Waking up to headline after headline of mass killings and black lives dying at the hands of police, I am struck by the fact that racism, ignorance and bigotry has not only continued to thrive in the 21st century, but it rules our society. On Tuesday it was Alton Sterling, Wednesday we read about Philando Castile and this morning it’s five officers and one black man hanging from a tree. I am ashamed of who we’ve become.

Every day we shout, type and post about #injustice, #blacklivesmatter and voice our opinions on gun control. Each night we go to bed in our safe homes, holding onto the notion that we can make a difference by doing nothing at all. “Enough is enough,” we claim, and yet fear grasps us by the throat and holds us down until we choose safety over action. Wake up, America.

Jesse Williams’ now infamous speech rings so much louder today than it did even just two weeks ago. “I don’t want to hear any more about how far we’ve come when paid public servants can pull a drive-by on 12 year old playing alone in the park in broad daylight, killing him on television and then going home to make a sandwich,” he urged. But here we are again, in the same position, offering our prayers and moments of silence. It’s not enough.

There are good cops out there, I fully believe this. But if they are not willing to stand up to their colleagues, then they are part of the problem. If we cannot or will not speak up against police brutality, we are part of the problem. The gun is in our hands, their blood runs across our fingers. It’s time to take a stand, not fighting violence with violence, but by demanding justice at the foot of the White House steps and at the doors of our local government offices. We should not rest until those who’ve murdered innocent lives are brought to justice. United we stand, divided we fall.

All lives matter? Yes. But black lives are being targeted so no matter what color you are, this should be your charge. In 2016 alone, police killed 123 black people according to The Washington Post, last year that number was 258. Remember their names. Dontre Hamilton. Eric Garner. John Crawford III. Michael Brown Jr. Ezell Ford. Dante Parker. Tanisha Anderson. Akai Gurley. Tamir Rice. Rumain Brisbon. Jerame Reid. Tony Robinson. Phillip White. Eric Harris. Walter Scott. Freddie Gray. Trayvon Martin. Sandra Bland. Kathryn Johnson. Sean Bell. Rekia Boyd. Amadou Diallo. Kimani Gray. Kenneth Chamberlain. Travares McGill. Alton Sterling. Philando Castile. Every day African American men and women step onto a battle field, and while I can’t begin to imagine what that feels like, I know they shouldn’t have to live in constant fear for their lives. These beautiful humans need to know that justice will be on their side in the future. Otherwise we’ve failed them. This is no longer a sweep-it-under-the-rug topic, it’s an epidemic.

How do we make a difference? We write letters, we join (peaceful) protests, we educate ourselves on racism, support movements financially, teach law enforcement the difference between skin color and a violent criminal, and we refuse to let injustice continue in our court systems. But we don’t do nothing, we don’t sit behind computers and allow Twitter to speak for us. We’re too far past that point now. This is the only world we get, let’s stop screwing it up.

I used to crumble if I failed at something. Even the littlest things that I mess up on. Sometimes people would even tell me it doesn’t qualify as a failure, but to me, it usually felt like it was.

Over time, though, I learned that failure, however you define it, is a part of life. There’ll be major highs and terrible lows.

I slowly learned how to be okay with that. Well, sort of. It’s a constant work in progress.

But it was difficult coming to that realization and what I perceived as failures would often play a part in how I make decisions for my life. I’d play it safe, do what I thought was the right thing to do, and ultimately, even when I didn’t realize it, I was always trying to please people. Not just my family, but even friends around me and whomever that I meet.

I was always trying to reach for the things that I thought were important, but really, they weren’t.

Being kind to yourself

One thing that I’m constantly trying to work on is being kinder to myself. This is key in accepting that failure is simply part of the process of growing and learning.

If you make a mistake, own up to it and learn from it. But most importantly, love yourself even despite the mistake. Desire to take good care of your heart and mind even knowing that you messed up. Cease the self-destructive comments you make about yourself. Celebrating small wins

It could be as little as getting a thumbs up from your boss on something you did well at work or getting yourself to the office on a day that you didn’t really feel up to it. The smallest things are what makes the big things achievable.

You have to find a way to enjoy the process of it, even if it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.

Finding the humor in life

Sometimes life throws you lemons, and it might not be just one. It could be several in a day. Or a week! And well, it can be incredibly disheartening.

I’m a sensitive person and there are stretches when I feel down for a few days consecutively. When I’m already not feeling particularly great about myself, I often find that bad things happen throughout my day. I feel like I perform slower at work, I miss the bus and have to wait 20 minutes for the next or it starts to rain when I didn’t bring my umbrella out! It’s almost like the universe mirrors your current perception, and I personally believe there’s something to that.

Always try to find the good in life. There’s always something good. Even if it doesn’t make you laugh, a smile or a small lift in mood would suffice. Join RISHIKA(me) and KRINA as we talk more about dealing with the grind and failures!

Too often, we are taught to believe that our soulmate is someone that we fall head over heels in love with. We are lead to believe that our soulmate is the keeper of our romantic love. The one that we will spend the rest of our lives with. The one that we will “ride or die” for.

Well, this isn’t entirely false.

Except, lately I’ve started to think that maybe our soulmates aren’t the ones that we choose to marry, or the string of on-again-off-again boyfriends that we once had. Maybe, our soulmates are our best friends. I’d like to believe that mine are. I’d like to believe that the people I will be spending the rest of my life with are the ones that have always been by my side; the love that truly has not altered.

We don’t really take much time to thank our best friends. Sure, we’ll tell them that we appreciate their support when we’re going through a rough time. We’ll give them a shout out on their birthday, and talk about how amazing they are. We’ll smile when they show up at our door with cake…But they do so many things for us that go unnoticed. Thank you for being there through all the heartache, all the breakups, and all the ones that we lost. Thank you for holding my hand during the laughter and during the tears. Thank you for giving me stability through this chaos that we call life. So this is a thank you to my best friends, the friends that became family, the love that has been there from the very beginning; my real soulmates. riends come and go in our lives and our tribe is always changing. It is like the phrase “for a reason or a season.” As you grow and change, so do the people you choose to surround yourself with.

At times, all your friends will mesh together well and then there will be times when you have to hang out with different groups at different times. We can’t always make pieces of different puzzles fit together seamlessly.

Friendships teach us a lot about ourselves, about others and about the way we view the world we live in. They are our support when we feel alone, those we laugh with over the most ridiculous things and shoulders to cry on when we need it most.There is no coincidence to the timing of when certain people come into or out of our lives. Good friendships, as we move towards adulthood, are the ones that no matter how much time has passed since we last talked, we pick up right where we left off.

Friends are our chosen family. Those we choose to let in. Those we choose to help. Those we choose to share in life experiences with. They teach us love. They bring light. They instill in us an attitude of gratitude. Choose them wisely. Hug them hard but when it’s time to let one go, cherish the time for what it was. Wait for what’s to come and see what beautiful friendships can be formed from it and the benefits it can bring to all your friends’ lives as well as our own for years to come.

Creating beautiful bonds with each other means the world to you because it is the family you’ve created, and it becomes the tribe you always wanted and didn’t know you needed in your life.

Join RISHIKA and SHIRSHA as they talk about their beautiful journey of thirteen years! Join us as we celebrate friendship and also call up all your friends

Feminism. It seems like that word has become risqué. With so many negative connotations, and hateful synonyms, it’s no wonder why our generation does not want to labelled as a feminist. But lets cut the crap, and get down to what feminism is really about.

Feminism, as defined by the dictionary, is “the theory of political, economic, and social equality of the sexes… the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities.” Now lets get one thing straight off the bat, the definition of feminism has not changed. The feminist movement, is still the movement towards equality for all genders; men, women, and trans*.

For whatever reason, anti-feminists, people who do not believe in equality for all genders, have tried, and been somewhat successful in re-creating the meaning of this term. This new meaning has become synonymous with man hating. If you think about it, this literally makes no sense at all and I have no idea how this trend even took off. If to be a feminist means you are a “man-hater”, then, at most, you only support one of the sexes, and since feminism is about equality of sexes, then by definition, you are not a feminist. The definition itself boycotts this entire argument! Yet, for some reason, people are still buying into it.

Now many people have an issue with it being called feminism, and I don’t blame you for that. In fact, until recently I felt the same way. it is called feminism, for the same reason gay rights are called gay rights and not human rights. Gay rights are called gay rights, because we need to bring gay rights up to the normal standard for human rights. If, and when, gay people finally receive the same treatment as straight people, only then will it be called human rights. And feminism is the same thing. We call it feminism, because females are the ones whose rights need to be brought up to the standards of men.

Because of this reason, and many others, lately the majority focus of feminism talks and articles has been on women, and that’s because women have been on the receiving side of the majority of equality incoherence. But why don’t we talk about men? Feminism supports men staying at home and raising their children if that is what they want to do, or what is best for their family. Feminism supports women treating men with respect. Feminism supports men getting paid paternity leave so they can stay home with their newborn child. Feminism supports men being vulnerable, sensitive, strong, tough, or whatever they want to be. Feminism supports men. Feminism supports people. There’s a common myth that men cannot be feminists, but if you’re a man who believes in the equality of men and women; if you believe your sister should make as much money as you; if you believe you should get as much credit for raising your children as the mother of your children does, then congratulations you’re a feminist!

So join me on my solo episode where I talk about feminism in a neutral point of view and why feminism should be termed as equalism and how modern day feminism is so different from the definition!

Welcome aboard passengers, today the second station we visit is the social media and how it’s toxic so sit tight. We are constantly fed standards and projections of living that force us to want to be someone we are not and often all that does, is cause us to hate who we are in the process.

A lot of millennials and 20 somethings feel this way and I know that for a fact. According to Forbes, “The more we use social media, the less happy we tend to be…We all fall into the trap of comparing ourselves to others as we scroll through our feeds and make judgments about how we measure up.”

If you truly sit and think about it, a lot of us don’t need to post about every little goddamn thing we are doing, but the culture of media perpetuates this kind of behavior.

And it’s as if, nothing is off limits when it comes to sharing. On this episode join Me (Rishika) and the second co host of this week (Vianca) as we talk about how social media can be toxic and we talk about how we can utilise our time in a better way!

The journey through maturity is often a rocky one. Like a kid avoiding a vaccine, we often resist lessons in character development. Whether fear is at the source or we simply relish in our combative nature, our behaviors tend to perpetuate into these unshakable identities — which most of the time, aren’t even who we want to be. So dearest listeners, join Rishika on her very first episode where she talks with the first collaborator of the week! Rishika and Aaliya talk about the importance of maturity and the beauty of emotions sharing a few personal moments! So have a great time, grab a glass of wine and chill and enjoy this episode! Toodles ❤️ with loads of love from Rishika!!

Are you at war or at peace with your life?Does it feel like a series of challenges to overcome than a journey of self-discovery and fulfillment?

It’s important to know how you feel about your life’s journey to make sense of it. Perhaps you haven’t given it much thought, yet below the surface something is simmering.

You might find yourself reacting to situations or becoming frustrated things aren’t going your way.

I want to put your mind at ease because what you’re experiencing is normal and you are bound to face it from time to time. Join me on this journey as we transform from teenagers to baby adults talking about everything! Stay tuned!!