29.
my kohl's cash looking right, you just not gonna talk to me any type of way
swiss miss with the marshmallows is wintertime ambrosia, that shit will have me off the walls and you can have it too
“live mas, always. eat taco bell before it eats you”
“everything you say says a lot about you. but everything you don't say says infinitely more”
“sometimes the people who tell you you're unapproachable have never stopped to think about their approach. keep going.”
“kill the cop in ya head before you become it”
“niggas really just be saying anything”
29 is weird. some of you who might be reading this might be older than 29 and hey this is my first time to let me have this, you hater! everybody looks at 30 as a magical number where you have to have all your shit together but i look at 30 as the beginning of who i actually am. i think for the first 28 years of my life i held myself to too high of a standard, trying to superhumanly handle everything at once because weakness was not an option and i didn't have unlimited extra lives like a lot of other p.o.n.cs i found myself around (real ones know what a “p.o.n.c.” is / free new lexicon for y’all who don’t). i spent a lot of time navigating spaces i was not comfortable in for a multitude of reasons but i've landed somewhere i haven't been for a very very long time: the present.
the best part about being 29 and off of social media is that i am finally able to live in the present. i feel as if i've spent too much of the last few years living in uncertain, ever-shifting futures (anxiety) and stuck in dark pasts (ptsd/depression) while my present was defined by the struggle between the pull of both of them. social media fought for my attention in a different way but it always trended towards the negative which felt like adding nitrous to my mental descent. but, now i really do feel as if i have found balance and peace in a lot of areas of my life. but more importantly, i think that i’ve discovered time travel, the secret ingredient was apparently “mento illness.”
i thought a lot about the future professionally, romantically, friendshipwise, creatively, etc but i was terrified of sitting in the present because i was afraid that past would drag me back to the dark places that i spent a lot of time trying to climb out of over the last 4 years. and lord knows i have been climbing, je suis trés trés trés fatigue, laisse-moi tranquille (bust out that duolingo and a baguette)
my birthday is on world mental health day which is more proof that god is a comedian and he's a little bit too on the nose (that shit is wild hack imo, my birthday should be ‘world space jam day’ or “african boxing day” or something off the beaten path). fun fact: my therapist thought that i was 35 years old until earlier this summer (it was truly some fuckery). when i informed her that i was 28, she admitted that she had been a little bit too harsh with me but honestly that harshness pushed me in the right direction; it made me come to terms with the fact that most of my friends have always been older than me and she cited how i sit in meetings, the work that i want to do, and how i approach situations as very mature which made her think that i was 35 when i was actually much younger. ***this, like my beard, doesn’t connect to anything but my therapist is a g, always reps her set, moves packs of high-end toothpaste, more on that when i feel like it.***
what i learned is the most difficult part of people looking at me as older, more buttoned-up, or mature is that i didn't feel like i was allowed to be youthful, at least not in the spaces that i was in academically, professionally, socially, etc; i constantly felt like the united nations ambassador from african muslim niggas with skinny legs and big hearts (unpaid, might i add). part of that might be from partial parentification in my mid-20s, part of that definitely comes from being a young black west african muslim person in this country, with the realities of having Black skin and non-santafied faith imparted to you early, robbing you the joy of being a child, but most of it comes from never wanting to make a mistake, something that paralyzed me for years until i learned that even if i didn’t make a mistake, people would make/find one. i don’t need to dig into the historical precedent to this, iykyk.
i feel like I did some of life out of order by trying to be older than i was, specifically the parts about figuring out my sexuality and doing book reports on nelson mandela (which happened in the opposite order listed previously). i’ve been superhuman my entire life, balancing too much all the time while never making space for just me, making sure that “multi” in “multi-hyphenate” is always expanding, and sometimes i worry i’ll never get to be human because i missed my shot by being excellent, working 4x as hard as a survival mechanism.
29 is the “fuck it” year, so please prepare for that energy. i’m taking crunchwraps to the face all year, mainlining baja blast, i’m tired of faking humble to make insecure cornballs feel smarter, i’m tired of people chatting to me crazy because they’ve heard of ta-nehisi coates, i’m tired of people pretending hot chocolate doesn’t absolutely go off in ya mouth in a way no other beverage can, i’m just not giving people as much space anymore. no more taking advantage of my kindness, no more third and fourth guessing for people who don’t second guess, run up and get done up, come correct, talk spicy, shit gets dicey. except i will be taking lactaid; dairy and the black community is deffo top ten anime fights
god level knowledge darts - desus and mero
truly a top-tier piece of literati (i don't even care if i'm using “literati” the right way it had the word “lit” in it and i had a double entendre that i couldn't pass up so you're welcome). these two knuckleheads honestly saved my life when i was in a deep depression with their rawness, authenticity, and my genuine joy for their ascension to become the #1 show in late-night, smdftb, die for the hive
fumbling towards repair: a workbook for community accountability facilitators - mariame kaba and shira hassan
y’all niggas don’t know a damn thing about accountability until you read this book. so much about how we interact with the world is based on the prison industrial complex and this book shows a possible way forward, one that is imperfect but malleable from case to case. it helped be settle down and recognize toxic thought patterns that our culture has normalized by being unable to imagine a world without police and prisons, trapping us in a white supremacist good/bad binary with no restorative or solution-oriented thinking. everyone trying to build a healthy community should read this one million times then run it back.
[thereforst and in conclusionly]
the thing that i've been sitting with over the last few days is how little time i allowed myself to be young, how much time i've spent burning myself out to create the future that i wish i had in my past, how many of my boundaries were broken and i remained silent, how much time was wasted being miseducated only to go back and have to unlearn and relearn (sometimes in real-time), how much time i wasted sitting in the dark trying not only to live but to explain why it's difficult for me to live. but that is going to be the past. my family’s finally feeling good, my homies are getting married, my big homie gonna have a baby, i’m there for my friends in a healthier way, I feel like they’ve got me too, i’m slowly letting go of toxic tethers, and life feels tranquil and calm for the first time in 5 years. i'm 29 years old and i'm ready to start living. or stop, depending on what pops off with america next month.
word of the day: “afronihilist” aka “niggas who think life don’t matter”
M