I know what people see when they look at me. They see someone intense, who doesn’t hesitate, who has probably always been this way. And they’re not wrong. I’m not a person who is big on giving grace just for the sake of giving grace, and I know that gets me a bit of a bad rap, which I am totally ok with. I’m the type of woman who has been thrown to the wolves and came back leading the pack. My Nana (a very dangerous yet loving woman) taught me that at a super young age. I remember me, my baby sister & cousins getting a lecture before school that if anyone tried us “you make em hurt so bad that they will never think of hurting you again” essentially I was taught that at the first sight of disrespect you eradicate it before it becomes too big to handle. Now Nana may have meant that in terms of bullies putting hands on us but there was nuance there. There are many ways to remove a threat to your well being that doesn’t equate to being physically violent - and yet at some moments in life that may be exactly what you need to do. Discernment is key here. When I seek out justice or retribution, I receive it — because I come letting people know that if I need to be deadly, I will. For my well-being, peace, community, whatever it is I’m fighting for. I will not hold that back. And because I am a fully embodied multifaceted Black woman there is another side to me that people don’t always see: I am as equally cutie patootie as I am bad b***h. I am very much a whimsical la-la girl. I LOVE that about me. And I can be that way — fully, without apology — because I have no problem showing my teeth. I don’t lose sleep over it & have never felt bad about it. I’m not concerned if someone says I’m too much or too aggressive. At all. Those two sides have always lived in me at the same time. And this piece is for the girl who has that same duality inside of her but hasn’t let both sides fully breathe yet. The girl who is bubbly and joyful and half-glass-full but has been told in a thousand different ways that her softness is the only version of her that’s welcome or allowed. The Dark Divines is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my art, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. That is a conversation I will probably always be having thanks to patriarchy (eye roll) so I wanted to put it here, plainly: it is okay for you to show your teeth. Actually, in order to fully get everything you want from this lifetime, you will have to. I was raised by women who showed their teeth all the time. And I saw how it protected them, how it allowed them to live in a way of freedom that most Black people didn’t even know existed. That forever shifted my understanding of what it means to call in matriarchy, the real deal not the weird whitewashed version trending currently. But to call that in, you have to be able to show your teeth. You have to be able to protect your being, inner God, higher self & inner child. You cannot do that without showing that you can bite back. I have this strong belief that Black women are like wolves. I’ve felt this since I was a child. I actually got an A+ on an essay where I defended the so-called Big Bad Wolf in the Three Little Pigs — those pigs sounded like terrorists to me, like Karens before the word Karen was a thing, harassing a wolf that was just trying to live in its natural habitat and survive. Anyways I’ve always had this kinship with wolves because I see how they’re portrayed in media as vile, irrational creatures that are always out for blood, with no warmth or care in their bodies. Things to be terrified of, to eradicate. And it always bothered me because reading Women Who Run with the Wolves confirmed what I already felt: wolves love and care for their community deeply. They only become vicious if you attack what they love. They are sweet, loving, intelligent creatures. That reminds me so much of Black women in particular. I’m not saying all women. I’m saying Black women. I said what I said. We are portrayed in media the exact same way as wolves, wicked and dangerous. Yet we are the exact same way as wolves — nurturing, community-oriented, instinctually protective of our young. Even those of us who have dealt with immense trauma. Part of our healing and spiritual journey is coming back home to that understanding: we are designed to take care of ourselves, and by taking care of ourselves, we take care of our communities. That is why I believe deeply that Black women who are fully embodied, who can operate in their light and their dark, will absolutely shift this world forward. Not save — I’m not calling us into becoming super mammies. My goal is for us to really live out our lives exactly how we see them in our mind’s eye, to be so clear in that decision that we fearlessly live it out loud. And that requires showing teeth. But society has tried to defang us. Remove our canines, our claws, so we would cower and be afraid of extinction and stop operating in our natural way of wildness. Too many of us have stopped showing our teeth because of it. Whether that’s through assimilation and just wanting to succeed with capitalism/racism/sexism or any of the myriad things we have to deal with as intersectional beings we are constantly told not to show our teeth. And when you grow up with that understanding, it is dangerous. It is you forcing your bigness into something so small that it is crushing you. There are parts of you that are being unseen and compressed and pressured into a shape that is not your Divine self. Hell not even your fully human self. You’re operating from a space of smallness. And I don’t want that for us anymore. It can cost you everything to not show your teeth. Even just hesitating a bit. It impacts your confidence. It becomes detrimental to your dynamics because people aren’t fully aware of all you are. You end up actively suppressing your bigness, so you make choices from a place of fear or desperation instead of power. And suppressing your true feelings, especially as a Black woman, can literally make you sick. There was an article that went viral from the Atlanta Tribune ‘Silent Rage Is A Hidden Health Crisis Among Women Of Color, Fueling Autoimmune Disorders’ and it laid out that the ‘angry Black woman’ stereotype pressures us to suppress our emotions to avoid being labeled, and that cultural silencing is making it a matter of life and death. Women of color who frequently suppress their anger are 70% more likely to develop conditions linked to heart attacks. Women account for nearly 80% of autoimmune disease cases. And the traits that get rewarded in us by society like agreeability, extreme selflessness, suppression of anger — are the same traits making us chronically ill. Your body will say what your mouth has been forced not to express. That’s clearly what the research is showing us. I have witnessed incredibly bright, brilliant women go through pain and humiliation simply because they were taught to be nice first. That leads to something else that happens when you swallow your teeth for too long you start questioning other women who you actively see using their teeth. Women who do know who they are, who are aware of their power, who do not hesitate to remove whatever is in the way of their joy — you start projecting yourself onto them. You start thinking, well, I did this, so they might go down this road too. But you’re not considering the fact that a woman who is comfortable showing her teeth is fully aware of what she’s experiencing precisely because she is not hesitant. She’s clear. And when you can’t see that in her because you can’t see it in yourself, it makes it very hard to be in circles with women who are actually showing up and living life. It costs you proper community and support, sisterhood. Because if you’re constantly projecting and not taking the time to allow another woman to be who she is because you are realizing that you are not all of who you are, you will push away the very women you need around you. There’s a deep wound underneath all of this, and for many of us it starts with our mothers. We talk sooo much about daddy wounds (which I think is hilarious because it just speaks to patriarchy) but it’s the mother wounds that tend to cause us the most pain. Because we lived inside of a body that we didn’t really get to know, or that we only knew in one capacity. We didn’t get to see the full dimension of who that person was, whether or not we know our biological mother. And that disconnect can create a real disassociation from your fullness and your power. If you were a golden child, a goody two shoes (I know that’s exactly what I was) you learned early what it meant to make yourself small so that your existence felt worth the sacrifice. I knew at an early age that my mother had sacrificed a lot for me to exist, and my main goal as a child was to make it worth it. I know that sounds heartbreaking. But that is something I intuitively felt the need to do because I was really grateful for my mom, I loved her and I could see, even at a young age, that she was suffering. Or maybe you were the weird girl, samesies. And depending on your environment, that weirdness might have actually shielded you from some of what society was trying to force on you — but you still felt the pressure of people wanting you to assimilate and be normal. Whether it was because being normal gave you more access to community or resources as a child, the pressure was there to not be too weird. To tone it down & fit somewhere recognizable. Or maybe you were the rebellious one. Who questioned authority, had her own thought process, was outspoken in a way that made the adults around her uncomfortable. And eventually that got weathered out of you — either you fell in line, or you were isolated and became an outlier to your own tribe. And that kind of exile
