Figuring

Recently, the concept of life and living has been really big for me. I started out trying to find the meaning of my own life. Why am I here? What is my purpose? What am I meant to do? Generally speaking, the first thing that comes to mind for me is writing. One of the first things in my life that I felt sure of was that I was a writer. It’s odd to explain the sensation. I knew before I knew. I wrote before I knew it was what I wanted to do. I wanted to be an WNBA player. I wanted to be some form of mathematician because I loved math. But I was already telling stories and writing cards and poems for people. I was already writing the stories of my dolls in their doll houses. They had families and those families lived. I was already pouring myself into essays, like the one I wrote in 5th grade which is one of the first places that I really set down my grief for my Papa. My Papa died when I was 9 and I was devastated. I loved my Papa so much. When he died it felt like a part of me did too. Maybe just the little girl who loved her Papa, but really the little girl who had been loved by her Papa. Whose Papa sent her pictures of a little brown girl who looked just like her to hang up to let her see herself in art. Little girl me could not speak to that grief. But I could write to it.

Like in 6th grade when I was given the assignment in English to write some kind of script. I wrote multiple versions of it. I really got into it. English was always may favorite along with Social Studies, even when I went through the space when I didn’t like reading. I got tired of reading all about little white girls. I didn’t mind reading about white girls, I just couldn’t relate to them. I needed to read stories about the life that I knew. The culture I knew. The world that I knew. A world of Tupac Shakur, Martin, Living Single, The Wiz, Friday, Claudine, Cornbread, Earl, and Me, Cooley High, Moesha.  As young Black girls in that era, we only had a few girls to look up to. Brandy. Maia Campbell. Reagan Gomez-Preston. Countess Vaughan. Shar Jackson. Meagan Good. Kyla Pratt. Raven Symone. Tia and Tamera Mowry. Kellie Williams. Michelle Thomas. Gabrielle Union. Zelda Harris. Vanessa Baden. That was the 90s. We were starting to see more of ourselves. I was raised on I’m Gonna Get You Sucka and The Last Dragon. Brandy was my Cinderella. I still randomly start singing In My Own Little Corner In My Own Little Chair.  I loved Ramona. I read all of the Ramona books. But I wanted to see something I could relate to. So from the 2nd until the 5th grade I shunned reading. We had that one book with the Black girl on it for real. I did get Black dolls. I had a set of Black twins that I named Tia and Tamera. I had the Kenya doll. I had Annie from the American Girl Dolls. You know the enslaved one. That’s so messed up that the one Black American Girl Doll was enslaved and don’t say that’s not racist. That is racist as hell. This was the late 90s, early 2000s. How far back did they have to reach to make her enslaved? Tisha Campbell did not sing her little heart out on Rags to Riches for y’all to act as if there were no modern Black girls to model her after. Cree had been like 50leven voices by then. Suzie was right there. Shirley Chisolm. Coretta Scott King. Hell, Oprah. All of the Black women you could have modeled that doll after and she had to be enslaved? But I was so happy. I loved my Annie Doll. I had her books. I was proud of her and I still am. But they could have least made more than one Black doll and made one not enslaved. Mae Jemison. Ruby Bridges. 

I’m getting off track because that’s what I do. I meander. I tangent. That’s me. My point is that I wrote before I knew that I wanted to be a writer. Which is why I never really decided. I realized I was. But even with that certainty, reconciling that call with the world around me was a bit strange. I couldn’t really make sense of it. Nobody in my family was a writer. At least not in any way I knew. They may have wrote some letters. Wrote in cards, but that was it. I didn’t know anybody who was a writer. That wasn’t a thing to me. I liked to read, but I didn’t think about the writers like that. I just loved the stories. So even in my certainty that I needed to write, I wasn’t so sure that anybody would care. Moesha used to click clack in her journals and she wanted to be a journalist. Khadijah was a magazine publisher. I saw it more on TV than I did in life. I saw Dr. Maya Angelou. I saw Terry McMillan. I saw Sister Souljah. Zane. Those were most of the Black women writers that I saw. Nina wrote that poem in Love Jones. Sidney was a writer. Dre read her articles in the park all of the time. The more you see, the more possible it seems. But most of what I saw was fiction. It didn’t really seem to exist in the real world. So it seemed like a dream to be a writer. To be able to write for a living? I’ve always written. I’d be insane if I hadn’t. I didn’t talk a lot. I did when I did, but the older I got I learned to be quiet. I learned to keep the things I cared about to myself, because no one seemed to care what I thought about. My siblings were 5 and 6 years older than me. They didn’t really care. My parents were in their 20s with 3 kids and not a lot of money, they didn’t really care. I was always whimsical, imaginative, dreamy. Yeah, people aren’t very fond of that. So I learned to keep it to myself. Which is why releasing my writing is so tough for me. It’s always been for me. It’s not as easy for me to do for others. I don’t know what other people care about. I just know what matters to me. Didn’t really seem to occur to me that it mattered to others to. I’m still figuring that out. I’ll pick this up tomorrow…