Adiba Nelson

I would break girl code. And if you love me, I hope you would do it for me too.

"I now had my seat of power, my throne, if you will. That’s why I customized my chair to look like a throne. And that’s why I liked it in my act: because I was truly in love with it and all that it represented for me. It was no longer a trap or a cage. It was freedom. It was power. It was sexy. And it was mine."

[CN: mention of suicide] How did we get through love before Lemonade? We examined our lives through Mary’s shamelessly honest storytelling on My Life.

This was how my eating disorder began. This is when I first consciously ate my emotions. THIS is when I said, “I don’t need you to love me. I don’t need to love myself. I don’t need to feel or be felt. Hear or be heard. See or be seen. I just need to eat. I just need to eat because food will never judge me. Food will never leave me (unless I make it leave me, which I did. In college. A LOT.).

Apparently, we Black women have a smell. And it’s been bottled and labeled and is being offered up for consumption by Sunflower Cosmetics. Yep. You read that right. There is a legitimate company out there who is selling a perfume called “Black Women.” If my girlfriend hadn’t posted a picture of it in a local shop, I would have called her a damn liar.

I think we can all agree that there is an incredible amount of power in being a woman. We run corporations, households, and our own glittery, mashed-up, sometimes-so-fucked-up-I-wanna-hide-under-a-blanket-and-never-come-out-again lives. And we do it as gracefully as we possibly can. And while we’re doing it, we have a soundtrack playing in the background.

If 93% of the Academy is White, but as of 2014, only 62% of Americans were White, and art is supposed to imitate life...

My father was an abusive man, plain and simple.

That wasn’t all he was, but to my mother, that's who he was. He was a controlling individual who perhaps took the scripture, “Wives, submit to your husbands” a tad bit too literally — and when my mom didn’t submit, she paid the price. Often with a blow to the head.

Black women were branded as sexually promiscuous and immoral, which in turn was used as justification for sexual trauma/rape.

My job is to make you feel — whether it’s lust, pride, anger, guilt, joy, sadness — whatever it is you feel, I want you to feel it.