I’m A Strong Black Woman but I Kind of Need A Man

So true story my friend Christopher once told me that I got about two good years left before niggas don’t want me anymore. I often think about this and laugh but I also often think about this and cringe. Because what if in two years I magically wake up and men are like oh my gosh you’re thirty bitch you better move. Or what if I turn 30 and I’m automatically ugly or something yes, I know none of that makes sense but you’re talking to a girl who is also afraid of butterflies so most of what I do doesn’t really make sense. I have a ton of fears that only started crossing my mind as I got older. Like what if I can’t find a man before 30 or what if I can’t have kids. I mean if those things happen then that’s obviously my destiny and I have to work around it but that’s not my ideal life.

I can already start to see my body changing, slowly but surely, just little things like it’s harder to lose weight now whereas before I could lose 10 pounds at the drop of a hat. Now to lose 1 lb. I have to survive off of water and grass for three months. My metabolism is sick of me and girl I am sick of you too. 

NOT TO MENTION THINGS HURT! Things hurt on my body that I just feel shouldn’t hurt. I can’t drop it like it’s hot anymore I have to drop it like it’s lukewarm. I had to take a bath and soak in Epsom salts the other day because I woke up sore from just merely existing. I bought asper creme rub as suggested to me by Michael (my 70-year-old father) to try to ease some of the pain from my body aches and I have to lay on a heating pad. Y’all your girl is getting old and I hate to see it.

I learned this summer that as much as I may want to be a friend to the streets, the streets are no longer my friend. My hangovers now last days, I don’t snap back as fast as I used to. I am now a brunch baddie. The casafreakhoes be taking your girl out the game for the next 3-5 business days. Once I go out, I have to take a break for a few months. I can’t even sneaky link anymore because my bedtime is 10 pm and these ppl wanna meet up too late like sir I AM TIREDDDDD. One of my favorite people Jayson was telling me he was going to take a pre-sneaky link nap before he links up with one of his women. We just don’t have the same energy as we used to. 

The other day I thought to myself is this my peak? Nah this can’t be my peak. Then I thought back to what Christopher said and I thought maybe I need to just get married and have some kids. Everywhere I look I see more and more people having children and having kids. I can’t help but think maybe I’m missing out or like I’m late to something. I started to get very anxious about it. For a while I felt very weird and confused about where I was going in life I had no idea what the next step was. I mean I quit my job with no back up plan and every day I’ve just been freestyling just doing whatever. I been living life like a battle rappers bars just freestyling it. 

It then occurred to me I have been in this predicament before, so I know exactly what to do to preoccupy myself. I know how to put myself on a schedule and how to prepare myself for my next steps. I have a plan and I can put it into place. My problem was that I didn’t have man problems. I had 99 problems and none of them was about a man and that was . . ..  different. When I have man problems I know how to deal with those but when anything else comes into play, bigger issues, like problems where I have to grow up and look at myself and what I’m doing wrong and then begin doing the work to begin being a better person. Well, that’s some scary shit. So, without man problems and without social media to distract me, I had to look myself in the mirror and realize that sometimes I am not the victim, but I am the problem. I realized I have not always been harmed but I have also harmed others and that was so uncomfortable to sit with. 

I’m still working on being a better me. A better daughter, sister, friend, significant other and a better therapist to you all soon. The journey to peace is such a rough one, it filled with mountains and valleys and rivers and oceans. My journey and your journey won’t look exactly the same but that doesn’t mean that either of us is doing it wrong. Another thing is that it never ends, it is an ongoing journey and sometimes you may get tired but that’s okay. You may take a few steps backwards, a ton of steps backwards and may need to sit down for a while but get back up and keep going. I know hard it is to not see any light on the dark days or weeks but when the sun shines it shines so much brighter. I am a true believer than in order to know happiness you must also know sadness.

On those sad days I like to practice my affirmations. I wake up every morning and before I even touch my phone I think to myself “I am thankful for waking up this morning, thankful for the health, strength, patience and other tools I am given to make it through today. Not to just make it through today but to have a great day. “I then say my top three affirmations for the week and I also write them down along with a schedule of my day. It helps me when everything else seems so out of control. I am putting out good energy into the universe even if things don’t seem good. It gives me hope and I also like to find a little piece of sunshine to hold on to. It can be anything, the tiniest thing. It can be that you have a bottle of Hennessy at home, so no matter how bad your day is going remember your bottle of Hennessy to keep you going for the day. I do this every single day that I battle/ battled depression because one day the sun does come out all you must do is hold on.

So yes, we know I’m a strong black woman, that’s a fact but do I need a man? or did I just want the comfort of man problems to use as a distraction because self-healing is so damn hard? Yeah, I think it’s the latter as well.