Send a text

A stranger’s 5 a.m. DM tried to make me small—attacking my sexuality, my finances, and my motherhood in one breath. What they didn’t expect was how quickly I would choose boundaries, body wisdom, and community over shame. This conversation starts with the gut punch of anonymous cruelty and opens into something larger: why sexually autonomous Black women who ask for help in public unsettle people who rely on control.

I unpack how purity culture once trained me to police myself and how perimenopause, therapy, and hard-won healing led me to claim my desire without apology. We talk through nervous system flares, the difference between constructive critique and projection, and the discipline of not feeding the spiral—block, delete, breathe, phone a friend, and return to self. I share the much-speculated Detroit story as a case study in assumptions, and then we get to the heart of it: support without moral tests. My GoFundMe was fully funded, not because I performed respectability, but because people chose care over punishment. That truth breaks a brittle system built on withholding.

We also zoom out to a fresh look at America’s Next Top Model: Reality Check on Netflix, asking where accountability lives when power shapes and harms young women on camera. Tyra’s role as mentor and face of the franchise comes into focus, along with what responsibility looks like when the receipts are public and the wounds are real. Across the episode you’ll hear practical tools for stopping rumination, language for rejecting shame, and a reminder that asking for help is not a moral failure. It’s community in action.

If you’ve ever been told your sexuality disqualifies you from dignity, motherhood, or support, take this as your permission slip to live ungoverned. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs it, and leave a review to help more people find these conversations.

Support the show