This Medium page has been through it these last three years. This was originally created out of spite because I was writing under the King Of Misogynoir, who kept sitting on my articles until they were old news. This tactic meant I couldn’t find them other homes. He would also put little problematic digs in his email responses that would eventually cost him the only two Black women who ever tried writing for his site. However, as his mother should have told him as a child, he is not important to anyone’s story.
After the immediate creation out of spite, like most things I have ever created, it shifted to me learning how to be better at something. I started writing things I did not want to pitch to the places I was miserably writing for at the time. I started figuring out that in my corner of the internet, I don’t have to sugarcoat my truths to make them more palatable to people who are going to just piss on them anyway. I started writing listicles because I like recommending stuff to people, which allowed me to hit more of my friends at once. Then I started noticing people who are not my friends were interacting with me here too, and that’s when it should’ve gotten fucking cool. However, COVID showed up instead. This became a place that I tried to update with recommendations while laying in my bed being reminded that there were still forms of trauma I had not experienced.
I didn’t do much of anything those first few months, so luckily, there are only one or two pieces from that era. However, it wasn’t until I was climbing the walls while serving my stint as an Academic Specialist in Indiana that I really saw the value of this page. While taking microaggressions virtually for my academic job, and really unpacking my issues with racial tropes for the first horror podcast I started, I fucking snapped. Again, out of spite, I did a thing, and it worked out better than I could’ve dreamed. I started writing listicles about the anti-Black behaviors I witnessed online every day via my job and social media. This was when I started getting actual money from this Medium situation. It felt good and inspired me to quit the shitty job and finally put some faith in myself, and my writing. My last day at that job was June 9, 2021, and I have been supporting myself with only the luck of freelancing and slinging plays I wrote…
