Thoughtful reflections on anxiety, Black parenting and beauty
There’s a version of your body that some part of the world, at some point in history, would have called perfect. You’ve probably never met her. She keeps changing shape. That’s the quiet tension underneath most of what women are
Most articles about anxiety are written for the version that feels manageable: the pre-exam nerves, the mild flutter before a big meeting, or the moment of uncertainty before something important. The usual advice is familiar: breathe deeply, go for a
Black Teen Safety often begins with a quiet calculation that happens in the mind of almost every Black parent, guardian, aunt, uncle or big cousin who’s raising a teenager. It’s small. It passes in a second. Your child says they’re
Relational Trauma Recovery begins with understanding the exhaustion that comes from being close to someone while still feeling the need to protect yourself. It is a particular kind of tired that comes from bracing for something to go wrong, not
Look at the Black men in your life. Their hair grows thick, coiled and healthy, largely left alone. Then look at your own hairline, or what’s left of it. Something in you knows the comparison isn’t fair. You make it
There’s a phrase that gets passed down before anyone properly explains it. Sell out. You hear it long before you understand it. Somebody’s cousin gets a fancy job and changes how they talk on the phone. Somebody’s neighbour moves to
At some point in your parenting journey, you might start to notice something. The questions you’re turning over — how do I raise a child who knows their own worth? How do I help them bounce back when things get
There’s a version of getting better from anxiety that gets talked about a lot. The one where you do the work, find the right therapist, take the right steps, and then one day you wake up and you’re better. Lighter.
There’s a conversation that happens in a lot of households — often quietly, sometimes loudly — that goes something like this. It sits at the heart of what many experts now call generational parenting: the way beliefs, habits and experiences
There’s a particular silence that falls when a parent tells someone from an older Caribbean generation that you don’t smack your children. It isn’t always hostile. Sometimes it’s just weighted. A whole worldview compressed into a pause. In many ways,
There might come a moment, as a mother, where you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and don’t quite recognise the woman looking back in this struggle of motherhood vs sexual identity. Not because you look terrible. But
At some point, without anyone asking your opinion, a decision was made. A decision shaped by beauty standards about what a woman’s body should look like. How much space it should take up. Where it should be narrow, where it
There’s a size that Western society has decided is the right one. You probably already know what it is. It’s the size that fills the most rail space. The size that fashion weeks are built around. The size that gets
Think about that for a moment. Childhood trauma and adult anxiety are often deeply connected. The anxiety you carry, the hypervigilance, the overthinking, and the way your body tenses before anything has even gone wrong didn’t arrive from nowhere. It
There’s an ongoing conversation in the Black community about beauty that often goes unnamed. You hear it in comments about hair, in women featured in music videos, and in who gets called beautiful without conditions. The reality is that sometimes
Something real has been happening in the beauty industry. Over the last decade or so, Black women-owned beauty brands and Black-owned beauty brands have been building products that actually understand our skin, our hair, and our long history of being
Some people spend years, even decades, trying to fix themselves. They work on their anxiety, their relationships, their self-esteem. They try therapy, journaling, meditation. They make progress, lose ground, make progress again. And underneath all of it, there’s a quiet
It has a plan for you. A carefully managed, smallish life. Not unhappy necessarily. Just contained. Safe. Familiar. A life where you don’t reach too far, ask for too much, or put yourself anywhere you might be judged, rejected, or
