Who am I?

I realize I never fully explained why g(h)ood girls heal.

Consequently it seems that my intentions for this website may have appeared vague but, I want to make it very clear that g(H)ood Girls Heal is for the evolving imperfectly perfect human.

I routinely harp on and on about the importance of individuality unaffected and being your own person while simultaneously ignoring myself. In my intrusive and oftentimes malicious mind, I pondered who I was and who I wanted to be and who I wanted to appease to. And in that thought process I realized the only person I was truly meant to care about pleasing was myself .

My only job in life was the nurture the little girl within me. The little girl who often got labeled some delicately abrasive adjectives that, she took on the motif of without any further thought or understanding. Always aiming to be perfect; the perfectly perfect good girl who only wanted approval.

Moving through life and into my twenties made me become kinder to myself. I realized I needed some relief from always trying to be what everyone else needed. I needed to be the shelter for myself. I needed to be what I needed.

Growing up, I remember being called hood or ghetto and it always threw me cause I’m the poster child for sheltered kids. Weirdly, the label came from my sporadic acts of assertiveness. Only when I spoke up for myself was I sassy or hood or ghetto and back then it use to affect me so much cause I wanted to be palatable, not one of those black girls that people often labeled as difficult. But I had to grow and learn that there was nothing wrong with those girls and that there was also nothing wrong with me.

g(H)ood Girls Heal is a gift to the little human in me. It isn’t just a personal journal or blog, it’s a place to grow, to ponder, to try and heal the person that you need the most: you. This is a place to take away from my experiences, words, and emotions and allow yourself to process your own. We’re healing and growing; from pain we haven’t yet felt, from love we’d seen come and go; and from trauma that is unspoken of.

g(H)ood girls heals is the opportunity to heal your mind body and soul. While also confronting you; unfulfilled, unprocessed, unbound.

What are we? [155]

Have you ever been intensely captured by emotion that you could hardly vocalize into words but still felt so strongly that it often took your breath? No? Just me? Well I honestly hope not. Sometimes the multitude of emotions overwhelming my sense seems like a necessary step in acknowledging myself. Nostalgia, namely; oftentimes works as a binding agent to reality for me. Helping me to connect the small and large, mundane and extraordinary to a point of intrinsic realism. But enough of Philosophy, for Dummies. I wanted to spend this week just reflecting. Thinking on pats and present and how it could help me better myself as a individual. Below is a poem that helps to portray my haphazard thought process through nostalgia, self reflection, and overthinking.

You were whiskey bottles and sunflowers. Fresh cookies and almond milk. Cool air and thick blankets. You were all the things I needed when I felt reality slipping away. When my fingers tightened around you and my hair bury into your palms as I watch the sun set I realized that home was a place where you were. Everyday I inhaled your scent and kissed your palms and stroked your hair, staring at you lovingly. Your unruly curls and dark eyes filled with hope and wonder. ‘You are the thing that makes my heart beat and the air that is taken from me everyday’. As the sun rose every morning,  I whispered this to you. Your eyes lit up and every night your arms swaddled me. My home would always be with you, a place within myself.

The manifesto [761]

One thing that I would like for you to know about me is that I do with my entire being. Meaning that I love with my whole heart, I care with my entire soul, I withdraw with my entire mind. I allow for you to experience me as I am if I trust you completely but if proven wrong there is no way, shape, or form of access to me. See I’ve written this sort of manifesto to explain to you who the fuck I am. This isn’t Beyoncé belting “who the fuck do you think I am” because I’m not giving you the chance to wonder who or what you think your version of me is. I give you what I have, no more no less and if you drop the ball with that then I drop you. With all this said I want to make it abundantly clear that if you are deemed fit and well and of sound mind; I will love, fight, care, protect, protest, and riot for you until my very last breath. Arguably, this can be my fatal flaw or this could be my saving grace. Not too many people possess the will to love and care unbidden. Often times people are afraid, afraid of the vulnerability that lives naturally within them so they hide it under layers upon layers of pride and anger and hate and other egotistical nuisances. I don’t want to be like that but in the process of combating the norm I continuously get hurt; so much so that I shatter, often. I try to find ways not to but I struggle, so I try and explain myself but why should I.

Introducing Jo

g(H)ood Girls Heal is a manifestation of Me.

I wanted to get to a place where I’m mentally and emotionally accepted by myself. Growing up I always felt like I needed to make myself smaller, less seen & heard, but still strong enough to bare the weight of the world. Now as an adult I’m incredibly lost. I’m fearful of what I can be, terrified of what I am, and desensitized to who I was. Written below is a note from my birthday that I’d written to myself hoping to gain more insight on who I was and honestly I feel like it’s the best representation of Jocelyn in the form that she’s in right now.

I never thought of my birthday as anything special. It had always been a day in the year that would push me closer to adulthood as a child. Then it became a day where I could go and buy alcohol legally be embarrassed. Now it was just a day. It never had much sentiment to me and was devalued even more once my grandmother and aunt passed away. 

But experiencing 2020 taught me something: life is worth living and I’m worth the celebration. For the first time in forever I actually indulged on myself. Not just buying things to fill a void or participating in events so people won’t think I’m soulless but actually celebrating me.

As I ring in my 24th day I feel that I should say what is on my mind. And that simply put is, I am Jocelyn. With the biweekly existential crisis I have and my lack of faith in humanity and myself, I forced myself to pause and reevaluate what it was that I wanted and what I wanted other to get from the experience with me. 

I had this bad bitch quote written for my birthday caption on Instagram but as I sat doing my makeup and watching Maid in Manhattan I realized I just don’t give a fuck. The caption was “The people who mumble your name in private never have the balls to speak in a crowded room” and when I came up with this I thought I came up with absolute fire. I was yelling fuck you to the naysayers, the haters, and the people who doubted me. I was telling my depression and anxiety to go eat a big bowl of fucks. But I realized it wasn’t about any of that. 

It was about me. I needed to stake my claim in my life. I had to become the main character in my own story. Normally I take comfort in being the background character, the supporting sidekick, the therapeutic friend. But I can’t anymore. I’m tired and empty and my cup had nothing left but air from lungs that breath too heavy.

Why G(h)ood Girls Heal?

I found myself at this place where I felt numb to being alive and I wasn’t quite sure how I could expand on feeling human again. In my adulthood I found solace in writing; it provided me with a outlet to show my emotions but also express words that I never felt comfortable saying, recounting memories lost in a haze of depression.  So it only made sense to create (g)Hood Girls Heal. An homage to growth and attempts at growth and being a black woman in this world that always seems to tell me to be quiet. g(H)GH is a home for me to express myself in ways that I may never allow most people to see. It’s Jocelyn unedited, unfiltered, unrestricted, uninterrupted.