I'm alive y'all and I'm still creating. My latest baby took place off the page. On October 21, 2017 I co-hosted the first iteration of the Manifest Destiny series, an accountability circle for brown women trying to figure out their purpose in this life. We shared, we shared some more, we cried a bit, we reflected in depth, we put pen to paper and memorialized our values and wants and we committed to help each other stick to our goals and manifest our best and most purposeful lives. The energy was real. Cosmic goosebumps and chills. There will be more destinies manifested! Be on the look out for the next Manifest Destiny event.
On Birth Chart Readings
I'm a Gemini. I'll leave you time to roll your eyes or snort a bit (I recognize we Geminis sort of have a bad reputation). I've read my horoscope before and would tinker with zodiac sign compatibility but never took any of this all too seriously.
One day my friend put me on to an astrologist she followed on twitter, Danielle Ayoka (@MysticxLipstick). A few weeks later I heard Danielle featured on a couple of podcasts, began reading her tweets and gained a little more interest. Then I put my human good luck charm skills to task and managed to book one of her highly coveted birth chart interpretation readings (note to reader: I have good luck when it comes to getting things in high demand be it Bey/Adele/Kanye tickets or a pair of Yeezys).
I was anxious leading up to the reading. This was either going to be a 100% quack job and not worth my coin or so spot on I would be astonished. Y'all, homegirl's reading was the latter. And let me note for you that she really is like your homegirl. I now call her my hood astrologer. Unabashedly black and brutally honest. It was like talking to one of my friends - colloquial ratchet full disclosure.
A birth chart reading involves giving the astrologer your exact time, date and location of birth and based upon the orientation of the planets at the precise time you rushed down that birth canal, a reading can help you better understand yourself. For me she confirmed a lot of my personality traits and explained how those traits evolved into being. This was a particularly comforting factor because it helped me to better understand my idiosyncrasies and how my life circumstances gave way to them. We talked a lot about relationships, mostly parental and romantic. I gained insight into my parents' individual struggles as people and reflected upon the narrative of my life that I told myself and the implications it had on my relationships. We briefly touched on career and how to gain fulfillment from a corporate job. She suggested I tap more into my creative side by way of creating a blog, although unbeknownst to her at the time I had already set into motion this very platform you're now reading.
Birth chart readings can be a little pricey ($95 a pop) but if you hit up www.cafeastrology.com you can insert your data and learn more about yourself there. That's precisely why I recommend this exercise - more self knowledge. You may not believe in astrology but what's the harm if you gain some insight into self you wouldn't have otherwise encountered? Here's some of the takeaways I received from my reading:
1. Rethink your approach to situations.
2. Consider the feelings of others.
3. Think and decompress before acting.
4. The right person for you will uplift you closer to your purpose not distract you from it.
5. Remember you're worthy of love.
6. Feel your emotions by way of writing.
On Zen in Corporate America
So here's the deal, my job is stressful. Its unpredictable, rarely encouraging and if you allow all consuming. But this is the life I chose, better yet the life that chose me. Not too sure about the applicability of the latter part of Hov's verse to me but the point is I choose to have this job and have figured out ways to take care of myself while I traverse this demanding corporate landscape. I realized before I can even attempt to be a semi-solid employee, I have to tend to my needs first. Balanced Dan = better Dan as an employee. Simple stuff that lots of people don't hone in on. For the first year of my job I would roll out of bed and go straight to work. I was so anxious to get to the office and get started on my never ending list of things to do, it never dawned on me to pay attention to myself first. So here's a quick run down of my morning rituals that keep me sane and hell sometimes even content on a day to day basis:
1. Read some quotes. I subscribe to two e-mail subscriptions that send me daily quotes - one about gratitude (gratefulness.org) and one about the universe (thetut.com).
2. Work out. I hit the gym usually three times a week.
3. Eat. Surprising, I know. But during that first year of work I was consistently skipping breakfast. Now I make sure my tummy is stocked.
4. Read a Bible verse. I'm not here to shove religion down anybody's throat. Insert here whichever source of inspiration works for you. To get into the habit of trusting myself (read my gut) more, I sometimes close my eyes and randomly open up to a page relying solely on how my gut reacts.
5. Journal. I used to hate keeping journals but now writing is the main way I'm able to actually feel my emotions. I have chubby fingers and a terrible handwriting so I don't go on and on for days nor is most of it legible (even to my eyes!) but I get my feels out of my head and onto a page.
6. Journal some more. I keep a loveable journal now. Loveable as in each day you write down how loveable you are. Each entry page has an accompanying quote about how bad ass we each are. I jot down a few sentences. At first I didn't believe all the good stuff about myself but as I progressed my thoughts began aligning with the compliments shrewn on the page.
7. Meditate. Only for 5-10 minutes. I close my eyes and just focus on breathing. I let my thoughts go where they may. Sometimes I pray, other times I think about a random person or what I'd like to have for lunch. Hell, sometimes I even fall asleep. Its all cool though. I allow my brain and my body to do the same thing all at once. No more disparity between thought and action.
8. Affirm. Once I finally make it into the office I pull a daily affirmation. I wrote down a bunch of different affirmations, threw them in a coffee mug and placed it right in front of my computer screen at work. I leave them out overnight and reread the prior day's affirmation the next morning before pulling a new one out. Yesterday's affirmation was: "I am enough." Today's: "My success is not a coincidence." Sometimes the thought of pulling a new affirmation is the only thing that I look forward to when entering the office. But so what, its one good thing to keep me going.
Now I know this all sounds like a lot. Like wait a minute, hold up I don't have three hours in the morning to dedicate to myself. But don't fret, this stuff doesn't tally three hours. Reading quotes takes all of two minutes (to be honest I read those quotes on the toilet and then hop on Instagram or catch up on texts). Working out can be as short as 30 minutes and you don't even have to leave the crib to do it. Its a Bible verse people not an entire book. I usually read maybe 2-3 lines, max (depends on my attention span for the day - let's be real sometimes you can get lost in the biblical sauce shout out to Gucci). I have smoothies for breakfast (I used to throw all of the ingredients in one baggie, freeze them the night before and then pop that joint right in the blender, bam smoothie in under five minutes). Journaling might take me five to ten minutes depending on how quickly my hands cramp up from writing. Meditation can be as short as five minutes. And pulling an affirmation takes less than a minute. Sometimes I forego a little bit of sleep to invest more in a lot of me but its worth it. Sometimes I'm in a rush and skip a ritual. I'm not legalistic with my self-care because well blaming yourself for stuff is by definition not self-care.
When work gets hectic, which it inevitably will, I am able to get back to center in a much shorter span of time thanks to these little rituals.
You > your employer.
On Blackness Down Under
Newark to Minneapolis. Minneapolis to Los Angeles. One pit stop at Roscoe's House of Chicken & Waffles (the one on Pico). Los Angeles to Sydney, Australia. Roughly twenty two (22) hours of flying later, I arrived in Australia with a "new continent alert" PSA snapchat revealing to my bubble of social media my arrival 9,936 miles away from home. (I tried to enhance my snaps with pre-selected songs referencing Australia, read Men at Work's Down Under or Kid Ink's verse on Your Number remix by Ayo Jay, but quickly realized y'all weren't worth the data usage on my international plan to perfect the musical timing of each snap).
Before arriving in Australia my knowledge of the country was limited to koalas, kangaroos, Iggy Azalea and the fact that they too had black people whom they marginalized (per usual), although their blacks kind of looked like a mix of black Americans and Native Americans. To get my Aussie knowledge up to speed, I perused Wikipedia while grabbing lunch at a spot in Darling Harbor. In the midst of learning about the concept of a prison colony, the full unabridged "Juju on That Beat" played for what felt like at least a solid 3 minutes and 30 seconds (if that's still the song duration convention used by the music industry). Now, Darling Harbor isn't Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn or your barber shop on 135th Street in Harlem. It's more like a majority tourist area, on par with Union Square, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, etc. I giggled at hearing the song beyond its limited scope as a 60 second clip on Instagram (almost like Dumbledore walking out of his Hogwarts portrait). But then it hit me for the first time, blackness as manifested in black american culture was appreciated here. Maybe (wait who am I kidding) definitely not fully understood but appreciated.
Flash forward to countless uber courteous Uber drivers, hotel concierges and waiters later, I noticed that I wasn't treated with the usual air of disdain that often times accompanies a white service person's interaction with a black patron. People were nice! And unassuming. There wasn't an assumption that I was less than (less poor, less educated, less sophisticated, less human, etc.) just because I was black. I dare say it for the first time in my 28 years the word black traversed an invisible yet fully tangible realm to hug up against the word privilege, creating a semantic love-fest I never before thought was feasible, not even in an all-black country. Black privilege. Or better yet Black Privilege (bare with me, I'm new to this privilege game!). To be fair it wasn't first class white privilege but it was business class black privilege and after a lifetime of no privilege, a girl will take what she can get, right?
Welp, that's the funny thing about being the oppressed - generations of immense pain make you empathetic to the suffering of others. The catch to this Aussie Black American Privilege was that it did not encompass the entire African Diaspora. We weren't all visible as people - just the ones with ties to popular culture, read Black Americans with our hip hop, r&b and rap musical exports. A Black American friend living in Sydney (with an internet wifi network named N*ggas in Sydney: classic moments like this - asking for the name of the wifi network only to then see N*ggas in Sydney pop up, truly truly keep me going), told me an anecdote of a white Aussie who loved him and all things Black American. The white Aussie told him not to look at an Aboriginal on the street, let alone speak to one. The extension of privilege encompassed the sharing of overt prejudice (if not hatred). We black Americans were lovely because we gave them Beyonce and TLC (TLC and 112 were randomly touring Australia and New Zealand during my travels LOL). But their blacks were less than and always would be. I visited the Australian Museum's exhibit on Aboriginals and to no surprise their treatment mirrored that of ours in the States. I was confused as to whether the footage and photos I saw were Australia or Selma or the Trail of Tears. The usual segregation, we'll take your kids and indoctrinate them with majority culture so that we can eventually breed y’all out and mix your lightest women with low class whites because we are so superior rhetoric.
I can't lie being seen for the first time ever (even if the catalyst is cultural misappropriation) was cool. Like exhilarating. Fun even. But short lived and hollow because back home we are the Aboriginals. Nonetheless, I highly recommend a visit to Australia and New Zealand, if not for a momentary glimpse of privilege, for the cultural immersion, food, and landscape.
On Suggested Reading
You remember back in the glory days of college and high school when the syllabus would contain the mandatory readings along with a list of suggested reading making you innately roll your eyes because like who has the time for extra reading? I struggled to get through the required readings in college and law school traumatized me so much so that I began to believe my choice of St. Lucy as my patron saint was no coincidence at all (homegirl stabbed her own eyes out). But when life hit me hard and I couldn't bare to listen to music (too many sentimental reminders) or watch TV (out of fear that a heart wrenching storyline would remind me of my woes), I picked up books. First I emptied out my wallet to locate my library card and lost myself in fiction novels and autobiographies. I was getting through books so quickly I began downloading e-books directly to my phone. Back when I used to be the biggest Big Sean stan (circa 2010-2011) I came across an interview where he mentioned that his favorite book was about the law of attraction. A tiny black man from the D carving out time to learn about the mechanics of the universe - how cool right? In true stan mode I downloaded the book merely off the strength of his recommendation and completely forgot about this purchase until the summer of 2016. Sitting in Orly airport in Paris with trash wifi while scouring my Ipad for some form of entertainment, I stumbled into the Books app and guess which book I randomly opened? That Big Sean favorite. I had already began the process of seeking out or encountering by chance soul searching-esque books so it came as no shock that although I had had this book in my possession for five years I was only now reading it because the timing was right. In the great words of Kevin Hart, "I wasn't readyyyy." The universe is a funny thing, man. And thus, I present you with my top soul-searching-awe-inspiring-self-reflective-life-is-a-journey-back-to-you book recommendations. AKA my suggested reading list sans pressure and completely at your leisure.
1. Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav (Oprah and Hov note this as one of their favorites books - I'm just saying)
2. The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra
3. Letting Go by David R. Hawkins
4. Ask and it is Given by Esther and Jerry Hicks (The Big Sean recommendation)
5. Codependent No More by Melody Beattie
6. Nothing Real Can Be Threatened by Tara Singh (Yes, Bey quotes this in her song "All Night")
7. Peace From Broken Pieces by Iyanla Vanzant
Now some of these books weren't the easiest to read and sometimes I put them down never finishing the entire book. However, I've found that whenever I've encountered these books I've taken away what was needed whether I completed three chapters or 30. And the best part of reading these materials is when you randomly revisit a book at a key moment in time and realize your urge to open that book wasn't by chance after all. Sometimes you give yourself exactly what you need without even trying or being aware.