by Blessing

Lately or better yet, during the COVID outbreak and increased visibility of the black experience, I've been obsessed with what it feels like to be free. Like really obsessed with What is freedom? How does it feel? and asking myself honestly.. Do I feel free?

For me to feel free, I’ve learned, that I must feel at ease. Freedom to me is comfort, restoration, rest, ease, authenticity and vulnerability. It’s hard to truly feel free as woman, especially as a black woman. There are all these ideals of who I am supposed to be and how I’m supposed to show up in the world. For many years ( like two ) I subscribed to being nice, meek, and humble even deprecating. After years of being told by peers and teachers I was too blunt, too combative, too forward, too passionate. I became docile, amenable, and declawed yet I felt to an extent comfortable. I was championed for my maturity, for being nice, eloquent, and the bigger person in the face of sexism, racism, and colourism. Still I didn’t feel good, let alone free. There was a point I began to be nicer to others rather than myself. Niceness swiftly became a cage. Things that without reflection felt natural to me- like my frequent use of the word “sorry”, my go-with-the-flow demeanour, my passivity all worked together to build a cage where I wasn’t free to express myself authentically. Somehow the scales had tipped and my niceness was no longer from the heart it was out of fear. Around these realizations, I painted “who me?” 2020 and “Untitled” 2020 .

I began to reimagining freedom to reimagine beauty, reimagining security and basking in what it feels like to be free even if completely inward. How it feels to talk freely, to think freely, to exist freely, away from the gaze, away from the fallacy of what we must be to be respected and away from any self-imposed barriers.

Music that makes me feel free:

Not Friendly - Flo Milli
Bald!REMIX - JPEGMAFIA
Ungodly Hour - ChloexHalle
Accepting My Flaws - Future

something to sit with.