Amen. Aśe. And All That Shit.

J. Crum
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Essays for people rebuilding after faith, people-pleasing, bad love, and survival mode. For the ones who got called different because they finally stopped betraying themselves. amenaseandall.substack.com

Episodes

  1. 1d ago

    The Room Chose Quiet

    Content note: childhood sexual violation, silence, survival. Okwu does not usually show up when I am angry. Anger is too easy. He shows up when I feel erased. When somebody tells a story about me that makes me smaller than I am. When my name moves through a room I am not in. When somebody makes a decision, places my shadow behind it, and lets the rumor travel until I start sounding controlling. Crazy. Dangerous. Difficult. That is when I feel him stand up. Quiet at first. Shoulders down. Eyes open. Already working. He does not ask if I am hurt. He does not ask if I am scared. He does not ask if I need a second. He says, Move. I got this. And most of the time, I want to let him. Because he is good at it. He knows how to make a room feel me. He knows how to make a sentence sharp and still walk away clean. He knows how to make somebody regret underestimating me. He knows how to take the thing people tried to use against me and make it look like power. I do not always like admitting that. Sometimes I do not just want to be understood. Sometimes I want to make myself undeniable in a way that makes people nervous. And I like him. That is the part people might want me to clean up, but I am not going to. I like the part of me that nobody can play with. I like the part that walks in and changes the temperature. I like the part that survived what softness could not. I like the part that can turn a room around with a look, a joke, a bar, a sentence, or a silence held a little too long. I like him because he had me. But liking him does not mean he gets to drive every time. The apology was not the repair A while back, I found out somebody had put a decision they made on me. Something about another friendship. Something they chose. But my name was moving through the story. By the time it got back to me, the story had stopped treating me like a person. I had become the excuse. I had become the reason. I had become the shadow behind somebody else’s choice. So when we talked, she apologized. Then she kept apologizing. And I kept saying I heard her. She said she did not like that I kept dismissing her apology. I told her, “I am not dismissing it. I just do not accept it.” And I meant that. There is a difference between hearing an apology and letting it fix something it did not repair. There is a difference between feeling sorry and correcting the story as loudly as you let it spread. But even while I knew I was right, I could feel something in me enjoying the control. Not peace. Control. That is the part I have to watch. This did not start with gossip Because this did not start with gossip. It started in a classroom. I was in kindergarten. We sat in a circle, close enough for everybody to see everybody. Little chairs. Little bodies. Crayons somewhere nearby. Colorful walls. All the stuff adults use to pretend a room is safe. A boy next to me started touching me. I told. The teacher saw enough to know something was wrong. Heard enough to know something had happened. Understood enough to hush it. And then she kept it quiet. She did not protect me. She did not tell my parents. She did not make the room stop. She chose the room. That is the part that stayed. Not just what happened to me. What happened after I spoke. That is a different wound. Pain teaches you one thing. Silence teaches you another. I learned that telling the truth does not mean somebody is coming. I learned that speaking up does not mean the room will move. I learned that an adult can know enough to act and still choose the easier thing: keeping everything quiet. I did not have language for that. I had a body. And my body understood. When Josh speaks up, people do not listen. So something else in me stood up. I did not know his name then. I know it now. Okwu. The word. The spoken thing. The one who would not be silenced. He was not evil. He was loyal. He was the part of me that said, Since they will not protect you, I will make sure nobody can ignore you. That is where the voice came from. Not the stage. Not the pulpit. Not the booth. Not the essays. Not the jokes. Not the bars. The voice came from a child who learned quiet had power and decided quiet would never win twice. The protector became a weapon Okwu learned how to keep people off me. He learned how to speak before the room could swallow me. How to attack before anyone could attack me. How to turn charisma into armor, humor into distance, talent into leverage, language into a room key, presence into a warning. He learned how to make people respect me. And sometimes, if people would not offer respect, fear would do. That saved me. It also made me dangerous. Because an old protector does not always know when the war is over. He sees dismissal and calls it danger. He sees misrepresentation and calls it the classroom. He sees gossip and hears the teacher hushing me again. Then he reaches for whatever will make me feel untouchable. The sharper sentence. The colder exit. The public flex. The private thing I turn into proof. The move that says, You thought you could play with me; now everybody has to watch me win. And it works. That is the problem. Petty works. Power works. Fear works. Getting in somebody’s head works. Making somebody feel small before they can make you feel small works. Revenge always dresses better than fear. It can look like confidence until I am honest about what part of me picked the outfit. Sometimes the flex is not confidence. Sometimes it is a wound looking for an audience. And if I am not careful, I turn the woman into a weapon. I turn the bystander into a target. I punish a room that did not fail me. I have had to look at that straight. I have used talent as proof that nobody can touch me. I have used access as revenge. I have looked at men who could not do what I do, could not rap like me, could not move the way I move, could not get the same attention, and I have wanted them to feel the gap. Not because I needed them to suffer. Because some part of me still needed proof that I was not the powerless one anymore. That is overcompensation. That is the shadow. Not the voice. The voice is mine. Not the confidence. I earned that. Not the fire. That fire kept me alive. The shadow shows up when I make innocent people carry evidence that I survived. I do not want to be that kind of man I do not want to be that kind of man. I know what it feels like when somebody hands me a bill for something I did not do. I know what it feels like to stand there confused while somebody else protects their comfort with my silence. I know what it feels like when people manage the story instead of protecting the child. So I cannot become another version of that. I cannot commit so deeply to never being helpless again that I make other people helpless around me. That is not power. That is fear with better clothes on. The work now is not to kill Okwu. I would never do that. He had me. When nobody else did, he had me. He stood at the door. He learned the exits. He watched the faces. He remembered every room that taught me I was on my own. He made sure I did not disappear. I owe him my life. But I do not owe him the wheel every time I am hurt. He can live in the music. He can live in the writing. He can live in the gym. He can live in comedy. He can live in the way I walk into a room and remember I do not need permission to exist. He can live in the work without turning my life into a battlefield. That is the chair I am giving him. Not a cage. Not a grave. A chair. Somewhere to sit when I need wisdom. Not a throne he takes when I feel threatened. The room chose quiet Because I am not that boy in the classroom anymore. Nobody protected that boy. That boy told the truth and watched an adult choose quiet. That boy learned too early that some people will see you hurt and still ask you not to make a scene. But he made it. I made it. We made it. And now the question is not whether I have a voice. I know I have a voice. The question is whether I can use it without making volume my proof. Whether I can protect myself without performing revenge. Whether I can stay accurate when my body wants to be absolute. Whether I can tell the difference between danger and memory. That is the war now. Not against the world. Against the old reflex that thinks every room is that room. The first time I told the truth, nothing happened. The room chose quiet. But quiet did not bury me. I found my voice. Now I have to stop making every room prove it heard me. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

    9 min
  2. Four Versions of Hell

    5d ago

    Four Versions of Hell

    Author’s note: This essay is about hell, but not really. It is about what happens when knowledge becomes armor. We were drinking frozen margaritas. She had invited her friend over, so it was two of them and one of me. Cold glasses sweating on the table. Something easy playing. The kind of night that does not announce what it is about to be. I had been in the city about a week. I knew almost nobody. My life was in boxes at my brother’s place, and I was still learning the trains. When you are that new somewhere, every room you sit in is a room you are asking permission to stay in. Her friend was not just a friend. They called each other sisters, which is different. There are friends you laugh with, and there are friends who feel responsible for what happens to you after the laughing is over. She was around our age, close enough to know charm does not prove character, and close enough to her to ask the question out loud. You a God-fearing man? I told them the truth, which is that I used to be a pastor. Seventeen years. Youth leader, touring musician, Bible college, seminary, the pulpit, all of it. I said it plain. The friend said okay, like she was filing it somewhere. Then she leaned in. Just tell me you’re not an atheist. You believe in heaven and hell, don’t you. Here is the first thing they ever taught me: whatever you believe, understand why you believe it. That was the whole discipline. That was the love, even. Do not hold a thing you cannot defend. So I went looking. Concordances. Translations laid side by side. Study Bibles with the margins full. Apologetics, which is a churchy word for learning how to win. I sat in rooms full of other believers and argued for hours about the most loving way to hold a hard doctrine. I got good at it. Better than good. They had a verse for it. Rightly dividing the word of truth. To know the word and cut it clean and hand a person the right piece at the right time. That was holy. That made you useful. That made you dangerous in the right way. That made you a man worth keeping around. I was twelve the first time it paid. We had a Bible memorization competition, and I won it. Then I kept winning it. I could hold the verses the other kids fumbled, chapter and reference, clean off the top. The youth pastor watched me do it, and his face changed. Then he said the thing. One day that’s gonna be you. You’re gonna run this youth group when you grow up. My father had been gone two years. So when a grown man put his hand on my shoulder and told me I was going to be somebody, I did not hear a calling. I heard a man who might stay. For the first time since my father left, who I was meant something, and the thing that made it mean something was the word. Knowing it. Holding it. Being the one who could. I had already learned that staying was not free. You earned it. So I learned the verses. All of them. A boy will do anything that makes a man look at him like that. Nobody told me what that command would do if you actually obeyed it. A man trained to ask why he believes will one day ask it about the belief itself. They put the knife in my hand for the faith. I turned the same knife on the faith. They planted the seed of my leaving and called the seed obedience. So when her sister-friend leaned in over the frozen margaritas and asked me to confirm the fire, here is what I did. I told her I don’t believe in hell. And then I could not leave it there. I gave her Sheol: the grave, the pit, the place everybody goes, good and bad, no flame in it at all. I gave her Gehenna: the valley outside Jerusalem where they burned the trash, a real place with a real smell, turned into metaphor and then hardened into doctrine. I gave her Hades, borrowed from the Greeks. I gave her the lake of fire out of a book of visions nobody reads straight. Four versions. Where each one came from. What got translated. What got flattened. What got preached until it sounded older than it was. To a woman who wanted one hell, I handed her four and a reading list. I out-theologied her at her own table. I built a podium out of frozen margaritas and stood behind it. Halfway through, I knew I was doing too much. I could feel the room change. I was not answering her anymore. I was taking apart a theology she may have received through family, grief, songs, funerals, mothers, aunties, and Sunday mornings. I had spent years training for an argument she had not come there to have. She had asked me if I had a center. I showed her I had weapons. But it was not just any table. The church is one of the things that carried us. When my people had nothing, they had a Sunday. They prayed their way through what was built to bury them. The freedom songs came out of that room. The marching came out of that room. The mothers and grandmothers and aunties who kept families alive came out of that room with peppermints in their purses and scripture in their mouths. So when a Black woman asks me if I am God-fearing, she is not always being nosy. And this woman especially was not being nosy. She was her sister in the way Black women sometimes mean sister: chosen, protective, close enough to ask the question nobody else wants to ask. She was not trying to win a debate. She was trying to see if the man at the table had a center. That should have changed how I answered. It did not. I knew what my no might sound like in a room like that. Not like a private conclusion. Like distance. Like danger. Like I had become too educated to still be held by the people who raised me. So I owed her honesty without conquest. But watch what I actually did. I did not answer. I preached. That is the thing I keep having to learn about myself. I walked out of the building and kept the pulpit. When she reached for my center, I reached for the lectern, because the church did not only teach me doctrine. It taught me to never let a true thing stand there naked and cost what it costs. You frame it. You defend it. You witness. The four versions of hell were not knowledge. They were armor. A man can get cut for being a heathen. He cannot get cut for being smart. So I traded the exposed man for the expert and let the expert do the talking. I gave testimony for my unbelief in the exact cadence they trained into me. Same machine. New gospel. And here is the part I cannot wave off: the fluency is real. I am not faking the four versions. I know them. I know them because of who I used to be, which means the truest thing about me is also the wall I hide behind. The rigor they grew in me is the cage I live in now. Nobody beat this into me. They praised it into me. Good is the part that does not wash off. I am the best student in a school I dropped out of. It is the same flinch every time. I can say the true thing. I cannot say it short. I cannot say it and stop. The quiet that comes after a naked sentence is the part that costs, and I have never once let it cost. I fill it. With context. With origins. With nuance. With the most loving way to hold the doctrine. I have been filling that silence my whole life. So picture me at the table. Frozen margarita going to water. Four versions deep. The most fluent man in the room, speaking a language I renounced, standing behind a podium nobody asked me to build. And she still could not see me. Not because she lacked the eyes. Because I had stacked a wall of Hebrew and Greek between her and the one thing I walked in carrying. The truth was never four versions. The truth was four words. I don’t believe in hell. There it is. I’m not going to explain it this time. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

    8 min

  3. 5d ago

    I Thought Leaving Would Make Me Free Faster

    I wrote a short version of this in May, before I understood it. A few field notes, just me catching the reflexes as they fired. This is the long version. The one where I went looking for why. I thought leaving would make me free faster. That was the first thing I got wrong. I thought once the beliefs came apart, the version of me built around them would come apart too. Read the books, trace the history, find the seams in the doctrine, and pull. If the belief came apart in my hands, the self would follow. But a self don’t surrender that quick. A self has habits. Reflexes. Attachments. Old rooms it still knows how to walk into with the lights off. The belief was the first thing I questioned. The person it made me into took way longer to find. I should say this is how it went for me, not how it goes for everybody. I know people who lost the feeling first. The body stopped showing up before the mind had an argument for why. They sat in the same pew and felt nothing where the certainty used to be, and the reading came after, almost like cleanup. For them the formation cracked and the belief fell in behind it. Mine went the other way. I won the argument years before my body got the memo. So when I say belief first, self second, I mean mine. The order ain’t a law. It’s just the one I lived. Deconstructing a belief is a research project. You can do it at a desk. You can do it angry. You find out the verse you built your twenties on was a translation choice. The church councils I had been taught to treat like divine inevitability were rooms full of tired men who took a vote and went home, and the ones who lost the vote got a new name: heretic. The truth was whatever had the numbers that afternoon. I’m not saying every person involved was lying. I’m saying the certainty was more human than I had been allowed to admit. You feel betrayed. Then you feel free. Then you move on to the next brick. It’s clean, at least next to what comes after. It got an ending. You can talk about it at a party and sound smart. Deconstructing a self is a different animal. Nobody warned me about that part. Or maybe they did, and I was too busy enjoying the clarity to hear them. Here’s what I mean. The belief was just the top layer. What I didn’t understand then was that the belief never stayed in my head. It trained my instincts. It organized my whole sense of danger, love, obedience, belonging, shame, and safety. And I ain’t even saying all of it came from church. Some of this just Black survival too. You learn to read a room before you can read a book. You learn to stay understandable. You learn to tuck certain parts of yourself away so don’t nobody punish you for being too much, too loud, too sexual, too angry, too honest. Church gave it scripture. The world gave it consequences. By the time I was grown I couldn’t tell you where one stopped and the other started. They had both been teaching the same lesson: make yourself easy to keep. Underneath the belief was a body that learned how to stand when worship started. Underneath that was a reflex that flinched at certain words. Underneath that was a way of loving people with conditions baked in I never chose. Underneath that was a version of me that only knew how to feel okay when somebody above me was pleased. You can delete the doctrine in an afternoon. The body keep the appointment. I noticed it the first time somebody disagreed with me and my body reacted like I had sinned. Not like I had been misunderstood. Not like we just saw it different. My face went hot. My ears actually rang. I felt my shoulders climb toward my neck and my hands go cold, and there was that drop in my stomach like the second before you get caught. The man across from me was just making a point. My body was bracing to get corrected in front of a room that had been empty three years. That’s when I started to understand. The church can leave before the formation does. You can stop attending and still carry its reflexes into every room you walk in. I left the building in 2021. I’m still finding rooms in myself with the lights on and somebody I used to be still sitting in them. Because when you take the belief out, you don’t get a clean empty space where a free man walks in. You get a hole shaped exactly like the thing you removed, and everything around it still leaning toward where it used to be. The trust I handed out too easy. The certainty I performed when I was scared. The way I turned being useful into rent. The way I tried to become smaller than whatever was about to judge me. None of that was theology. It was formation. It was what the theology trained in me, and what the world co-signed. For a while I thought I was free because I didn’t believe the old answers no more. But I still needed permission the same way. I still confused disagreement with danger. I still said yes with my mouth while my body was already leaving the room. I still tried to earn rest, earn love, earn belonging, earn the right to not be a problem. That was humiliating to admit. I wanted to believe I was free because I had new language. Really I just had new language over the same old fear. I could reject the whole theology and still act like somebody’s approval was oxygen, and hating that I did it ain’t change the fact that I did. I didn’t want healing. I wanted proof that leaving had already made me whole. Because that would mean I escaped the argument before I escaped the formation, and the argument was the only part I knew how to win. And you grieve it. That’s the part I didn’t expect. You grieve the certainty even when you know it was a lie, because the lie still gave you somewhere to stand. You grieve the version of you that fit, even though fitting was killing you slow. You can be right about all of it and still cry in your car, which I did, in a Walgreens parking lot, over a conversation that hadn’t even gone bad. I think I wanted deconstruction to be a debate I could win. It wasn’t. The debate was the warmup. The real work been learning how to be a person without the thing that was holding me up. How to feel safe without somebody telling me I’m safe. How to love without needing somebody to confirm I’m allowed to exist. How to hear my own no after being built to say yes. That take longer than reading, and it cost more than being right. I’m not standing on the other side with a clean testimony about how I lost my religion and found myself. I’m still in it. Some days the old wiring fires and I catch myself performing for a room that ain’t there anymore, trying to make my pain legible enough to be believed, explaining a boundary like a defendant when all I had to do was say it like a man who’s allowed to have one. And it ain’t always the church that pulls the trigger. Last month I was the only Black man in a meeting and I felt my voice go soft and reasonable before I even decided to talk. Watched myself round my own edges down in real time. Shrunk my hands. Smiled a half-second too long. No God in that room. No covering, no correction, no pulpit. Just an old part of me that learned a long time ago which version of me gets to leave a room safe. The church taught me to fear God. The world taught me to fear being misread. My body filed both under the same drawer and never asked me which was which. That’s not failure. That’s just how long it takes to put down something your nervous system picked up before you could spell it. So if you’re in the early part, where the ideas are falling and it feel sharp and clarifying and almost good, I don’t want to take that from you. That part matters. It just wasn’t the expensive part for me. The self comes later. People like to say bring water, like it’s a long hot trail and you’ll be tired but fine. I used to end it that way too. I don’t think it’s that. I think you bring water because you don’t know how far it is. Not because nobody made it. Because the ones who did kept walking, and ain’t circled back yet to tell you what’s out there. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

    8 min

  4. May 28

    Accurate

    She never asked me to be her n***a. That fact should clear me. It doesn’t. Because I knew there was a debt forming anyway. I could feel it gathering in the room, in the silence after certain conversations, in the way she waited for me to name something I kept refusing to name. I knew the arrangement had weight. I knew my presence was being counted. I knew my absence was being counted too. And I kept benefiting from not saying that out loud. That is the part I want to be clear about. Not because it makes me look honest, but because it shows how dishonest I was willing to be while technically telling the truth. I told her I wasn’t in a place to commit. True. I told her I was still moving around. True. I told her I didn’t want her holding her breath for something I couldn’t promise. Also true. But truth can still be used as cover. Mine was. I used honesty the way some people use tinted windows. You could see just enough to know somebody was inside, but not enough to hold them accountable for what they were doing in there. I called it clarity. We had done this before. Years earlier, and it ended in pieces. I had to remove her from my space more than once, and each time something between us broke a little further. Then I let her back in and watched it break again. By the time this round started, I wasn’t a man taking a risk. I was a man holding the autopsy report. I knew how fear moved her. I knew how resentment moved through the room when nobody wanted to call it by its name. I knew how we became worse versions of ourselves together. And I walked back in anyway. Not confused, not innocent, not surprised. She kept a ledger. Every woman I spent time with got logged. Every trip. Every night I didn’t call. Every dollar. She built a private accounting I never got to see, then billed me from it later, sideways, as criticism, disappointment, little charges added to the balance of us. And I gave her plenty to count. That is what keeps this from being a clean story. The ledger needed me. It only worked because I supplied the ambiguity. My “I’m not asking for anything” was the exact gap her accounting lived in. She got to keep score. I got to keep moving. We both got to call it something prettier than what it was. She wasn’t running a dynamic on a clear-eyed man who slowly figured her out. She was running it on someone who already knew the terms, who had seen this kind of contract before, who stayed because the access was still worth something to him. The redirects were real too. I would come in with something specific, something she had actually done, and within two minutes I’d be defending myself against something else. Keep me explaining. Keep me proving I wasn’t the problem. Keep me so busy answering for myself that I never got to ask what the argument was protecting. That is not conflict. That is management. And I knew it on sight. Not just because I had survived it, though I had. Because I had run it. I spent years in a church that handled accountability this way. Change the subject. Raise the stakes. Make the person asking the question feel like the question is the sin. I wasn’t only in those rooms. I led some of them. I stood in front of people who came with fair complaints and turned the mirror back on them. I made their doubt the issue instead of the thing they were doubting. I made their pain submit a formal request before I would treat it as real. I was good at it. So when she did it to me, I didn’t have to decode anything. I recognized my own handwriting. That is the part I would leave out if I were still trying to win. My fluency in her trap is a confession about what I used to do to other people. I knew the architecture because I had helped build versions of it. I knew the exits because I had blocked them before. So yes, I could name what was happening. Of course I could. Naming things has never been the hard part for me. Naming things is the thing I do instead of leaving. I paid her rent. I’m leaving that in because it cuts against me. That wasn’t generosity. Not clean generosity. That was me funding a seat I wanted to keep without having to claim it. I can’t pretend I thought I owed her nothing while I was paying her rent. I can’t pretend it was casual while I was making myself useful in ways that kept me welcome. I liked being needed. I liked being wanted without being claimed. I liked having an exit. That is uglier than simply saying I was manipulated. It is also truer. The first time I told her I needed space, she said I wasn’t shit. That I didn’t give a f**k about her. And I felt the old pull to walk it back. A Black man who asks for space is often treated like a Black man preparing to disappear. That script is real. Your needs become evidence against you. Your boundary becomes proof you were always leaving. But a real script is not a pardon. I hid behind it. The script handed me a reason to stay that sounded like care, and I took it. Because leaving would have meant admitting I had known better since the first time. Leaving would have meant giving up the version of myself that could still say, “At least I was honest.” But I wasn’t honest. I was accurate. There is a difference. Honesty would have named the shape of the thing. Honesty would have said, “I know you want more than I am willing to give, and I am still accepting the benefits of your attachment.” Honesty would have said, “I am not confused about what this costs you.” Honesty would have said, “I am using the absence of a title to avoid the presence of responsibility.” I did not say that. I said I wasn’t ready. I said I didn’t want pressure. I said I didn’t want anyone waiting on me. Then I stayed close enough to be waited on. That was the contract. Not the one we said out loud. The one underneath it. The one written in favors, access, resentment, sex, rent, late-night calls, withheld definitions, and the comfort of being able to say nobody technically lied. I ended it eventually. Not in anger. Not in clarity either, because I had clarity for years and clarity never once moved my feet. That is the thing nobody warns you about seeing the structure. Seeing it does not get you out. I walked away from the church years after I knew the doctrine was hollow. I walked away from her years after the first time she showed me who we were together. The distance between knowing and leaving is the whole story. And it was never only a story about her. I used to think the problem was that I kept negotiating a contract I never signed. But I signed this one. I knew the terms. I had read them out loud to other people once, from a stage, and called it ministry. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That Shit. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

    7 min

  5. May 27

    The Job Is Nanny

    I landed in New York with six suitcases and a job I didn’t have a title for. My brother needed help. His kids needed somebody in the apartment when he wasn’t. I’m 38. The job is nanny. Zeke is three. Azzy is eight. They don’t know I just moved here. They don’t know I left a city, a relationship, an apartment, and a friend group I was still tryna figure out how to leave. They know I’m uncle. That’s enough. Zeke calls me Joshy-Wah. His three-year-old version of Joshua. Two syllables he sings together like they’re one word. Joshy-Wah, can I have fruit snack? He says fruit snack instead of snack. He says it all day. He’ll be three feet from a plate of food and ask for fruit snack. I’m still not sure if he knows what the words mean or if it’s just the sound he makes when he wants something. Either way, I open the snack. He also tells me he’s so tired when what he means is he’s bored. Says it wide awake, sitting up, eyes shining, with the gravity of a man who just worked a double shift. Joshy-Wah, I’m so tired. “Tired from what, man? You three.” He looks at me like I asked a dumb question. Can I have fruit snack? “That’s not tired. That’s snacky.” He does not laugh. Comedy is wasted on toddlers. He just stares at me until I open the snack. He’s skinny. Bow-legged. Dark skin, curly hair. He runs across the room with the urgency of a small animal that just spotted something better in the next room. Then he climbs onto me and watches Bluey on his iPad with his head on my chest. He doesn’t put the tablet down. I don’t ask him to. Sometimes he just sits next to me and copies whatever I’m doing. If I’m on my phone, he’s on his iPad. If I pick up a cup, he picks up a cup. He doesn’t say anything. He just wants to be in the same shape as me. Azzy is eight. She watches me. Not the way three-year-olds watch you, looking for what you’ll give them. The eight-year-old kind. The kind where she’s tryna figure out who you are. She told me me and Isaiah look like twins. She’ll sometimes mix us up for a second. I get it. I lost a lot of weight this year. My brother and I have the same face when we’re tired. Later, I catch myself in the hallway mirror and see what she means. Not twins exactly. More like two versions of the same man who learned different ways to carry pressure. She’s into pop music I don’t know. She’ll play a song and I’ll nod like I do. She knows I don’t. We’re cool about it. Yesterday Azzy wouldn’t stop running. Didn’t I say no running? I said. She kept running. Then why are you doing it? Why are you playing tag when you’re not supposed to be running? Do you not respect me? She stopped. The questions stacked. Each one tighter than the last. I heard my daddy in them. I heard my mama in them. I heard every Black uncle and pastor and big cousin who ever needed a child to know they had reached the end of the negotiation. The cadence is older than me. I used it before I decided to. The need inside it was older too. She wasn’t scared. She just stopped. Then she went and sat down with her brother, mad for maybe twelve seconds before asking if we could play music. For the last year I’ve been managed, narrated, talked about. Loved on bad terms. Misread on good ones. Everybody had a version of me. The kids don’t. They just have me. When Zeke wants something, he pulls on my arm and says my name. He doesn’t have a story about whether I’m a good uncle or a complicated uncle or an intense uncle. He has whether or not I’m in the room. Whether or not I respond. Whether or not the fruit snack gets opened. The care is granular. Open the snack. Find the shoe. Locate the show. Hold the door. Wipe the face. Carry the body. Read the book. Read the book again. Read the book again. This is the work. Ain’t nobody got an opinion about it. Nobody’s talking about how I’m doing it. Nobody’s gonna take what I did today and pass it through three rooms till it becomes a different story. Just the snack, the shoe, the show, the door, the face, the body, the book. I’ve been a youth pastor. I’ve been on stages. I’ve been the one who could say the right thing at the right moment to crack open a room. I’ve been good at being public. I’m learning to be good at this. Which is different. When nobody needs me at Isaiah’s, I sit in his recliner and put the TV on low. It’s naptime. The apartment goes quiet in a way that doesn’t feel like rest. It feels like a held breath. Before Isaiah leaves, he gives me the rundown. “They ate already. Chicken’s in the fridge. Zeke’s gonna ask for fruit snacks. Don’t believe him.” Then he’s out the door. I pull out the laptop and get to work. Substack drafts. Marketing emails. Client work. The nanny job has windows. I live the rest of my life inside them. Then I take the train back to my own place. My apartment is half-empty. Furniture is coming this week. The air mattress is here too. Pigeons sit on the AC unit outside my window like they pay rent. Memorial Day fireworks have been going off in the borough for three days straight. Folks tell me they won’t stop till the Fourth of July. I lay down. I put on my iPad. I journal. I text people. I sleep. This is the part of the job description that didn’t make it into the conversation with Isaiah. The going home alone. The empty apartment after the full one. The pigeons. The fireworks. The quiet. It’s fine. The quiet is mine. So is what comes in it. My dad is older. I tried to see him before I left and it didn’t happen. I called. He didn’t answer. I don’t know if I’m gonna get another chance. I’ve been sitting with that. Holding Zeke does something to that grief I haven’t figured out yet. He doesn’t weigh much. He’s three. He puts his head down on my chest like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. And I keep thinking about my dad’s chest. Whether I ever put my head down on it. Whether I would now if I could. I would. I would be a fantastic father. It’s not a hope. It’s information. Whether I want to be one is a different question. I love being alone. I love a quiet apartment, a long morning, a thought I get to follow all the way through. I’m not in a hurry to give that up. But Zeke comes and asks for fruit snack and I give it to him without thinking and the calculus shifts a little. There’s a difference between uncle and father. The kids feel it before you do. They come to me for things because they know Isaiah’s a little tougher. I’m the soft one. I can be silly. I can negotiate. I can let one more episode of Bluey happen. Daddy is structure. Uncle is play. That’s a fine arrangement. It also tells me something about what I would be, if I chose it. The version of me in other people’s mouths can keep moving. I’m not in those rooms. I’m in this one. Zeke is asleep on me. Azzy is reading. The train sounds different at night than it does during the day. The fireworks are still going. There’s a half-eaten bowl of cereal on the counter and I’ll deal with it in a minute. This is what I came here for. I didn’t know it yet when I was packing. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

    7 min

  6. May 21

    Some Chemistry Is Just Chaos With Good Branding

    Sometimes chemistry is not love. Sometimes it is your body recognizing a familiar kind of chaos and calling it fate. In this episode, Josh breaks down the difference between passion and panic, intimacy and intensity, desire and emotional surveillance. He explores how inconsistent affection can make longing feel sacred, how anxiety can disguise itself as connection, and why being wanted is not the same as being well-loved. This is not an anti-passion episode. This is an anti-confusion episode. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

    15 min

  7. May 19

    The Mercy of Control

    Author’s note: This essay discusses power, consent, kink, religion, masculinity, and emotional responsibility. Details have been blurred to protect privacy. The point is not exposure. The point is what power reveals. The first thing I usually noticed was how fast somebody said yes. Not the outfit. Not the room. Not the fantasy they carried in with them like a lit match. The yes. Sometimes it came too quick. Too eager. Too clean. Like they wanted to skip the part where they had to be a person and get straight to being desired. Like if they could become the fantasy fast enough, nobody would have to ask what hurt them. One night, I stopped before anything really started. I had asked a boundary question. Nothing graphic. Something ordinary enough that most people would have missed the way her answer left her body before she did. “Yes.” Not nervous. Not grounded either. Just automatic. Like a student trying to pass a test. So I asked again, slower. “Do you actually want that, or do you want to be the kind of person who can say yes to that?” The room changed. Not dramatically. Nobody stormed out. Nobody cried. The lights did not flicker like we were in somebody’s prestige drama about desire and damage. But something shifted. Her face got quieter. Her body came back into the room a little bit. That is the part people do not understand. Everybody thinks the Dom is the powerful one because they imagine command. Voice. Posture. Somebody kneeling. Somebody obeying. Whatever movie taught them kink was just trauma in better lighting. But the fantasy is control. The reality is attention. You are watching breath. Shoulders. Eyes. The little flinch somebody swears did not mean anything. You are listening for the difference between arousal and panic, performance and permission, surrender and disappearance. You learn that yes is not enough by itself. Folks will offer you things they do not fully know how to give yet. That was the part nobody told me. The power was never in what I could make someone do. The power was in what I knew not to take. I spent some time as a Dom. That sentence looks louder than it feels. People hear it and immediately start decorating the room in their minds. Leather. Red lights. Danger. Somebody’s secret Tumblr from 2014. And yeah, there were aesthetics. There were roles. There were voices I learned how to use. There were stories I still probably should not tell with names attached. But the truth is quieter than people want it to be. A lot of domination is paperwork without paper. It is negotiation. It is asking questions that interrupt the fantasy long enough to protect it. What do you want? What do you not want? What scares you in a good way? What scares you in a bad way? What have people misunderstood about your body? What do you say when you are overwhelmed? What do you do when you are trying to please somebody instead of telling the truth? That last question matters more than people think. Because people lie with their mouths all the time. Not always maliciously. Sometimes they lie because they want to be wanted. Sometimes they lie because desire has trained them to audition. Sometimes they lie because shame taught them to treat their own limits like bad manners. Sometimes they say yes when what they mean is, “Please don’t stop seeing me as desirable.” And as the Dom, you have to decide what kind of man you are going to be in the presence of that. You can pretend the offer is clean because it benefits you. Or you can pay attention. That is where the actual power begins. Not in the command. Not in the posture. Not in the fact that someone is willing to surrender something to you. Power starts when someone gives you access and you still refuse to confuse permission with wisdom. A lot of men want control because they do not know how to be trusted. That is the part I had to sit with. It would be easy to write this like I was above the whole thing. Like I entered every room as some enlightened, emotionally literate, consent-forward philosopher king with perfect lighting and a working knowledge of everybody’s childhood wounds. That would be cute. It would also be a lie. There were parts of it I liked because they made me feel chosen. Needed. Exceptional. There is a specific kind of validation in being trusted with somebody’s surrender. It can make you feel almost holy if you are not careful. Somebody is not just wanting you. They are placing themselves in your hands and saying, “I believe you will know what to do with me.” That can feed the best parts of you. It can also feed the worst. Sometimes I liked being trusted because it let me avoid being questioned. That is not a pretty admission, but it is true. When you are the one holding the structure, people can mistake your control for clarity. They can mistake your attentiveness for wholeness. They can mistake your ability to read them for proof that you know how to be read. And I liked that. I liked being seen as safe. I liked being Sir. I liked being Daddy. I liked what those names did to the room. How they gave shape to the air. How they made me feel wanted without having to ask for wanting. How they let me stand inside a role that already knew what to do with its hands. That is the part I have to tell the truth about. Because being called Sir or Daddy gave me a script. Ordinary intimacy did not. Ordinary intimacy asked questions I did not always know how to answer. Do you want me when I am not controlling the room? Do you want me when I am unsure? Do you want me when I am not useful, not impressive, not leading, not reading your body like scripture and telling you what comes next? The role let me be wanted without having to wonder if I was loved. And that was easier than I want to admit. Sometimes I wanted credit for refusing what I never should have taken in the first place. That is the ego trap. A scene had rules. Love did not. A scene had language. Love made me improvise. And I have always been better with a script than with an ache. That is a dangerous kind of safety. There were times I liked the clarity too much. The boundaries. The language. The structure. Everybody knew what the room was for. Nobody had to pretend power was not present. Nobody had to do that fake grown-up thing where two people are clearly negotiating desire, ego, abandonment, shame, fantasy, and control, but calling it “just seeing where things go.” I liked that kink told the truth. Power is here. Desire is here. Risk is here. Say what you mean before somebody gets hurt. That clarity mattered to me because I had spent too much of my life in spaces where power wore church clothes. In church, people used soft language for domination. Submission. Covering. Accountability. Leadership. Servanthood. Headship. Discipleship. All these pretty words that could mean care or control depending on who was holding them. I saw people call coercion wisdom. I saw people call fear obedience. I saw people call silence unity. I saw men with no emotional discipline claim spiritual authority over people who were just trying to be loved by God and not abandoned by community. And that thing will mess with you. Because at least in kink, when somebody called me Sir or Daddy, we both knew a role was being played. That sounds crude until you have been in enough respectable rooms where nobody admits the role is a role. Where the man at the front says he is serving while everybody else adjusts their life around his appetite. Where somebody tells you your discomfort is rebellion. Where somebody else’s need for control gets baptized and handed back to you as your responsibility. Kink did not make power harmless. But it did make power visible. And once power is visible, it can be negotiated. That is no small thing. There was a mercy in the stop. The stop was sacred. Not dramatic. Not theatrical. Just stop. Immediately. No sermon. No guilt. No “are you sure?” No “maybe you’re overthinking.” No “don’t ruin the moment.” No spiritual manipulation dressed up like concern. Just stop. The whole universe had to obey that word. That kind of clarity will ruin you for relationships where people punish you for having boundaries. It taught me that consent is not just permission. It is structure. It is pacing. It is the right to change your mind without being treated like you broke the spell. And honestly, that is where a lot of people fail each other outside the room. They want access without maintenance. Desire without conversation. Intensity without accountability. They want the feeling of being trusted, but not the responsibility of becoming trustworthy. I have been guilty of that too. That is the line I cannot skip if I am going to tell the truth. Because I know what it feels like to be wanted for the version of you that performs well. The calm one. The intense one. The one who knows what to say. The one who can hold the room. The one who seems dangerous, but safe enough to confess to. That version of me has opened a lot of doors. It has also kept me from knocking on some. Being a Dom can hide a lonely man beautifully. People do not talk about that part. Control can become a costume for longing. It can make you feel above need because everybody else’s need is louder. You are checking on them. Guiding them. Holding the boundary. Reading the signals. Deciding when to push and when to stop. You get so focused on being the container that you do not have to admit how badly you want to be held by something too. That is why aftercare stayed with me more than the scenes. Not the spectacle. Not the part people would ask about first while pretending not to be nosy. Aftercare. The quiet after. The return. The water. The blanket. The hand on the back. The nervous laugh when somebody came back into themselves. The softness after intensity

    15 min

  8. May 18

    The Death of Being Known

    I’m moving to New York in a few days, and the wild part is the logistics are not even what’s bothering me most. The logistics are loud. Don’t get me wrong. Boxes everywhere. Bills. The lease. The car. The last-minute math. Everything I still have to handle by Tuesday. The little piles around my apartment looking at me like, “So what’s the plan, genius?” That part is stressful. But that ain’t the thing sitting in my chest. The thing sitting in my chest is harder to admit: I’m grieving the death of being known. Not famous. Not important in some grand historical sense. I’m not that far gone. But known in the local way. Known the way a person becomes part of a city’s background noise. Part of the weather. Part of the “oh yeah, him.” Known by rooms. Known by scenes. Known by churches. Known by artists. Known by people who saw me rap before they watched me unravel. Known by people who remember versions of me I have spent years trying to outgrow. There is a kind of identity that only exists because a place keeps saying your name back to you. Omaha did that for me. Not always kindly. Not always accurately. Sometimes not even lovingly. But it did. For years, I built myself here through proximity, usefulness, visibility, and performance. I was in rooms. On stages. In meetings. In churches. In studios. In inboxes. In group chats. In somebody’s mouth, for better or worse. I was the rapper. The pastor. The organizer. The strategist. The intense one. The thoughtful one. The problem. The solution. The person people called when they needed language, a hook, a plan, a verse, a post, a prayer, a concept, a hard conversation, something to make sense of the mess. And that kind of being known can start to feel like belonging if you don’t look too close. I did not always look too close. Because being known gave me something. It gave me proof. It gave me shape. It made my life feel like it had evidence. If enough people knew what I had done, maybe I had done enough. If enough people remembered me, maybe I wouldn’t disappear. If enough people associated me with something meaningful, maybe I could stop worrying that I was only meaningful when I was useful. That is the part that embarrasses me. Because I want to make this sound cleaner than it is. I want to say this is about legacy. Impact. Community. The ache of leaving a place where I gave real years of my life. And it is. But not only. Some of it is ego. Some of it is resentment. Some of it is me wanting my absence to inconvenience people emotionally. There it is. Ugly as hell. But honest. I think part of me wanted Omaha to look up from whatever it was doing and say, “Wait. Him? He leaving?” I wanted the city to pause. Not forever. I’m not that dramatic. Okay. Maybe a little. But I wanted something. A collective exhale. A little reverence. A sign that the years had gathered into more than private compliments, old flyers, public association, half-remembered conversations, and a quiet exit. Instead, the city is doing what cities do. People are going to work. Somebody is planning an event. Somebody is mad at somebody. Somebody is making a flyer. Somebody is starting a podcast. Somebody is becoming visible. Somebody is stepping into a room I used to know how to enter. Somebody is becoming the person people call. Omaha is continuing. Not because it is cruel. Because it is alive. That is the humiliating thing about leaving a place. You find out the place had a whole life outside of your mythology. I knew that intellectually. Emotionally, I think I had made a quiet little agreement with the city. I gave you years. You give me permanence. I gave you talent. You give me memory. I gave you my contradictions. You give me proof that I mattered. But cities do not sign those contracts. People barely do. And if I’m being real, I have spent a lot of my life trying to be unforgettable because I did not always trust love. Being unforgettable feels safer than trusting love. Love can change its mind. Love can get tired. Love can misunderstand you. Love can leave. Love can make you show up without the costume. But being known? Being known has receipts. A show. A title. A reputation. A role. A story somebody tells. A room where your name still means something. You can point to being known and say, “See? I was here.” That is seductive when you have spent years trying to outrun the fear that your presence is conditional. I can see it now in ways I probably couldn’t while I was still in it. There were times I called it service when it was survival. There were times I called it leadership when it was control. There were times I called it community when I mostly wanted to feel necessary. There were times I said I wanted to help, and I did, but I also wanted helping to make me irreplaceable. That ain’t the whole truth. But it is part of it. And leaving has a way of making the partial truths loud as hell. Because New York does not care who I was in Omaha. That sentence is terrifying and merciful at the same time. New York does not care about my local mythology. It does not care what rooms I used to be in. It does not care who nodded when I walked in or who had opinions after I left. It does not care that I used to be a Christian rapper. It does not care that I planted churches. It does not care that I deconstructed in public. It does not care that I have history here, or that some of that history cost me more than people know. At first, that feels insulting. Then it starts to feel like mercy. Because if nobody knows who I was, nobody can keep handing me old versions of myself and calling it recognition. There is grief in that. There is freedom in it too. And I do not want to romanticize the freedom too fast because I know me. I am not suddenly above wanting people to see me. I still want my work to matter. I still want rooms to feel me. I still want people to understand me with precision. I still want somebody to say, “No, you need to hear him.” I still want to be chosen. A plane ticket does not kill that. But I am starting to understand there is a difference between being seen and needing a place to keep reflecting me back to myself. Omaha gave me a mirror. Sometimes it told the truth. Sometimes it warped me. Sometimes it made me bigger than I was. Sometimes smaller. Sometimes it showed me my gift. Sometimes only my damage. Sometimes it loved me. Sometimes it used me. Sometimes I used it back. That is the part I have to admit too. I cannot make Omaha the villain just because it did not give me the goodbye I imagined. I loved this place and resented it. I served it and needed it. I outgrew parts of it and still wanted approval from the same rooms. I criticized its smallness while benefiting from the intimacy of being legible here. I wanted freedom from its memory while still hoping that memory would treat me generously. That contradiction might be the most honest thing I can carry with me. Because leaving does not make me above the place. It just removes my access to the version of myself that only made sense inside it. There are places here that know me better than some people do. Studios where I tried to turn pain into something with a hook. Church rooms where I said things with certainty I no longer possess. Stages where I performed confidence while holding my private life together with tape and adrenaline. Coffee shops where I tried to look like a man with a plan. Apartments where I became versions of myself I now have to forgive. Streets I drove down while rehearsing arguments with people who were not even in the car. Rooms where people praised me. Rooms where people tolerated me. Rooms where nobody invited me. Rooms where my name got there before I did. That is what I’m leaving. Not just a city. A whole system of recognition. And maybe that is why packing feels so strange. Some things fit in boxes. Some things don’t. The clothes fit. The books fit. The records fit. The documents fit. The dishes, if I decide they’re worth the trouble. But what do you do with the version of yourself that other people’s recognition helped build? What do you do with the part of you that still wants the city to regret not loving you better? What do you do with the man who thought if he became meaningful enough, he would finally feel secure? I don’t have a clean answer. I don’t even trust clean answers right now. Part of me wants to end this with something elegant about rebirth. Something about anonymity being a gift. Something about New York making me new. Something about stepping into my next chapter and leaving old narratives behind. Maybe that will be true. But today? Today it feels less like rebirth and more like social death. And maybe that is not a bad thing. Maybe we do not heal every version of ourselves. Maybe we bury some of them. Not because they were fake. Not because they were wrong. But because we built them for a life we are no longer staying inside. The version of me who needed Omaha to remember him was not pathetic. He was trying to survive. He was trying to matter. He was trying to become real. He was trying to make a life out of talent, pressure, faith, ambition, disappointment, and whatever scraps of belonging he could find. I can honor him without letting him run the next city. That might be the real goodbye. Not goodbye to Omaha. Goodbye to the belief that being known is the same as being held. Goodbye to the idea that usefulness can protect me from loneliness. Goodbye to needing a place to keep proving I existed. I am leaving in a few days. The city will continue. People will eat, argue, post, preach, flirt, gossip, organize, perform, grieve, reinvent themselves, and misunderstand each other in rooms I am no longer in. Somebody might miss me. Somebody might not. Somebody might not know how bad I wanted them to. And I will get on a plane anyway. Not because it does not hurt. Because it does. Because part of me still wants Omaha to turn arou

    11 min
  9. Stables on Sorenson

    May 12

    Stables on Sorenson

    Omaha knew me before I knew myself. That’s the strange thing about leaving a place where your whole life happened in public. People remember the versions of you you’ve already outgrown. Sometimes they remember the versions you’re still trying to forgive. I wrote about leaving for New York in two weeks, public reinvention, community memory, masculinity, faith, being witnessed, and those stables next to the projects on Sorensen I still can’t explain. “Stables on Sorensen.” Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That Shit. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

    5 min
  • 9 Episodes

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Essays for people rebuilding after faith, people-pleasing, bad love, and survival mode. For the ones who got called different because they finally stopped betraying themselves. amenaseandall.substack.com

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