“somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff” — Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf
Shange wasn’t talking about possessions. She was talking about the self. The particular, irreplaceable accumulation of a woman — her rhythm, her voice, her way of moving through the world — that gets quietly redistributed to men who don’t even know they’re carrying it. Who walk away full and leave you wondering why you feel so empty.
I need to start there because I am writing from inside this. Not above it.
I am Black and non-binary and fem and I have spent considerable energy wanting to be affirmed by men who were not built for the complexity of what I am. I have softened edges they never asked me to soften. I have made myself more palatable, more available, more legible — not because I was asked to explicitly, but because I understood the terms. Because being desired when you exist at this particular intersection feels like evidence that you are real. That you count. That the world has made room for you even if only in this one specific way.
When you are Black and non-binary and fem, your desirability is already contested. Already conditional. Already dependent on how well you perform a legibility that doesn’t fully belong to you. The arithmetic of that is specific and daily — a world that has told you your whole life that you are too much and not enough simultaneously, and that someone choosing you anyway is a gift you should not push on.
I have done that arithmetic in my own head more times than I want to admit.
So I am not above this. I am calling us all in from the inside of it.
Let’s talk about who you let in your house.
Not your politics. Not your public commitments. Your house. The man you keep rearranging yourself around. The one whose mediocrity you have developed an entire spiritual practice to accommodate. The one you told your friends is a work in progress while you do the work and watch his progress from a distance that keeps shrinking.
You cannot be a feminist in the streets and a maid in your own home and call that liberation.
And before anyone decides this doesn’t apply to them — the woman who has read all the right books, who knows the language, who can cite bell hooks in conversation — I need you to stay in the room. Because the most dangerous version of this is the one that has learned the vocabulary of liberation and is still choosing the same patterns underneath it.
We were handed one form of power and told to be grateful for it. Beauty. The ability to attract. To be chosen. To be on the arm of someone whose value the world already recognizes so that some of it lands on you by proximity.
Jessica Delphino said it and I keep returning to it: we cannot confuse what makes us feel powerful with being empowering.
Being chosen by someone the world already values is not power. It is access. And access is revocable. The moment you stop being useful, agreeable, ornamental, available — the door closes. You didn’t own the power. You borrowed it. And you paid for the loan in ways you are still calculating.
Beauty is the only power women are permitted to wield — and they are never permitted to own it. Unilever owns it. The male gaze administers it. The market packages it and sells it back to you labeled liberation.
And if your particular intersection means your beauty is already being debated, already conditional on how successfully you perform a femininity that was never designed with you in mind — then the pressure to leverage whatever access you can get is not vanity. It is survival mathematics.
There is survival in accommodating. I am not going to judge the woman who softens because the world is already hard enough. Who lets things go. Who decides that some battles cost more than the relationship and the relationship is what she has built her life inside of.
That is a woman reading the terms of a system she did not design. That is intelligence operating under conditions of scarcity.
But survival and liberation are not the same word.
Shange knew this. Her lady in green wanted her stuff back — not because having it would make her powerful in the world’s terms, but because without it she couldn’t be herself. And a woman who cannot be herself is surviving. She is not free.
Watch what you excuse in him.
Not what you say you value — what you excuse. The consistent lateness you call him being bad with time. The emotional unavailability you have reframed as him being guarded because of his past. The way he takes up every room you share and you have learned to exist in whatever space is left. The ambitions he has described for years while yours quietly negotiate with themselves about how much longer they can wait.
Character is claimed not by what we say we value but by what we choose to excuse.
If a man can be emotionally absent, financially inconsistent, intellectually incurious, and unavailable in every way that matters — and still be chosen, accommodated, loved through it by a woman giving everything she has — then he is not being held accountable to anything. And she is not being liberated. She is doing the labor that keeps the whole system running while calling it love.
I have done this labor. I am writing from a position of being tired enough to finally name it. Not to shame anyone who is still in it. I am still in it. But Shange’s lady in green didn’t ask for her stuff back quietly. She demanded it. She said it plainly: this is mine. And she was right.
Not every choice has to be a feminist choice. Living in idealism is a luxury and not everyone gets it. I know that and I mean it.
But every choice is still a reflection of your politics — whether you are ready to own that or not.
Who you let in your house. What you let him get away with. How long you pour into a lake that never fills. What you tell yourself about why you stay.
This is a call in. Not a verdict. I am sitting in this with you — not above it, not past it, not finished with my own version of it.
The question is not whether you are allowed to make the choice.
The question is whether the choice you are making is the one you would make if you truly believed you deserved everything you are capable of giving.
Somebody almost walked off with all your stuff.
Don’t let them finish the job.
ebonyicons 