tiddiesmalls

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"It goes like this:

On the day you’re born, you’re given a little plot of rich and fertile soil, slightly different from everyone else’s. And right away, your family and your culture start to plant things and tend the garden for you, until you’re old enough to take over its care yourself.

They plant language and attitudes and knowledge about love and safety and bodies and sex. And they teach you how to tend your garden, because as you transition through adolescence into adulthood, you’ll take on full responsibility for its care.

And you didn’t choose any of that. You didn’t choose your plot of land, the seeds that were planted, or the way your garden was tended in the early years of your life.

As you reach adolescence, you begin to take care of the garden on your own. And you may find that your family and culture have planted some beautiful, healthy things that are thriving in a well-tended garden. And you may notice some things you want to change.

Maybe the strategies you were taught for cultivating the garden are inefficient, so you need to find different ways of taking care of it so that it will thrive. Maybe the seeds that were planted were not the kind of thing that will thrive in your particular garden, so you need to find something that’s a better fit for you.

Some of us get lucky with our land and what gets planted. We have healthy and thriving gardens from the earliest moments of our awareness.

And some of us get stuck with some pretty toxic crap in our gardens, and we’re left with the task of uprooting all the junk and replacing it with something healthier, something we choose for ourselves." » Emily Nagoski

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men who can’t maintain platonic friendships w women can’t be trusted lol

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I am tired. These people make me feel I have a hole in the middle of me.

— D.H. Lawrence, from The Complete Works; The Plumbed Serpent

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Any dumbass ever: dark-skinned girls can’t wear this hair/clothes color

Me, graduated from 4th grade art class: Brown is a NEUTRAL color, it goes with ANYTHING, you stupid bitch. You cowardly racist motherfucker. You absolute buffoon.

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well!

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History books always seem to leave this out.

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How to Deal with hurt and Pain

1. Try and put into words exactly how you’re feeling. Is it the pain of rejection? Is it an overwhelming feeling of shame and self-loathing? Is it a sense of disbelief that you’ve been treated so cruelly by others? Is it a sense of utter desperation?

2. Try and find a way of expressing the pain. Sometimes we can tell the person who has hurt us– but often we feel that they won’t be responsive. If that is the case, find someone you can open up to. It’s really important that you have the chance to honestly express what you’re going through. If you feel there’s no-one you can talk to right now, then perhaps try journaling, or using some kind of art, like music or painting.

3. If the pain’s related to something that happened, admit that you can’t go back and change the past. You need to let it go and keep your eyes ahead. You are not defined by what happened to you, and you have what it takes to live a rich, rewarding life.

4. Related to this, forgive yourself and don’t hold on to regrets. Learn what you can – and then choose to move ahead. Don’t be a victim of your past, or other people.

5. Reconnect with the person that you were previously. Think of who you might have been if this had never happened. You can still be that person: they are still a part of you.

6. Focus on the things that bring you joy and happiness, and focus on those people who love care for you.

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Confession

There’s a cousin that’s used as an example of what not to be. All because she’s never been married and doesn’t have kids. What’s sad is she has no clue how bad she gets talked about. To piss me off, I’ve been compared to this cousin since I was little. I was told I’m miserable like her & I’ll be alone for the rest of my life like her. I stopped being compared to her once I let my mother & grandma know that comparing me to someone who had a much different upbringing than me, doesn’t bother me.

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Slavery displaced MILLIONS of Africans!

However, our spirituality was not completely lost.

Often we had to synchronize our spirits with the forced religious beliefs of our masters as a means to covertly pray to our own.

In other instances we willing and deliberately retained as much as we could under the eyes of our oppressors; and we also merged various practices of other enslaved Africans into one.

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@eboneedavis

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📸:majesti.i

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May brighten up your TL? 🌞🌻✨

IG• modern_day_esther

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Lanisha Cole in “Break You Off” (2002)