Because all I can think about is this:

As a person with breasts, society would absolutely lose its collective shit if I walked around bare-chested in public.

And before somebody starts hollering about biology, decency, or “appropriateness,” save it.

Men’s chests are not inherently more neutral. Society just decided one version of a torso is harmless and the other is sexual, political, disruptive, tempting, dangerous, or “asking for attention.”

That’s the part that fascinates me.

A stadium full of shirtless men becomes:

community

tradition

team spirit

good clean American fun

A woman existing topless in public?

Suddenly we’re clutching pearls, citing morality, talking about “the children,” and acting like civilization itself is moments from collapse.

And the wild thing is, I don’t even necessarily want to walk around topless.

I just notice freedom when I see it.

I notice who gets to occupy public space casually.

Who gets to be loud.

Who gets to be comfortable in heat.

Who gets to be ridiculous without becoming dangerous.

Who gets to have bodies instead of “statements.”

Because that’s what this really is: casual bodily freedom.

Men get to remove their shirts without their bodies becoming a debate.

Without their morality becoming a referendum.

Without their chest becoming public discourse.

That’s power, whether people recognize it or not.

Gravity Did What Gravity Does

And let’s tell the truth all the way through while we’re here.

I’m not twenty-two.

I’m post-menopausal.

My breasts look like breasts that have lived a life, not breasts trying to win a popularity contest.

They have sustained life.

They have brought pleasure.

They have survived gravity.

They are not defective because they changed.

They are not shameful because they are no longer performing youth.

They are mine.

Men are allowed to age into comfort.

Women are expected to age into invisibility.

And that’s when you really start noticing the rules.

A shirtless older man at a baseball game is “living his best life.”

A shirtless older woman becomes a public discussion.

A warning.

A spectacle.

A joke.

A morality issue.

A meme before she is a person.

Stay in Your Lane

It reminds me of that moment in Dance with Me when the older dancer sees what the younger dancers are doing and says, “I wanna do that too.”

And you can feel the room dismiss her before she even moves.

Not because she lacks desire.

Not because she lacks ability.

But because everyone around her has already decided what kind of body is allowed to want, to move, to try, to be seen.

That is the quieter rule underneath all of this:

stay in your lane.

Age gracefully.

Dress appropriately.

Be respectable.

Do not ask to feel free in public.

Do not remind anyone that your body still belongs to you.

Even now.

Even after motherhood.

Even after menopause.

Even after survival.

Even after the body has carried work, grief, heat, joy, stress, years, and history.

We are still expected to negotiate whether our existence is visually acceptable before we’re allowed comfort.

The Old Brutal Logic

There is an old, brutal logic underneath all of this:

the idea that a woman’s body has an assigned purpose.

Be desirable, but not too available.

Be fertile, but not too loud about the cost.

Be modest, but still pleasing.

Be youthful, but not childish.

Age, but do not become visible in your aging.

And when you are no longer useful within that framework, disappear.

That is the part I keep thinking about.

Not because a shirtless baseball chant is the same thing as historical practices that treated widows as disposable. It is not.

But because the same old question keeps echoing underneath different rules:

What is a woman allowed to be once she is no longer being arranged for someone else’s comfort?

The Children Are Watching

What fascinates me is how early this starts.

When I was little, my chest looked just like my male cousins’ chests.

Flat.

Childish.

No real visible difference.

And yet somehow they were allowed to exist freely in the heat while I was already being taught regulation.

My wife remembers something different.

She grew up in the country, running around outside barefoot and bare-chested as a little kid in the heat, the same way boys did.

Free.

Unselfconscious.

Human.

Meanwhile, I grew up in the city already learning surveillance.

Already learning:

Cover yourself.

Close your legs.

Put a shirt on.

That’s not ladylike.

People are looking.

Don’t give people a reason.

That conditioning starts long before sexuality ever enters the picture.

Which means this was never really about “protecting children.”

The children are learning the rule from us now, in real time.

Boys learn:

Your body is natural.

Your body belongs in the world.

Girls learn:

Your body is public property that must be managed for other people’s comfort.

Your body must be negotiated.

And apparently we’re still teaching that lesson at baseball games now.

That contrast has stayed with me because it proves the rules are not natural.

They are taught.

The Stories We Tell About Bodies

And this is where I keep coming back to the stories we are told about bodies.

Because the story matters.

For generations, even biology was narrated like conquest.

The sperm races.

The sperm wins.

The sperm penetrates.

The egg waits.

Even there, the body coded as female was made passive in the telling.

But what happens when the story changes?

What happens when we admit that bodies are not neutral in the way we describe them, study them, regulate them, or shame them?

That is what I keep seeing in this baseball trend.

Not just shirtless men having fun.

A story.

A story about whose body is allowed to be casual.

Whose body is allowed to be funny.

Whose body is allowed to be hot, sweaty, aging, loud, ridiculous, and free without becoming a public problem.

And whose body has to be justified before it is allowed to exist.

Modesty Is Not the Same as Control

And to be clear, this is not me arguing that everybody should walk around naked.

I’m actually a fairly modest person.

I like structure.

Layers.

Clothing with shape and intention.

I feel more like myself in draped fabric than bodycon anything.

Sometimes I cover my hair because it’s comfortable, grounding, practical, or simply beautiful to me.

But there is a difference between choosing modesty and being taught that your body is inherently disruptive.

There’s a difference between self-respect and surveillance.

Because real self-control has never been about forcing other people to disappear themselves.

It is about how you conduct yourself.

How you behave around other human beings.

How you practice restraint, dignity, and respect without requiring someone else’s body to carry the burden of your discipline.

Closing the Loop

So no, this is not really about whether a bunch of men take their shirts off at a baseball game.

It is about what gets celebrated as freedom when men do it and what gets punished as indecency when women even imagine the same thing.

It is about children watching from the stands and learning, again, who gets to be comfortable in public.

It is about a country that calls baseball America’s pastime while still passing down America’s oldest lessons:

boys get space

girls get rules

And apparently, even in a stadium full of bare chests, some of us are still expected to keep our shirts on.

After I published Part I, I found the picture.

The lime green top. The pageboy haircut. The pose I remembered. The version of myself I thought might have been lost.

There she was.

Me at eighteen, trying to capture something I had once seen in my mother.

Finding that picture made me go back and look at hers again.

There’s a part of me that wants to blame her. And there’s a part of me that doesn’t.

Because the truth is, I don’t know what she was given either. I don’t know what softness looked like for her. I don’t know if anyone ever slowed down long enough to see her the way I wanted to be seen. I don’t know if she had the space to question how she loved, or the language to name what was missing.

It was a different time. And not in the way people say that to excuse things, but in the way that shapes what people even believe is possible.

Looking at that picture now, I remember that she was eighteen. Or almost eighteen. Seventeen, turning eighteen that November.

It was 1962. Medgar Evers would be assassinated the following year. Malcolm X in 1965. Dr. King in 1968. The Civil Rights Act had not yet passed. The Voting Rights Act had not yet passed.

She was coming of age in a country that had not yet been forced, even legally, to stop pretending Black people were disposable. And I wonder what that does to a girl.

Not in theory. Not in a history-book way. I mean that girl. The one in the picture. The one looking directly into the camera like she already knew how to hold herself still.

What happens when survival becomes the first language you learn? When you are taught, directly or indirectly, that softness is dangerous, that fear must be swallowed, that tenderness is something to protect by hiding it?

What kind of woman does that girl become?

And what kind of mother?

I wonder if it silenced her in a way. If she learned to swallow fear before it could show. If softness felt like something she could not afford. If being seen too clearly felt dangerous.

I don’t know what was going on in her mind then. I don’t know what she feared. I don’t know what she hoped for. I don’t know if anyone ever gave her room to be afraid.

By the time she had me, the story I heard most often was the emergency: I was premature. My umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck. Something almost went wrong before I even had language. But I don’t know if anyone held her through that. I don’t know if her mother showed up. I don’t know if anyone said, You must have been terrified.

She never told me.

She never showed it.

And maybe that was part of what she learned too.

I can hold the context of her life without erasing the harm in mine. There were things she did that I can understand now, but understanding does not make them harmless. Some of it was neglect. Some of it was abuse. And naming that does not mean I am blaming her for everything. It means I am finally telling the truth without flinching.

So I can’t sit here and pretend she had tools she may have never been given. But I also can’t pretend that I don’t have them now.

Because I do.

I’ve had time. I’ve had distance. I’ve had experiences that made me stop and ask myself why I respond the way I do. And once you start asking that question—once you really sit with it—you don’t get to unknow the answer.

That’s the part that belongs to me. Not what I was given, but what I do with it.

I can understand where something comes from and still decide it’s not how I want to move forward. I can recognize a pattern and choose not to repeat it. That doesn’t erase anything, but it does change what comes next.

There’s also a part of me that learned a long time ago that I will have to answer for the things and decisions I’ve made to my children, if not anybody else.

Respectfully.

Not because I believe mothers should disappear inside their children. Not because I believe martyrdom is the price of love. I don’t believe that. I can’t believe that. There were times I had to choose myself because no one else was going to choose me, and because disappearing would not have made me a better mother. It only would have made me more resentful, more exhausted, more absent in ways nobody would have named until much later.

But I also know that choosing myself did not happen in a vacuum.

My children experienced those choices in real time. Not as intention or survival strategy. Not as a woman trying to claw her way back to herself. They experienced me as I was. And whatever that was—whatever I gave, whatever I missed, whatever I didn’t yet understand—that is what they lived.

I don’t get to rewrite that. I don’t get to soften it after the fact just because I know more now. I don’t get to say, But I was doing my best, and expect that to answer every ache.

I think about a conversation I had with my mother once as an adult. I remember us passing by a train station, though I don’t remember where we were going. I tried to talk to her about some of the choices she made. Not to put her on trial. Not to make her answer for everything. Just to name that some things stayed with me.

Like the times she put me out.

Once, when I was six or seven, she locked me out of the house. I remember going across the street to the little park near our apartment complex. I sat on the swing and cried because I was terrified and didn’t know what to do.

Things like that linger.

When I tried to talk to her about it, she said, “I did the best I could with what I had.”

And I didn’t counter it. I didn’t ask her to defend it. I let that be her truth.

But now I understand something I didn’t understand then: her truth does not cancel out mine.

She may have done the best she could with what she had. And I was still a child locked outside, afraid, trying to figure out where to go.

Both things can be true.

That is what I have to remember when my own children come to me with their version of the story. I may want to explain. I may want to defend myself. I may want to tell them what I was carrying, what I was surviving, what I was trying to do.

But before I defend myself, I want to learn how to open the door.

Because sometimes my best may have still hurt them.

Sometimes my choices may have confused them. Sometimes my distance may have felt like rejection. Sometimes my silence may have sounded like indifference.

Sometimes the ways I was trying to survive may have looked, to them, like I was choosing something or someone else.

And maybe sometimes I was.

That is a hard sentence to write. But it is probably the truest one.

I have made choices I am proud of. I have made choices I would make again. I have made choices that gave me room to breathe, to become, to stop living like my own life was an afterthought.

And I have made choices that I may have to answer for.

Both things can be true.

I can love my children and still admit I did not always know how to mother from softness. I can know that I was carrying my own wounds and still recognize that my wounds did not make me harmless. I can understand myself without excusing myself.

That is the difference I am trying to learn now.

Not perfection. Not performance. Not pretending I finally know how to love correctly.

Just the willingness to notice. To listen. To stay present when the answer is uncomfortable. To not make my children responsible for reassuring me that I did okay.

If they ever come to me with their version of the story, I want to be able to hear it without reaching immediately for my defense. I want to be able to say, I understand why that hurt you, even if I remember the moment differently. I want to be able to hold the truth that love was there and still recognize that something else may have been missing.

That is a hard place to stand.

Because it means holding two truths at once: that I did the best I could with what I had, and that my best may not have always felt like enough to them.

Both things can be true.

And neither one cancels the other out.

Maybe that is where soft love begins. Not pretending we were given everything we needed, or that we gave everything perfectly. But in what we are willing to notice now.

And what we choose to do next.

I don’t mean love in the general sense. There was food. There was shelter. There were decisions made in the name of care. But there wasn’t softness. Not the kind that lingers. Not the kind that checks in. Not the kind that says, I see you, and I’m here with you.

I’m talking about soft love.

The kind that notices when your energy shifts. The kind that asks what you need before things fall apart. The kind that makes room for your emotions instead of managing around them.

I didn’t have that.

What I had was something else. Something more practical. More distant. Love that showed up in responsibility, not presence. Love that expected me to figure things out. Love that didn’t always make room for me to be soft.

So I adapted.

I became someone who could make decisions early. Someone who could take care of herself. Someone who could read a room without being taught how. Someone who could keep going without needing much.

At least, that’s what it looked like.

What it actually meant was that I learned how to live without being held.

And when you grow up like that, something subtle happens. You don’t go looking for softness. You don’t expect it. You don’t even always recognize it when it shows up.

You just move.

You build a life. You make choices. You become responsible. You become the kind of person who can take care of others, even if no one ever taught you how to do that gently.

There’s another layer to this that people don’t always like to talk about.

Motherhood isn’t always born out of softness or even desire. Sometimes it’s obligation. Sometimes it’s circumstance. Sometimes it’s a decision made in the middle of everything else you’re trying to survive.

I’ve made different choices in my life. I’ve chosen to continue pregnancies. I’ve also chosen not to. None of those decisions were simple, and none of them came from a place of having been deeply nurtured myself.

So when I say I became a mother without knowing what soft love felt like, I mean that in more ways than one.

When I became a mother, I did what I knew how to do.

I showed up. I handled what needed to be handled. I made decisions. I kept things moving.

And there is love in that.

But there is also a difference between love that sustains and love that soothes.

I didn’t know that yet.

I didn’t know what I was missing.

I only knew how to keep going.

I still have the picture of my mother at eighteen.

It’s one of my favorites of her. She looked cool without trying. Settled in herself in a way I didn’t have words for yet, but I recognized it.

The picture of me—the one I took years later because I wanted to look just as cool—is harder to find.

Maybe that says something. Maybe it doesn’t.

But I remember it.

So I went and got my own picture taken.

Back then, you didn’t need an appointment.

You went upstairs to this little studio, picked your background, and for twenty dollars you walked out with an 8x10, a couple of 5x7s, and a stack of wallet prints. It was quick. Twenty minutes, maybe. Everybody did it.

Not just for graduations. Not just for birthdays. Not for the kinds of photo shoots people do now in fields with golden-hour lighting and coordinated outfits.

This was different.

This was: it’s Saturday, you just got your hair done, you have a new outfit, and you want proof that you looked good in that moment.

That day, I felt good.

I had on a lime green sleeveless top. Lime green and black were my colors back then, and I had a few outfits that worked those colors hard. My hair was straight, cut into a pageboy right at my neck. No bangs, because I have never really been a bangs person. I had a job. I had just graduated. I was getting ready to leave for college.

I was stepping into something.

And I was proud of that picture.

When I brought it home, I showed it to my mom.

And the first thing she looked at was my arm.

Not my face.

Not the way I had put myself together.

Not the fact that I had tried to capture something I saw in her.

My arm.

I don’t even remember exactly what she said. I just remember the shift.

That quiet, familiar shift where something that felt good suddenly didn’t.

I didn’t have the language for it then. But I know now that was a moment where softness could have met me.

Someone could have said, You look beautiful.

Someone could have said, I see you.

Someone could have said, You did good.

Instead, I learned something else.

Something quieter.

Something that would take me years to name.

I went to see One Spoon of Chocolate at its premiere opening in Portland.

I didn’t go alone. I went with my middle daughter, and the decision to go came after a weekend that left a particular kind of residue. We had gone out dancing—one of those queer events that promises community but delivers something narrower. The music was familiar, but not for me. ABBA. “Dancing Queen.” The B-52’s “Love Shack.” A playlist, not a set. Nostalgia, but not exactly mine.

There is something about being Black in white spaces: we are expected to be fluent in everyone else’s nostalgia, even when it has never been ours.

It was a white space. A lesbian space, yes—but still white in a way that felt curated rather than shared. A true DJ is not just someone with access to songs. A true DJ knows how to mix and blend, how to take familiar ingredients and make something new. They are part chef, part conductor, part cultural translator. What we had that night felt less like a set and more like someone opening a personal archive and asking the room to dance inside it.

So when I saw there would be a set tied to this film—something rooted in Wu-Tang Clan, in ’90s hip-hop, in a sound that raised me—I was ready.

That music is home.

Hip-hop is not just music you hear. It is music you touch and feel. It is rhythm, memory, posture, weather. It lives in the body before it becomes nostalgia. I was 20 when Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) came out, and it found me during a time of transition. So when the DJ started, I felt it immediately: the nodding, the recognition, the quiet gratitude of being in a space where something familiar finally showed up.

And yet…

There was a dissonance. It was like being fed, but not fully nourished. Like the plate was familiar, but something in the seasoning was missing.

Looking around the room, seeing who else was moving to that same music—people wearing merch, people claiming the same cultural touchstones—it raised questions I couldn’t shake:

How are we all here? What does this mean to you? Do you feel this like I do? Can you?

It wasn’t about deciding who belonged there. It was about realizing I was experiencing the room from somewhere they might not be able to reach.

By the time we sat down for the film, that awareness hadn’t left. It had sharpened.

You could feel the room shifting as the story unfolded. Certain scenes landed differently depending on where you were sitting, who you were, and what you carried into the theater with you. Moments of violence, racism, and reversal drew reactions—applause in places that made me pause, awkward silence in others.

And throughout it, my daughter and I were talking.

Not to disrupt, but to process in real time. That’s how we move through stories, and how we make sense of what we’re seeing.

The difference is that I have learned to measure myself in public. My daughter has not learned that same kind of shrinking, and I am trying not to teach it to her. I know what masking can cost. I know how easily a person’s natural rhythm can be corrected out of them and renamed manners, maturity, or respectability.

For her, especially, the social contract of “sit still and be quiet” does not override the need to engage, respond, and question as things happen.

So the film wasn’t something we passively received.

It was something we moved through—together, in conversation, in a room that was also telling its own story.

And all of that—the music, the room, the reactions, the conversation—shaped what came next.

There’s a particular kind of disappointment that only comes from watching a story that almost works.

The premise of One Spoon of Chocolate is not the issue. In fact, it’s potent. A racially hostile enclave operating as a closed system of harm—one that preys on Black bodies under the guise of order and community—should feel chilling, expansive, and uncomfortably plausible. It sits in a lineage with films like Get Out, where horror emerges not from spectacle alone, but from the quiet normalization of violence.

But where that lineage relies on precision, this film leans too heavily on familiarity.

Let me be clear: this is not a dismissal of RZA. As an artist, he has long demonstrated an ability to build atmosphere, to create texture, to evoke something deeper than surface. And there are moments here—brief, flickering—where that instinct shows up. The use of origami as a symbolic throughline. The restraint in the central relationship, where intimacy is allowed to exist without being reduced to spectacle. A final image that gestures toward a reversal of power.

Those moments matter. They show intention.

But intention is not execution.

Too often, the film relies on its themes to do the heavy lifting. Racism is stated rather than revealed. Dialogue leans into the expected—slurs, declarations, the language we’ve heard before—rather than unsettling us with something quieter and more precise. The result is not that the film is offensive, but that it becomes predictable. And predictability is the death of tension.

There is also a structural issue that undermines the story’s credibility. The world is over-engineered. Key figures are too conveniently placed: the coroner’s office, the mortuary, law enforcement, and social ties all intersect in ways that feel less like an ecosystem and more like a constructed maze designed to move the plot forward. Instead of expanding the scope of the horror, it contains it. It tells us this is happening here, in this one place, among these specific people—when the more frightening truth would be that it could happen anywhere.

And then there is the question of complicity.

One of the most striking missed opportunities lies in the portrayal of those who know and choose not to act. A mother who works within the system, who has likely seen evidence before, only arrives at moral clarity when harm touches her proximity. This is not just a character flaw—it is a thematic doorway. The film brushes against it but does not step through. What could have been a sharp critique of selective empathy becomes instead a narrative convenience, a trigger to propel the protagonist forward.

The treatment of Black women within the film further reflects this imbalance. While the story centers the suffering and symbolism of Black men, Black women are often relegated to the periphery—functional rather than fully realized. Even when afforded more dignity, their roles remain tethered to the arcs of others. This absence is felt.

And yet, what lingers most is not anger—it is the sense of something unfinished.

Because the film contains ideas worth exploring. The metaphor of “one spoon of chocolate” is simple but evocative, speaking to fears of transformation, proximity, and perceived contamination. The quiet discipline of origami suggests a character capable of control, patience, and internal evolution. The final confrontation hints at a shift in power that could have been far more unsettling had it trusted silence over explanation.

This is what makes the film difficult to dismiss outright. It is not devoid of vision. It simply does not follow that vision far enough.

We are in a moment where storytelling—particularly stories rooted in race, power, and history—demands care. Not perfection, but rigor. Not just bold ideas, but the willingness to sit with them long enough to make them land. Cultural memory is not something to gesture toward; it is something to engage with fully.

And that is the ask.

Not to abandon experimentation. Not to shy away from genre. But remembering that style cannot replace substance. That homage—to blaxploitation, to kung fu cinema, to directors like Quentin Tarantino—requires more than aesthetic borrowing. It requires discipline, intention, and a deep respect for the audience’s ability to see beyond the surface.

There is a stronger film inside One Spoon of Chocolate. You can feel it trying to emerge.

And that is precisely why it matters to say: we deserve that version.

Not just as viewers, but as participants in a culture that recognizes when something is close—and refuses to settle when it falls short.

I want people to see this film.

I want it supported. I want the doors to stay open for artists like RZA to keep experimenting, to keep building, to keep reaching. That matters.

But support cannot mean silence.

Because we have seen these images before. We have lived these dynamics before. Racism, exploitation, the casual and systemic dehumanization of Black bodies—these are not new ideas to us. They are not theoretical. They are not distant.

So when those themes are brought to the screen, they require more than recognition. They require care.

Not a solution—this film is not obligated to solve anything. But it is obligated to engage its own premise fully. To push beyond what is familiar. To trust that the audience does not need to be reminded of what racism sounds like, but invited into what it feels like beneath the surface.

That is the difference between repetition and revelation.

There is a version of this film that does exactly that. You can feel it in the quieter moments—the restraint between characters, the symbolism carried in small gestures, the ending that resists over-explanation and simply… drops.

And that ending works.

It doesn’t tie everything up. It doesn’t set up a sequel. It leaves space. It lets the weight sit where it lands and trusts the audience to carry it forward with their own questions:

What happens next?
Who walks away changed—and who doesn’t?
What does power look like now?

That kind of ending lingers. It doesn’t chase you—it waits for you.

And that is why the rest of the film matters so much.

Because when you end on that kind of note, you are asking your audience to stay with you. To think. To feel. To wrestle. And if you’re going to ask that of us, then everything leading up to it has to be just as intentional.

We don’t need perfection.

But we do need more than what we’ve already seen.

We need the full version of the story that is trying to be told.

And we’re not wrong for expecting it.

This reflection turns toward the body — toward the burden of proof, the expectation of endurance, the quiet redistribution of risk. Some people are required to carry documentation, explanation, justification, vigilance. Others move without friction.

The imbalance is not accidental.

It is designed.

In this piece, I’m tracing the quiet evolution of control — how it moves from the visible to the procedural, from spectacle to paperwork. Chains did not disappear. They were redesigned. Violence did not vanish. It relocated.

This is not an argument about nostalgia or inevitability. It is an examination of mechanism.

Because when harm changes form, it becomes harder to name — and easier to deny.

How Harm Is Reassigned

There was a time when chains were visible.
Metal. Iron. Flesh bound to flesh.

When control was intimate. When it pressed into skin. When it left marks that could not be explained away as policy.

But control does not disappear when the chains come off. It adapts. It refines. It relocates.

Long before voter ID debates and passport requir…

Read more

It goes something like this: things were bad, people protested, laws changed, and the arc bent toward justice. We mark the moments of reform as proof that the system learned, evolved, corrected itself.

But I’ve been sitting with a quieter, less comforting question:
What if reform is not evidence of …

Read more

In this piece, I reflect on:

• resistance as continuity rather than spectacle

• the difference between reform and reluctant concession

• how systems respond when silence fails

• what it means to refuse martyrdom while remaining present

This essay situates the present moment within a longer historical pattern and asks what endurance actually costs — and who is expected to pay it.

🎧 Listening note: This piece is meant to be heard slowly. Pauses are intentional.

About the series

This essay opens a four-part Black History Month series, with weekly major entries and midweek reflections released throughout February.

Access notes

• The written version is available to all subscribers.

• Audio is shared first with paid subscribers, then opened to everyone later in the week.

This piece references historical state violence and incarceration.

The ocean holds what I can’t. The trees offer silence without demand. Between them, I remember that resistance doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it simply refuses to disappear.

Latel…

Read more

Quick check-in so nobody thinks I vanished into the ether. I’m deep in the lab working on a few things that need my full focus, which means my writing cadence has been quieter than I’d like. But I haven’t forgotten you — not even a little.

I really loved sharing the voice notes last week. That space felt good, and I’m looking forward to returni…

Read more

Last night I went to the movies and saw The Chronology of Water.
I’m still processing.

The cinematography was intense — not just visually beautiful, but invasive in that way certain films are. You don’t simply watch them; they insist on being experienced. I don’t mind blood on screen. Violence, strangely, feels less personal to me than sex scenes. Sexual …

Read more

This final movement is not a conclusion so much as a crossing. Heresy names what happens when you step outside the stories you were handed—when you question what was sacred simply because it was old, when you refuse to keep bowing to what never loved you back.

Who Decided? has always been an invitation more than an argument. An offering. A slow unfolding meant to move through the body before it ever lands in the mind. If something stirred in you over these seven days—if a sentence lodged itself in your chest, if a memory surfaced, if a question wouldn’t let you go—that is the work doing what it came here to do.

Awakening doesn’t arrive like a lightning strike. It moves the way truth always has: quietly, persistently, finding those it’s meant to find.

May what you’ve heard continue to echo in the places that matter.
May it meet you where you are.
May it loosen what no longer serves.
May it remind you that you are allowed to choose.

Thank you for walking this path with me.

This section turns toward proximity.

Part VI of Who Decided? asks what happens when harm stops being abstract—when it’s no longer a headline, a villain, or a story about “somewhere else.” It’s about the moment we realize that systems survive through ordinary people, preserved innocence, and familiar faces.

Anchored in the story of Eudora Welty and the man who murdered Medgar Evers, this part isn’t about spectacle—it’s about recognition. It reveals how power hides in plain sight. How cruelty becomes domestic. How “good people” learn to look away.

It’s an invitation to notice where harm feels distant.
To question what innocence protects.
To sit with the discomfort of recognition.

This is where the myth of the monster breaks.
This is where the neighbor comes into focus.

Listen slowly.
Let it unsettle you.

The Pyramid is about hierarchy disguised as destiny.
About fairy tales and romance as training grounds.
About how “happily ever after” becomes a system—one that sorts us, ranks us, and teaches us to accept our place.

This is the first curriculum.
The one we never consented to.
The one that still lives in the body.

Listen for the scaffolding.
Notice what you were taught to reach for.
Notice what you were taught to accept.

For the next seven days, I’m sharing my essay, “Who Decided?” in spoken form—one section at a time—so it can unfold slowly, in the body, not just on the page.

This part looks at what happens when authority learns to sound like family—
when protection becomes control,
when guidance becomes governance,
and when the father becomes the state.

Listen for where safety began to feel like obedience.

In this section, I look at the stories that arrive disguised as innocence—the fairy tales, romances, and “happily ever afters” that quietly train us in obedience, longing, and restraint.

This is where desire is shaped before it’s named.

This is where compliance first feels like love.

Listen closely.

In this section, I explore the first stories we’re ever given—the ones that teach us who we’re supposed to be before we ever choose.

This is where fairy tales become training.

Settle in.

In this section, I explore how our earliest stories teach us who we are allowed to be long before we ever get to choose—how power enters the body as lullaby before it ever arrives as law.
It’s an invitation to notice what we were taught before we ever chose—and what it might mean to unlearn it.

The full essay is available in print on Substack.
Paid subscribers receive early access to the audio, one section per day.

Thank you for being here.

My last essay here was December 18, and I know some of you have been quietly holding space for me since then. I feel that, and I don’t take it lightly. When people choose to sit with your words, even in absence, that’s a kind of relationship.

I didn’t disappear because I ran out of things to say.
I went quiet because everything I wa…

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