we read can shape how we see ourselves and one another.

It’s about creating a living record of the books that formed us, the women who taught us, the conversations that saved us, and the tables where we learned how to tell the truth.

That’s why Come Celebrate With Me feels like part of the bookshop’s next life. This space isn’t separate from what I’ve been building. It’s one of the ways the Socialight Society is still breathing. It’s where the essays live. It’s where I practice telling the truth with beauty. It’s where I write about starting over, faith, feminism, memory, grief, joy, books, Black womanhood, and the ordinary miracles that keep saving my life.

Over the last few days, more people have started gathering here. My notes have been reaching folks I didn’t expect. People are commenting, reading, sharing, and pulling up a chair. New subscribers have found their way to this table, and some of you may only know a piece of the story. So it feels like a good time to say plainly what this is becoming.

Come Celebrate With Me is the essay table. It’s where the bookshop’s love for Black women’s stories meets my love for story. It’s where the work continues through reflection, memory, and conversation. It’s where I get to write the kind of thing I once needed to read.

Maybe that’s why Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me” keeps following me. When Clifton writes, “come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed,” I don’t read that line casually. I hear it like scripture for survival. I hear it as testimony from a Black woman who knew what it meant to shape a life without a model, to stand between starshine and clay, and to call celebration into the room without pretending life had been easy.

I keep returning to that poem because I know what it means to make something without a model. I know what it means to become while grieving. I know what it means to build while tired, to celebrate while surviving, and to keep showing up even when something in your life has ended and the next thing hasn’t fully introduced itself yet.

Celebration, for me, has never been shallow. It’s never been about pretending everything is fine or throwing glitter over grief. Celebration is testimony. Celebration is resistance. Celebration is the decision to honor what’s still alive after life has tried to take too much. It’s the deep breath after the hard season. It’s the table set after the storm. It’s the laughter that comes back slowly and surprises you. It’s the moment you realize you’re not who you were, and somehow, by the grace of God, that’s good news.

The vision was born from that kind of celebration.

It came from the belief that Black women don’t have to wait until the world catches up to us before we honor ourselves. We can build the shelf, set the table, make the room, tell the story, and gather the books that remind us we’ve always been worthy of study, beauty, care, and remembrance.

I thought I was building a bookstore, and in many ways, I still am. The shelves look different now. The room has changed. The work moves through essays, book lists, pop-ups, conversations, digital spaces, future gatherings, and whatever else God gives me the courage to build. But the heart of it hasn’t disappeared. I’m still making space for Black women’s stories to be read, remembered, and celebrated.

For me, part of the answer has been this work I started in 2021. Part of the answer has been Come Celebrate With Me. Part of the answer is this ongoing practice of writing myself toward clarity, even when the map is incomplete. I’m learning that the work doesn’t disappear just because the room changes. Sometimes the room was only the beginning. Sometimes the thing you built has to change shape so you can finally understand what it was trying to become.

I thought I was building a bookstore.

Now I can see that I was also building a table, an archive, a doorway, a gathering place, and a living record of the books, women, stories, and conversations that keep calling me forward.

This time, I don’t need to make it smaller to make it make sense.

Socialight Society is bigger than books because Black women’s stories have always been bigger than the pages that carry them.

So if you’re new here, welcome. I’m glad you found your way to this table.

The books are here.

The stories are here.

I’m here too, still becoming, still building, and still celebrating the life that made it through.

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.