I am changing into who I am meant to be and it is scary.

My body is turning into someone who looks like a woman. I look at my hips, widening with the days, block back the tears that come when people pull me to the side and give me the knowing glance.

Those hips came from...you know. They say, giving me a side grin. I look back and sigh. No, no bun in this oven. Still trying to figure out the yeast in my own oven.

I see how my steps have become more confident. I speak up more, but then in the same breath, I've become quieter and more fearful. I am becoming myself, and the little girl in me is gripping tightly to who I was. She doesn't want to change.

Friends who I thought would bring the laughs in my life only bring tears that I just am not ready to yet fall yet. My relationship has brought up new questions. Marriage is not the answer that I am ready to reply with, although my boyfriend has luckily turned out to be pretty much the best guy in the world.

I am still learning the crooks and crevices of me. Of my body. From the tops of my soon to be all natural hair to the bottom of my toes. I want to learn me. I want to explore me. I want to love me, no questions asked.

This brown skinned girl...I just want to be her. I just want to be me, and I know this makes no sense at all, but that's the beauty in this process. It makes no sense to me, yet I know that I'm on the right path.

I love hard. I try to write the stories that I think fit the people in my life, but I'm learning that journalism and storytelling, although my gifts, are best for characters that I have no ties to. I'm focusing on writing my own story. Using the notebooks that I've had all alone. Selah.

Oh, and it means...praise and meditation.

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If I Could Make Time Stand Still

I always complain about not having time to write personally for myself, but the truth is, I do have the time. I just don't spend it as wisely as I should. Well...that is definitely something that I plan on working towards doing--spending my time more wisely. So...I plan on blogging more (and I have my wonderful teacher, Tamara Jeffries, to thank for this). I can't work on developing my craft if I don't actually practice it. My creative juices flow at their best at night time.

Something that India.Arie said in her recent blog really stuck out to me. She discussed how her putting her time and energy into her career led to her not nurturing her relationships in other areas. I feel that I have done the same. I have this complex inside of me where I feel that I have to constantly work and prove myself, that if I don't, the millions of other people in the world who work harder than me will snatch up the opporutnities that I missed. It has proven to be a dangerous complex at times. It has left me feeling physically drained and emotionally exhausted. It has left me in tears at 4 in the morning. It has left me laying in bed, looking up at the wall, wishing that my bed would swallow me because at that moment, the thought of getting out the bed exhausted me too much. It has left me gaining more weight than I would have liked to. I have physical and spiritual baggage because of it. And right now, in this moment and space, I recognize it and I want to change it.

I wish that I could spend time with every single person in my life who means the world to me, and I am plagued with an immense amount of guilt when I can't. I try to be 5 different versions of myself so that each area of my life will be satisfied, and as expected, I fail each and every time.

The truth is, since my sophomore year (last year) of college, I have worked hard. I've gotten the grades. I've been involved. On the outside, I have looked like the perfect college student.

On tbe inside, it has been a different story.

I don't talk to my best friends as much as I used to, and it does hurt. Is it my fault? I can take the blame. I'll text because it takes less time than making a phone call. I've convinced myself that a text message is better than nothing, and it makes sense to the busy Bri. But the real me--that's not something that I do. I don't actually enjoy texting. You can't hear that laugh that people laugh from their stomachs through a text. You can't hear that sigh when you both have finished laughing and can only sigh. You're laughed out, and you enjoy knowing that you have someone that you can laugh that way with. Honestly, I wish I could do it face to face more often, but the way that I have positioned my life, it's left me not coming home more and more often. Everyone is proud of me, and I am proud of what I've accomplished. I have an extremely powerful and competitive resume.

But I can't help but feel empty as I do my traveling, as I come back to school early to handle my responsibilites as an RA. Is this the way that my life will be? Professionally sucessful, but emotionally poor?

Maybe.

But I want to make more of an effort to not use the "I'm Busy" excuse as much. Yes, I am busy, but not busy doing productive things. And sometimes, it's okay to get lost in a conversation seeing how my friends and family are done. That paper or that article can wait a few minutes. I've seen more friendships of mine fall to the wayside in the past two years than I would have liked to. Some of them were expected, but ones that are really dear to me need to be nurtured and loved.

So beyond working on my procrastination, I want to work on my time management so that I can have a balance of professional success and emotional happiness. One day at a time.

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I Am Woman

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/09/AR2009120904546.html?sid=ST2010041904904- Helena Andrews

The second issue I hear, mostly from heterosexual black women, is a deep concern about being un-partnered, which I blame on an overwhelming discourse around this idea that there are no available black men.
So in some ways, young women may be more connected to these gender scripts than we were, because marriage and motherhood is at the center of popular discourse.- Beverly Guy-Sheftall
http://www.theroot.com/views/root-interview-beverly-guy-sheftall?page=0,2

These are two very different articles, but both relate to feminism, although in the first article, a profile of Helena Andrews, author of the memoir Bitch Is The New Black, the author refers to our generation as being one that is "post-feminist". The ssecond article, an interview with Beverly Guy-Sheftall, a scholar and feminist, deals with Guy-Sheftall's opinion of feminism now and how it relates to us, in comparison to when she herself was younger.

The above quote stood out to me because I agreed with Guy-Sheftall. Black women in my generation, and I'll add my mother's generation to this category as well, are very concerned about being partnered. In all honesty, I know very few Black women who are married, including my mother. From conversations that I've heard practically all my life, it is definitely a concern for them.

I began reading Bitch Is The New Black over the summer, and once school started back and I became busier, I wasn't able to finish the book in its entirety. I was quite fascinated with how much emphasis Helena Andrews placed on her relationship status. To her, it wasn't just a status, it was a definition. SINGLE. It was like a curse word.

I noticed, too, that in the headline of the profile on her, it uses lonely and successful almost as synonyms. Andrews, to me, is the epitome of success. She graduted from Columbia University and Northwestern University, wrote for Politico, O, The New York Times, and now has a movie deal possibly in the works, in addition to a book out. But the majority of the book and the article focuses on her lack of a relationship.

Is this the new face of feminism? We don't define success by our jobs or education--it's as if we almost take that for granted. Attending Columbia and Northwestern, two of the top schools in the country, are thrown into the book and article like an afterthought. Attending an Ivy-League is an amazing feat; it is supposed to set you apart from others. However, in a post-feminist word, it makes you a regular old Joe. Andrews says that she has friends who are lawyers, social scientists and more--those with presumably lucrative careers, but again, she states it as if she's mentioning the walk that she gave her dog that morning.

We're not feminists anymore. We're not even successful. We're just lonely.

It's scary.

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There's No Good Music Left!

"There is no good music around anymore! I feel sorry for your generation!" My boyfriend's relative said to us recently on a car trip tp their hometown of Philadelphia. We were in for an 8-hour drive, and she was determined to make use of the time that she had with us. I could tell that she enjoyed speaking with us. We defied her stereotypes of the typical 20-year-old college students.

I shook my head as I glanced at her from the rearview mirror. I loved having conversations about current music. I'm not the typical music listener of my generation. I barely listen to the radio in my car. The freshwomen in my residence hall (I'm a Resident Assistant) keep me current with what's going on in the music world...which furthers my hesitance to turn on the radio.

In a sense, I told my boyfriend's relative, I agreed with her. If all I did was listen to the radio, I would be disheartened to hear bitch and hoe after every line, said by both men and women. I would turn up my nose at some of the lyrics. The most recent one to make me shake my head in disgust?

"You wanna see some as*? I wanna see some cash...and that's gon' make me dance."
Make It Rain- Travis Porter

So yes...I understand why she would say that. Only IF I listened to solely the radio and mainstream music.

But since I don't, I have more of a variety to choose from, which led me to say that there IS good music in our generation. Beyond good music. A lot of this music, however, does not make it to mainstream radio. The artists that make this music are fine with that, as well, I added.

I say that because by the time the music makes it to mainstream, it goes through so much changing and forming to fit what is believed to be popular that I'm sure it is unrecognizable.

The true fans of these artists know how to find their music. They know that it most likely won't be found on the radio, their concerts aren't at sold-out venues and they may not have the most downloads on iTunes. But they also can trust that the depth and meaning of their message won't be lost among the many other songs on the radio that already have. Those who want to find good music, do and will continue to.

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Move Me

At the same time as my decision to wear my hair in its natural state has really increased, so has my decision to delve deeper into my writing. No longer do I want to just write a pretty sentence. I want to write a sentence that has to be rewritten over and over again before it makes me say BOO-YOW. I want to write not just for the sake of being "deep...yo, that was deep, man". No, I want to "go free", as Tamara Jeffries, my Creative Nonfiction instructor has been pleading with us to do. But no amount of pleading and prodding from her can take us there until we are ready to be taken.

When I wear my hair bone straight, which is how it is typically styled by my beautician, I feel pretty. I feel ready to face the world. I feel as thin and as straight and predictable as my freshly wrapped hair in the morning. And after 20 years...I finally spoke the truth: it was boring me.

I've always secretly wanted to be natural. My heart jumped and did a little shimmy each time I saw someone holding the tips of their curled ends, reaching to the sky and smiling along the way. Yes, my hair looked bomb and fierce when it was straightened, don't get me wrong. Beauticians in the past have hooked up my hair, providing me with layer upon layer, color upon color that at one point, my hair resembled the sun as it bid the sky adieu. Beautiful is how my hair has always been to me.

That's what I've been known for--my long, thick beautiful hair. At the mention of cutting it, I received so much flack that I wished I could take each letter of my suggestion and stomp it out on the floor until no one ever remembered it existed. Except me.

Good words inspire me, to be a higher me like the first artist who really took me "there"--Lauryn Hill. Whether I'm reading a book or magazine or listening to poetry set to a beat (what I call music...I'm sure I'm not the only one), I feel moved. I feel like jumping in my car and driving to South Carolina for no other reason than because I can. Words are my food. They are what keep me going, especially those words that make you remember them during the time when they were intended for--when we need them the most. Depth is what drives me wild.

I'm realizing that I like my hair when it is wild. I love when it is all over my head in curls. I love the things that it does, the shapes that it makes. I never know how it will look. It's getting to know me as much as I'm getting to know it. It's not always a love relationship, either. Sometimes I feel like calling a relaxer up and apologizing for leaving it cold in the rain. Other days, I feel like hugging each curl, even with the relaxed ends, and taking them all out for ice cream.

My writing is figuring out that "Hey...sistergirl is changing up on us!" And of course, it would be right. I pay attention more to word order, to sentence length, to whether or not something is right for the story. I pay attention to craft.

Much like I do when twisting my hair each night. It's all in the arms. It's all in how you do it. If you don't twist it right, it'll look all wrong. But sometimes, that's the point. Sometimes it has to look wrong in order for you to style it into something that will end up right where you want it to be.

My writing and hair move me.

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Story

I recently saw Tyler Perry's film adaptation of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, and although this was not a creative nonfiction piece, it does have to do with biographies in a sense that Perry took the stories of seven women and put them to the screen. He studied the play (over a thousand times, he said in a letter on his website), studied the women, did the same kind of research that we would have done had we continued our biography assignment in class. He could not speak to these women because they did not exist, similar to the fact that we could not speak to the women that we were writing about. All we had were words that they left in letters, books, articles and words spoken by those who know them. Words are powerful--it can make the difference in portraying someone as evil or someone as resilient. I admired Perry for his work because he took the words from the play and added more to them to create the screen version. It was not easy blending poetry with film, and several others have said that this is one of the donwfalls of the film, but he told their stories. He told their stories like he knew each one personally, even though he didn't create them. The theme that I seem to repeat in my blogs is the art of storytelling, and how my idea of it has changed over time.

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Tell My Story

What makes someone's story interesting enough to put to paper? Can any of us make that judgment? Yes. We all have backgrounds, true. We all don't have stories, also true, in my opinion. Not everyone possesses the skills necessary to put you in their shoes so that you can live their story. So that you can understand it.
Which is where writers come in. We have (or we should have) the ability to take the spoken word and craft it into something written, something tangible, something to make you look at that person and say 'Wow...so THAT's why..." or 'Wow...I couldn't have done that, but I understand why you did..."
This is biography. That is how you do it. You don't tell the positive side, you don't tell the negative side. You tell the story.

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