I want to tell you something . . . This is about my family. About my siblings, specifically. My brother and my sister. How they pissed me off a couple of months ago. How I was so angry, so full of rage (I was hurt, actually. The whole incident brought me to tears, but no...

What if you stood up and screamed with me right now? How cool would that be? Picture us, being witnesses for each other’s stories. Isn’t that why we’re all here? There’s a quote by Ram Dass that goes, we’re all just walking each other home. I never heard of that quote until I started hanging...

West Pittston, PA — July 2022 ✦ Part 1 ✦ What made us decide to move to Mexico? Short answer: American life. More specifically, American racism. No, it wasn’t because we were being routinely discriminated against or because we were suffering under the oppression of institutionalized racism in banking, schools, commerce, real estate, and other...

✦ Part 2 ✦ We never once visited Mexico. We simply packed up and moved here four months ago. Howard and I were born in the Caribbean. We came to America as children with our separate families and spent our whole lives living in America. Our parents certainly didn’t vacation in America before coming. Adventure...

I wasn’t always this self-aware and deliberate about my life. I was too busy self-hating and hiding my past. Too busy feeling like an outsider everywhere I went. ### Note to whoever: the next time someone tells you that everybody’s life was some kind of difficult in response to you talking about your painful experiences...

Why would I say this? Because most of us have no real practice in daily, deliberate and uninterrupted acts of self-love. A new year begins. We say we want to do things differently. This time we really mean it, no more fucking around. We’re tired of starting and not finishing, tired of not doing that...

I don’t usually write about my kids. It’s been a kind of unspoken rule I have had for my writing. Today I’m breaking that rule. This morning, while in meditation, the words to this essay began taking shape. ❦ I have two beautiful and amazing children. My daughters, T and N, were the first two...

I regret nothing. That’s right. I had a fucking blast. My drinking days were good while they lasted. Sure, there were blackouts and some awful choices. I was at times reckless and maudlin and outrageous and hilarious. But I was an addict, a woman addicted to alcohol. I was a girl-woman stuck in her pain...

This is my mother. We call her Ama. Whenever my siblings and I have spoken of her in the third person we referred to her as Mama. But we never, ever called her Mom or Mommy. She never wanted to be a mom or a mommy. But she has loved us in her own way...