S5E25 Is This the Only Way We Know How to Connect?.mp3

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Transcript

Speaker 1 (0s): Hey, can, can y'all lean in for a second? John, can we talk about a couple things? I just, can we talk just for a second? Lean in for a second. I just wanna holler at you guys for a second. So look, I think some of you guys like being upset. I do. Excuse me. I gotta make sure you know, because it's clear before I pull out here on the street. But yeah, I think many of you like being up in arms.

I do. Y'all like being upset. Y'all like responding to shenanigans online. You do. I wrote down a couple of points here 'cause you know, I was thinking about some things while I was getting myself together. Y'all like to get out here on social media, listen to all these draining, like, you know, takes on anything. It could be what's in pop news or whatever the, the current trending mentally and emotionally draining topic is, right?

And then everybody wants to respond to these things. Now it doesn't mean that I have not consumed some of that content, but I think like my inner a DD kicks in. I'm like, I don't care anymore. I don't care, I don't care. For those of you who are new to my channel, I'm the black opinion native woman, also known as a B. And I talk about whatever just comes to my mind. It's my channel. I do what I want, right? So I just run my mouth. So look, listen to me.

Now, I wrote down a couple of points, not in a really good order, but it was like quickly scribbled right before I walked out the door. I just wanna talk about people who look like me. We tend to, if we're actually on social media, get caught up in when you're, you're, you're I guess scrolling or whatever it is. We, we see some of the same things happening over and over. We kind of like bond over like these emotionally draining topics.

It could be anything from who's attacking Angel Reese. Yeah, I don't like when they attack Angel Reese. You know, people want you to respond to, you know, just like shenanigans. And this is the thing, I just feel like at some point we have got to exit the group chat. We gotta exit the group chat because a lot of these topics are requiring us to provide like this emotional labor, right?

You gotta provide commentary. Then people are like, Hey girl. Yeah. You know, like, and I'm like, you know, what's gonna be saved? And not everything requires us to respond. You know, after, you know, the, the, the results of the Len collection or whatever it was, you know, we said we were taking a break and we were in our arrest era and all these other things like that. But I feel like we're lying because if you're gonna rest, then rest, like, I don't feel like we should have to constantly provide like to, on the one hand, I get it, you don't want that someone, you don't want people to write the story for you and to create the narrative for you, right?

But I feel like we're constantly like reacting to when someone is doing something negative, right? And I, and I, and I guess we do need people in those spaces and I'm torn, but in the same token, I'm like, if we're gonna rest and just rest. So if they wanna make some jacked up statute and people try to tell you, they'll try to sell to you like, oh, you should like this statue and you don't like how you look. I'm like, no. Why do we have to accept that black woman to look a certain kinda way? See how just that quickly I got caught up, caught up, caught up.

Just that quickly. The point I'm making is whether someone's creating this statue or because you have someone who is a conquered individual, you know, providing commentary on Angel Reese. And I'm not saying Angel is perfect, but like, or God, I dunno, you know, people want you to weigh in and I'm like at the point where I'm like, we don't need to weigh in on every topic. We don't need to.

We don't need to. So like when RG three made his comments about angel reasoning, you know, you had people who looked like me, but they were male. They responded, they got 'em together and I felt like it's about time they got them together, right? They did their job. I think there is this dawn like this, this, this awakening the dawn of the awakening of some of the individuals who look like me that are men. I think some of them are starting to get it right, but with that, with that, even still, we should like take a couple steps back and like, they gotta get it because like you can put all this energy and all this labor into it and people, you can't deny people their process.

You cannot. And so I have learned like, I don't wanna like constantly like have these parasocial relationships with people. Well, I don't really have a whole lot of parasocial relationships with people, but I do listen to some social media content and a lot of it's centered around the shenanigans. Like I don't wanna, I don't wanna hear it like I wanna talk about something else. What was I gonna say? I don't know if it's truly a trauma bond, but I looked at the quick definition.

Well, I, I use Siri and it basically says that it is an external bond based off of some sort of like cyclical pattern of abuse. And then basically you form some sort of like emotional bond with your perpetrator. I don't know if I would call it an emotional, a trauma bond per se with women who look like me. But I will say we are doing some form of bonding online, getting involved in having to respond to all the shenanigans every two seconds.

Now I, I don't respond to a whole bunch of shenanigans every two seconds because I really do think I have a form of a DD and my boredom kicks in hard and I'm like back to the lion in the Serengeti. You know, I like looking at other things. So I feel like it would be nice, I think a long, long time ago. See, I gotta go back into the archives. When I first started doing this, I said that we needed to, you know, people who look like me, we needed to start putting out content that wasn't the same, like wash, rinse, repeat content, right?

We needed to put out content where maybe we were exploring like our creativity or maybe if you wanna travel or maybe if you were into the sciences, engineering, whatever like that. And that's not to say that there aren't some diamonds in the rough out there, but as far as having like that kind of notoriety, many of us are not out there like that. Many of us don't have the cycles. If you look at what I'm doing, I don't have a whole lot of cycles to just sit down and make regular content anyway. 'cause I'm too busy raising my 50 11 kids and I got my job, I got my husband and I got a diva cat.

So I resort to making my, my little small time content in the car. But the point I am making is we need to create different types of content. The content doesn't constantly need to be about responding to what these Concord individuals are saying about us or somebody putting up some, some statue. And then they want to say, you should, you should accept this and, and accept this is what the form a black woman should look like. And I'm like, come on, like, you are not gonna sit here.

Well they say pee on your leg and tell you it's raining or whatever it is. I'm like, don't even respond to a lot of this stuff at this point. We need more people who look like me talking about like not just financial literacy, but like creative ways, creative ways of doing this. We need to talk about things like can we, like why we don't want to just engage in like this hustle cu culture all the time. We need more people talking about yes, it is okay to educate yourself, right?

We need to laugh more. Let me tell you, I was on TikTok, you know, I love TikTok, but I have like this feast or famine relationship with TikTok depending on what's going on in my, in my, my daily life. And there was this lady on there, she formed the WDNC Club Club and it was called the We Do not care club. And, and it's funny. And so she's, she's, it's a little tongue in cheek, but ultimately what she's saying, it's like, look, we do not care if, you know, I forgot what she would say.

Like, it would be something like, hey, these are things from the, this is our next meeting from the we do not care club. And she pulls out a piece of paper and she'll say things like, we do not care if we are wearing the same hairstyle or we do not care. You know what, we're gonna find some clothes that fit us and it's probably gonna have some elastic pan in it and we don't care if you like it or not. Or like, you know, she's supposed to be funny. We, but, but the point of it is she's like, this is for the women who are like perimenopausal, menopausal and the things that you cared about before then are completely different than now.

And what she's doing is she's getting people to, you know, get community in terms of like, yep, you're right. Like you, you, you notice these things about when you're perimenopausal and you get a kick out of it, you laugh at it. Like, I don't, I don't care. Look them kids better find something to eat. They know how to feed themselves at this point, right? When you have old enough kids to do things. I think she might've mentioned that, I can't remember. But the point I'm making is she's not out here trying to bond with people over why, you know, all the athletes are marrying certain types or whatever.

Like she don't care. And that's how I feel. I'm like, I don't care. I don't care. I see stuff that comes across my timeline all the time. Why should I be caught up in this? These same dudes doing the was saying wash, rinse, repeat behavior. I don't care. I don't care. It's for the men to go check them on certain things they clearly don't like themselves. They clearly go after the same thing. So I'm like, you gotta let it go. Like you have no control over that.

Live your life. So anyway, I just feel like we need to stop reacting to anything that's gonna be disrespectful. Anything that's going to, like, there's always like a race element or colorism element or you know what I mean? Like you gotta let some of this stuff, like you gotta let it go. And it's gonna be hard because I know everyone wants to chime in and have a voice and I get it. But sometimes I feel like if I'm truly in my rest era that I am all the way resting.

And, and it doesn't mean that this is gonna be the same for for always, but what I don't want is to constantly like, have to like be on now. I just wanna like laugh. You know what I'm thinking about right now. Like, because I know how much you guys care for the last couple of days I have, well it's been longer than a couple of days. I have been trying to figure out how I'm gonna carve out some time. I think I wanna lighten my hair, but I don't wanna put bleach. So I'm like asking people who've gotten their hair done. I'm like, so what did you do? Like is did your hair snap off?

Because we all know I get to put bleach in your hair and lighten your hair. That shit is snapping off. So I'm trying to figure out what do I wanna do with my hair? I don't know. I'm going through it. And then I may just cut it all off after I've dyed my hair or maybe just lightened it for like a month or two and then I might be done with the whole thing and I just go back to just wearing a little short hairstyle. I don't know. But that's the kinda stuff I wanna talk about. I wanna talk about the things like when did you start sleeping better? Like did you figure it out? Like I wanna talk about things like, hey, I no longer can eat these things, makes me feel like this or you don't anymore.

The the, this truck behind me, the light is like lighting. I'm gonna let this guy pass me because it's like, it's washing me out. It is washing me out. So where I'm going with it is we gotta get out of this, this group chat. We need to get outta this group chat of constantly having to chime in and feel some kind of way. Like, you know what I do when I start to see some of these things, I'm like, I don't really care. I don't care. And I swipe past it. I just keep swiping because I'm like, I don't wanna constantly feed myself with bad images or whatever like that.

I'm trying to curate my timeline. Now it doesn't mean I don't catch some of the most trending things, but oftentimes I try to avoid consuming so much of that, that content I could see taking in like a small like piece of it or whatever, just to know what's going on. Sometimes I don't, sometimes I just don't care. But then what I do is I tend to like move on because I don't wanna constantly feed that to myself. And then you're constantly feeling some kind of way and I'm like, I look, I can't give you all of my, you know, emotions, all of my mental cycles on things that I'm like, I have no control over.

And I I don't care. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what, what, what else did I write down on here? Oh, so I just feel like, oh, what I was gonna say was, whenever we're constantly consuming some of this crazy content, I feel like what happened is like it's low key creating like this group think mentality. We are like, yeah, we're collectively mad. And that's not to say that we shouldn't be in community and, and do things, but I feel like we get into this group syn where like no one can think for themselves.

'cause you get a few people who may or may not have an opinion and if, if you happen to consume their content and, and there's no one in particular, I'm just talking about my thoughts, you know what happens is it's like they're creating the narrative and they're creating the opinion and I'm like, have your own opinion. And it very well may align with someone else's. But I feel like also, and I tend to do it myself, like we tend to consume content that, that affirms our beliefs.

So there's the level of confirmation bias happening. We're all guilty of it. I raised my hand, so I'm just at the point where I'm like, we're now like we, we consume this content. It becomes like this gigantic therapy session. But like, yeah girl, like let me tell you like, and I'm, my God, I can't, I just, I don't care. So let me see, what did I say? Alright, so a while ago I put out, oh, may maybe been like two years ago.

I can't remember. I'm gonna have to go deep into the archives. I may have deleted some stuff. 'cause occasionally I just delete old videos just because I was so brand new to doing it. And so may the content may have been good, but the video may have been like just, you can tell I was brand new. I was, I, oh gosh, this might have been like three years ago. Oh, I, I I don't remember when. But I was talking about basically there, there has to be a paradigm shift.

There has to be a paradigm shift in terms of what does content look like? And right now content looks like either you gotta talk about the, the gender war. I don't feel like talking about politics all the time because people are just gonna believe what they want. I don't care if you have facts or not. It's, it is just not something that I wanna lean in on. You know, like it's like the same topics over and over again. I think that's the reason why I, I'm more interested in like, learning about these animals.

I don't know why I'm, I'm like fascinated about these animals in Africa, but I like to, to consume other content. You know, I think last week I mentioned that I like to like consume content that challenges the brain. Like, you know, I'll start thinking about like, you know, there was, there was some videos And they talking about how many numbers are between one and two, and of course they start breaking down these different types of infinity and some other things like that.

But I was like all in, I was all in on it. And I'm not saying that you guys need to nerd out like me, but what I will say is we gotta shift a paradigm of thought to where our notion of what content looks like. It doesn't look like the gender war, it doesn't look like colorism. It. I mean like content can include those topics, but it should include additional topics. It should include topics like, why did we move so far away from, from the church?

It should, it should include what is, what does education look like? It should include what does financial health look like? What does that mean to be financially healthy? Right? We should talk about those things. We should talk about things like, you know what, what, what really, what does motherhood look like? What does, you know, like there's so many topics, but instead we wanna talk about the same stuff.

And I just feel like when it comes to the men who look like me, I had to mentally check out. I'm like, they've gotta fix it. They have to fix it. It is their image that's on the line. And I can't care more for somebody than they, they care for themselves, right? So sometimes you have to say, it's hard, but let me take a step back. Take a step, let them fix it. They have to fix it. They have to check each other. There appears to be a little bit of an awakening happening right now.

There's this one guy, I guess he's on the grits and something podcast. I, I've seen him before, but I finally just started really viewing the clips that he has to say. He says some really good things. I mean, he talks about dudes who are coming for black women and he talks about things where like the men are not being accountable, all kinds of, all kinds of stuff for that, right? But I feel like he's checking, So let him do it right.

And it's not to say that I don't ever consume some of it, but I also feel like it, I have a duty to myself to consume other things while the men are going through their, their awakening. I think, what was I gonna say? All right, so basically what I was getting at was, I'm getting to the point where I'm just tired of people who look like me wanting to suffer out loud together. I'm like, why do you guys wanna do that?

Why do you wanna suffer? And it doesn't mean stick your head in the sand. What I am saying is there's other things going on because at the end of the day, while there's all these like side conversations happening, you can control the narrative for yourself. You control the things that you wanna consume. You control, control the conversations that you wanna have. I just feel like we, we we get into this mode where we're like, we get together and it's like this big group think of, yeah girl, let me tell you like, oh, like oh my gosh.

Like no, I don't, I don't wanna talk about that anymore. Let who are, are well versed in handling all that, the social scientists and everything else. That's not said, we can't have these conversations, but I'm like, but what else? What else do you wanna talk about? About what else is going on with you? Right? Like that's just where I'm at with it. What was I say? Oh, so where I was gonna go was I feel like with women who look like me, one of the things that we will do is we will get in community with each other.

Right? You'll, you'll have a lunch, you'll do that. And it's, it doesn't even have to be women who are like me, it's just women in general. I feel like when we need something or whatever's going on, we get in community. But I think we need to get in community even for the non-negative things. Like just get in community, continue to get in community over something else. Bond over something else. I don't care if it's your love for rem melting old candle wax and creating new candles. I do it all the time. All the time.

Why? Because I'm cheap. Well, I'm not cheap. I'm, I'm, I don't like to waste. I, I know. I just feel like we need to continue to get in community but not over like some emotional bond that people wanna be up in arms over. We've gotta start shifting away from that. I think that that will positive mental health instead of consuming all this, I'm like, as soon as women start getting on there, yip yapping back then I'm like next.

So anyway, where I'm going with this is like, if we're gonna rest then we need to rest, truly rest, do what we say we're gonna do. Talk about something else. Talk about, I don't, I don't know, I don't know. I dunno. Whatever floats your boat, the things that float my boat are probably kind of like lame. But that's where I'm at with it. Had an alarm go off. Anyway, that's it. So this is probably not the kind of video that you wanted to watch, but this is the one I felt like making.

This is the one I felt like making. We need to stop all this bonding over all of this negative information about people who are way too obsessed over us. Way too obsessed. Because now what's happening is low key. I think that some of these women are so male centered and identified. They're obsessing over them. They're obsessing over why the men don't want 'em. Like look, they got their own issues. Go where you want.

There's plenty of content out there now. So why do we have to continue to lean in on that content? And it doesn't mean that we shouldn't create content like that in the future, but it is time for us to work on some other kinds of content. We gotta balance this out. We've got to balance this out. People need to be making content on how to, how I'm gonna lighten my hair. We need to make content on all kinds of things like this. This trauma bonding.

I don't know if it's really truly trauma bonding, but this bonding over all this other stuff has got, Ugh. All right, so that, that's all I've got. This is where my, I'll tell you guys to subscribe to my channel. Now look, I'm known for telling people to get off of some of these whacked out weirdo podcasts and then I follow it up with telling you guys go ahead and follow me and watch all my videos. Oh gosh. But anyway, yeah, so watch all of my videos and just scratch to my channel and if there's something that you wanna talk about or you want me to talk about, let me know.

I do read comments. It's not always timely. Sometimes it is. I mean it just really depends on what's going on. But I do read the comments. Sometimes the comments are so extra. I don't have the energy to do any major responding. Sometimes it's just I don't have the time to do a whole lot of responding. But I do read the comments and let me know your thoughts. Let me know your both thoughts. How about that? And I dunno. That's all I got. All right. Have a good one.