Patia Braithwaite

My well-meaning friends would share how their ‘bad cramps’ were cured with birth control or yoga, and I’d feel like the failure with a low tolerance for pain. I’d sit in bed, between pain spells and wonder if my agony was an elaborate form of laziness designed to help me shirk the adulthood. The Bad Cramps Brigade meant to foster solidarity, was inadvertently gas-lighting me.

There is black struggle, but there is black joy. There is black heartache, but there is black levity as well. There is black income disparity, and there is also black wealth. There is softness and light in the black experience. It all coexists. It’s all valid.