THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE

You’re suicidal. Yes, I said it. You ’re suicidal. You’re suicidal every time you remain quiet. You ’re suicidal when you stay silent in your relationships. At the doctor’s office. With your family and friends. At work. Even with yourself. Now that I have your attention, let me tell you what this is really about: silence. We do not talk about silence the way we talk about death. But silence has killed more people than suicide ever has. Silence is the slow version. The every

We walk through life loaded. Not with guns. With emotions we never learned how to feel. Most of us were never taught how to talk about what we carry. We were taught how to conceal it. Swallow it. Dress it up. Smile through it. Silence it. And call that strength. But concealed emotions do not disappear. They sit in the body like ammunition. All it takes is the right trigger, at the wrong time, with the right person, and suddenly everything we hid becomes a weapon. Emotions an

“It’s genetics.” That’s our favorite cliché. We use it when we don’t want to do the necessary work on ourselves. When we don’t want to slow down long enough to ask the real questions. When we need a quick explanation for patterns we’ve been living with our entire lives. High blood pressure? Genetics. Depression? Genetics. Anxiety? Genetics. Addiction, anger, diabetes, silence, scarcity? Genetics. We treat it like a medical fact when in reality it’s often the most convenient e

Southern hospitality is often praised as warmth, kindness, and good manners.But what we don’t talk about enough is how deeply it trains people to abandon themselves. I was driving recently and felt that familiar knot in my stomach.The kind that shows up when you know what’s expected of you, even when your body is quietly saying no. I realized something uncomfortable. If I go to my mama’s house and don’t come inside, it’s considered rude. Not asking how I’m doing. Not checking

New Year’s Eve Edition Every December, people start yelling the same thing: New year, new me. We repeat this every year without ever asking the most important question: How can you become someone new if you don’t even know who you are yet? And for a long time, I believed that was the goal. To become new. To erase the old. To start over from scratch. But this year, that didn’t sit right with me. I don’t want to become someone new. I want to remember who I was before the wo

Holidays have become a lot louder than the truth. So instead of getting lost in Merry Christmas Eve, I think about two women who carry more meaning than any holiday could hold: Mary and Eve. Mary Eve. Two women whose stories shaped the world, and somehow, shaped me too. If I’m honest, I didn’t always understand women. I didn’t always feel connected to them. And I didn’t always feel safe around them. For a long time, I questioned why everything in society seemed to revolve ar

I never thought I’d be the one writing about “daddy issues.” For most of my life, I honestly didn’t understand the phrase. Growing up, it felt like none of us had fathers, so how could something be an issue if it was everybody’s reality? In the words of Drake: “Boohoo, sad story, Black American dad story.” I brushed it off. I survived through it — or so I thought. I never let not having a father define me. I told myself it was normal. And for a long time, I believed it. But t