Adiba Nelson

Black women have endured the unfathomable. We’ve watched our leaders be assassinated, and our hopes go with them. We’ve watched the nation’s leaders be assassinated, and watched our hopes float away with them too. We’ve buried our 5-year-old daughters after they were bombed to death in church, our 12-year-old sons who were playing in the park, and our 29-year-old daughters who were stopped for simple traffic violations.

“Why would you do that? You have a daughter. Why would you put yourself in that position?”

Where did you even get that statistic from? Did you make it up?

Then we had that talk that made my eye twitch: the budget talk.

A: No one is perfect, B: Perceived perfection is a LIE, and C: THEY’RE CHILDREN FOR FUCK SAKE!

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

"...do you know what happens in lightly buzzed stupors? You get brave. Really brave. So, I signed up for it. In my lightly buzzed stupor I signed up for the burlesque mentorship program.

[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.

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.

There wasn’t going to be any sparkle. There wasn’t going to be any new mommy magic.