So, my writing playlist consisted of Jhene Aiko's mixtape (Sailing Souls), Jojo's mixtape (Can't Take That Away From Me) and then just some random Frank OCean. Well I'm about halfway through Jojo and her song with Travis Garland "When does it Go Away" came on. And I relate to the entire mixtape but this one specifically gets me every time!! -- Listed below are the lyrics (taken from AZLyrics.com)
"When Does It Go Away"
(feat. Travis Garland)
[Garland]
I swear we both used to say
that we would never walk away
Now when I see your face,
It's like you never felt the same
Explain to me
[Chorus]
How are you okay?
When I can't be around you.
Don't you feel pain that I feel without you?
Cause I have to pretend that you don't make a difference, it's the lie that I'm living in.
When it does it go away, when does it go away, when does it go away?
[JoJo]
Baby, my worst mistake
was letting you ever get away, away from me.
And I couldn't see everything
when it was right there in my face
And baby it's killing me...
[Chorus]
How are you okay?
When I can't be around you.
Don't you feel pain that I feel without you?
Cause I have to pretend that you don't make a difference, it's the lie that I'm living in.
When it does it go away, when does it go away, when does it go away?
[Garland]
I heard them say that times heals everything.
Every second without you, I'm going insane.
Ain't nothing in the world can help me now, help me now, ooooh.
[JoJo]
I told myself that today I'm moving on.
I can't even breathe now that you're gone, you're my everything.
Let me know when does it go away.
[Chorus]
How are you okay?
When I can't be around you.
Don't you feel pain that I feel without you?
Cause I have to pretend that you don't make a difference, it's the lie that I been living in.
When it does it go away, when does it go away, when does it go away, when does it go away, when does it go away?
This song drives me crazy because I really relate to everything that they're saying. Which leads me to my question -- When does it go away?? That time heals all bull isn't seeming to work. I just want it to go away. I mean don't get me wrong. I am in a better place than I was when it first happened. But it's not like I'm not still feeling the effects everyday. His name brings the pain back. Songs on the radio bring the pain back. Seeing his family brings it back. And what's worse is he isn't effected at all. I'm that stupid girl that I judged relentlessly in high school. I'm emotional over someone who couldn't care less. Or at least isn't showing me that he was effected at all. And admittedly he probably doesn't know how deeply it hurt me but I mean he knows something.
And, believe me I've tried all the methods. Remembering all the negatives (but the good seems to outweigh the bad), cutting his family off (but some of them are super important in my life), get under someone new (not literally...... but still), pretend it doesn't effect me (but inside I feel empty). I know I'm a punk. Get over it already right. You can't move on when you're caught up in him.. But as J.Cole said in Miguel's - All I Want Is You; "It's hard to move on when you always regret one."
Don't get me wrong I would love to be over all of this. And am always welcoming new methods of getting over a heartbreak as long as it's NOT just wait it out. Cus that ish don't work. (yes I had to say it like that).
That's all on this topic. Thanks a whole bunch Jojo and Travis Garland for getting me all in my feelings. And incase you were wondering; yes, the song is now on repeat smh.
Here's the song -- I love Jojo's voice
And just for good measure, here's Miguel's video too!
Thursday, October 27, 2011
#YouKnowILoveYouWhen
The top (non-promoted) trending topic on Twitter (World Wide) is #YouKnowILoveYouWhen and it got me thinking. How would someone know that I love them. Let me start with a little background on my relationship life.
In every relationship I've been in (during the relationship) I thought I loved the person. And as I'm growing wiser I'm realizing that I did love each of them to the best of my capacity. I loved them with the kind of relationship love that I understood at the time. Which is an easy way to say that I've had friendship love, puppy love, and real love (or what I think was real at this point in my life). And which actually translates into I had no idea what I was talking about during my preteen and early teen years. And that the love that I think I've experienced in my late teen years and early 20's was intense and maybe real love. So at the varying stages of my "love life" the way I show that I love "Him" has varied.
During friendship love it's if I'll share my last with you. If I let you eat off of my plate. If I let you make fun of me without answering back. If I won't discuss politics with you (because I want to keep you as a friend). When I tell you secrets, or share my business with you. When I share my joys and pains with you. When I rejoice in your joys, cry in your pains, and want to destroy those who hurt you. When I despise your enemies more than I dislike my own.
In my puppy love stage:
I would write notes all the time. Stay up on the phone with you. Say I love you a million and one times (true love is shown more than said IMO). I smile just from the mention of your name or it showing up on my phone.
When I love you for real:
It's a mixture of my friendship love and puppy love but with so much more. I become your biggest cheerleader. I will fight my family for you. I trust you with every detail of me. I'd kill for you. I'd die for you. Your enemies become my enemies. Your friends, become my acquaintances (I don't add friends easily). I trust your judgement. You could have my last. There is pretty much nothing I would withhold from you. You can share my family. Your problems worry me (probably more than they worry you). Your well being is all that I care about. Even when/if it ends I still love you. I find it hard to remember the negatives. I still get butterflies. Every love song makes me think of you. I write you poetry and love stories and letters (that you'll probably never get to read lol). I have the ability to hate you.
Love to me is beautiful but with a lot of work. But overall when I truly love you be it friendship or relationship or even family love I model it after 1 Corinthians 13. It says : 1If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned,a but have not love, I gain nothing.
4Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;b 6it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
13So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Now that's real love :) <3
In every relationship I've been in (during the relationship) I thought I loved the person. And as I'm growing wiser I'm realizing that I did love each of them to the best of my capacity. I loved them with the kind of relationship love that I understood at the time. Which is an easy way to say that I've had friendship love, puppy love, and real love (or what I think was real at this point in my life). And which actually translates into I had no idea what I was talking about during my preteen and early teen years. And that the love that I think I've experienced in my late teen years and early 20's was intense and maybe real love. So at the varying stages of my "love life" the way I show that I love "Him" has varied.
During friendship love it's if I'll share my last with you. If I let you eat off of my plate. If I let you make fun of me without answering back. If I won't discuss politics with you (because I want to keep you as a friend). When I tell you secrets, or share my business with you. When I share my joys and pains with you. When I rejoice in your joys, cry in your pains, and want to destroy those who hurt you. When I despise your enemies more than I dislike my own.
In my puppy love stage:
I would write notes all the time. Stay up on the phone with you. Say I love you a million and one times (true love is shown more than said IMO). I smile just from the mention of your name or it showing up on my phone.
When I love you for real:
It's a mixture of my friendship love and puppy love but with so much more. I become your biggest cheerleader. I will fight my family for you. I trust you with every detail of me. I'd kill for you. I'd die for you. Your enemies become my enemies. Your friends, become my acquaintances (I don't add friends easily). I trust your judgement. You could have my last. There is pretty much nothing I would withhold from you. You can share my family. Your problems worry me (probably more than they worry you). Your well being is all that I care about. Even when/if it ends I still love you. I find it hard to remember the negatives. I still get butterflies. Every love song makes me think of you. I write you poetry and love stories and letters (that you'll probably never get to read lol). I have the ability to hate you.
Love to me is beautiful but with a lot of work. But overall when I truly love you be it friendship or relationship or even family love I model it after 1 Corinthians 13. It says : 1If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned,a but have not love, I gain nothing.
4Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;b 6it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
13So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Now that's real love :) <3
Monday, October 17, 2011
My Battle WIth Complexion
The challenge of complexion in the African American culture is age old. During slavery it is known that lighter skin made life easier for you, you could work in the house as opposed out in the harsh land of the plantation. After slavery it was light skin was better because if light enough you could pass as white. And then, it became that even in our own race mean and women liked lighter skin on the opposite sex more(for what reason I really don't know).For people who don't have to deal with this regularly (because you are not African American or because you have the medium brown skin or you have the lighter skin complexions) it is thought that this is no longer and issue. It's 2011 right? People don't judge people based on their skin color. And certainly not within their own race based on complexion. But you would be surprised just how often it still happens. In fact this is not only an African American issue, I know from research and books that it is also an issue in some Middle Eastern cultures. But I can only speak on my own experience which is with my own beloved African American brothers and sisters.
My complexion issues started when I was old enough to understand what I heard. When I was little I always heard my great aunts and uncles rag on my great -aunt Debbie because she was the darkest of the 11 brothers and sisters. They would make fun of her and call her names like blackie and say that she was found on the doorstep because no one in the family was that dark. I would hate going down to West Philadelphia to see my family because not only did they make fun of me because I was suburban but I also had to hear them attack the person that in my mind I most closely resembled in complexion.
And when summer came it would get worse. Like any other child I loved to play outside. And with a birthday in June I was a true summer baby. I loved the beach and the park and amusement parks but what did that do to my already dark complexion? It made me even darker. I would get things like you must be African, and you look like a tootsie roll, and you're blacker than the night, and you have to go inside when the sun sets because your parents are afraid they'll lose you at night. And me being the closet sensitive child that I was I cried. All the time. Side Bar: it cracks me up that my big cousins always called me the tattle tail but I never told when they truly hurt me. And knowing my mama they are lucky I didn't -- anyway
So as I got older I would do my best to stay out of my beloved sun. I hated my summer complexion. I took way more pictures in the dead of winter when all of the summer complexion was gone and I was pretty pale. Which brings me to what caused me to write this today. I was putting on lotion and I remembered that one of the reason's I hated putting on lotion was it made my color shine. I'm lucky because without lotion I don't really look ashy; I usually look pale. And looking pale makes your complexion lighter. So in the winter I wouldn't put on lotion so that I could look really really pale. In the right lighting maybe even look brown skin as opposed to dark brown.
But my struggles didn't end with my cousins when I was too little to defend myself. It came from tv growing up and watching how being light was so coveted. And, I could see how "light-skin was pretty". It was easy to be a pretty black girl as long as your skin wasn't too dark. and of course your peers are always the meanest to you. A year ago I was reminded of my insecurities. -- Because, see the thing about insecurities is they stay with you, and your coping mechanisms for them continue. But when they aren't thrown in your face it's easy to forget why you don't go to the beach without an umbrella or why you don't put on lotion in the winter (or summer when you can help it)--
I began working at Prudential and one of my colleagues was a bi-racial young man in his mid 20s. He always had snide remarks about my complexion. I mean i have to preempt with the fact that we had a play fight sort of relationship. We were mutually rude to each other. But usually not for the things about us that we don't have any control over. But one day he commented on my complexion. I took it in front of him - because I try my hardest not show weakness-- but it really hurt. It bothered me all day and all night. I cried about it a little. And over the next couple of months he started to say things about it more and more. Like he was just seeing my complexion for the first time. Like how freaking dare he. But of course instead of saying to him can it, I went through a couple of months of crying a lot and hating my complexion all over again. Summer came and I started avoiding the sun again (which was easier because i wasn't working at the summer camp I usually worked at). And I started avoiding mirrors again like I was a pre-teen all over again. It was painful but in my mind I was again made at my beautiful dark skinned daddy and his family for this complexion he gave me.
His snide remarks went on for a couple of months and I was dying a little inside. Finally I was like okay listen, either you shut the ---- up or don't speak to me. (Sorry Jesus but I was not a good example of you in that moment.) I don't know if he really ever stopped but I came to grips with it. It became easier for me to ignore him and to overlook the comments. But it's so easy to fall back into that place of hurt when people start to go after that one thing about you that truly eats at you.
Now, let me not sit here and make you feel sorry for me because everyone was so mean about my complexion. Because, that is honestly not true. There has always been a steady stream of people in my life who have loved my complexion. Who have always said how beautiful my dark skin is. How flawless it can look (God's gift because he knew they wouldn't make many foundations for this deep a complexion) and just sometimes how much they wish that there skin was so dark.
When my dad passed it was one of the things that helped me always feel close to him. I look like my daddy (more so if you know him) and a big part of that is that I am closer to his complexion that my mommy's. But it was one of those things that there was no question that I got from him lol.
And part of my growing up process is God teaching me to love the exact woman that He made me. And a great part of that is loving the skin that I'm in. With the eczema and scars and softness and complexion. My God doesn't make mistakes and I'm made in his image whether I'm Lily white or charcoal black. And, I'm in the midst of learning to love me for me.
I really write this to just remind people to be mindful of what you say. Not even always what you say directly to kids, but also what you say in their presence, about the people the admire, and the people they see themselves in <3
India.Arie makes our different complexions sound so delicious in her song Brown Skin
My complexion issues started when I was old enough to understand what I heard. When I was little I always heard my great aunts and uncles rag on my great -aunt Debbie because she was the darkest of the 11 brothers and sisters. They would make fun of her and call her names like blackie and say that she was found on the doorstep because no one in the family was that dark. I would hate going down to West Philadelphia to see my family because not only did they make fun of me because I was suburban but I also had to hear them attack the person that in my mind I most closely resembled in complexion.
And when summer came it would get worse. Like any other child I loved to play outside. And with a birthday in June I was a true summer baby. I loved the beach and the park and amusement parks but what did that do to my already dark complexion? It made me even darker. I would get things like you must be African, and you look like a tootsie roll, and you're blacker than the night, and you have to go inside when the sun sets because your parents are afraid they'll lose you at night. And me being the closet sensitive child that I was I cried. All the time. Side Bar: it cracks me up that my big cousins always called me the tattle tail but I never told when they truly hurt me. And knowing my mama they are lucky I didn't -- anyway
So as I got older I would do my best to stay out of my beloved sun. I hated my summer complexion. I took way more pictures in the dead of winter when all of the summer complexion was gone and I was pretty pale. Which brings me to what caused me to write this today. I was putting on lotion and I remembered that one of the reason's I hated putting on lotion was it made my color shine. I'm lucky because without lotion I don't really look ashy; I usually look pale. And looking pale makes your complexion lighter. So in the winter I wouldn't put on lotion so that I could look really really pale. In the right lighting maybe even look brown skin as opposed to dark brown.
But my struggles didn't end with my cousins when I was too little to defend myself. It came from tv growing up and watching how being light was so coveted. And, I could see how "light-skin was pretty". It was easy to be a pretty black girl as long as your skin wasn't too dark. and of course your peers are always the meanest to you. A year ago I was reminded of my insecurities. -- Because, see the thing about insecurities is they stay with you, and your coping mechanisms for them continue. But when they aren't thrown in your face it's easy to forget why you don't go to the beach without an umbrella or why you don't put on lotion in the winter (or summer when you can help it)--
I began working at Prudential and one of my colleagues was a bi-racial young man in his mid 20s. He always had snide remarks about my complexion. I mean i have to preempt with the fact that we had a play fight sort of relationship. We were mutually rude to each other. But usually not for the things about us that we don't have any control over. But one day he commented on my complexion. I took it in front of him - because I try my hardest not show weakness-- but it really hurt. It bothered me all day and all night. I cried about it a little. And over the next couple of months he started to say things about it more and more. Like he was just seeing my complexion for the first time. Like how freaking dare he. But of course instead of saying to him can it, I went through a couple of months of crying a lot and hating my complexion all over again. Summer came and I started avoiding the sun again (which was easier because i wasn't working at the summer camp I usually worked at). And I started avoiding mirrors again like I was a pre-teen all over again. It was painful but in my mind I was again made at my beautiful dark skinned daddy and his family for this complexion he gave me.
His snide remarks went on for a couple of months and I was dying a little inside. Finally I was like okay listen, either you shut the ---- up or don't speak to me. (Sorry Jesus but I was not a good example of you in that moment.) I don't know if he really ever stopped but I came to grips with it. It became easier for me to ignore him and to overlook the comments. But it's so easy to fall back into that place of hurt when people start to go after that one thing about you that truly eats at you.
Now, let me not sit here and make you feel sorry for me because everyone was so mean about my complexion. Because, that is honestly not true. There has always been a steady stream of people in my life who have loved my complexion. Who have always said how beautiful my dark skin is. How flawless it can look (God's gift because he knew they wouldn't make many foundations for this deep a complexion) and just sometimes how much they wish that there skin was so dark.
When my dad passed it was one of the things that helped me always feel close to him. I look like my daddy (more so if you know him) and a big part of that is that I am closer to his complexion that my mommy's. But it was one of those things that there was no question that I got from him lol.
And part of my growing up process is God teaching me to love the exact woman that He made me. And a great part of that is loving the skin that I'm in. With the eczema and scars and softness and complexion. My God doesn't make mistakes and I'm made in his image whether I'm Lily white or charcoal black. And, I'm in the midst of learning to love me for me.
I really write this to just remind people to be mindful of what you say. Not even always what you say directly to kids, but also what you say in their presence, about the people the admire, and the people they see themselves in <3
India.Arie makes our different complexions sound so delicious in her song Brown Skin
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