Originally published June 02, 2021. Article has updates.

I remember sitting at home watching a show when I was younger, and I saw a woman. I had seen her plenty of times before, but this time was different. I smiled at her a little harder on this particular day. She was just “really pretty to me”. As years passed, I noticed that I began to have a crush on this pretty woman on TV. I never shared that with my siblings or my parents because I knew based upon the conversations I heard at home; I would get in "trouble" aka beat. It was like that growing up in the deep south. 

With this month being Women's History Month, there are a lot of conversations being had about the plight and the power of women. Yet, there is one conversation that continues to be discussed in hushed tones, infertility. As very young girls, we have been taught that our worth is measured by our ability to marry and have babies, there are so many reasons why this narrative is damaging. As black women, we are the descendants of the women who had their choices made for them and their life paths mapped out before they could walk. ​

​​We are divine beings capable of creating with our words. Adopting an Affirmations practice has helped me recover and heal in so many ways, specifically when it comes to living with grief and an anxiety illness. If you are just beginning to explore using affirmations, figuring out how a collection of words can shift your life might be difficult to grasp. 

​I remember sitting at home watching a show when I was younger, and I saw a woman. I had seen her plenty of times before, but this time was different. I smiled at her a little harder on this particular day. She was just “really pretty to me”. As years passed, I noticed that I began to have a crush on this pretty woman on TV. I never shared that with my siblings or my parents because I knew based upon the conversations I heard at home; I would get in trouble. It was like that growing up in the deep south. 

​When the COVID Virus began to plague the world, I knew that the experiences of the black population would be profoundly different, especially for black women.  We were informed about symptoms, statistical data, job loss, educational impact, and social distancing; but the grief of COVID wasn’t something the was emphasized enough. The reports that I watched had an underlying urgency, the masses wanting to know when life would return to normal.