i’m still going to say it the way i mean it

There’s a part of this I don’t say out loud very often. Not because it’s rare, but because it sounds like complaining if you don’t already know what I mean.

It’s this stretch I’ve been in, where I keep showing up and keep making something that actually feels like me, and it just lands nowhere. I post it, I sit with it, and I rewrite it until it sounds like my voice again instead of something I dressed up for the internet. Then I put it back out, and nothing really moves. There’s no spike, no “finally,” no sign that it reached past the edge of my own hands.

I won’t lie to you, that kind of quiet will mess with your head if you let it. It starts whispering small things at first, like maybe say it softer, maybe make it easier, maybe people would understand it better if you took the edge off. And I have to keep reminding myself, almost daily at this point, that’s exactly how you lose the thing you were trying to say in the first place. So I don’t.

But I also don’t pretend all of this is neutral, because it’s not. We’re not just posting into the void. We’re posting into systems that decide what gets seen and what doesn’t, and I feel that in a very specific way as a Black woman. There’s a version of me that would travel further, and I know that. Lighter, less direct, easier to package. And then there’s the version of me that’s actually telling the truth. That one moves differently. That one gets quiet. Not dragged, not debated, just set aside, like the room heard it and decided not to respond. Reduced reach, no traction, like something just quietly pressed the volume down.

I’ve had to sit with that without letting it turn me into someone else, because if I start shaping everything just to be received, I won’t recognize my own voice when it finally does land. That matters more to me than pretending this is a level playing field, because it isn’t. And still, we’ve never needed permission to matter. That’s the part I keep coming back to. We are a small group in this country, and somehow we still move everything—language, culture, memory, resistance. That didn’t happen because someone gave us room. It happened because we kept speaking anyway.

And I keep thinking about what we actually put into the world when we show up as ourselves. There is something in the way Black women love that doesn’t get studied the way it should. Not soft in the way people expect softness to be, not fragile, not ornamental, but deliberate. It’s in how we hold people and still tell them the truth. It’s in how we build things with very little and make them feel like abundance. It’s in the way we make room for others even when no one made room for us, and how we carry memory, care, humor, and survival all at once without announcing it as labor.

It shows up in the details. In how we check on people. In how we notice what’s missing. In how we create language for things that didn’t have words before. In how we protect, even when we’re tired. In how we stay imaginative in environments that try to make us practical to the point of disappearance. That kind of love is not passive. It’s work. It’s choice. It’s a form of authorship over a world that doesn’t always return the same care.

And that same love is in the work we make. It’s in the refusal to lie just to be liked. It’s in the insistence on naming things clearly, even when it costs us reach, ease, or approval. It’s in the patience to keep going when the response doesn’t come back right away. That isn’t just persistence. That’s devotion.

So I’m trying to stay in that, not the part where everything is working, but the part where I decide I’m not going to shrink just to make this easier on other people. I can feel the difference in the work when I don’t. It’s slower, yes, but it’s mine. And I think that’s what this stretch actually is, if I’m being honest with you. It’s not nothing. It’s time. Time where the work is finding its shape without me forcing it, and time where the right people haven’t found it yet, or maybe haven’t recognized it yet.

I hate how soft that sounds, but I don’t think it’s wrong, because the alternative is believing that if it didn’t hit immediately, it never will. I don’t believe that. I think some things just don’t announce themselves loudly. They move quietly until they land somewhere they’re understood.

So I’m staying with it, not because it’s easy and not because it’s working right now in any obvious way, but because I know what it feels like when I say it the way I actually mean it. I’m not giving that up just to be seen faster. I’d rather it take longer and be real. And when it does connect, I don’t think it will feel random. I think it will feel like it finally reached who it was supposed to.

Until then, I’m still here, still saying it.