TO DO LIST:

-Appreciate who I am and what I am doing and acknowledge that it is enough. That I am exactly where I am supposed to be in this moment.

-Ask for help when i need it and accept help when it’s offered. Know that this does not make me weak.

-Remind myself that a life well lived is a life full of mistakes. What matters is that I learn from them. Perfectionism does not exist.

-Be gentle with myself when I am feeling vulnerable and accept that sensitivity is a part of who I am…and a beautiful part at that. My feelings are valid.

-Learn to accept compliments and really let them sink into my soul and allow myself to feel all those warm fuzzy feelings. Stop the self deprecating conversations.

-Remember that I am NOT alone and I am extremely blessed to have an incredible group of friends & family surrounding me. I also have the privilege of connecting with many inspirational individuals who are walking a similar path… not ahead or behind but hand in hand.

-TRUST MY BODY. And Respect it. Treat it as the sacred vessel it is. Do not blame it and punish it for all I deem wrong. Realise that my body is actually the innocent one in all of this and my mind is what causes the pain. My body is working for me, not against me and I need to join forces.

-Walk away from people and situations that damage my soul and know that it makes me powerful & self protecting NOT selfish.

-Extend the same kindness to myself that I would another.

-Remember to count nutrients, not calories. And celebrate my body for all the wonderful things it can do. Start focusing on the forest rather than the trees.

-Instead of thinking “I’m ugly.” Rephrase to…”My thoughts can be ugly but I am not my thoughts.”

– Speak my thoughts and feelings (no matter how dark) rather than communicating them through my body.

-Stop caring about how other people see me and start focusing on how I want to see myself: free, real, open, confident, courageous & content.

-Nurture the child within me. Protect them her the way I would protect any other child. I deserve my own love and affection.

-Listen to my heart & intuition…not the “shoulds” of the outside world.

-Spread little acts of kindness, daily.

-Realise that I wont always love every part of myself but I can accept that.

– Move my body for health & wellbeing, in a way that makes me feel good…not for weight loss & punishment.

-Accept responsibility for my own actions, but let go of responsibility for the actions of others. They are not mine to hold.

-Let go of shame & guilt.

-Know that I am worthy of love, life & joy. Celebrate the unique creation that I am & believe that I can never be “too much”…since when was too much, too much anyway? You can never have too much of yourself. I am exactly who I need to be.

—the-healing-nest

(via spinsterette)

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

–Langston Hughes, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

(via spinsterette)

He was so beautiful,
Because,
When he held her, he was no longer concerned with ‘being a man.’
‘Being a man’ had nothing to do with this, these flowers pouring from his chest.

–Nayyirah Waheed

(via KEW)

To brown girls whose bodies are never enough, to those who have been disappeared in nighttimes and bleached away in daylight, remember, there are revolutions to feed, protest songs to be rung with our fullness. We are all more amazing in three dimensions. Keep the future in your hearts and love yourself for appetite. Because we are the most beautiful equations the world has ever seen.

–Janani Balasubramanian

(via KEW)

When you feel sensually attracted to someone, it’s not a choice to combine an abstract enjoyment of physical affection with a person you feel comfortable with; sensual attraction really is a kind of attraction, a pull toward someone specific, a directed desire to touch someone’s body and have them touch you. It’s not something you can conjure or eliminate. The desire comes into being of its own accord.

When I desire someone, every single touch we share becomes a source of joy. Our touching is the communication of love, a million times more visceral than an exchange of words. When I desire someone physically (and nonsexually), what I desire is pleasure and intimacy and connection and care and love. When I desire someone, I see the beautiful parts of their body, their face—not because I’m attracted to their appearance (I could be, but that attraction is separate) but because my love for them, my desire for them, makes them beautiful. They become, in their physicality, a source of pleasure and love; they become a vessel where I can direct my own loving.

—The Thinking Asexual

And I am not saying it is easy to be ugly without apology. It is hard as fuck. It threatens our survival. I recognize the brilliance in our instinct to move toward beauty and desirability. And it takes time and for some of us it may be impossible. I know it is complicated. …And I also know that though it may be a way to survive, it will not be a way to thrive, to grow the kind of genders and world we need. And it is not attainable to everyone, even those who want it to be.

—Mia Mingus – Moving Toward the Ugly: A Politic Beyond Desirability

(via Queering the Game of Life)

When my student Wilson asked me how I want to be loved, I was afraid to tell that I want to be loved by an unreasonable love that loves me enough to say and mean that Trayvon Martin, Rachel Jeantel, you and I are beautiful and worthy of second chances and healthy choices.

This is just part of our story.

I want to be loved by an unreasonable love that refuses to accept poverty and sexual abuse as reasonable.

I want to be loved by an unreasonable love that loves black art and black communities enough to insist that black artists stop dismantling black women’s bodies, hearts and minds for profit. I want to be loved by an unreasonable love that loves black art and black communities enough to insist that every letter, color, word, shade, scene, rhyme, paragraph, photograph and step be rooted in a textured exploration of unreasonable black love.

I want to love and be loved by an unreasonable imaginative love that swings back and insists on superb universal health care, progressive tax rates that eliminate all rich folks exemptions, and mandatory courses on Intersectional Love and Discourse in every middle school, high school, college, church and community center in this country.

I want to be loved by an unreasonable love that refuses to conflate honesty with transformation and hard work with revelatory work, a love that expects unreasonable love from police, teachers, doctors, politicians, presidents and CEOs.

I want to be loved by an unreasonable love unafraid to reckon and fight and listen and share before going to bed, an unreasonable love that gets turned on by periodically turning off crippling pathologies and the Internet.

This is just part of our story.

I want to be loved unreasonably by an unreasonable love because we’ve nearly drowned in the poison of reasonable loving, reasonable liking, reasonable living, reasonable essays, reasonable art and reasonable political discourse.

I want to be loved by an unreasonable love that knows the only reason we’re still here, breathing, imagining, fighting, wandering and wondering is because of the unreasonable work of a small but committed group of black southern unreasonable lovers.

I want to be loved by an unreasonable love that loves itself enough to leave me if I insist on loving it reasonably, an unreasonable love that tells its mama, its father, its friends, its co-workers, its auntie, its mentors, its mentees, its lover, its grandmother, that the reasonable era of black American death and destruction ended in 2013.

This is just part of our story, but I want the rest of the story to be written by reliable black characters, black activists, black parents, black children, black aunties, black uncles and black authors ready to demolish American reasonable doubt with waves and waves of unreasonable black American love.

–Excerpt from Kiese Laymon on Trayvon, Black Manhood and Love published by Colorlines on 12/30/2013

(via KEW)

Femme is, in part, about femme friendships. Femmes are people who see another feminine person and purposefully ignore the culturally prescribed girl hate and learn to say, ”God, you are beautiful and I want to be your friend,” rather than, “She’s so much prettier than me, I hate her.” My femme friendships are a mutual celebration of our brilliance, beauty, strength, power, heart and soul. Ultimately feminist, we heal through loving each other in a world that teaches us to mistrust each other.

–Melissa Heckman, Body Image: I’m a Femme

(via Love, Labia & Liberation)

When I go to contemporary Asian restaurants, like Wolfgang Puck’s now-shuttered 20.21 in Minneapolis and Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Spice Market in New York City, it seems the entrées are always in the $16–$35 range and the only identifiable person of color in the kitchen is the dishwasher. The menus usually include little blurbs about how the chefs used to backpack in the steaming jungles of the Far East (undoubtedly stuffing all the herbs and spices they could fit into said backpacks along the way, for research purposes), and were so inspired by the smiling faces of the very generous natives—of which there are plenty of tasteful black-and-white photos on the walls, by the way—and the hospitality, oh, the hospitality, that they decided the best way to really crystallize that life-changing experience was to go back home and sterilize the cuisine they experienced by putting some microcilantro on that $20 curry to really make it worthy of the everyday American sophisticate. American chefs like to talk fancy talk about “elevating” or “refining” third-world cuisines, a rhetoric that brings to mind the mission civilisatrice that Europe took on to justify violent takeovers of those same cuisines’ countries of origin. In their publicity materials, Spice Market uses explicitly objectifying language to describe the culture they’re appropriating: “A timeless paean to Southeast Asian sensuality, Spice Market titillates Manhattan’s Meatpacking District with Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s piquant elevations of the region’s street cuisine.” The positioning of Western aesthetics as superior, or higher, than all the rest is, at its bottom line, an expression of the idea that no culture has value unless it has been “improved” by the Western Midas touch. If a dish hasn’t been eaten or reimagined by a white person, does it really exist?

Andrew Zimmern, host of Bizarre Foods, often claims that to know a culture, you must eat their food. I’ve eaten Vietnamese food my whole life, but there’s still so much that I don’t understand about my family and the place we came from. I don’t know why we can be so reticent, yet so emotional; why Catholicism, the invaders’ religion, still has such a hold on them; why we laugh so hard even at times when there’s not much to laugh about. After endless plates of com bi, banh xeo, and cha gio, I still don’t know what my grandmother thinks about when she prays.

–Soleil Ho, “Craving the Other”

(via the dopest ethiopienne)

You are the only person who is in charge of how you feel about yourself. Nobody else can possibly do that. You get to decide if you believe you are beautiful or not, and nobody can take it away from you. If someone suggests that you aren’t beautiful, you can consider how sad it is that they have such a limited view of beauty. You can consider how unfortunate it is that they have such an exaggerated sense of self-importance that they think you should care about what they think. You can also choose to realize that it has nothing at all to do with your beauty and everything to do with their limitations.

—Ragen Chastain

(via KEW)