Black and Nuanced Podcast

In the season finale, I finally figured it out. From forming a second business prematurely, to getting laid off a third time, to grieving some sh*t my body needed to release, I was ready to go full throttle with storytelling as a living. The gag is I had been doing it in my own way for so long. I was just ready to own it more confidently and take it to new heights. Knowing people in real life doing the same thing, I invited friend and collaborator, Darnell Lamont Walker, to bare his soul on how writing became his life’s work. He used to curate writer’s rooms in his former Bronx apartment, encouraging people to get their stories out by any means necessary. Well his stories have been making its rounds in shows like Blue’s Clues, Karma’s World, and more. We delight in our journeys and the work never being done. 

Maybe we’re masochists that love to tell stories or maybe “I’m a believer in the power of knowledge and the ferocity of beauty, so from my point of view, your life is already artful—waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.” -Toni Morrison

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In my best Biggie rapping voice but remixed, “What’s grief? Grief is when you need any noise to go to sleep, grief is isolating yourself for several weeks.”

You get the lyrical point. What I didn’t understand, until I navigated that darkness I mentioned in episode two, was that grief wasn’t limited to losing a loved one. My body was grieving some things that my mind was slow to catch up with. It was a rough few months that I was forever changed by. Well actually bufo (toad venom) and my sister’s death a few years ago, forever changed me, but that darkness was still a seminal moment. This episode features my play cousin, Shaunathan, whom I consider fra-mily, a friend that’s family, who recently lost their mother. There isn’t one way to grieve and we get candid about the multitude of things we’re still grieving.

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And then the music stopped. In a game of musical chairs, I was left without a seat. But the game wasn’t musical chairs, it was my health. I had experienced a bout of debilitating back pains in 2021 that took me down. I had taken walking, standing and sitting up straight, and being active without being in pain, for granted.

But the story doesn’t actually start there. Let’s just say it did. In my late 30s, I thought I had all the doctors I needed. I didn’t. In this episode, I sit down with my chiropractor, Dr. Phelts, who takes on more of a holistic approach to wellness, and Nikki “Kether” Morgan, a certified, clinical somatic sexologist, who helped me reconnect with my body, after later learning I was dissociated.

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In the words of Jay-Z, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.” I studied entrepreneurship in undergrad because my natural inclination was to always be in charge of some sh*t. But I still had a lot to learn. They say to be an entrepreneur, you need to find a need that exists and build a business around that. Well that wasn’t my motivation. I didn’t want future million dollar checks being assigned to my social security number, so I legally formed a production company…and then a second one during the pandemic.

I had illusions of grandeur on this “consulting business” I was going to start during the pandemic after getting laid off. I was introduced to Passion Artis, during her time at Netflix, as she was getting her business, BlaytorBox, off the ground. It was an all too relatable story of having your full time job feed your creative hustle until your creative hustle became your full time.

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Being unemployed [for a third time] in New York crushed me and this time around, the additional bump in benefits, because of the pandemic, was gone. There were more rules and monitoring than before. I was embarrassed by being unemployed at my “big old age” in my late 30s. But after every storm, there’s supposedly a rainbow. It would take me another year to see that.

Tonja Stidhum, a writer, director, and producer, whose work I knew from The Root, a Black-centric online magazine, was vocal about her unemployment on Twitter. We connected about navigating the ebbs and flows of our industry (Hollywood), the come to Jesus moment of being unemployed in your late 30s, and the story we were assigning it.

Previously recorded: March 2023

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I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have lingering PTSD from my past work experiences being the only Black woman or Black person in an all white corporate space. The reality is a lot of Black people do. There are also some that don’t. These experiences marked very transitional moments in my life so I called up Amadi Pate, a TV and film coordinator, and Stephen Williams, a brand marketer, to share their differing experiences of how they navigated their Blackness in these spaces and insight that made them see themselves and their environment differently.

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I thought I had my career path figured out in my early 30s. I was making decent money as a freelance contractor at Viacom in New York and I had never thought about leaving my TV production gig until it exhausted me. I didn’t feel like I maximized pursuing my goals of being a radio personality. I also didn’t imagine jumping careers at 33 but I did.

Syndicated radio personality, Lenny Green, became a dear friend and unexpected mentor of mine when I moved to Miami for a year and decided to “start over again.” He shared some insight into his journey that also saw an expanded opportunity arrive later in his career.

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Having immigrant parents, getting a good education was over emphasized in our household. Lucky for me, I was down for traditional schooling, having gone to a four year college then grad school. But after seeing “battle royale" play out between the Biden-Harris administration and Congress over student loan debt cancellation AND realizing how much I owe, I chatted with my co-producer, Wize Grazette of The Indie Creative Network, about the worth of getting a degree versus real life field experience.  

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As an Afro-Caribbean woman, I’ve had to navigate multiple worlds beyond my comfort and rarely with enough language. When I fell into a dark space at the end of 2022, I was lost and couldn’t understand why. Coming out of that moment, changed me. It changed how I viewed myself and the people, places, and things I interacted with.

This solo episode serves as a preview of the nuanced journey I take my guests on, as they open up about their experience navigating their Blackness in various spaces.

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This season, I did something different. I got a little more personal and vulnerable and decided to share stories about the nuances of being a Black woman still navigating various aspects of my life in ways I didn’t expect to or want to. I invited some guests to join me along the way.

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