“I paid half my rent this month.” I uttered this phrase many times in September while talking with friends. Eventually, it began to feel like a litany that sums up my year thus far. I’ve been struggling financially for most of 2017. In 2016, I took a leap of faith in obedience to God; I started 2017 without a full-time job. When the difficulties started, I honestly thought that they would be short-lived. But by the time spring rolled around, my smiles had become a bit more strained, and my go-to response to “How’s it going?” was usually something like, “Oh, Read More
Tag: friends
Don’t Trust Your Gut
Growing up as a black girl in the United States, I was “taught” a lot of things about people from Africa. The content of the lesson depended on the source. Overall, the understanding that I operated under was this: Africans did not like black people born and raised in the United States because we were not “pure” Africans. Not only did they dislike us, they looked down on us. Because of the way that Chicago is segregated (that’s a whole other blog post!), I never had the chance to prove or disprove this theory. I recently published a piece about Read More
What about your friends?
I had every intention of writing about a totally different topic. But while I was out running an errand, my mind got to wandering (as it often does). Somehow I ended up on the topic of what a “real” friend is (vs. the people we refer to as “friends” on social networks). I’ll admit that I have “friends” on Facebook I’ve never met in person. Those numbers are pretty small, but I met these people through mutual friends. I enjoy the conversations we have, and some of them have become sources of encouragement and laughter. However, I’d classify them as Read More