Threadings.

[The Preview]: Oh, then in regards to mutual aid, I keep faltering with this series because I can't, like… I think I need to find a balance between what I wanna talk about and what I feel like the public needs. Because I keep curriculum planning and then realizing we are way behind as a public where I thought we were when it comes to understanding the importance of mutual aid and what it does. I really wanted to jump into the how-to, which is the mutual aid by Dean Spade is just a book of how-to. And then I realized we were missing a lot of the why. We are doing all of this work and being in community with one another because we are designed to be compelled by community, not because we are trying to win a battle. Yeah, like the winning the battle stuff is important. That's cute and that's...It's not insignificant. It's just that if our goal is to win, my question is win what? Win against tyranny, win against oppression, win against all these things. Do we see how that still centers the oppressor in the first place? We're not actually thinking about like, what is it that you want to win? Past beating them. You want, you know, OK, I understand we want the satisfaction of victory. What is victory? What does it actually look like to win?What does the world look like? What do people's day to day look like? What does it look like for the most vulnerable in our societies when we win? Because then we have to start thinking about building. That's a, it harkens a bit to what I said earlier about when I ask my groups, okay, so like what does community look like? What do you want community to look like? And I get a lot of, “well, I don't want this. I don't want to feel this. I don't want that.”You haven't actually told me what it is that you wanna build. You've told me what it is that you wanna avoid. And that is, it can be helpful, but you don't lay a foundation with negative space. We lay a foundation packed solid on what it is that we do want. ismatu gwendolyn (00:01.134)Hello, oh no, I don't have my notes near me. Now I've started this, I gotta get up. I want a little tea. You know what, just give me a second. Let me situate myself.[ismatu putters around the apartment]: Notes. Tea mug.[ismatu, muttering mostly to themself]: Beyoncé do be right about some things. It does feel good to be alive. I will not hold you.ismatu gwendolyn (00:55.121)Welcome a little bit of Pistachio Tea, in which I'm cheating on the love of my life and drinking white coconut. Mmm. Oh, that's delicious. Ohhhhhh, that's so good. Thank you, God. Alrighty. So.I am here because I am time blind, and sometimes I think I'm doing great and then I wake up and I realize I have not posted in a month. Again. Oops! There are so many moving parts to my life and I'm beginning to figure out a cadence that works well, and the cadence is Ismatu, you have to put down your perfectionism. It's past like, do what you say that you'll do. It's past, people want to hear from you anyways.It gets into more of you cannot always be curated all the time. You cannot always put out your magnum opus. You cannot always write THEE essay or pen THE script or whatnot. And I know that this doesn't need to be the goal because every now and again I get [distinct feline noises of tomfoolery] that's my cat lemon deciding that she also needs to make herself known. Every now and again I get a, “I appreciated this essay so much!” from an essay that metrically did not perform that well. I can base my entire, like, not quite my life. I wouldn't say that I'm that sold, but whether I think something is good or did good or what have you based on how many eyes were on it and how many people saw it and how many comments I got. And that can be...not even can be. It's quite a rollercoaster because every time I put something out, I'm like waiting, bated breath. Do people like it? Do people fuck with it? Do people think it's cool? Am I lame? Am I gross? I don't know. So every now and again, I get an email that talks about an essay that I thought that nobody saw because, I don't know, Substack told me nobody saw it. So I was just like, okay, well, I guess that's not it. I think I keep looking. It's like, um...Being a content creator is a lot like trying to pan and strike gold. Like you don't really know what's gonna pop off and resonate with people until it happens. So, I think that I'm in a space where I have to put down my perceptions of what other people think is good and what other people think is correct or beautiful. And I just have to go with what I… want.What I want, as it continues, is a life that resonates with me. And what I want is the freedom to be able to put my first draft out there somewhere, at least the first draft that makes it to me wanting to share my thoughts without having to worry about whether it is the various kinds of Good Enough that I erect for myself. So last weekend, over this past weekend, I wanted to write an essay about love and the attention economy and how those things upset one another. I've been talking a lot in the groups that I run about community. What makes community, what makes it good, what we're scared of. Often when I ask people, so what do we think when we want community? When I say, what do you need from a community to be able to be expansive, to not shrink? We often start naming what we don't want because oftentimes our experiences in community are far more traumatizing than they have been helpful. So I've been thinking about this essay.I keep wanting to pull it forth before it's ready. One of the reasons that I think I need to start talking more and sharing more first drafts or maybe first drafts with you all [the patrons and substackers] and then second drafts when I have a little bit more teeth on the subject before it turns into an essay is because writing these essays is like giving birth. I just straight up can't rush it. I am bringing something into the world that is bigger than me and my timelines and what I want.So, I’m trying to figure out a way to be able to let people in on this process of thinking without having it be so formed. There have to be some places for my scrambled egg thoughts, you know? I'm thinking about this essay about exceptionalism? about the attention economy, about what love looks like in community, how these things interrelate with one another. What I'm finding is being in online spaces, talking about sincere community work, that people assume that I am some sort of exception.They assume that what they perceive as charisma or friendliness is just some like innate ability that God struck me with rather than many, many years of trying and failing and trying and failing at friendship. I've said before, or rather I think I said in a video that's rendering right now to upload, that I bring a lot of thoughts from my journals when I was like 15 and 16. I'm finding that where we are as a general public is was talking about in my journals when I was a teenager, when I was 15 and 16. I was thinking and ruminating a whole lot about love and the lack thereof. And I was deeply lonely. I didn't want to be lonely. I was hoping that there would be a day where I had space to breathe, to be around people that liked me when I expand and when I shrink, space to not be around so many pedestals.Just space. Space to take if I wanted it, space to give if I wanted to give, space to be in sincere community with other people that didn't expect me to be any type of way and that could love me no matter what hue I was that day. You know? I was thinking a lot.I'm thinking about this 15 year old self now, who was deeply lonely, who had a lot of trouble with friendship, who continued to be rejected, who had friends that lasted in the moment that didn't happen in adulthood, who had to start over in college, who was scared over and over, who had to start over again and again in college settings, in graduate school settings, in professional settings.Who made myself skilled at the wants of friendship because I spent many years lonely thinking and dreaming of what it could be like to want this thing that I thought was impossible.I'm sitting here now on the other side of really beautiful friendship that I talk about a lot on the internet. And I'm finding that people think that I am the exception. I'm finding that people find me exceptional. “Well, Ismatu, it must be easy for you because, *insert thing here.*” I don't know what I have done— or I do know what I have done. I've trained myself to be good on camera. I've trained myself to be charismatic. I've trained myself to say hi to strangers. I did all this work to make myself super, super friendly so that I wouldn't have to deal with all this aching loneliness that I felt for most of my life. And now people see exceptionalism. Well, it must be easy for you when it was not easy. When I know, especially as an autistic person, right, that all of these traits can be learned. I'm also thinking about brilliance and how often we're sold the idea that brilliance is again like a lightning strike from God Almighty and not something that you hone. That brilliance is the presence of intellect that can't be taught or some sort of aptitude for knowledge that can't possibly be taught, rather than the continual returning to oneself even after the systems that we have in place try to divorce you from your own internal community.There are these two things: the friendliness, the charisma, the ability to be well explained, and this perception of brilliance or intelligence that is making me seem exceptional, like other people cannot possibly do what it is that I do. And I don't know how to push back against that without sounding like I'm Cinderella outgrowing her glass slippers. You know?Especially because one of the reasons I talk about Beauty is because it gives me a lot of structural privilege in terms of navigating social circles. And one of the reasons I talk about Beauty is because it is not easy to be an autistic, introverted person in the body of somebody Beautiful. Because when you are capital B Beautiful, people also expect you to be a certain level of poised, or confident, or charismatic. They don't expect you to be awkward and painfully shy. And I wasn't actually shy, I was just um...crass, I'll say? lol. I didn't have strong understandings of what you should and should not say. I ended up being rude a lot, and I didn't mean to be rude. I just, I don't know, didn't understand the normal waxes and wanes of conversation. I didn't understand that most conversation does not actually want you to be honest about your honest opinion. I didn't understand that even when you must be given and able to provide an opinion, it has to be soft and bubble wrapped, because that's not how I wanted other people to interact with me.I didn't understand how to make an object of my body and how to not wear exactly what I was thinking on my face and on my person. It was very off-putting. The reason I learned to walk in an area of poise and grace and benevolence is because people continued to make it known that was the expectation of me. I'm realizing that in an effort to make myself some sort of palatable, I've also dehumanized myself a little bit to the experience of being painfully awkward and terrified of doing and saying the wrong thing. Then in addition! right? that's essay one, that's like, ruminating at me and I can't tell if these two essays are interrelated or not. I have one more that's just been chewing on me and it's this idea of— oh no, and it's an entirely different notebook. It's this idea of revolutionary love. I'm reading through In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love by Joy James.and it has a chapter called Oshun's Flight. I think I might just read Oshun's Flight and talk about it and release it tonight because I'm sick of not creating. I'm sick of being in this silo where I have to do and say everything perfectly and write the most beautiful essay in the world in order to feel like I can take space on my podcast. That's absurd! But Oshun's Flight is about...It's the preface to the rest of the text, Revolutionary Love, which revolutionary love is a concept that Joy James expands on past the captive maternal. What does it look like to be engaged with a love that might cost you your life? What does it look like to be so compelled by love for oneself and one's community that you are willing to go past inconvenience, to go past what is easily accessible? and move towards what might cost you something quite significant? What does that feel like? How does that unfold? And how can our communities possibly survive without it? So… hold on, let me put myself on a cute DND so I don't keep pinging. Because that's my bestie. Once I get one of those, I'm like, oop. Uh, let me just...Ahhhhh. I also feel like a weenie (!!!!) because I keep saying, I want to talk about masturbation online and then I keep like, pussying out!! because I know that it's going to be taken in like a sensationalist manner because anytime a particularly a woman folk, a queer person talks about sex, it's taken in this sensationalist manner. But I continue to say that my target audience is me when I was 15. I want to be making the stuff that I wish that I was looking at and reading and writing when I was 15. and I had all these questions about the world that the adults around me either couldn't answer or I didn't feel like they were being honest. I didn't know what masturbation was when I was 15. I grew up in a house where nobody talked about it. Um, I- I go on a little bit about this in the Get Unready With Me video that is literally rendering right now if it's not already done.It's a whole series that I keep thinking of that came to me during this year's Ramadan because I realized how depressed I was when I was hungry. I realized that food is not only a mood regulator for me, it's literally masturbatory, the way that I go about food and eating food, the way that I engage with making things that are delicious or eating things that are delicious.it literally is an orgasmic experience. I think the way that I go about multiple aspects and areas of life are orgasmic. I think this is A, because of my relationship to food, I grew up food insecure, so it kind of makes sense that I like heavily pleasure seek in food and how that doesn't have to be a bad thing. And B, I also had a really delayed sexual debut because of the heaviness of Christianity that I grew up in. I would say that I'm on the later side of average because I started having... I had gone through the gambit of what most people consider sex when I was like 22. I had checked off what boxes people might naturally conceive of. There was plenty that I hadn't done, but yeah.So, and that was like, it was also very interesting becoming a stripper before I started having sex in general. It's just like, I wanna talk about sex in public. I understand that I'm gonna have to put it behind a paywall for a multitude of reasons, but I also keep feeling myself like shy away from these subjects because, ah, respectability, because I'm pussy? I don't know. Because I keep thinking that maybe I'm doing too much?…Says who?Ismatu, you right. Says who?Oh, then in regards to mutual aid, I keep faltering with this series because I can't, like I think I need to find a balance between what I wanna talk about and what I feel like the public needs because I keep curriculum planning and then realizing we are way behind as a public where I thought we were when it comes to understanding the importance of mutual aid and what it does. I really wanted to jump into the how-to, which is the mutual aid by Dean Spade is just a book of how-to. And then I realized we were missing a lot of the why. We are doing all of this work and being in community with one another because we are designed to be compelled by community, not because we are trying to win a battle. Yeah, like the winning the battle stuff is important. That's cute and that's...It's not insignificant. It's just that if our goal is to win, my question is win what? Win against tyranny, win against oppression, win against all these things. Do we see how that still centers the oppressor in the first place? We're not actually thinking about like, what is it that you want to win? Past beating them. You want, you know, OK, I understand we want the satisfaction of victory. What is victory? What does it actually look like to win?What does the world look like? What do people's day to day look like? What does it look like for the most vulnerable in our societies when we win? Because then we have to start thinking about building. That's a, it harkens a bit to what I said earlier about when I ask my groups, okay, so like what does community look like? What do you want community to look like? And I get a lot of, “well, I don't want this. I don't want to feel this. I don't want that.”You haven't actually told me what it is that you wanna build. You've told me what it is that you wanna avoid. And that is, it can be helpful, but you don't lay a foundation with negative space. We lay a foundation packed solid on what it is that we do want. I think contemporary widespread political education online lashes like heat in a frying pan. It's all about like what do we do and not why do we do it? Because you can have the what and like the what is very it's viral bait. People really do (and me included, I'm including myself and people), we love to feel productive. We love cosplaying productivity without necessarily doing something attached to the things that we're learning. So the how-to's, the tutorials, the book lists, they help us to feel really productive, but they don’t necessarily translate to actionable items that take place in your real life. So I'm slowing down. I'm talking a lot more about like, okay, so what does it mean to make friends? What does that look like? And that's way slower than I thought that I was going. And I owe people videos. Like I have attached to the how-to stuff. I have videos attached to this. I wanted to highlight Juju Bae's podcast, a little Juju, because they're doing a fundraiser and that's been going on for months and I've been wanting to make this stuff like for literal months.it’s like, a six month video that's overdue, but I wanna put it in a context that it will thrive in, which means I gotta get through the why before I get to the how. I wanted to highlight the University of Michigan because their grad students are on strike and it's like a strike girl summer. Hey, everybody's striking. You get a strike, I get a strike, he, she, me, we get a strike, we love it. I'm feeling like these things should have been done forever ago, but I'm also feeling like I don't know that they would have the traction that I want without this basis of why do we do this? Why am I highlighting these people in particular? Because I'm in direct community with them, you know? [a medium strength negro sigh]I'm overwhelmed. And at many points in time in this journey of existing in a real time.I feel like I'm in over my head because I don't have answers. I'm learning in real time, not because I'm learning this material for the first time. I'm learning about how people interact with this material and I'm changing course as I go. That's overwhelming and I feel like I'm doing everything wrong and I feel like I should be moving a lot faster than I'm capable of.[a moment of consideration]In all, today I feel like a weenie. So we will try again tomorrow.ah.[a therapist tries at self-regulation]I'm doing my best, and my best is all I can do. I'm preparing for this big push surrounding Revolutionary Healers and a third university as possible in August. So I kind of have a deadline to be able to get some of this stuff done.So I'm gonna get it done. A lot of this feels insurmountable, but many things feel insurmountable until they're done. I don't actually think this is about proving to myself that I can do it. I think this is about proving to myself that I am exactly who I think that I am… and not even me, right? I'm continually blown away by how big I am.I recently had a sound engineer say that they've been dreaming of an opportunity like this because I'm bringing them on to a couple different projects and I was like, wow, me? The subject of dreams?the material of answered prayers? Me? [ismatu unto themself]: Yes, bitch, you.I feel so itty bitty. I feel like a beetle. I feel like a worm. And then I'm sitting on a patio with a new friend having dinner and I hear my name. I'm like, what? I look up and someone is waving at me. So excited to see me— in the way that like, you wave at a friend when you're in the fifth grade and you unexpectedly see a friend from school at the grocery store and you're like, hiiiiiiii, Emily!!!She's going, “Ismatu!!! hello!!” I was like, hi!! She was like, “I watch all your videos online, I love them!” I was like, oh, thank you!I can't feel myself outside of me, but it appears as though everyone else can.[a moment of consideration]I am so alarmed//I am so grateful.It lets me know that I must endeavor to keep trying and past trying. Trying and then consistency and then from consistency into blooming. And I think it's actually the blooming that scares me because I have so little control over buds and blossoms. That would mean that I just have to let myself unfold in public where people can see me.I am beginning to realize that that's not altogether a bad thing.Thank you for listening. I always let my tea get cold, so I actually started with a cold tea this time. I'ma catch you in the next one.ismatu g. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe

No stripping did not ruin my relationship with men but you should hear how many hours in a row I can work nonstop hahahahah <3 on treating myself as a body that breathes and moves slowly. Much love. Jazz of the Episode [incomplete list]:Hour of Parting x Sun RaSend In The Clowns x Pat MartinoLena’s Song x The Sweet EnoughsCicada Season x FuubutsushiWhy, Buzzardman, Why? X Alabaster PlumeSpring Yaounde x Wynton MarsalisThe Jordan River Song x Emahoy Tsege Mariam GebruTurpentine x Alabaster PlumeTenkou Why Feel Sorry x Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe

Authors Andrea Ritchie, Mariame Kaba, and Melissa Gira Grant discuss the connection between social work, policing, and sex work. They explore the history of social work's association with policing and challenge the politics of deservingness within the field. The podcast also dives into the flaws of the current therapy system and emphasizes the importance of community healing and support.

I feel like i am in a zoo. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe

Musings from my porch in Chicago that ask: am I good at hosting happiness? Am I the right shape to hold onto the life that I want? What noise do I make when I get knocked around? read this episode at ismatu.substack.com.Jazz of the episode:Why, Buzzardman, Why? x Alabaster PlumeThe Jordan River Song x Emahoy Tsege Mariam GebruLena’s Song x The Sweet EnoughsYou Go To My Head x Billie HolidayExit x Sebastian MikaelStill thinking of Jordan Neely.ismatu gwendolyn This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe

on what we owe to each other in the grief. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe

a conversation about survival, archival, and the intimacy found and lost when you grow up in the public eye. request the full transcript at ismatu.gwendolyn@gmail.com This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe

this is the next essay in the study of self series. listen to the previous episode here. Content warning for: mentions of suicidal thought and intent, allusions towards self-harm. Nothing graphic, but it is a recurrent theme of the piece. The first time I got recognized from TikTok, I was at a porn convention. [insert the really cute but compromising picture of me at said porn convention here. I most definitely cannot post this photo so just imagine xoxo <3]I need you to be right here with me in this moment. You are at a work event, crop topped and busty, see-through bedazzled mini skirt stretched over a bright pink thong, standing sure on seven-inch chrome Pleasers and an iconic bright pink mini afro (to match the thong, obviously). And you are freezing. Like, yes, it is cold in the convention center when you’re wearing this little clothing, but I mean deer in the headlights, this cannot be be happening freezing while knocking back your third (work-sanctioned) shot of the evening. Maaaaaaybe you’re wrong. Maybe you’re just intoxicated! Maybe you totally did not just hear someone gasp and say “Oh my gosh, are you on TikTok?” to the back of your head. To you, the stripper.I’m not being a very helpful narrator— you and I both know that’s all just wishful thinking. LMAO you definitely did just hear that this shit is wild. Now what? You’ve been on TikTok for like… a month. No one prepared you for this eventuality so soon. Being recognized is for famous people!! What the fuck!!!! Do you think of a lie? You cannot just stand there omg think! Think of a lie!! You’re draining the shot awkwardly and now you’re… swishing that casamigos around on your tongue? oh my word now you’re grimacing. Do something. Okay. You’re breathing out. That’s good!! You’re swallowing the shot. Great momentum. You are turning around on some newly found liquid courage and move to open your brilliant mouth and then this voice in the back of your head comes forward, all bright and toothy: Everyone can see you. Already. How did you manage to imagine this social media thing would never really affect your life? You can officially never go backwards. Hi. My name is Ismatu. I have for you an essay that used to be called, “on being surprised I bloomed sunflowers.” It comes to you in three acts, with the following thesis:One of the best ways, the kindest ways, the most lasting ways I can love myself is through archival. It’s through constant self-perseveration— not only “self-preservation” as in survival, but in my record of life. And because I love myself as a stitch in a quilt, a part of a whole, some of my archival belongs to the people that see me. Let’s begin.Act I: GerminationMy first era of life was spent in the lovingkindness of anonymity. Such is life in the mountains— one thing they will do is shelter you. Earth that’s stacked toward heaven like that is hard to get to know. She slow to like and she longer to love. Mountains and the love you find there press on you in ways that renegotiate time. They impress upon you timelessness. I appreciate moving slow from being brought up there. Mountains make you get to know your neighbors because you need each other to survive them. And the mountains I was raised in (the Colorado Rockies) were kind to me in their various reminders: that I was teeny and always will be. That clean, good air is a blessing. That I am lucky to be so small and yet held so gingerly by mighty Mama Earth. “We ourselves are only her fingertips, her eyelashes,” they chorus. “How big she is; how gentle all the same for choosing to hold your hand every day.”Mountains also remind you of how little you’ll ever know and it makes you breathe a sigh of relief. This world exudes stress in its constant quest to become larger than life; I was always content as a finite little being because of the mountains that made me. For me, life was about as long and thick as a tree— and I wasn’t dealt an easy life necessarily, but it had the character of ease, if that makes sense— there is only so much you allow yourself to be rushed when you can hear trees and what they say to you. They talk so low and so slow. It was a childhood where I felt the rise and fall of every day. I never, never woke up and thought, my goodness I can’t wait to be an adult.Colorado was my first love, which I first defined without realizing as how much I’d been given or how much I was willing to give without asking. I had a family with love in it, I had friends; my child body did not feel love and name it until I watched the winter sky bruise periwinkle with planets and stars that hung glittering over the peaks, like a lover loathe to leave. Until the sun set in the west at 10pm while I had my first honeysuckle. The breeze is sweet and I say, “Oh. This is love.”I learned to journal in the cradle of the trees, actually. All my important conversations with myself and with God Creator happened at least twenty feet off the ground (as a security measure). The trees kept all my secrets, and I kept theirs. It was this one day in a garden when I was thirteen that they revealed to me I had their roots inside my chest cavity. That paper could keep me and my secrets just like they do. That I could belong to myself just as much as I belonged to everyone else— even more than that. That I was someone worth belonging to in the first place.I had my own self dangling from the end of my pen and tasted love for the second time. I didn’t know I’d been hiding from myself until I called my own name and heard an answer within me. Thirteen and dreaming of what selfhood feels like when the only person that owns me is me. Thirteen and looking at raspberries bend their whole plant because they’ve grown up to be thick and ripe and on display. Thirteen and thinking of what it could be like to be all ripe and ready like that. I named my notebook Thesilina and began to germinate. This is the blessing of anonymity: no one talks to a little Black girl up in a tree. No one asks you any probing questions. No one is interested in the minute of your day, not even your parents. Most days, no one even sees you— not many people think to look up when they walk outside. By the time I picked a pen and found myself, I had the freedom of zero follow-up questions and a 10pm curfew. Blessed, sweet privacy. No one in my family ever attempted to read what I wrote down— I truly don’t think my parents even thought about it. Invaluably, I was alone with myself feeling through my own desire for my body and my time and my own sovereignty. I don’t know that I’ve ever wanted anything worse than I wanted myself in my own entirety.Raspberries tasted just like me. I opened up pages and gobbled myself down.Act II: Stolen BloomsMy love affair with myself began cataclysmic and I knew it even then. For one matter, I was dying. I told you: it was a life with ease of character, not ease of circumstances. My circumstances were, point blank, going to kill me (or I was going to put myself out of my own misery). The reasons why are for another essay, but for the purposes of this one: Death breathed and heaved over me like July stormclouds, just thick and delicious and promising to come cool and all at once. Dying young seemed like a neutral fact of life, like falling to sleep on Christmas Eve even while you try and fight it. Death was a matter of when, not if. I was also wrong to think in terms of ownership, and I knew it then too. A relationship with myself that could last (like, truly last) could only ever thrive in balance, with true agency reciprocity, where I choose myself and my body chooses me back and my mind oversees the union, and we move together like that. A daily choice, hesitantly made— long to love and slow to like. I knew I was rushing into things with someone I had quite literally just met, but I was teeny— when you are young like I was (and like I am), the world has a way of convincing you that everything you’ll ever be is right in front of your eyes. Plus, there was that whole matter of “I’m pretty sure I’m not going to live to see sixteen.” I generally felt like I was moving on borrowed time so… might as well do it hot and fast, right? In the meeting and the keeping myself, I, Juliet, was my own Romeo.I will tell you this because I am endeavoring to be honest with you all: I did not fucking care. I knew I was being selfish and I could feel myself bottling up all this hot ash and I promise you I did not care. And I tried! It’s not like I wanted to leave someone the trauma of finding me stilled and cooled and at peace. It just… it felt so good to luxuriate and decay in places no one else could see. I reached inside myself and found the earth and I said mine. And I began to bury me. This disposition intoxicated me, the thought that I could account for myself, and keep all of me, and not spill or share one singular drop. That I was mine and mine alone. It was good like when you’re doing drugs with no intent to come down. I assumed I’d be dead before I’d ever need to sober up.And then (there it is, the predictable and then), Words began to find their way out of me. It happened in public, which is the most embarrassing part! Somebody fucked up and handed me a mic. I could tell you who, in fact: it was my youth pastor (lame). I was a child and so I could not see that I was silly for thinking I could have my own secrets. I hand’t yet understood that other people saw things that I hadn’t developed the eyes for. I also have one of the loudest dispositions I have ever seen radiate off a person; my thoughts flash across my face with the strength and clarity of a gospel choir soprano. It was truly so unserious of me to think I could keep all my own secrets that young. Like. Imagine having a chest full of trees and deluding yourself into thinking that no one can see the branches but you.I could not own my own soils any more than I could own the earth, and me and the mountains are the same thing. Slow to like, long to love, visible for miles and miles around. It’s just that at that time, the only example I had of love was one rooted in possession and ownership. I did not know how to exist in community with myself— I did not even know that was possible.Even in speaking, in learning to navigate a mic and a stage and a spotlight, it wasn’t really for me. It was for “sharing my God-given talents with the world.” Read: it was for white adults who applauded me while I died in front of them, and I was so eager to please. Growing up in the white evangelical Christian church made me such a glutton for pain. White folks with money really do love to watch a Black Girl Bleed. Agony on display in my essays and in my poetry and they applaud. I am dying in front of you, I would rumble into the mic. And that declaration would always be followed up with a bigger mic, a larger stage, and more applause. This is the first time you ever hear that honest, toothy voice, bright in your mind voice from back to front: Hey. Hey. Everyone can see you. Are you certain you want to be seen like this?I think, after all this, I became a recluse. I was too young to love the stage— I didn’t have the wherewithal to make that choice. When you start existing in that kind of emotional nudity at fourteen, and when you do so for survival, you don’t really have time to think about your relationship to performance. I didn’t love the stage; I didn’t like the stage; it just was a part of my week. The loose warmth of something familiar and not altogether unpleasant. As neutral as Death himself. I am dying, I wrote and was handed a scholarship. We are dying, I penned and was handed research money. More stages. More money. Bigger mics. Nothing to ever fix the problems. Sometime in college, while I lost family to poverty and to stress, and while Ebola was still a case study in my Global Health courses, this stitch of time where I had to wade between this life and this death to find the cadence of every day— this was the time I realized I was owned. I saw how brilliant Pain is and why it’s so lucrative. How… ritualistic all of this was. How much my blood looks like diamonds. How much they (the audience, waiting bated-breath) is willing to pay for my blood. Diamonds. I want it in diamonds, since I am so sacred to the ritual of this world order. These people are going to pay for my blood in diamonds. Once I realized the precarity of my place, that the love of institution was still just ownership by other names (like publication), I came to a screeching halt. I was a senior in college and I blamed it on burn out. It was so much more than just exhaustion. It was repulsion at coming to understand that I has sold my mind, my fertile earth, to the academy without even realizing. That this life of mine was built on turning my thoughts into some tangible, supple thing that Bleeds so I could tack it with some words— a butterfly pinned shiny on a cork board. Pieces of flesh stitched together with someone’s humanity and immortalized on the page. This university that paid for my health insurance and new laptops in exchange for my fertile earth. These were not the pages of the trees that once held regard for me. This was love in ownership, again. There is no freedom in the academy. I had pimped my mind out to a new age plantation and they wanted me to pretend like I liked it. Graduate school began to knock and I was celebrated. I received the prize for all my scholastic excellence: more hard work. I shut my mind off. She had seen enough. Nothing in my purse but lipgloss, a MacBook and a change of hell. What was coming next was not safe for us; I didn’t know how to keep our secrets anymore. I didn’t even trust myself. I kissed my pen and put her in the pocket between one rib and another. I graduated college; I did not publish my thesis; I began my master’s program and I laid us all to rest with a two line refrain. I have misplaced my seams. My grief spills everywhere.Act III: What I Owe to the Sun I don’t have much to say in public about my time as a dancer, except that I appreciated it for its honesty. There was no delusion or pretense to the job— your body is on display and you are paid accordingly. Literally just like academia, except better paid and with far more agency over your day to day. The strip club is a place where you actually need to be honest with yourself, because there are some bits of you cannot come into work. There is no money at the club waiting for you if you are not capable of a precise, thorough self inventory. I shed what I need to when I take off my sweats. My brain gets put in a jar, and the jar in my locker. This process was very rinse and repeat with me. Beauty rituals require brutal self appraisal as a daily practice of sanctification. I never really surprise myself with the parts of me that make it out of the locker room— I have been performing my whole life.Upgrade your subscription to read fun things like the above and also help me attend my local farmer’s market.We flash forward a handful of years in a montage of black lights and white lingerie and morning-after alcohol. This is really why I don’t talk much about the club— it’s fr one part spite towards a nosy ass internet and three parts because I would run out of things to say five minutes into an essay. It is more or less uneventful. Sure, every now and again Something Happens, but most days, it’s just Tuesday. Every day is a Tuesday. My life tumbles forward. I renegotiate myself at the start of every day on what I am and what I would like to keep.Except. Except. Here is our final and then. And then, after I’d been in the ring for a while, long enough to know better than what I was doing, I started swinging myself around on the pole. Just to try it. Just to see if I could. Because I was too fucked up to say, no, maybe it isn’t a stellar idea to try flips for the first time with an audience and a stomach full of cucumbers, hummus, and champagne. Because I was sick with envy that other girls were better dancers than me. Because I didn’t realize I still had this unrealized dream of dancing on the world’s stage, where everyone could see me. I am not pristine enough for the world’s stage, and I am too much of a perfectionist to embarrass myself, but this... this was most certainly not an audience of everyone. And I was so, so intoxicated. I flipped myself over and started flying. I don't think I've hit the ground yet.The first night I ever pole-danced (as in, really fucking did that shit pole danced), I pulled an inversion I’ve only ever seen me do in my dreams. I was fucked up and in new heels because mine broke on me during my last stage set, and I wasn’t about to go home, I had my prettiest lingerie on. I remember hearing my first ever stage song play over me diamonds on my neck, di- diamonds on my wrists. And I remembered what these people owe to me. And I remember thinking to the chorus that lives in my head, this stage is going to be soaked by the time I’m done. And my body found its way into spinning, upside down, arms in front of me, grabbing my back leg, hanging there like a ballerina in a snow globe. And money rained down. Here is that bright and toothy voice, who I now call Auntie Dae: It’s a shame everyone can’t see you do this. You are a star. You love the stage. You were born a dancer. Remember?Oh. I… do. I love the stage. I think I missed the stage.This was also a stage in life where I was passively dying. As much as the club low-key saved my life, I was only ever so attached— here enough to function and to drink and little more. Remember where we are in this season of life: gone past the mountains years ago, fooling folks into thinking I’m a true blue city bitch, hiding my brilliance from graduate school so the university cannot take myself from me again, hiding my real identities and signifiers at work for my own safety, hiding my work from my family, somehow never hiding from myself because I needed an honest self inventory to survive all this. A secret that radiated off me: I was not doing a great job at surviving all this. I felt the familiar cool, delicious storm clouds swirling above me and thought, not at all startled: those clouds are so low I can’t see my hands in front of me. I remembered the last time I couldn’t see anything past my current age. I was fifteen. That was the year I tried to kill myself and failed.I was there at 23, watching me drink bottle after bottle of work-sponsored top shelf liquor and thinking somewhere distant, maybe I should save myself. Followed up with a revision, when that felt like too grand a task, maybe I should save bits of myself somewhere. Just in case I survive this, like I keep doing. I will want to know what happened to me. So I did two things. I kept one notebook over three years (a record low but it was better than nothing). And I picked up TikTok, at least in part, to have a means of documentation of myself in spite of my hiding. Maybe that’s just me making a story out of things— but never in my life had I really felt like I had things to say to the public until now, in this season of hibernation. One last bit of crucial honesty before we get back to the plot: writing and keeping record of myself and my circumstances was crucial to my survival as a teenager. I am going to talk about this openly because I think a decent amount of teenagers follow me, and because I am a mental health professional, and because I would have loved it if more adults were honest with me about suicidality. There was a time after my suicide attempts (on and off from fifteen to twenty-three) where I did not have the will to live, I just lacked the will to die. Death is a commitment in a way the shuffle of every day life is not. Just because I did not actively want to be alive anymore does not mean I magically wanted to stay. I had incredibly important spiritual revelations after 15 about choice and destiny and being anchored to this world. My understanding had grown: I was meant to be on this earth still. I just had no idea why. It was a day to day that I characterize as the Chicago winter impressing itself on the skyline: every day is gray. Some days, the fog is lower than others. We went on like this until my brain clicked into place at almost 24. [This sounds corny but I am so serious. You can trust me to be honest and so I am telling you: life really does get better when your brain is done growing. Please hang in there.] Anyways. I am there, breaths from my next stage of life that I do not know is coming yet, a couple years into the club, a couple years into graduate school, having made a full revolution (as in all the way back to start) around the ten year anniversary of me answering a notebook’s call and deeming myself worth writing down. I made a TikTok (just one video) because I was attempting to pretend it wasn’t that deep. And then I immediately went viral. THIS is our last and then, forget what I said earlier: you make your cute lil speaking video and then the first TikTok you ever make goes viral. Look at you, foolish! You called the Stage and she came running. What did you think would happen? And you look good on the stage. There’s the truth. You are supposed to be up here.We’re at the end of the montage and you are easing yourself into the spotlight, just barely. You’re trying to pretend like it’s super normal to hit six figure follower counts in as many weeks. Life is still fractured, and that is okay. It gets glued together bit by bit and it’s good for you to learn patience. We are back here at this moment when this lady clocks you while you are *insert stripper name here* and startles you speechless. [Ha! You. Speechless. Anyways.]You cannot think of a lie so you just smile and say yes, you are. And she’s cool. In fact, she says, “it makes you cooler, knowing that you do this. That you are like a really full person off screen.” Leaving you wondering what it would be like if everyone on the internet knew. If you family knew. If one day your life was not so dissected and pinned apart and you didn’t have to pretend like you were ashamed of yourself. Maybe the mess belongs on stage just as much as you do.And this time, the stage is on more of my own terms. Not quite, not all the way. But certainly more than before, at the club. At church. At school. You have more freedom to expand and contract and so many kind people watching you. People are watching us. People are taking inspiration and joy from us when you yourself could not give myself those things. And instead of constant dying and constant public spectacle, we balance the hardness of things. I have always been one to wear my hardships on my wrists and now here I am having folks assume I had a rich kid life with healthy attachments to my parents. Befuddling. Amazing. Look how fast you found yourself, sharing us in moments, in morsels of time you found lovely. Then… just like that. Self-documenting. Archival. I cannot help but love myself, even when I do not like myself. And what better love than the love of being kept, collected, considered?a brief letter to me on my 23rd birthday entitled, “forgive me for spoiling the ending.”At the time this picture was taken, you have only just begun to understand how vast you are and how pointless it is to try and underperform. You were raised up by the mountains and cemented in the sun. You, a Leo! You thought you could run and hide when you got scared. Imagine thinking you’d be raspberries your whole life. You are a grown-up now. You have made it to adulthood and you are surprised your flowers changed and bloomed. Welcome to your era of sunflowers.I am an amalgamation of the people that built me and if I am honest, good and honest, I have been built in part by the public eye. I have been pieced together by and under the center spotlight. Fourteen was such a tender age to take the stage ; there are some ways I will never unsee my body as opportunity ; it was what it is. I can never go backwards, and me hiding wasn’t backwards, it was around again in the same orbit. All it did was delay the inevitable. When I speak, it feels like branches are shooting out of my chest. I am most rooted when I feel my voice carry on the sun rays. People from all over the world listen in on your lives, on your podcast, quite literally on your musings and solidifies what I already knew: the reason we prohibited social media in our life as a teenager is because we knew what would happen to me if the internet saw me speak. How hilarious it is that I thought I could run! I was always going to be up here. You were built by the sun; you owe those rays you soaked up a second chance at shining.Well, beloved, you survive. You survive your next big heartbreak and your freakouts about graduate school and your wild ass landlords. You survive the pilgrimage home and back to yourself, night after night. Era after era. So much gumption! My stars, you amaze me. I will spoil this ending for you, which is just the middle of my own block. I am still here, making notes in the margins for us. I have new questions of love to consider; they are as follows. How do I love myself best in public? What is self love when a part of me always belongs to the people?I haven’t reread the notebook you kept loosely during this time but I cannot wait love and love,@ismatu.gwendolyn, one year inFinal thoughts: archival is not only a study of self. it is a declaration of love. I love myself and so I want to remember. I am enthralled with the smallest bits of this life seeding and sprouting years later, when I have the fertile earth to hold onto them. I surprise myself with what I grow, even still, after all this time. I expected to look back and see the wildflowers of my youth littered everywhere the wind blows. I am shocked, ten years later, to see what fourteen year old planted in their left hand as she wrote to me with her right: there, blooming up from the margins: stocky, bright, thick-stemmed flowers turning their face up to the sun. I keep myself and in doing so, I declare me worth keeping. And this time, I open up my garden heart to the people that see and see me, that have found ways to love me in sincerity with even the smallest glimpses of my life. I spare a seed where I am able. I know I am in a temporary space and I am flying all the same. I hope the work of your day passes through your hands with ease. I hope you have something left over to say to your future self at the end of the day.warmest regards,ismatu g. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe

A child model turned grad school stripper speaks openly about the reality of being shackled to Beauty (and the negotiations you make at the top of the hierarchy).Read the full essay at ismatu.substack.com. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe

Welcoming in Season II of Threadings. Notes on my the orbit of my personhood. An essay once titled, “how do I love myself?” (but I didn’t know what I meant by “love,” so first i sound it out)Themes of the essay:love is the feeling that compels you to action and the action itself. Poetry is the thesis of my life and practicing it is an act of love. Black feminism and love studies are, in many ways, the same discipline. I am just as much of the earth as the mountains are. Read the full essay at ismatu.substack.com.Next episode in The Study of Self: love of my physical being This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ismatu.substack.com/subscribe