Roll Up My Sleeves and Fight for You Girl

 "Backtight" by Jaheim

...ain’t nothing stopping me from getting backtight with you / go head and trip you got the right to / if I gotta roll up my sleeves and fight for you / i’ll stand outside in the rain all night for you

School is out.  The semester is over.  I took my last exam on Wednesday afternoon and it was a stellar performance, as usual.  I earned more B's that I would like but I did work hard most of the time.  I found it difficult to balance my extra-curricular activities, that arouse so much of my passion in helping to fix the world, and doing schoolwork.

I recognized that my academics were important, as I have been taught my whole life, but I am recognizing that my service to the community is much more important.  The issue, however, is that my academic work, achievement, and licensure will give me more tools to serve my community on a larger level than my current volunteering and action allow.

Therefore, I persevere.


I am so proud of myself.  I think that so much has occurred and so much growing took place.  I hate cliches and I hate to sound cliche, but...


I am quite different from who I was four months ago.  And it was only four months ago.


My family and I reconnecting, apologizing, spending time together, supporting each other definitely made a huge difference in my psyche.

It didn't cure anything, but it made it possible to bear some of the ills of my life and my mind.  My Mommy validated much I had been feeling and hypothesizing about the points of contention between us.  Because we never sat and discussed anything without arguing and attacking each other, we lost the details of the issue.

We argued about stupid and irrelevant things all to communicate our dissatisfaction with each other.  All we had to do was say we were dissatisfied, but communication has always been really difficult for us.


The war between the Dr. and Mrs. versus me is over and that has lifted such a heavy, heavy weight.


Then the beautiful Black womyn I met this semester and reconnecting with the beautiful Black womyn I already know was a nourishment like no other.


Afrikana Student Organization and OMSA's Womyn of Color Discussion group have been my church on campus and through it I met Charity.Velma.Ariel.Valerie.Brittany.Amanda and they have literally changed my life...they way my Christina.Brittany.Ravi.Gwenny did and continue to do.



Although age carries me closer and closer to the center of my "Africanness" (as Shahedah has dubbed it), spending time with people who are also being carried closer has made my carriage that much sweeter.  We all recognize answers in Africa.  Not that problems are not rampant, corruption is not real, poverty is fictional because all of those things exists...

But that Africa has resources...and we are a few.  And we want to encourage other Black people, all the people of the Diaspora to be resources for Africa, on the continent and off.


Thirdly, I started therapy.  Going to therapy is like putting on corrective glasses and seeing what you have been missing all along.  Taking what I learn in therapy seriously, improving my life by improving how I think of myself is like getting lasic surgery to improve my sight permanently.  I will do that.


And then I actually got glasses because I am near-sighted and have astigmatism in some eye...and I've been walking around missing all the details of the scene.


Lastly, I am working on my self-esteem.  It is hard to do because it is such an abstract concept that is developed without one's awareness.  How do you catch or gauge when you are growing up that [this], whatever it is that you are experiencing or enduring, will cause damage to your self-concept?  Self-esteem seems to develop in us, without us, informed by the people around us, most of whom are old enough to know the events of now nourish or deplete my self-esteem later.  But somehow, they overlook it too, and you are left, an adult, maybe self-loathing, and inept at thinking in any other way.


But I am working on it.  It sounds strange [mainly because I am strange], but I think of "self-esteem" as myself as a little girl.  When I am talking to myself, thinking to myself, I try to be careful what I say to myself by imagining that I am talking to a child.  I love children like I love God.  My service to the community will always be predicated on what I am leaving and providing for the children of the world, who don't ask to be born and are expected to assume all the pathologies of the world they are born into.


So I talk to [me] as (me - 17 years = selfesteem).  When I make a mistake or do something I am unhappy with, I reprimand myself appropriately, recognizing that the [little girl: self-esteem] wants to be a good person and is trying her best.  She is young and unwise, willing to learn, but always human and imperfect.  She lives, she learns, she does it better next time as long as it doesn't kill her this time.  And it usually doesn't.

Give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have NO time to criticize others.

 And I have to be willing to do that for myself too.