The "Journals+Journeys" series features
Vagabroad diarists sharing their journey with journaling--
for your inspiration.

I need to give a huge HAIL UP, mehson!!! You’re from my mom’s island of St. Croix, US Virgin Islands (STX) so this is a marvelous moment… Talk about what it’s like living in STX?
This is so important and an honor, Chimene. I’m so glad you asked me, and you know you’ve got a guide and friend in me whenever you make the journey home. Living in St. Croix is…everything everywhere all at once. It’s beautiful, it’s difficult. We are at the center, the crossroads, and at the edge. Not to sound too poetic about it, but that’s what it is. We share a flag with St. Thomas and St. John, but St. Croix is off to the side, on her own, our two sisters much closer to each other than they are to us. That level of isolation creates a unique, almost stubborn kind of independence in Crucians. It’s almost rural here, our hills are softer, more rolling than the other two, our twin cities calmer, than the hustle and bustle you feel in St. Thomas, or the forced Americanization that tourism creates in the Cruz Bay in St. John.

—I cannot stress enough how much of a shock it was to go over there for the first time for a few hours and spend my time looking around for black folks and to only see them being the ones sweeping the floors and taking trash out. I was so vex. Then to make friends with St. Johnians and learn how families have to bust their asses to make sure they can pay property taxes ON TOP of paying wilder food prices than I do in St. Croix.

Rich white folks are a blight to us in this way.

Ok you went there! So.... watching these socioeconomic factors hinged on antiBlackness and the dehumanization of the Black body to create white paradise... How have you learned to define violence within this setting? How have you redefined violence for us as a whole?

Violence can also be neglect. Violence is careless extraction, pricing people off their land, making this place unlivable for the working class Virgin Islander. It can feel like you're going crazy here because, and this may be harsh to certain folks reading this, most of the entrepreneurial and political class in the Virgin Islands lack any kind of race or class consciousness. They are out of their depth in these conversations and it's a deliberate ignorance at this point that I don't have the patience for. Certain people are perfectly okay with being the faces of neocolonialism and white supremacy if it gets them a kickback and some semblance of local celebrity. Some of them still believe in bootstraps and trickle down economics. Many of them still couch representation and black excellence as the answer without considering those who have the least. I don't have any interest in sitting with folks like that. I think unless we call those people out and take them to task, nothing is going to change for anybody anywhere.

You were ahead of your time in choosing to move back to St. Croix (STX) when you did. During the pandemic, many millennial West Indians began moving back to the Caribbean as an act of both reclamation and return. Take us back. Why did you decide to go back to the island?
I was running. I don’t talk about it much, but I was burning to come home. I was in an emotionally and mentally abusive situation with a man I loved who couldn’t love me back and I’d let it take everything from me. By the time I left New York City, I’d lost a scholarship, left a job I was proud to have, and latched onto my Oma who was freshly in remission from cancer and needed someone to live with her. Physically I was wasting away, enough to scare my mother and grandmother. I jumped at the chance to come home because it was the only place I felt like myself. It’s still the only place I feel like myself. When I’m stateside, I’m always on edge for several reasons both personal and institutional. I’d rather live the life of a pauper in St. Croix than the life of a queen in the states and if you know me well enough you know I mean it. It’s been ten years, and the life I’ve created, the self I’ve become, I couldn’t have found her had I not come home.

SIS– first, what a triumph. You endured A LOT. I too left NYC after a bad situation; my mother also acknowledged my need for recuperation and I remember the moment where she sternly and lovingly said “Chimene, come HOME.” and how those words gave me solace and strength. Could you briefly discuss the role of “come home” in the journey from a macro perspective?

I get how it can feel like a loss, or a failure starting over or changing direction, or down-sizing but the binary of losing and winning, succeeding or failing is a colonial, capitalist, white supremacist lie. The life that is for you will never miss you. What’s mine is mine and nobody can take it or stop it from coming to pass. My steps are guided. It took years for me to realize this and forgive myself, and even more years to realize that my impulse to “come home” was probably deeper than I gave it credit for at the time.

I needed to reset and ground myself. I needed to figure out who I was when nobody was projecting onto me. St. Croix seems like a fun place where some folks can drink and beach their way through life, but it’s also pretty isolating and difficult at times. Especially if you do any kind of community development or justice work. You need a strong sense of yourself and a deep deep grounding that can only come from knowing what home looks and feels like fully embodied. I have people in my life who feel like home, places here on St. Croix where I go when I need to remind myself who I am, or sit and write out the noise in my head. This grounding is crucial because there are people who profit and bet on us not knowing this or caring to learn it again.

For those who are unaware, STX was a Danish colony, renown for its sordidly brutal, torturous treatment of enslaved peoples– and many equally deadly revolts against enslavers. Sugar and rum were the main resources exploited and exported back to Europe. What are some trenchant effects of slavery’s legacy that you’ve noted which may not be perceivable to a Black, non-Crucian?

This land has been colonized seven times. Eight, if you count the United States which I think we should. Most Virgin Islanders have ancestry from all up and down the Caribbean chain, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, Dominica, Antigua and so forth, so sometimes I feel like the idea of legacy of roots, isn’t thought of properly unless we think about it regionally. Black Americans built the US and their ancestry in the country is generations deeper than Caribbean people. Their legacy written down or not, goes further back than ours before you hit a ship that brought the unwilling. I find that beautiful, precious and it’s no wonder racist whites did all they could to rip them from the land as soon as they were done exploiting them for their labor. But I digress. Generally, slavery in the Caribbean wasn’t about keeping us alive for generations, as our ancestors were considered easy to replace and more trouble than they were worth. Most of our ancestors were only a few generations removed from Africa because the people were worked to death. The forts, the historic buildings, the sugar mills that are still standing are in use as other buildings and in the case of sugar mills, completely decontextualized from their original use. People pose for engagement and wedding photos in the same place where body parts would be severed if they were caught in the gears of the mill. It’s like how people get married on plantations stateside. That’s so wildly disrespectful to me. But “we” allow it because that is the nature of mainstream tourism. There is little room for history that has the potential to make white people “feel bad” because then they won’t come spend money.

This was very difficult to read. I could ask tons more Q’s after this alone. Recently, I completed Clint Smith III’s book How the Word is Passed where he essentially documents similar sentiments. He records the flippant treatment of slavery’s memory and landmarks (ie plantations) across USA almost like a diarist. In all, we the reader are exposed to the danger of history being narrated by a people who 1. have no remorse 2. are able to profit off of even the aftermath and the “ruins” and 3. Who are first loyal to whiteness and it’s entitlement to always feeling good about itself. My question is, how have you learned to carry yourself in the midst of such entitlement and dismissiveness/ flippancy? How would you council a teastained woman who’s facing a similar observation about the resourcefulness of the deranged being that is the colonizer?
Let me preface this by saying I’m not suggesting anybody else do this. I’m rude to tourists. Not aggressively so, but I don’t bother trying to make anybody comfortable anymore. I don’t think we should. When I’m in these spaces, I make noise, I laugh super loud with my friends, if I see them doing something wrong I’ll say something. Like when they feel the wild chickens at restaurants so they’ll leap on my table later cause they’ve been emboldened. I’m rude about pointing it out. In my work, I’m very honest about the ways that race and class intersect and I don’t skin teeth about naming white supremacy verbatim. I’m also as of late very careful about my own consumption of this place and what I’m posting on the internet about it. Like yay beaches, yay nature, but what else? I’m still figuring out what that looks like in some ways. I’m very careful not to recreate these systems in my own life after spending so much energy writing and workshopping ways to dismantle them.

Describe how the population influx of colonizers on the island. Have you noticed a change in how white people carry themselves when they visit or move to the caribbean versus when they live on the mainland?
This is a general statement, but white Americans are entitled. The Virgin Islands’ nickname is America’s Paradise. That sense of entitlement is to the land, the culture, the space. They position themselves as experts and historians, explaining our culture and get paid to do it while the rest of us eek it out as a side hobby. I’m saying this as I watch someone white on my flight home edit a document about the history of quelbe. We fight to get these things written down, we seek out elders and beg for the funding so we don’t starve as we do it. But again I digress. They take things you wouldn’t consider in ways you’d never think to, but that is how colonization, how gentrification works. It takes. It doesn’t give. There are a set of people who come here because they enjoy the way things are and they wish to add, to help, to allow, and they’ll use their privilege to stand in the face of what we face unflinching, and that’s beautiful. They are, however, outnumbered and out-moneyed by others at present.

I know what you’re describing– it’s similar to gentrification. The smugness followed by the entitlement all the while they are stealing from us, displacing us and in many ways happy to be “replacements”, which is why I believe they obsess about absorbing so much nuanced history. What are 3 things you have learned about the colonizer’s relationship with teastained people’s histories?
I’m a student of Toni Morrison, so I view myself and black women and femmes as the center. I take this so seriously. I don’t center or think of white people or their gaze when I’m creating. I’ve come to learn that I have to take up space unapologetically, and not let these people over-talk me or temper my language when we are in spaces that are supposed to be addressing some of these things. No, it wasn’t occupation, it was colonization and we’re gonna name it. No the Danes weren’t more lenient during chattel slavery, they were awful and we’re naming it. It’s deeply annoying to me when we center white folks in mainstream tourism because I don’t feel like things have to always be for them. Nor should they be. I like spicy, flavorful food and heavy portions for instance. Much of this gets drained out to appeal to white palates.

Naming “it” was a huge part of my understanding of my relationship to history and my indignation. They get away with so much because they’ve left innumerable things unnamed, or nuanced to a palatability that’s ancestrally irreverent. I can hear the boldness in you in this response. Please, what played a role in helping to release this boldness into you in NAMING especially in these sorts of spaces?
Several events, but one in particular, years ago, my older cousin had a cute little round table type discussion that briefly dissolved into chaos. Without naming names, should they read this the woman brought her white European husband to a discussion about blackness and our identity as black Virgin Islanders and as one can expect, some people took issue with being subjected to the white gaze while we were having such a sensitive conversation. There were some preliminary swipes taken and then the question came up about the white gaze and tensions got high. Our eyes were darting back and forth like it was Coco vs Serena.

Boiling point moment was why should we even take the white gaze into consideration at all. The elder who’s side I was on said flat out “WHO CARES WHAT THEY THINK” and the woman and her white husband ended up leaving. I still see her sometimes. You could put her husband in front of me and I wouldn’t know who he was. Sorry to that man? But also not. The elder who’s side I was on has since passed on, but I think a lot about how indignant she was at the mere suggestion we temper ourselves or the way we show up to be palatable to whiteness. It’s really stuck with me. I venerate her for it.

Also leave your white partners at home, if you must have one.

What are the resolutions that guide your coexisting with such blatant colonization? Has the gift of this observation guided/influenced your journaling?
I’ve become very aware of my privilege living here. More so than when I lived stateside. My class privilege, my adjacency to whiteness, the fact that I can code switch. The fact that I am an only child that stands to inherit a home that I have mostly to myself. It’s probably only affected my journaling in the sense that the slights I feel, the hurts I pour out onto the pages are a result of this. Also the responsibility I feel sometimes, that I have to make sure isn’t just ego in disguise. It’s a constant monologue scribbled.

Are there any moments where you see commonality between Palestine’s plight and that of our people in the islands?
Oddly enough, in the taking of the foods and cultural practices. Hummus, the dabke, even the symbolism of the watermelon online. There was a video I saw years ago of a Palestinian woman talking to this Zionist man, and their interaction reminded me so much of some of the conversations we have here about land grabs. Especially when he told her “If it wasn’t me stealing your house, it would be someone else” I remember having an emotional reaction to that. The Virgin Islands have always been a crossroads, and we have a Palestinian population and have for decades. The mosque is next to a synagogue which is next to a christian church, so I’ll be honest, I was ignorant about why there was conflict as a child. I didn’t get why they had to steal and kill and why there wasn’t peace. Current events have shown me why. It seems like a shallow thing, but the cultural erasure is violent as well. It erases people’s history and denies them their story.

Do any of these observations make it into your journal?
Yes. My journaling isn’t always deep introspection. Sometimes it’s “this shit I am seeing/hearing right now, I’d like to flip a table” that’s why I have so many different journals that fit in something as small as a clutch. I have snarky paragraphs all over the place.

There’s a blueprint that’s followed across colonization and it seems we have refused to clock it and move accordingly. In the islands, our refusal to reckon with the evil that effortlessly moves around us, swindling us from what belongs to us, and separating us from our heritage is enough to make someone go mad. Have you noticed the “insanity” play out in other ways?

Race and class here play in very fun ways and by “fun” I mean people don’t realize that you don’t have to be white to perpetuate racism. They don’t realize that the talented tenth, tokenism, so-called Black excellence and all that stuff is folly and a means to further divide and create margins within already marginalized communities. Some people just straight up aspire to whiteness. Any benefits one can expect to experience from being anti-black and classist are short lived and vapid, but I’ve watched people, elected officials especially repeat history’s biggest blunders and tell folks to shut up when called out. Certain people don’t want to reckon with our collective pasts because that would involve changing behaviors, giving something up. Maybe getting off of “important” boards they sit on, not taking up as much communal space and air the way they do. Many would sooner wither up and die rather than pass the mic, share the spotlight, admit they don’t know everything, or for once in their lives, move from somewhere other than their own ego.

What do you believe you’re meant to witness while you are living in STX?
Honestly? Myself. My own becoming.
I would have never thought going back home would
show me myself in the ways that it has. I sought out mentors and teachers
looking for wisdom from other people for most of my 20’s and it took a few
times for me to realize that sometimes, there’s none. The mentor is life.
The wisdom comes from being foolish.
What you’re meant to witness is yourself.
Even as the world’s happenings break and make you; you’re meant to be
where you are with what you have at the time.

What does it mean to be a witness to the transformations
culture and society are experiencing in St. Croix?
It means you’re going to be angry.

It means you struggle to love others and yourself through it.
People love to act like our colonization is something that ended with slavery,
with the Danish, with the French, the Spanish or the British.
Like the United States isn’t the worst colonizer we’ve had yet.
Culture is a living thing, it’s our language, our art, the clothing and adornments we wear.
It's knowing that we are the beginning and end of everything. I think very often that
the elder generations’ biggest mistake as a collective is forgetting what it is to be young,
to be hungry for life and experience and they often are dismissive
of what culture is being created rather than actually engaging with it.
We don’t criticize from a constructive place anymore and that’s why we lose things that matter.

…and that’s why we lose things that matter. So question: how do you journal rage?
With a ballpoint pen. I’m kidding but not.
I have written vengeful angry prose about people who’ve wronged me and some
of my scribbles have come to pass. Sometimes it’s a cuss out, sometimes it’s a revenge fantasy.
Sometimes it’s more abstract, like the fall of an empire, or that someone will be doomed
to spend the rest of their lives searching and failing to find feelings I gave them in anyone else.
Sometimes I’ll burn it, freeze it, or bury it. Sometimes I keep it. It really depends.

There’s been a steady string of agendas intended to disconnect us from this kind of thinking. To make us into what you’ve described as “palatable” mostly to the colonizer. What are several strategies you have witnessed that the coloniser employs to get Black people to separate from our culture/consciousness/convictions and become convenience for them?

…The way anger is villainized, even when it’s righteous.
Especially when you’re a woman or femme.

…The way we are made to feel like we’re not beautiful, and when we are,
it comes with feeling like a sideshow.

…The way straight forward language is seen as aggressive when it comes from us.
…Code switching being an economic advantage.

I also think of the great swindle as I call it, which was when my mom’s generation in STX (the boomers)
were “encouraged” to leave the island for college. I also think of the day she described
to me when she realized her lusting after Wonder Bread was a set-up to cause her to disregard
the sovereignty of the local bakery. She actually had tears in her eyes one time…
This is rooted in anti-blackness and colonial bullshit and I'm so sad people fell for this,
because it's cost us so much in so many ways.

When and why did you start journaling?
I’ve been a “writer” since I was 8. I was given a journal around then. I wrote fan fiction as a teenager. I wrote stories that were very transparently about the things I was experiencing. Being an only child I had nobody to tell my secrets to, so they’ve always been kept in a journal of some kind. I need that place to put my thoughts, to sort things out. I recently went back and read some of what I thought back then and I wanted to go hug that girl and tell her that she was right. And that those poems were really cringe…

As a Black woman, what excites you most about the practice of keeping a journal?
Having a place for my thoughts. Having somewhere to put them where nobody will see, mostly because my penmanship is a mix of cursive and print, and only a few people have the patience to read it.

What’s a revelation that’s come to you about the power of this practice?
I can look back and see that there are certain things I literally wrote into my life. My partner and the way they’ve grown in love with me and is still growing, how we’re growing together, I wrote before I met them that that is what I wanted. My life and the way it feels I wrote that I wanted some of these things. I didn’t realize this until maybe about a year ago that I asked for the things I have now, and it’s really grounded me. Even some of my losses, I realize, are more of a clearing than a loss.

What is the most surprising benefit you’ve experienced to documenting your life?
Going back and seeing that I’ve wanted all of the things I have now my whole life. My child self wanted to be a writer with two dogs living in St. Croix. It’s literally who I became minus the 3 children and husband, but I teach a drama program on the side, so those kids are mine a few times a week.

Where are your favorite places to journal?
The beach, empty bars, in a specific corner of my yard where nobody can see me. I also like to smoke there. I also like journaling on flights. I write some of my most profound thoughts in the air, I don’t know why that is.

When is it most difficult for you to journal?
Sometimes I’m too tired, my mind too wrung out. When I was teaching my first class of Calico Cats (under 12 drama class at our community theater) I would get home and write the most basic entry. I had no thoughts. When I pour out too much on the socials is another time, and also a sign that I need to do a cleanse so I can come back to myself.

How has journaling impacted your lifestyle in general?
I always carry a journal in my purse, I have several journals for several different things. Different kinds of thoughts. Yours, as I’ve told you, is for my most private ones. I have journals small enough to fit in a clutch. Pens live in my hair, stuck in my bun, behind my ear. It’s a siphon for me, writing, journaling, it always has been the one thing I can do when things are messy. I can unclench my jaw and start writing.

Have you noticed anything different about yourself when you go without writing for a long time?
About a year ago I got bitten on my writing hand by a centipede (in my sleep) and it swelled up so badly I couldn’t write and within 3 days, it was pissing me off. Typing isn’t the same as making the words with your hands. When I neglect my writing practice, I feel stopped up, unmoored and almost cut off from myself. There are times where I maybe need that, to get out of my head, but having that siphon, that release, of writing is vital. Writing is a part of who I am and it always will be. I can’t remember not knowing how, thanks to Ms. Casey, Ms. Simon, and Ms. Woods. I’m always going to feel that pull, that need to write.

Have you recognized a specific relationship with your memory and how has journaling taught you to revere it?
I block a lot of unpleasant things out of my working memory. It’s a trauma response that I’ve never bothered to try to undo and I really try to use it as often as I can. Journaling helps me get things out so I can forget, and not carry things around, but I can always go read back some of the things at my own leisure, which I don’t do lightly, or super often because somethings are painful to recall, and I don’t like to dwell for too long unless there’s a reason. I have a few Scorpio placements that make me very acquainted with vengeance as a virtue.

How would you advise someone who’s dealing with something similar– who needs to journal THROUGH but also does not wish to hold the “unpleasant” for too long?
Write it. Write that you’re gonna let it go. That you’re putting it on the page to put it out of you. Again and again. And if it’s that bad, write it on loose paper and burn it somewhere safe. Watch it burn. Rip it into confetti. Bury it. Whatever symbolic thing you’d like to do that won’t hurt anyone else. Cry while you write it and allow the emotions to fully transmute. Sometimes, it stays for a while and it takes what feels like forever for it not to feel so close, but eventually most things feel small.

Favorite pens?
Ones that don’t smudge. I have so many different ones,
the bic ballpoint which is the classic and fancier Sakura ones that are meant for calligraphy.
I worked in an art supply store when I first moved back home. My gateway into archival ink.

Journaling playlist?

Depends on how I’m feeling, and I have playlists for those.
They’ve got names like “beach witch” “skinny lead singer” and “first born ratchet”.

Journaling by day or night?
Both. Journal all the time.
The day and night both have their purposes and bring out different things.

Do you believe journaling plays a role in hearing the Divine? If so, how?
It brings you closer to yourself if you do it right, so that’s how. To be connected to yourself, your truest, barest self is as close to the divine as one can get while still among the living in my opinion.

What are “noises” in society that you’ve noticed distort the ability to hear sacred things/ the things of revelation?Social media, mindless scrolling, needless comparison. I’ve taken to deleting the apps off my phone for weeks at a time, but as a writer in this age and time, you always have to be “on”. I’ve come to resent that a bit, and I’m still navigating the balancing act of being in my own mind, but not so disconnected that I don’t see what’s happening in the world.

What are major distractions from journaling and how do you guard from them?
Again social media. The clock app, the bird [read: X, formerly known as Twitter], IG. I’m laughing to myself because I honestly am in the process of navigating how and when and what I share and how to balance it. I try to journal first. To save the dregs for the internet.

The big heavy things are for my journal. Those things are precious.

Has your relationship with your mother and grandmother influenced your journaling?
It’s just the 3 of us. I’m the only daughter of an only daughter of an only daughter. I’ve read snippets of my Oma’s old journals, and now that she’s in her 90’s and she doesn’t remember everything, it feels like a blessing that I have that way of looking into her head when she was even younger than I am now. What St. Croix was like, what Antigua was like, she wrote about how things felt, what she wanted. It’s very affirming to know all the wants and desires you have aren’t new. That my way of thinking and feeling is something that’s in my lineage.

In general, do you journal your conversations with your elders?
Things that hit me, I write down no matter who tells me. Things my Madrina (godmother) has told me, little quips my grandmother’s said, things Ms. Frandelle, a local historian has told me. Things the women who serve as aunties, as elders to me and have most of my life. Even my friends in casual conversation I find there’s wisdom if you’re open.

Talk about life there as a millennial, between older and younger generations and the specificness of understanding you have, due to more information about history, colonisation, enslavement, etc.
The “elders” of the Virgin Islands would be considered now to be the Boomer generation and probably some of Gen X. We are so behind in the sense that I don’t think most folks realize that millennials are in their 40’s, they are parents, they aren’t college students anymore, even if some of us still look like them. I’m not a parent, but most of the people I grew up with are. We have as a generation been infantilized and tokenized in influencal space, and we still are. I fight not to roll my eyes at the way this plays out in our local politics, because who is chosen to speak for us as a generation isn’t by mistake. There is very little understanding of self among the political class in the Virgin Islands, that isn’t self serving and performative. We talk about Emancipation Day (July 3-4th because St. Thomas learned of our freedom the next day) but we still commemorate our sale to the United States, in which we were sold like the lizards and the rocks. There is this aspiration to higher things among young Virgin Islanders, but very little class consciousness, very little understanding of how gender plays a role in our ongoing colonization even, and that’s maddening sometimes.

Have you ever experienced writing a dream, hope, or vision and then seeing it happen?
Yes. I wrote my living at home into existence, having an occupation that pushes me as a writer with room for growth. Something that helps people who need it. I think it’s so important to write what you want, even if you’re unsure of what it is that you want, writing how you want to feel, how you want to your life to feel.

What is the role you want your journals to play in the future?
I don’t know, but I do know that there are some I won’t mind being published, but there are some I want burned on a pyre as a tribute to my memory and to ensure my privacy is guarded. Maybe if I’m blessed with age, I’ll feel less protective of my thoughts and letting people see everything, but now, there are certain things I’ll take with me to the afterlife, consequences be damned.

Do you see journaling as historicizing?
What legacy are you stepping into with your journaling practice?
Yes! I don’t think folks truly take themselves seriously when it comes to legacy, and I’m included in this but I’m trying to do better every day. After hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, I wrote constantly, about what I saw, what I felt, what I was hearing on my little radio, and I knew as I was doing it, it was important. People act as though those hurricanes only happened to Puerto Rico and not us in the mainstream media, even more leftist outlets. I was so angry about that, so I wrote in defiance. I wrote in anger. I think my legacy will be heavily rooted in a sense of defiance, in that indignant anger I feel that drives me to write in times like that.

This reminds me of Ida B. Wells, whose indignation with the misnaming of horrors and atrocities/ disasters
drove her to incendiary, indicting documentations. How do you approach writing indicting journal entries?
Like I’m making pages for a burn book. My opinions and disdain for certain politicians is personal as well as political. The Virgin islands is a small place. I actually used my journal as a child as a place
to put my slights and who was vexing me and I’ve been in trouble for it from authority before,
so it should have deterred me, but I’m obviously stubborn. Laying out how someone has shit all wrong,
and why is just really cathartic for me and has been since girlhood.

*Kaila, writing in her VGB journal with an arm full of Cruzan bracelets!*

If you could comprise a list of necessities a Black woman needs to keep a journal (physical, spiritual, emotional, etc.) what would they be?

All you need is some paper, a pen, and some thoughts to put down.
You also need to be open.
Drop the ego and self judgment, the world does that enough without us becoming that to ourselves.
The expectations of always writing something profound and deep is unrealistic.

Just start with the date, and work your way out.
It’ll come.
Everybody’s got something that’s inside that belongs in the pages of a journal.

Everybody but especially Black women, our histories have long been disregarded and erased, so we’ve got a duty to be our own historians.

In your opinion, what are a few life events/seasons
every teastained woman should be sure to document?

When you feel small.
When you feel stuck.
When you feel alone.
When things feel like they’ll never get better. Then when they are.
When you’re falling love.
When you’ve had your heart broken and you’re about to stop believing it even exists.
When you’re in your bag, and you love what you’re doing and how you do it.

VGB Diarist: Kaila F.

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VGB Diarist: Kaila F.

A Moment with Sandi

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