Revisiting this Space: Thoughts on Sisterhood Through the Pandemic
Photo Credit: Steven Jones @5amtoday
I can't believe it's been over 3 years since I updated this WordPress blog. To be fair, I have been busy! Between navigating motherhood, marriage, and being a business owner, life has been feeling so chaotic that something as consistent and commitment-filled as running a personal blog did not seem like an option for me. I have been publishing, however. Sometimes my own work, but mostly the work of other women. It's been such an incredibly rewarding experience. In the past few years, I have experienced some amazing collaborations. I've had wins and losses and I figure it just wouldn't be right to stop documenting my journey, because I think a lot of young, especially Black women and women of color entrepreneurs and creatives can learn from my experiences.
This leads me to the topic I'm approaching today, "Sisterhood". So as you all know, we've been living through a global pandemic for almost 3 years now. To say this had been a challenging time would be a major understatement. On a very real note, there has been a devastating amount of grief as loss, people have been lost not only in body but in spirit - people have been wandering, finding themselves, and leaving behind their lives as they previously were forever. It's certainly an interesting time to be alive, but it's a lonely time too. For many, it has been a time of isolation and quarantining, spending less time with our elders and immune-compromised and disabled friends with the fear of spreading a deadly virus. There's the constant anxiety and fear. There's the fatigue of waking up each day and wondering what the pandemic has in store for us today. It has been a time of division. From the maskers and the anti-maskers to the vaxers and the anti-vaxers. It's enough to make you want to abandon society completely. But for most of us, that's not an option. We just have to redefine what it means to be a community. Community care is a certain kind of love that isn't nourished as much as it used to be.
Maybe it's because I just turned 30, but it has been so long since I had a girl's night out. In my twenties, nothing gave me more joy or misery than dressing up in the sexiest dress in my closet, applying a cute lipstick and a winged eyeliner, calling up my girls to see what they were wearing, and venturing out (sometimes even in the dead of winter) to drink at crowded bars and dance to soca, reggae, and hip-hop chart-toppers until I was tired and sweaty. It was a ritual that I could rely on no matter where I was in the world or which friends were in my company. I was a fan of friend dates to the museum, Sephora, and cute little cafes, picnics in prospect park, and poetry readings. I was all about it. I had my people.
Every woman has a different experience with sisterhood. I guess I'll start with my definition of sisterhood. To me, a sister is someone you can trust. Someone who loves you through good times and bad times, even if you get on each other's nerves sometimes, you still support however you can. Sisterhood is messy, but it's not mean. It's not spiteful. I guess it comes down to the intention for being in relationship with someone. Do you want to get something from them or do you just love them for who they are? I think this question gets murky when you bring sisterhood into the creative entrepreneur sphere. We see each other's work and accomplishments and we want to work together, but the world is harsh on Black women, also quick to dismiss us after one misstep, and I'm afraid that we have internalized this in the way that we interact with each other sometimes.
I'm reminded of this quote from Audre Lorde:
"Every Black Woman in America Lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers.
My Black woman's anger is a molten pond at the core of me, my most fiercely guarded secret. I know how much of my life as a powerful woman is laced through with this net of rage. It is an electric thread woven into every emotional tapestry upon which I set the essentials of my life - a boiling hot spring likely to erupt at any point, leaping out of my consciousness like a fire on the landscape. How to train that anger with accuracy rather than deny it has been one of the major tasks of my life.
Other Black women are not the root cause nor the source of that pool of anger. I know this, no matter what the particular situation may be between me and another Black woman at the moment. Then why does that anger unleash itself most tellingly against another Black woman at the least excuse? Why do I judge her in a more critical light than any other, becoming enraged when she does not measure up?"
Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger from Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
There are many instances when we "boundary" and "toxic person" away other women who are actually hurting and looking for a safe place to express their emotions. We're not very forgiving with each other. It varies depending on the woman and the environment we find ourselves in. School and work were some of the first places outside of my own home and my own sister that I sought sisterhood.
As a kid, I never understood why my sister called women who were not her blood relative sister, but now I understand. It takes a village. Different friendships will fulfill different needs. I have my sister-friends who I share book quotes and recommendations with, the ones who I can go to a yoga class with, the ones who write poetry, the ones who are mothers and understand the trials of motherhood, the ones who are wives or spouses and understand the trials of making a life together with someone.
There is the expectation of some level of grace, but one thing to understand is that we can only offer each other as much grace as we are able to give ourselves, and for many women, that isn't very much at all.
A lot of times we are hard on ourselves, expecting perfection all of the time. We're mad at ourselves for being human and making mistakes. When we meet a potential sister we have to open our hearts and hope that they don't hurt us, leave us, or misunderstand us. My issue with that is that there is sometimes a lack of maturity and emotional honesty, a lack of communication that would never be forgiven in a romantic relationship but is all too common in friendship.
There is this fear of confrontation, that if we say what we need the other person might run or belittle us for it. This, my sisters, is a trauma response that we have to unlearn if we want to have true sisterhood.
I'm not saying that you have to stay in every friendship, or that people don't grow apart, I'm simply saying that we have to be more forgiving with each other because no one else will be. Especially among Black women. There is this popular quote by Malcolm X that no one is more disrespected than the Black woman, but to see how easily we can turn that disrespect around on our fellow sisters. We make them offers that we would never take, we cross lines that we wouldn't dare with anyone we did not identify with as our own, we're hard on each other when we're not perfect because there's still this narrowed mindset out there that one of us represents all of us. It's as if this white supremacist inflicted shame pops up and we have learned to police each other. To dismiss each other.
The divisions in our ranks have to be healed.
In the Black community, sometimes we live with a lot of qualifiers. We qualify who is Black enough, who is the closest to what we believe a Black woman should be to be included, whether she's the daughter of immigrants like me, or mixed race, or Afro Latina, or LGBTQIA+, it's amazing to see the way we sometimes exclude people from sisterhood. It needs to end. That's one of the reasons why my focus at Spoken Black Girl has always been diversity, even though we serve Black women overall, we serve a diverse array of women who are Black or brown or identify somewhere in between. We are a publication where people with hyphenated and -multilayered identities can add new dimensions to the conversation on Blackness, and I'm really proud of that.
As Black History Month comes, up, this a great question for us to reflect upon.