April is the cruelest month, a brutal reminder of what it is to want but cannot have, to need freedom but be restrained, to be conveniently feminine, summoning that version of her at their beckoning. And when she approaches, they criticize her leaning in with a past stained by ambition. …

May is Mental Health Awareness Month; as such, this is a timely piece. I always believed I would never untangle myself from what was a culmination of inherited trauma, and my traumatic experiences warped into some deep-sea tentacled beast without a face. What I thought was a life-long battle with…

A Founder’s Low It’s been an interesting few weeks. Since my previous post on our startup journey, the co-founder became overwhelmed by the fast-paced and various demands from both the incubator and interested parties. My fearful, repetitive reminders that this work is not like the startups with spacious offices and free snacks, this…

Life is strange, and it takes examining your failures to appreciate how chaos, rejection, and redirection are the fertile foundations for becoming a successful individual. We don’t define success as possessing an excessive amount of financial wealth. Instead, success is the ability to look back onto a journey full of…

“Somewhere beneath the load of the emotion-freezing ice which my life had conditioned my brain to produce, a spot of black anger glowed and threw off a hot red light of such intensity that had Lord Kelvin known of its existence, he would have had to revise his measurements.” —…

My recent treatment began to eat at my hair. Combing was painful and resulted in more hair loss that left trails like breadcrumbs throughout my apartment. My shower meditations quickly turned into drills hoping I’d avoid examining the hairballs crowding the drain. I sought ways to hide from myself and…

Throughout my years of experience in employee resource groups (ERGs), when organizations devised structures for ERG development and management, I’ve come to notice behavior quite troubling, in which employees rummage for opportunity instead of change. Such a motive reinforced itself within systems intentionally designed for power-grabbing, validating one’s false sense…

I’m usually not interested in celebrity news or gossip, but a recent headline featuring actress Keke Palmer popped up in my Apple News feed and caught my attention. For many, it might’ve been her reveal of struggles with acne, but for me, it was the attention she had drawn to…

Since I became familiar with the concept of employee resource groups (ERGs) in 2016 — four years after entering the workforce, these groups played a critical role in my personal and professional development and preservation. However, employers fail to realize this is the case for many Black employees — even…