I’m In My Substack Era

First, I want to share why I have a Substack. I’ve been writing/dialoguing in some format since high school (Live Journal) through college (Twitter, Facebook) through my working periods (Tumblr, Wordpress, Medium, LinkedIn, IG stories, TikTok).

I realized most of my past writing was passion-motivated: I wrote when I had something to say and I wanted to immediately get it from out of my head into the atmosphere. I don’t think that will ever stop for me. Substack was a commitment I made to get back into consistent writing after a long stretch of short-form writing and videos. I realized that I LOVEEEEEEEEEEE long-form. I love nuance and to take my time and to let things breathe.

Second, I’m going to share why I publish weekly on Substack. I read that keeping promises to one’s self is a form of self-care. And when I looked at the types of things others do for self-care (running, going to the gym, meal prepping, etc), none of those were appealing to me. But writing and communicating is something that fills up my cup, lets me process and make sense of what’s swirling around my head, allows me to connect with people, and allows me to solicit new thoughts to keep growing as a person.

The goal for me has to be demonstrate that I can follow something disciplined. That I could write with consistency. For me, a public form of accountability is a stronger motivator than just a consistent practice of essaying privately.

My future ambition is to find a great balance and ability to wield my passion and have the muscle to be disciplined in output. The advice I’ve gotten is to draft/write hot and edit/place cool.

Third, I realized I write some big, super-sized essays and some that have research-heavy aspects.I would not change that for anything. I love to yap and go deep and long!

At the same time, I am wondering if delivering that amount of depth each week is possible with my future goal (see below). I want my Substack to remain free forever because in this hyper capitalistic world, some things should just be free. And knowledge is one where I believe we gatekeep a bit too much of it. While yes, people should be paid for their research, work, and thoughts, I have a complicated relationship with asking for money for a gift that has been given to me: my brain.

In fact, the parallel that I might draw is to my family ethos of service to others. You’ve heard me talk about my family being deeply invested in community. And the first person that came to my mind as I wrote the last paragraph were my mother and my grandmother. My mother is where I got the brain and curiosity that I have. Shout out to her for leaving me something that protects me and allows me to feed myself (working). And then my grandmother because she said: God gave me the gift of cooking, so it is what I will do each Sunday for the church for as long as I can.

And that is why I feel weird about asking every day people to pay for my writing or thinking. But before you protest, read the section below.

Positioning Myself For the Future

When I reflected on over achieving against my goal in the first half of this year, I was so proud of myself. And I remain proud! At the same time, I think I realized that I’ve been writing really long, deep dive essays which presents a slight wrinkle for my broader goals.

My broader goals include finding time to be a published essayist and writer here as well as in other outlets/magazines. Part of that goal is that I’d like to expand my readership and my ability to be connected. For me, writing has allowed me to connect with people who like ideas. It’s been a filter for the friends who like to think big and ponder. So if you’re here, please don’t leave, I love you.

As I approach 40, I start to reflect on what my 40s and 50s will entail. My hope is more friends who think big (or enjoy being in the company of, asking questions, and engaging). I’d probably say these are the people who’ve had a natural affinity for the library at some point (or still) in their life. That is why I’d like to spend some time getting into outlets/magazines so I can find my way into a community that is larger than my existing community.

What I mean by that is: I love the friends I have, but their desire to build their own families, move to the suburbs, or otherwise prioritize other things, means that I have to start planning for my future as a childless, somewhat orphaned person who loves hugs and being around others.

Here are the mechanics of getting published in an outlet/magazine.

1. They usually require first-rights: they run your essay/writing first before it can go anywhere else (Substack or otherwise)

2. Exclusivity period: commonly 90 days before you can publish it on your own platform, which makes sense given the reach they provide and potential payment (though not all pay)

3. Fresh ideas: while some of my past essays could be adapted, editors typically want an essay that feels new because of points 1 and 2

The prospect of adapting past essays doesn’t sound that appealing to me because I write hot and do best when it’s my burning passion. Think about eating leftover french fries. Some foods reheat fine, but others not so much.

While getting paid for my thinking and writing is not my primary motivator, I think this would allow me to continue to offer lots of me as a public good while also monetizing where it makes sense. People can always provide tips through my ko-fi link, but until I need writing to pay my bills, I feel weird asking individuals versus organizations and established entities.

The better alternative for individuals to share their appreciation is probably just sharing, liking, and commenting. Primarily because today’s attention economy is overly tied to algorithms that use those signals push smaller creators to larger audiences. Unlike TikTok or Instagram where I am leveraging some of my beauty capital to drive views and engagement, I don’t have that same ability on this platform.

That said, I’d rather a text, email, or comment here and there that is thoughtful over just doing it unless you are commenting publicly and giving me thoughtful in my DMs, email or text. What I love about my friends who read is that all of you are thoughtful. At the same time, putting your name online puts you out there in a way that I can understand wanting to avoid.

The cost of our friendship is not sharing, liking, or commenting. I promise you that. I’d rather keep our friendship and find readers organically than for you to feel obligated. It reminds me of trying to date someone who sings for a living and you hate their voice, the genre, or other aspects of their process. No one should subject themselves to pain for the sake of love.

Part of my new path includes honing my craft further and expanding community. One of my friends suggested writing classes to me and I was like “bih, what? I know how to write!” until I realized and she said it was for me to find like-minded people to be in community with (something I crave).

But also, one of my dear writer friends who I went to HBS with reminded me that one can always improve their craft. And she’s part of the reason I’m even deciding to take the class and start to submit to outlets/magazines. She, , is a published fiction and non-fiction writer whom I respect deeply. I am following in her path.

As a result, I’ve enrolled in a 10-week writing class that meets weekly for 3 hours. I have no clue of the writing assignments or commitment that will take, but I won’t move from the commitment I made to self, it just might look a little different.

Classes start tonight!

My Open Questions

In realizing how much depth has been in the past essays, I don’t want to reduce the quality of what I share here. That would be awful to me.

Question: What makes the “status” posts impactful?

I’ve noticed that the two posts I wrote where I didn’t have as much to say but that I was either tired or had things I wanted to write about were the ones where I received texts/comments more so than my other works.

I’m tempted to conclude those posts because they are either vulnerable in their honesty, their brevity, or that they leave space for participation and collaboration have elements I should infuse moving forward. Let me know what you think it is.

Here’s what the interactions were:

• A friend texted me that she was proud of me for keeping up my promise to myself when I first made a post about not having a full essay. And that made me feel so good for her seeing me and my efforts. She is the friend who told me she clutched her pearls reading this essay:

• Another friend following this post sent me a highlighted version of that post with her preferences for what I could write about with the caveat “to the degree you care.” And of course I care because, I love when people read what I write and tell me what they think (for better or worse). It’s like performing in front of a quiet/still crowd, quiet/pensive/attentive, or a super loud crowd. I’m really content to have attentive and pensive friends who show their appreciation in these small ways.

• The same “I wanted to write…” post landed a comment from someone I don’t know in person, which made me happy because it’s nice when you reach folks you’re not yet friends with.

Question: What’s the right length or depth?

I was thinking about the grief series and how I broke that up over a few essays, which felt more manageable. I also know those were pieces that could stand on their own. I love to compact things for a clearer through-line as I write, but I don’t always think about what the reader can handle.

I also would never impose a word limit. I have no clue what the word count is nor do I ever check. I write what is on my heart until my heart feels like it’s said what needed to be said. I want the reader to think “it gave what was supposed to be given” and “you ate that.”

• What are some essays/pieces/reflections that are not super long that felt meaningful or substantive? I ask so that I can level set from people who actually read my work what feels right. I don’t have that discernment, so please do NOT throw this question back to me

• What’s an essay I could have split up and you’d still be able to follow along? I ask this because I know I can be dense so it might take multiple reads, but I tend to aim for completeness of the narrative as a writer assuming people can or will pace themselves.

• What are some singles and demos (or liner notes)? I’ve been thinking about some of my works as deluxe albums, albums and extended plays. And that I should also mix in some singles, demos, and snippets for variety, but also to give me some breathing room for the other goals.

Question: Do you want to participate more?

I write to connect and engage. I do not write to be the authority. I have had people tell me they like what I write because it gives me words or ideas for what they are thinking/feeling but did not know how to articulate fully. That kind of compliment is what kept me going on IG stories for as long as I had.

I also love when people send in requests or things they’d want me to cover. I don’t really do hot takes and I try to steer clear of trending topics because I’d like to have evergreen content that either reflects who I was at the time or a decently formed concept of what was occurring at the time.

• What would make you comment? Again, this would make things public. But if that’s not your concern, let me know what you’d like to see more of. Do you want questions at the end of pieces to generate discussion?

• Do you know how much I value your opinions as readers? I love writing with a person in mind. It’s why I wrote about pillion. It was after a conversation with a friend on the phone and same with the OBAA vs Sinners post. You can also add topics you want me to cover to a queue. I typically cover: the construction of masculinity, queer life, Blackness, weight-body-identity, and building community. But no question or topic is off limits. A friend today has encouraged me to write about kink. And through a few messages over IG, we got to a place where I know what I can write that makes sense to me.

• Would you ever sit for an interview? I have a concept up my sleeves since 2020 that was initially crafted as a video series and I was pushed away from doing by some who called the subject too narrow. But I’m now back to thinking it is a good idea. Instead, I’d offer the chance to do video, audio, or just a transcript of our conversation. I’d omit your name if you preferred. If this is even remotely appealing to you, I can send you more info!

So I literally was wondering what I would write about for the last like 36 hours. I had the stuff from last week, what my friend has added as her interest, and then I even spent last night outlining 5-6 different essays.

And yet, this is what I wrote for today instead. This is my process. I sometimes find myself just getting carried by creativity and inspiration. You’d be surprised by how a fleeting thought can lead to a 2 hour writing session and then boom. PUBLISH.

I attempted to cobble together something that I thought could make sense, but I decided against that. I also looked at the drafts I have that could be ready, but those are not calling to me in this moment to communicate what matters to me right now.

I could wait until tomorrow and still give myself credit for this week, but I’m going to see how it goes today/tonight/tomorrow before I make a firm decision.

That said, here’s what I wanted to write about:

• How I realized being a writer is something I’ve always been doing and honing, but it has been in the background. I want to bring it to the foreground of my purpose with more intention in the next phase of my being

• How I’ve been feeling like Aang from Avatar The Last Airbender. A character who lost all of his family and is now bearing a lot of responsibility and feels obligated to others.

• How some of my friendships seem to have asymmetrically shifted. We were once growing together and now one of us is choosing a path and it’s like: wait, we aren’t doing this together?

• The values I’m now realizing I need in this phase and how that’s different from the last values exercise I did.

• Why I majored in psychology and how that choice is indicative of so many of my actions that are rooted in poverty avoidance, awareness of others, and wanting financial independence

I write here as a promise to myself. I don’t have notifications on for new subscribers or look at the per essay analytics. I measure my happiness in telling a story that I feel good about. It is always a bonus when people like, comment, share, or tell me what they liked or were surprised by in my writings.

I will throw in a few YouTube videos that I really enjoyed lately. I love learning about random things over on that app.

Here’s a recap of what I wrote about this year and a request from you (the readers)!

Request for readers — email, text, or comment in response to the below:

Recap of what I wrote and possibilities for what’s next.

Subscribe now

Care

I wrote a bit about my people pleasing tendencies (abandoning myself in the process), what family means to me, and lots of grief.

• My Patron Saints of People Pleasing

• What About Me? When Family Means Sacrifice

• Family Is an Ongoing Set of Actions

• The Greatest Gift My Mother Gave

• Introducing You to My Mom

• All Types of Exhausted

• We Need to Talk About Grief at Work

• Grief Is Worsened by Broken Systems

Village

I wrote about trying to be in community and some ways I’ve felt supported in community.

• How Friends vs. What Friends: Evolving

• My Full House Dreams Realized

Desire

We got really gay this year as I talked about sex, dating, kink, icks, and the politics of desire.

• Pillion, The Kink Curve, & Gay Happy Endings

• Dating Diaries: Open or Closed?

• Dating Diaries: Icks & Pet Peeves

• Dating Diaries: Things I Go Feral For

• Dating Diaries: Classism vs. Financial Compatibility

• White Bottoms, Black Dicks, & PrEP

Visibility

I wrote about ways in which I feel seen and unseen.

• Audit Your Instagram, Define Your…

• What Does Flossing Reveal About Class?

• Okay, So Is It Just Me or Do You Miss…

• To Be Modest, To Be Understood, Or…

Blackness

I talked about the ways my Blackness was shaped and what continues to make me proud.

• Black History Month 100: What We Kept

• Black History Month 100: Who We Are

• Black History Month 100: Where Home Is

• Black History Month 100: How Will…

• An Ode to My Ancestors & The Thighs That Persisted on Juneteenth 2026

Culture

I really went deep on film. I dissected a few things, followed the money, and tried to ask questions I thought weren’t being raised.

• Reality Check: We Were Rooting For You (ANTM Part 1)

• The Machinery Behind the Spectacle (ANTM Part 2)

• The Machinery Behind the Spectacle (ANTM Part 3)

• Short Bites: One Battle After Another vs. Sinners

• 2026 Pride Film List: The Campy & Chaotic (Part 1)

• 2026 Pride Film List: Prestige Queer Cinema (Part 2)

• 2026 Pride Film List: Black & Queer-ish (Part 3)

Leave a comment, send a like, or reply to this email with your thoughts, hopes, wishes, and desires for the second part of 2026.

alterrell

I grew up in a home where my reality and existence was fully validated. I mattered. My reality mattered. How I thought about myself belonged to me and no one else with just a few exceptions. I was told by my grandparents (who we lived with in a multi-generational home) to never leave the house without our hair brushed or without a belt on. Outside of that, I was a free thinking young Black boy who enjoyed not being doubted for my worth or capacity. It is something I have come to realize is a privilege.

As I entered adulthood, leaving for college at 18 and then off into the corporate world at 22 and onward, I found myself loudly explaining myself to people who I believe just did not understand the words that were coming out of my mouth. I was certain that people just needed more explanation, that I could provide more nuance to shift their thinking, that with more evidence their ears would open. I was wrong. For many people, this is not a novel revelation. For me, growing up as I did, it’s been a frustrating two decades that have finally become clearer: speaking louder is not going to land with people who do not listen.

I hate to give away the conclusion this early, but I do think the rest of this essay is worth reading to understand the journey. Actually, I’ll wait until the end to give you my reflections now that I think about it!

The Harvard Guy

I remember one of the most pivotal and traumatizing experiences I had was my first full-time job. I was in a strategy group at American Express that only recruited from two schools for Analysts (officially, but there were nepotism exceptions, of course): Harvard College and Wharton undergrad. I was told the group was a flat organization and that there was no sense of hierarchy. I believed them because I did not know any better. My parents never worked in corporate and many of my college friends were not sharing their experiences with me or worked in clearer work environments where the gap between what was said and done was smaller.

I earned a reputation for being “The Harvard Guy” who refused to print copies. That was far from the truth. I was being logical and going based on what was explicitly stated rather than what was implied. I was asked by someone one level higher than me that I did not report to (we both reported to the same project lead) to print copies of the team presentation. I was confused: if this is a flat organization, why would I be asked to print?

I literally said:

It takes fewer key strokes for you to press CTRL+P than to send the presentation to me, find my name, write the email, etc.

I clearly did not know that there would be an expectation of what people think of Harvard grads, so I was not clear on what perception I needed to manage until this incident would shape my next 2 years in the group. I also did not understand how in a group that only had Ivy League and comparable grads along with former consultants from McKinsey, Bain & BCG, I could be perceived as thinking that I was better than anyone. An internal consulting group was where I landed because I could not even get farther than a first-round interview with just one of the MBB!

Yet, in one of my feedback reports at the end of the project and in discussion with my SVP, it was said: you think because you went to Harvard you’re too good to make copies. That is when I started to speak like Chris Tucker. Trying to explain to people who were not willing to hear me. My assumption being that if I spoke louder, then they’d see that I was not like the other Harvard alums they had met. Not because I was superior, but in fact because I grew up working class, struggled to keep up freshman year, and that I barely got into this group by the skin of my teeth.

Managing the perception of being a Harvard grad is something that has occupied too much of my corporate work experience over my career. My time at American Express really put me through the ringer and forcibly taught me about the reality of spoken and unspoken rules. I learned a lot of life lessons that I still unfortunately have to leverage and internalize as a Black working professional. I view my time at American Express as Sparta for emotional awareness: thrown into the wild, where only the strong return as adults.

Me(n)tors at Work

After American Express and Harvard Business School, I found that I now had to manage another issue of listening and comprehension. Whether I worked at a non-profit or for-profit, I kept running into male managers and mentors who would give me advice or manage me from the perspective of someone who had my educational and professional background. It was almost always speaking to me as if I had no agency or awareness of what I wanted.

With two Black gay mentors/managers, I was being told what I should do in a way that suggested I did not know what was good for me or that I had not calculated or understood the tradeoffs. It was that I should stop putting up a fight about wearing a tie, or that I shouldn’t make decisions about which grad school to attend, or how I should manage my career if they were a double Harvard grad. I also suspect there was a desire for youth as undercurrents of this advice: talking to a younger, gay version of themselves. Both of these men were very publicly self-assured in their ego and intellect, yet both were living in glass closets. Men who believed no one thought they were gay or that they were doing a good job presenting as masculine or straight-passing.

Tesla & Testosterone

At Tesla where all of my managers were men, I often was being given feedback that ultimately was from a place of fear. White male managers who feared me for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. One manager told me I intimidated two of the Indian men on the team. Only after further questioning and discussion did he admit that it is what he perceived. The same manager refused to give me a certain level of bonus because my pay was higher than those two men on the team. I was in a rotation program and he was enacting his version of fairness by: refusing to connect with the prior rotation manager to get the prior 6 months of feedback, deciding what I made was at his discretion despite a year of meeting the bar for the bonus level I thought I deserved.

In fact, this same manager put up a massive blockade when I requested to move teams after he told me compared to the other 3 on the team, he wasn’t sure why it wasn’t working out with me. The new manager who welcomed me openly requested I spend time with my former manager to explain more of why I left because he wanted closure. I opened that meeting with an agenda and the first thing he said: will I have a chance to speak? This is someone who spent our first meeting ever explaining to me how he was special forces in the military in a 35-minute monologue before I could even utter a word.

I could not understand why a man who didn’t want me refused to let me leave peacefully and quietly. But I know any woman reading this will know exactly why. These are some of the weird male-male dynamics that confuse me. I’ll share more on my Tesla time at a later time.

I’m Finding It, I’m Finding It

I have come to expect a certain level of weirdness, projection, and perception management at work that while exhausting appears to be just one of the taxes extracted from my paycheck. Perhaps it is the intimidating Black guy tax.

I have learned that I need to make myself less threatening in order to keep my job. I cannot show my full competence, but I cannot be fully incompetent. I have to lead, but never over power. I cannot speak too often, but I cannot be silent at work without someone asking why I haven’t said anything. If I get something wrong, it is surprising because I went to Harvard. If I get something correct, it is not a surprise because I went to Harvard and that is table stakes of what I ought to know.

I think what frustrates me most is that outside of a 9-to-5 job, I do not expect or desire to engage in minimizing behavior. I don’t enjoy it at work, but I have yet to find another way. Outside of work, I try to remain humble and grounded.

But lately, I’ve been wondering why do I not put my dick on the table more?

The great scholar, Beyonce Knowles has two moments that always come to mind when I think about leading more with who the fuck I am. First is “Who the fuck do you think I is? / You ain't married to no average bitch, boy” from Don’t Hurt Yourself. She was really telling Jay-Z to not forget who he is and who she is. Granted this was after being cheated on, a level of disrespect that warrants the bravado on that track. Second is from Bow Down, where she tells her industry peers that she is her, she is Beyonce, and they should know their place. And then I remember the blow back she got from her peers and then I humble myself before I say something I cannot take back.

It is quintessentially this moment:

Three Men at Dinner

A few weeks ago, I was at a pre-dinner ahead of a conference where I had to decide how much emotional labor to invest: do I correct or do I let it go.

I was speaking to two gentlemen about wanting to expand my network but I did not explicitly ask for their help. I was making conversation. Gentleman A decided to tell me that my “score card” (his term for my resume has some great logos) and it should be really easy for me to network. That I should:

Set aside from my work day to network, to look for people, and then ask them to introduce me to two people I should speak to next.

Now, if my resume is so great, do you think I accomplished all of that without knowing a core skill of how to network? You see how logically that does not even make sense. But sure, imagine if I did not know how to network, do you think this man actually stopped during his lecture to understand what I actually needed from the conversation?

Gentleman A tuned out when I spoke next, and then Gentleman B stepped in to also provide input but that was a bit more measured. I explained that while my resume has great logos, I’m not values-aligned with as many people with the same logos. Therefore, sorting through my network was not a function of time or intent, but a lack of clarity in how to sift for values. I explained that going only by the logos landed me in companies and places that were not long-lasting or sustainable.

Gentleman B continued to engage and I decided I would continue that conversation despite how annoyed I was at hour 3 of this dinner where no one seemed to actually speak to people they did not already know. The next day when I saw both men, only Gentleman B acknowledged me.

It often baffles me why people offer advice when I did not ask. Me explaining my thinking or what I am trying to do is not always an invitation for unsolicited coaching. And this comes back to the 8 ways people listen (link).

The Stud and Her 3 Assumptions

Assumption 1

I was at a gathering to see a friend in town where I was not sure of the depth and strength of the other relationships. One of the people present was a stud. I only mention that because I wonder if her way of thinking or relating is impacted by her gender expression/presentation.

The conversation started with me sharing that I was not going to partake in the food because I am on a GLP-1. I know, I know. I should not explain myself more than I have to, but I am working on that. The conversation swirled around GLPs for a bit, where I found myself explaining how they work and more. I was met with a series of platitudes, the first of which was that I just have to get moving and go to the gym.

My issue with the empty statement to “just go the gym and get active” as advice is that it completely misses why some people cannot go to the gym. At the hardest times for me, going to the gym was not about laziness.

There was an entire mentality I had to overcome around who I am and what I value. Going to the gym (for me) meant choosing not to be authentic, accepting that I do not like myself as I am, and that I was accepting the gay norm of wanting to have my body be what becomes my passport to social acceptance.

Working out meant abandoning being my true myself. Yes, health is important, but often people infer health from weight. Skinny people can have a terrible metabolic panel while a larger person might have a perfect panel. Humans are built differently and that’s OK.

Assumption 2

I realized after the first set of platitudes that this person was not listening to me. I gave the smile externally yet internally said “don’t do it to ‘em.”

Eventually, the conversation shifted to dating. I was expressing that dating was not working as well for me. The next platitude that came was:

“You just have to work on yourself and love yourself first.”

Okay, and then what? What happens once I stopped finished working on myself and I love myself 100%? Do I then no longer need other humans? Do I then stop thinking about being lonely? Do I then automatically get a lover?

What is often missing from this advice and in this particular conversation is that the people who often say this to me have no idea of the inner work that I have done and am doing. Rarely do people even reflect on where I started versus where I am, how far I’ve come, and if the person speaking to me has even done any work at all.

Who is to say that I cannot do both (focusing on myself and wanting a partner)? It is, philosophically, a frustrating question. It is the type of presumption that awakens my inner Toni Morrison.

Why couldn’t people actually listen to me about myself and what I need when I spoke? They felt the need to speak because they were not listening to me. They were listening to a version of me that they had constructed or believed they understood. They were listening to solution rather than listening to see me.

Do I need to put my dick on the table every time just to be seen and heard?

Assumption 3

Now that we were nearly 3 hours into this hangout, I was frustrated with continuing to be misperceived. I was finally exhausted of the labor of protecting the ego of someone else. The third time I was met with another platitude I decided I no longer wanted to be humble.

The conversation shifted to: well do you like to travel? You gotta travel and see the world?

I snapped internally but externally retained my cool. I decided that the small hints to explain my context were falling on deaf ears. I channeled my inner Monique (from The Real Housewives of Potomac) and said “Well, I’ve actually been to 38 countries and over 60 international cities, I’m actually a little traveled out. So yes, I used to enjoy travel.” It was my “No, actually, I have four homes.”

That is when it dawned on her, yes my challenges in dating and otherwise are because it is hard to find compatibility. She acknowledged that she finally understood my plight. But why was it about her needing to take her time to understand me instead of just listening to the words I was saying? Why was I engaging in this ritual of making myself understandable for other people?

You’re Fat & Should Be Grateful

There’s a guy I met on Twitter who I believe he thinks he is being helpful and affirming. Yet, I experience him differently. I’ve tried to explain this a few times, but I sometimes wonder what is not connecting.

In my experience, he seems convinced that I do not like my body because I’m fat/thick/hefty rather than I can make negative comments about my body and also be fat/thick/hefty at the same time. I know that I am valuable and loved by enough people including myself. I am also allowed to be dissatisfied with myself in ways that are not 100% dictated by my weight. And maybe in his experience this is true for the other chubby men he chases. But I do not believe my issue is only about my weight.

I am often frustrated by being overlooked by people because of my body and weight, but that does not mean I believe I am not valuable. I don’t think my value has anything to do with how other people judge me. In most cases, it is a reflection of their values. And I do not wish to be in community with people whose values do not align with mine.

My stance is not “no one loves me, I’ll be alone forever” but rather there are not enough people in my local community that do not appreciate what I have to offer. It is a very different critique that I believe that I do not matter. I think he approaches me in a way that makes me feel like he believes that I believe that about myself. Despite attempts to provide correction, I’m still often met with endless affirmations and reminders of how attractive I am.

And perhaps there’s something internalized that I have not accepted, but it is also very hard to get someone to accept something they have not acknowledged for themselves. Moreover, if we don’t have the kind of personal or intimate relationship, it feels like an overstep. And we’ve never even met in person nearly 5 or more years later.

And while well-meaning, it lands as someone not listening to the words actually coming out of my mouth. Do I not know what I look like? I know that there’s a level of handsomeness I possess, but there’s also a level of modesty and humility that is expected to come with privilege — be it racial, gender, class, beauty, financial or other forms of capital and privilege.

A Dark Place Without Knowing It

During my 10 year HBS reunion, I volunteered to give a 7-minute talk along with 10 of my classmates. I spoke about my grief for 45 seconds in a recap of the 10 years since graduating.

I said, “despite all of my losses, there’s still been a lot of good things that have happened.”

One of my classmates decided to provide unsolicited feedback 28 hours later. I received a Whatsapp message that inquired if I had a therapist, followed up by asking for how long after I shared that I had one. That was followed by a 43-second voice message telling me that I was clinically depressed, needed urgent intervention from a counselor, and that I should fire the one that I have.

I decided that while I did not owe him an explanation, I wanted to create space for something being lost in translation. But he tripled down, telling me that I should be less defensive and that he wasn’t being evaluative. And this person works as a senior leader in a client-facing role.

I am aware that what you say publicly has implications for how people feel that they can respond. I was just shocked that this unsolicited advice came after at least 2-3 instances of trying to provide an out. Instead, where I put up yellow lights, he drove through each of them as if they were green.

But again, do you know how much self-work I’ve done? Are you in a position to provide me feedback when we have not spoken in 10 years? Do you think your own house is in order before you come to comment on mine?

For me, it was the unmitigated gall. The audacity. Mostly because we do not have a relationship to start with. It was another person talking at me.

A Man That Listens

I went to an event with Out in Tech that was a great example of someone who was not listening until he was.

He approached me after the panel ended to tell me he loved the question that I asked. The question was not amazing objectively though several people made it seem like it was. Instead, I was just aiming to clarify something and everyone in the room appreciated it because I said what many had been thinking.

The gentleman started to give me advice about what he thought I should do before he realized that he had not asked me what my goals were or if he had overstepped. I fully appreciated that the loop of awareness that was under 10 minutes. He realized maybe he didn’t know who I was or what I cared about. He decided to ask me after he apologized, saying “maybe I over estimated that your story is similar to mine.”

That man’s ability to just stop and pause, ask if he was close or far was amazing for me. For me, that has been the ideal.

Concluding Thoughts

When I say that I’ve become less like Chris Tucker, I mean that I am no longer going to try to speak more loudly for people to understand me. I’m not going to explain myself further when there is a misunderstanding from someone who has shown that they are not interested in (or has the ability to) listen to comprehend instead of listening to respond.

In the scene with Chris Tucker, Jackie Chan is silent. He knows that he can speak English and that Tucker has made a series of assumptions. Jackie Chan, I realize, plays it the way I am aiming to: acceptance that others’ lack of effort reflects their capacity and that you do not need to fill in for others. The emotional labor required to constantly work to be understood by people who are not curious enough to understand you is exhausting.

Yet, it is something that many women will understand. I’d connect my doing this type of labor to growing up in what a friend recently explained to me was a matriarchal environment. I was confused because there are men in my family and they aren’t overpowered. But she explained that I grew up in a family where women had voices and ran the show. And I have never really doubted that that environment was not the norm for most Black people.

In her home, her parents were incredibly affirming and her parents treated each other as equals. Yet, her broader family was patriarchal. It meant she often had to justify her reality and explain herself in ways that introduced doubt or resentment around sharing. It also meant that her baseline was that people would not by default want to understand you.

And the intriguing thing for me is that being a man in a patriarchal world that was raised under matriarchal values often means that I benefit from patriarchy in ways that I had not realized. The reality only sets in when I speak to women about what has been denied to them, or to straight men who are trying to figure out how to navigate what they saw growing up and the kind of family they want to create. With other gay men, it is often very hard to separate out what lessons we’ve been raised with as a result of being male, but socialized and lumped in with women.

My Upbringing

My home life, while chaotic in other ways, was deeply liberating in how I was allowed to think. It is why I am such an optimistic and idealist about the way things ought to be. I grew up in a home where the people I looked up to say what they meant, supported me, nudged me where I could grow, and allowed me to be me. I grew up believing that most adults and humans when they do not understand just need a little more information. They need you to speak a little more loudly like Chris Tucker.

As an adult, I can see how speaking more loudly has only been an energy waste when people choose to close their ears to what you say. And that being in a group can mean you feel constrained to maintain social rules and politeness. It is one of the things I resent so much about the world that Harvard pushed me into: the social niceties mean that “G checking someone” is frowned upon. It means that putting your dick on the table is not acceptable unless the right person does it. It means that you often endure being misunderstood to facilitate social cohesion. It means you allow others to harm you while you stay quiet.

What’s Next

The path that I see for myself is one where I can find a middle ground. To date, I find being around Black people is one of the most fully seen environments for me. Particularly being around Black people with any ties to the working class. I struggle to participate in Black elite and pretentious culture because it feels inauthentic to how I was raised.

I also am understanding that my being modest and humble to pacify others is killing me on the inside. I am learning to accept that my modesty has been mistaken for a lack of capacity. And that is hurting me and preventing me from being around those I should be in the company of. If my shine can blind others, then I am around the wrong people.

I have been making myself palatable and comfortable for other people for much too long. I must embrace my light and hold onto the people who are not blinded.

When my mother died a day short of her 56th birthday on June 17, 2024, I did not take time off right away because I had never experienced this type of loss before. I lost my maternal grandparents (2014, 2017) and did not feel the impact of loss when they died, I kept working at American Express (2014) and The Harlem Children’s Zone (2017) without too many sleepless nights. I assumed this would be the same, but it was not.

I thought I could soldier through, distracting myself like I had in the past. Yet, now my brother and father were relying on me to take the administrative lead on all of the work required to get my mother’s paperwork in order, to file for the insurance claim, and all of the things the “responsible” child does. But also, of the 3 of us, the person with the corporate experience who would be able to handle those things more easily from practice.

My brother and father took point on clearing out my mom’s items and other non-administrative tasks. I recall feeling a deep sorrow for my father. I had only spent a few hours choosing which items to donate to charity, but he’d need to sleep in that same room, and same bed by himself and think about the woman he remained with for 38 years. If thought if this is hard for me, I could not imagine what it must be like for him.

My doctor asked as he read down the list of pills that I had tried, prescribed by my mental health provider to help me with sleep and to manage anxiety. I explained that I was not taking all of them, just currently 2 of them. I had to try the others but stopped because they blunted my emotions, made me too groggy, or just didn’t work.

I started to get nervous and explain that I was taking all of these pills because my mom had just died. My doctor, who I see semi-annually, offered some of the most human care I had received in some weeks. The doctors at the hospital where my mother was being tended to were incredibly clinical. As a failed pre-med, I was familiar with the types of folks who could be great at the biological and chemical side of treatment but woefully lacking on the human services side of administering care.

He asked me if I wanted a hug after I started crying. It was the first person who I felt had shown me care and compassion in this situation who had some medical authority or someone responsible for me that was not also grieving my mom. It really broke something in me to see where and who can care for you in your hardest times.

Why Don’t We Just Ask HR?

My biggest takeaway that I’ve seen handled poorly in other losses is that “smart people” often freeze from fear of saying the wrong thing and do nothing or say the wrong thing. All I could think is: HR is where you go when you do not know what to do from a people perspective.

The way you’d reach out to your finance partner if you had a budget issue, your marketing counterpart if you saw something was off brand in store, or would alert the product team if there was an error on the website, it seemed to me that you should just think to contact the people specialists.

When I managed a team of 30 across three sites, HR was the first call I made when a personnel situation got complicated. It kept something that could have gone badly from going badly. I never forgot that.

During this personal loss, I was grateful to the HRBP who walked me through the options available and actually felt like she was in my corner, wanting me to be able to return to work.

Managing A Grieving Employee

My manager and I did not have a strong working relationship, he inherited me from my hiring manager who had changed teams a month into me starting at the company. It was a forced fit that the loss of my mother only accelerated our disconnect. I was working from the NYC metro hub of Walmart, traveling about once per month to HQ in Arkansas where my manager was based.

I remember that my manager said something to me that I assume he himself would have wanted to hear, but for me landed too coldly on the side of neutral that I knew I needed to take a step back from work:

I think it was a few days or a week or two into trying to manage working and commuting to Long Island to organize at the funeral home and to go through my mom’s paperwork that I realized: this is overwhelming.

I had time with my skip level, an incredibly warm woman who I had only been under for a few months. The comfort and care that she provided made me feel seen and supported. When I shared the news with her she was already pinging the HRBP, who I would have time with immediately after this meeting, and sharing her heartfelt condolences. She said:

What I would later learn months later is that it doesn’t really matter what someone says if the relationship is already fractured. The people who have been investing in you and caring for you (at work or in life) will just know what to say because it isn’t about the message, it is about the messenger.

The Admin Side of Grieving

One of the things that surprised me is that there are so many things that you don’t know that you need to do. The number of things required are staggering for a person who is already grieving and might have a demanding job and/or a family of their own to care for.

My mom was such a planned person that this was actually much easier than it could have been. Her wishes were clear. Her policy was clear. I was her healthcare proxy. She had already moved over benefits and beneficiaries. She had already taken me to Bank of America and gotten my name on accounts. She had given me the key to her PO Box in anticipation of the end.

My father, who was with my mom even though they weren’t married, and my brother did not contest any of the plans she had laid out. Compared to when my grandparents died, where there was a probate process that still hadn’t been resolved by the time my mother died years later.

For a lot of people that’s not the reality. I was fortunate.

Also, there are so many people to contact. I remember my mom’s boss crying when I explained why she had been out of work. I did not anticipate having to hold the grief of people I had never met. I had to contact the insurance company. I had to talk to my friend’s dad (he’s a lawyer) after hitting a roadblock with her union because she died before 62 (even though she had worked there for 30 years).

And then there’s the number of times you have to explain what happened, who you lost, try not to break down on each of those calls. It is a lot. You wind up filling out the same information over and over again. Sending the death certificate again and again and again.

It is (re)traumatizing in its own way. I believe the wealthy have estate attorneys to handle these things, which is something I did not know was a thing.

Funeral Planning and Decisions

Some of the questions you never think you’ll have to consider because you’re never ready to lose your loved one.

• What do you want to do about the parent? Do you want to cremate them? Do you want a casket?

• Who is picking up the body? Who will be paying for these services so your loved one doesn’t sit in the morgue for too long?

• What does the policy state? Who are the beneficiaries? Will anything be contested?

I was able to switch into corporate mode and return to these questions with:

• What are my options? What are the considerations?

• What levers can we pull?

• Do I get reimbursed for this? Do I not get reimbursed for this?

The decisions themselves weren’t actually difficult but being the person responsible for making things happen while also trying to process what was happening was really hard for me.

Why I Built Forever Loved

I wanted to figure out how to honor my mom. Her birthday is tomorrow. Her passing is today.

I think about the fact that my mom organized so much of this ahead of time. I think about how fortunate I was that she had done that. And I think about how overwhelming it still was. When you’ve never done this before, you don’t know what you don’t know.

You don’t know what forms matter. You don’t know which accounts need to be closed. You don’t know who needs a death certificate. You don’t know what questions the funeral home is going to ask. You don’t know what benefits exist. You don’t know what conversations need to happen.

I just felt like this tool was necessary. I feel quite alone sometimes, even though I have family that I can count on one hand. I’m not particularly close to them. I have friends that I consider chosen family. And I think about the support that someone needs, whether they’re the kind of person who asks for help or the kind of person who doesn’t.

Forever Loved1 is not a passive resource: it’s the thing I wish someone had handed me.

Forever Loved: A Look Inside The App

Admin Checklist

The Admin Checklist tab, showing the First 48 Hours section. Eight tasks listed including obtaining a pronouncement of death, contacting a funeral home, requesting certified copies of the death certificate, and notifying your employer to arrange bereavement leave.

Obituary Builder

The Making Arrangements tab, showing the Obituary Builder. Fields for full name, nickname, pronouns, date of birth, date of passing, hometown, occupation, survived by, and preceded in death by. Preview panel updates live as you type.

Helpful Resources

The Helpful Resources tab, showing a book recommendation shelf with titles including When Breath Becomes Air, The Year of Magical Thinking, and Good Grief. Below it, a Practical Guidance section with accordions for what to say, self-care during grief, when to seek professional support, and understanding the legal timeline.

It’s about PrEP.

PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) is a medication people can take to prevent the transmission of HIV. It was approved by the FDA in 2012.

As a 38-year-old Black gay man who grew up in the suburbs outside of a major city, I was aware of gay people, gay sex, and the fear of HIV/AIDS my entire childhood through adulthood. I also grew up in the era of highly discriminatory profiles on gay hookup apps and lived through the pre and post PrEP eras. I am young enough to hear the tales of the mass deaths of the AIDS generation, while also happily looking at the younger generations of Queers who seemingly live without fear of what was once viewed as a death sentence.

But one thing that has sat with me about PrEP is how sexual dynamics seemingly have changed specifically as it relates to interracial sex and dating. I’m going to use some pretty candid language that is not intended to offend, but is focused on speaking as plainly as I felt at the time I thought these ideas and will be more refined where I am speaking in more present experience. In instances as it relates to Black people living with HIV, I am trying my best to avoid furthering serophobia (the fear of those living with HIV).

I am also not moralizing Black men and those they felt coerced to partner with for any reason. I am trying to share parts of my experience and the questions that had come up for me that I now feel safer to discuss.

I Lived It, I’ve Seen It

In my youth, I slept with a lot of white men. And that is not because it was my preference, I was preference agnostic. I was happy to be desired after a teenage period of no sex or desires from those who I desired. I grew up in the 90s and 2000s, if boys had crushes on boys, it was not openly discussed. And while I would say I would have described myself as not at all straight, gay as a label didn’t feel perfect. But as someone who preferred certainty, I actually just wanted to not feel like I was misleading anyone so I waited until I was 18 to attempt to have any sexual relationship. None of this is surprising, I tend to prefer certainty of self before taking actions.

I grew up in the burbs and went to college in a very white city just out of Boston. My access to Black gay men was limited by my inability to drive, the inaccessibility of Black neighborhoods via public transit, and my laziness. The part about my laziness is that I did not want to travel 30+ minutes to go find Black male partners and as a college student who was not out, I could not really “host” in my dorm. The majority of my sexual partners in my college years were not my undergrad classmates, but mostly Harvard grad students and Cambridge, Somerville and similar places that were along the red line (Boston’s train/subway system).

When I was in college (2006 to 2010), Grindr did not exist. We had Craiglists personal ads, a few websites but nothing that was mobile friendly. The phone I had freshman year was a Motorola Rzr until I got a Blackberry my sophomore year. Apps like Uber, DoorDash, and other apps that exist today to make life convenient did not exist. I sometimes had guys in Boston who would pick me up from campus to hook up at their house, then drive me back home. Yes, that is 4 trips they would make. It was super rare and more often than not, I was just finding a patchwork of ways on the red line and Harvard campus shuttles. Given these dynamics, if they were not on a campus, they were locals who tended to be over 35 or 40.

I have too many stories of my early days of no preference before I understood why preferences can be protective and reinforcing of one’s agency in a deeply racist LGBTQ community.

A Theory: Post-Prime Whites

The theory that I developed, the one that I started to internalize: post-prime whites sleep with non-white men.

Although I studied psychology in college, I was always torn between that, sociology, and anthropology. I loved the fusion of people and science so much, I worked in a research lab all 4 years of college that looked at out-group/in-group dynamics focusing on race, gender, and power. Some of those experiments included seeing how men physiologically react to being told what to do by women while being instructed to play a new video game. I wrote the protocol for that experiment.

I coded videos of white and Black women engaging in social activities, while hooked up to various machines to see their physical reactions to racial pairings. I collected saliva samples to measure cortisol levels in experiments covering aging, babies racial preferences, and more. I’ve held most roles one could have in an experiment. I share this less to say I’m a scientist but more so to indicate the ways of thinking, evaluating, and exploring how an experiment could be conducted was a core part of my life from 18 to 22.

The theory I developed was before PrEP. It helped me explain why I thought so many older white men became bottoms that exclusively slept with Black men. In particular after a middle age turning point of having only been top and only sleeping with other white men. In the libidinal economy where whiteness, fitness, wealth and other components associated with capitalism and transactional value: fit, white men have the most libidinal currency and value. That means, they get to choose who they want sexually and proximity to them confers significant social advantage for those who value prominence within the gay male community. It can be explicit or implicit. We are not always aware of our proximity especially if we happen to be lighter, fitter, or conventionally attractive by European standards without any additional effort like working out, skin lightening, hair straightening, etc.

The only thing that I could see to explain why these objectively hot white men who were over 35 were no longer being valued was that they were post-prime.

They were meat that had hit its expiration date or at least lost the peak of its value. Gay men are often very transactional and will assess your value immediately, discarding you if you are not deemed “hot” or “valuable.” Think of collecting trading cards. That is how many gay men during my early 20s were approaching sex.

So I was curious: why would a hot white man suddenly opt into sleeping only with Black men? I do not believe Black men have less worth, I am looking at this from a purely market explanation. And I am not a red (or black) pill podcast person, I had this theory well before social media was even a thing.

In my mind, other conventionally attractive white men no longer valued them as tops, so they realized if they still wanted access to sexual partners where they could still be selective and in the power position of deciding: they had to pivot to “lower value” sexual partners. And you see this with not just Black men, but Asian and Latino men who have white partners.

You’ll often notice the age gap (the white male partner often 1 or 2 decades older) or the attractiveness gap first.

For a post-prime white man, he’s only post his prime in an all-white sexual market. But if and when he pivots to other groups, he might even be seen as high value. And if he is a bottom, which is often a lower-status in the highly misogynistic gay male community, then there’s an interesting power dynamic presented. The Black male can feel a sense of power over a white bottom that is “equal” or greater, similar to how straight Black men and white women are said to be the same degrees of power away from white maleness.

All of this is before you even get to the stereotypes about endowment. Presumably the white bottom has at least a meaningful enough endowment to have been exclusively a top in his former sexual life. So that man did not because a bottom because his endowment was insignificant. And while ED and sexual performance could be possibilities, that was not what I typically saw in my experience.

The White Men in Black Neighborhoods

As a gay man growing up in the pre-PrEP era, I was adamant about condom use and maintained the serophobia that so many youth of my age had. It was the era before the awareness (and possible reality) of undetectable = untransmittable (U=U).

As a hyper vigilant, risk-averse observer I would look at the gay apps (at this point, everything was a hookup app, no dating apps really catered to gay men) and notice a pattern. The white men who lived in Black neighborhoods, the ones who showed up on the grid, the ones who would message me, the ones with the most permissive profiles of what they were willing to do sexually were often HIV+. It is also possible that those are the profiles I had remembered most, but I recall it being a consistent pattern when I lived in NYC, went to college outside of Boston, spent summers in DC, Chicago, and Berkeley, or really anywhere I could log onto a gay app and exist in a community with Black gay men.

I want to be super clear that this is not a judgment of people living with HIV or to further serophobia. I am not making a moral argument, but am trying to explain a pattern I saw to understand if this was my observation that others have experienced or might be able to counter. Some alternatives to this hypothesis include:

• Older people have had more sexual experience, therefore greater exposure risk in aggregate of time

• White men living with HIV like so many are disproportionately impacted financially such that Black neighborhoods are where they could afford to live

What always stood out to me, besides what seemed to be an obvious overlap, was that these men often had a clear preference for Black men. It was visible on the language they used on their profiles; often indicating they were NOT interested in other white men. A massive departure from the white men who were younger, fitter, and living in the gay hubs like Chelsea (NYC) or Boystown (Chicago). I was often shocked by why some white men were interested in me, but others had profiles that said “no blacks, no asians.”

Then, when I would receive messages from those men and I’d see their face, I would be able to spot them out at the mostly Black gay clubs or at mixed bars and clubs. And when I would see them, they were often with younger Black men. Often appearing between 20ish and 25. I started to wonder if there was a power dynamic at play, an asymmetry of information and risk.

It is really hard, or has been for me, to strongly insist on condom usage when someone you think desires you does not want to use one. Especially when that person is nice to you and does not seem like they might physically harm you. I remember having several conversations in my 20s with mostly white men who would use science speak, passive aggressive language, and other powered communication tactics to make me feel guilty for wanting to use condoms.

I remember telling one guy who I spent the summer of 2009 with that I preferred to use condoms, and he insisted that he couldn’t use them because they irritated his insides. And he was very persuasive. I was a rising senior at Harvard, formerly pre-med and someone who knew a little about the world, and I still un empowered to say no. Why? This man had an incredibly nice condo in Boystown, was in impeccable shape, “didn’t look sick” in the sense of that time what we think HIV/AIDS looks like, and he seemed to be the type of white guy that I had never gotten attention from in my 3 priors years in Boston.

He was hot.

He was also a liar.

When we first met, he told me he was 40 years old. He would later reveal once we met that he was actually 50, a 29 year age between us. The summer we spent was nice at times. His nice condo and his taking me to see parts of Chicago was a welcome distraction from my internship in the Chicago suburbs and in my nearby sublet that was a true shit show. I felt like surely, this man cannot be someone who would be HIV+.

And then, he started to tell me stories of his preferences for Black men. He would tell me about his past exes (all Black). But some were masculine, others feminine. Some tall, some short. He, the bottom in every dynamic. And I had asked if his preference was always this way and he said he used to be a strict top when he was in his hey day (also back then he was an alcoholic) who mostly dated and slept with white men.

I started to realize, this man was a collector of all things Black in a way that did not feel like he had discernment. He was also on steroids, which led to massive mood swings, arguments rooted in jealousy, and a way of operating that made me feeling guilty for not being exclusive with him despite him not wanting exclusivity.

My own experience in Chicago was not super different from my time with an Italian man who would say he was once a strict top that dated white men but was now 100% a bottom for black men. It was he that I asked even more questions about how these preferences seemed to shift so much for so many older white gay men. He shared for some there’s fear of what their friends will think or actual fear that gets reduced over time. Even when I was at HBS in the PrEP era, I had a man tell me that condom use didn’t protect against the other STIs so him being on PrEP meant I didn’t need a condom.

I found myself wondering what conversations (if any) were actually happening around risk, protection, disclosure and power. If the other black men where anything like me, then they might have also struggled to say no. I also remember my first boyfriend had shared that he had “survival sex” when he was under-housed and moving through the foster and youth homelessness system in NYC. I started to reframe my Chicago experience as survival sex even if it was one a higher class and income rung, I was still sleeping with a man as a form of escape from my internship summer from hell.

I really started to look at every older white man and Black male public interaction with a weary eye: were they equals, or was this similar to what I had experienced?

Important Note on Serophobia

I want to be super super clear that I am not implying that people living with HIV are post-prime. That is not an analysis I can meaningfully support given its biased nature. But also, HIV+ men have their own communities where they prefer or only sleep with other HIV+ men.

I cannot make any conclusions about that in good faith that I would say is my belief. I can only say that serophobia is a real stigma that even I held before I fully understood U=U and have no problem with sleeping with or dating HIV+ men. Someone’s sero-status is not a dealbreaker in any of my dating in the last 10 years and I do not expect it ever will be. I fully understand that people’s seroconversion and the context around it is not my business or concern. A partner managing their health and me managing my health are what are the priority for us as a unit.

The PrEP Era Shifted Things

PrEP hit the market in 2012, but I did not become aware of it until I was at HBS in 2014 about to head to NYC for the summer. In my pursuit to get on PrEP ahead of an internship, I was met with a lot of medical discrimination that later led to me getting reimbursed for copays and other things after speaking to a patient advocate at my insurance company.

Although I was now on PrEP, I still used condoms. I never told the men I was on PrEP because I was afraid they would try to coerce me into condomless sex and I was sure of my ability to say no. If this seems hard to understand: imagine this. I spent a full year in Boston being rejected by men who aren’t that attractive or interesting for 4 years during college, only realizing my actual beauty and appeal when I would spend a summer away. And then when I returned to Boston after 4 years living in NYC, I was back to feeling undesired and overlooked.

What was different now was that there were fewer white men saying “no rice, no spice, no fats, no fems” on their profiles.

Something had shifted in the community.

Suddenly I was seeing many more white men who seemed completely comfortable pursuing Black men sexually. The thing that fascinated me wasn’t the sex itself, but this new racial openness among white men under 40. Before PrEP, many of the white men I encountered appeared highly concerned about HIV risk and asked me a lot of questions about the last time I was tested, etc. After PrEP, that concern seemed dramatically reduced.

Now, obviously, there are other sexually transmitted infections. This isn’t an argument that PrEP eliminated risk altogether but PrEP changed the HIV conversation. It also shifted responsibility in a way that I think really speaks to the root of the racialized concerns: selfishness.

The PrEP Era Accelerated Racialized Sex

This is where I struggle to know exactly what is my opinion versus what is likely to be a racialized mechanism at play.

I now see so many white men who are into anonymous sex, are load collectors or cumdumps (lookup these terms at your own risk). They have decided who they have sex with is no longer a risk if the main community fear, HIV, is effectively mitigated with PrEP. I’ve seen white young men who are collecting loads from Black men and all men. A weird racialized dynamic that you also see in straight porn where white bottoms have slotted into the role of Blacked or Brazzers.

The abandon of sexual fear from many white men (to me) reveals that the fear in the past meant Black men were viewed as objects of disease. Possibly pleasure but only after the white subject was effectively post-prime in the libidinal market. It also doubles down on the hyper-masculinization of Black men and the softening of white men in the dynamic.

In an incredibly fascinating turn, we can see this trend in two groups that are considered white by US census standards. In France, where racial census data is prohibited, this dynamic exists with white French “Europeans” and those of North African & Arab descent (be they French citizens or not).

In the article, “Top or Bottom: How do we desire?: What do queer memes of a top shortage reveal about the racialized orders of desire and new directions for gay critique? (article)” we get language that equates topping with being the savage, the brute, the outsider, the hyper sexualized.

It is a dynamic we’ve seen in the United States with Black people (male and female) that was part of a fear of the Black body going as far back as slavery to the present day.

It is not clear to me if the onslaught of messages that I receive unsolicited from white men is purely racialized, though I’ve come to learn white men relate to each other often in very transactional ways that feel racial when it involves Black and white men (compared to just two white men).

But the new messages in this era is very depersonalized. Some of the common things you’ll get:

• Dick pics?

• Hung?

• How big?

• I’m a submissive ready to be used

• Looking?

There’s a complete omission of pleasantries that did exist in the pre-social media era, that waned over time, and is now completely gone. What I’ve experienced is what feels like a flattening of me to a human dildo. It does not matter if I am a top or bottom personally because many of the men do not read that my profile clearly stats that I am not into submissive men or any dom-sub dynamics. And nearly all of my Black friends who are bottoms are always assumed tops the same as many of my Asian friends are assumed bottoms no matter what their profile explicitly states.

Concluding Thoughts

And while interracial hooking up appears to be progressive, I am often skeptical of the power dynamics that exist in these cross-race, age-gap dynamics because of what I saw and experienced for myself. The conclusion I’ve been arriving at: PrEP has unmasked the racial preferences that have existed globally to reinforce racialized, colonial dynamics.

For a very long time the access gap to get PrEP was of course racialized given the US healthcare and insurance system. PrEP requires testing every 3 months and is very expensive unless you have good insurance or are eligible for Medicaid. The reach in communities of color is worse than in the white gay communities where PrEP (and now DoxyPEP) is like the world post Polio or Smallpox vaccine. You can truly see how much the privilege gap exists in looking at PrEP adoption rates from 2012 to the present.

When I discussed what I viewed as selfishness was a belief of several white gay: “I am taking PrEP, so you being HIV+ is not something that impacts me, therefore we can have sex that is high-risk.”

All of this seems to be rooted in the focus on the white person and their sexual health and safety. It does not have as much regard for the sexual health of the other party/partner.

Disclosure conversations ( ones that discuss testing, other safety practices) are mostly gone. The lack of discussion always means some of the racialized bias that was present in the past has been replaced with a view that says “I cannot be racist, I have sex with Black men.” But none of this assumes the person having sex with you views you as a full person, believes in your rights to exist in anyway outside of the pleasure you can provide to them and their needs.

My therapist and I were having a conversation the other day that really came to a head around a pretty hard question when it comes to my dating life: class politics and money management.

In that particular session, we were talking about is deal breakers for prospectives moving from initial date to serious consideration.

I think that when you're trying to date Black men who are highly educated or successful in their careers, sometimes that comes with a lot of classism and elitism. I see it in many of my friends. And for me, I don't wanna date someone who's classist. I feel like Black people should care about all Black people.

At the same time, financial security is really important to me. I don’t have a family anymore or someone I could rely on to get me out of a financial pickle but myself. I saw the financial dynamic between many of the men and women in my family, and none of them have aspirational dynamics except for the ones who separated themselves from the family. In that way, I don’t even know if I have a full picture of their actual relationship and situation. Instead, I just have the optics of what appears to be a relationship/marriage that seems financially balanced.

I try to date guys where I tell myself money isn't the most important thing, but I still haven't figured out where that threshold is. How much am I comfortable being the financial breadwinner when I’m tired of being reliable and the stable force in my family, in some friendships, and at work on some teams. It would be nice to be able to be a little more careless with money or my career, but I do not feel like I have the latitude to do so.

The question my therapist asked was: Is it easier to teach a man to be less classist or to teach a man to be better with money?

And it felt like such a hard, paradoxical question. Maybe not a paradox for the question, but that it would require me to compromise on one of my values. Pitting the me who grew up with working class values in a family that managed money decently against the me going to that one university twice who was always good with money, but now has more of it to worry about for self-survival.

Would I rather date a classist man who could potentially change but is financially secure? Or a man with better politics who's bad with money?

With my family context and financial reality, there's this really difficult tension where oftentimes the partners who can provide the most financial security also have the worst class politics. And that's stressful for me. It puts two values that matter to me against it each other.

I know that in an ideal world I can have both. I should be able to get both. But I’m also very aware of the patterns and data in my dating history. It has shown me that Black men with good politics aren’t often financially rewarded in our deeply capitalistic country, and that those are the men who are attracted to my body and mind. People who value my intellect and the body my ancestors so proudly retained, thighs and all the fixins. And from what I see in my peer set or from my skinnier times, body politics and people politics often go hand in hand.

I’m aiming to hold out for both, but if I cannot I still think it's a really interesting question. And I’m not looking forward to being forced to choose. What about you?

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I’ve been debating a lot about sharing more of my writing and reflections on grief, how traumas get reactivated unknowingly in the workplace, and how I’ve been trying to process what I’ve been feeling specifically as it relates to work.

I’m on a leave of absence from work to process some deep grief that’s a mix of the loss of the 3 grandparents I grew up with (2014, 2017, 2026), the parent I lost (2024), and honestly parts of me that died with each of those losses and cumulatively as they add up.

When my mother died in June 2024, it took me a month or so before I could acknowledge that I really needed time away from work. I had a phenomenal skip level, HRBP, and mentor who made me feel safe to step away. 3 amazing women who provided clarity in a very uncertain time.

My grandmother who died recently is one I hadn’t spoken to in nearly 3 decades (by my choice). Yet, I feel the compounding of grief especially as the person I always turned to, my mother, is no longer here. It’s a reminder that often times we can’t always connect our feelings to clear moments in time.

I’m embarrassed to admit:

1. how reliant I’ve become on AI for the emotional support & translation one might get from family or close friends,

2. awareness of the harm data centers cause,

3. how helpful these tools are to me at the expense of other people.

I often ask ChatGPT to help me sift through what I’m feeling when I don’t have the words. Lately, I’m “emotionally saturated.” Yesterday , I asked Claude to look into my LinkedIn to tell me which messages I owe responses to (and to start drafts to lower emotional load).

And thanks to my Fitbit, I finally have accepted that my grandmother’s death mattered to me more than I assumed.

I wrote this because I think some people forget that work involves humans. Humans who are filled with emotions and obligations and priorities that are not exclusively focused on work.

I also believe there might be people similar to me in feeling like you had to compartmentalize in order to make it in corporate America. That you’ve had to disconnect your head from your heart to be taken seriously at work. Or to survive under capitalism, you had to employ survival skills that serve shareholder value while slowly killing you.

Although I am confident there is an audience for what I want to share, I’ve noticed the visibility of liking, sharing, etc on LinkedIn means all of your activity as an engaged reader exposes you to (real or perceived) professional risk. So I hope this little slice of what I write will be valuable. I’ll tag these reflections working through grief and figure out how to allow for a specific newsletter for that.

I don’t check who subscribes, but I always welcome messages, comments, etc on posts. That type of feedback and engagement is what keeps me writing and sharing.

If you only want to read about grief at work, be sure to choose only that newsletter. Otherwise, you’ll get my other awesome writings as well.

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And if this doesn’t resonate with you, feel free to share with a friend for whom this might matter.

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While I said I wouldn’t call this entire series “Dating Pet Peeves,” I am going to give them space today :) These are likely particular to Black queer dating, but they might not be. Let me know so I can take it easy on the gworls.

The Sunken Place

I am going to try not to say every Black man who refuses to entertain dates with other Black men is in the sunken place…but you have to admit, it is weird. And yes, this occurs with other races as well, but I’m not as qualified to speak on why we rarely see sticky rice.

For Black men, I think I’ve come to realize that I grew up with the privilege of being told my skin color and complexion was a blessing. I did grow up with the negative effects of colorism in my own family — my brother is “light skin” in our family as is half of my immediate family. And my maternal grandmother absolutely favored him in large part because of that. She herself a woman my complexion and her husband, my grandfather, was the same color as my brother and mother. It was a perfectly 3-3 split of who was dark and who was light. Yet, my mother made clear that I was beautiful, that darker skin is why she chose my father and that my brother was liked in large part because of his skin color. I also knew that I mattered outside of what I looked like.

That said, what I find frustrating is not that these Black men do not desire me, but that I cannot opt out of seeing them on a dating app. After 2020, a lot of gay apps decided to undo the decades long “no fats, no femmes, no rice, no spice” that was all over most white mens hookup profiles. That also ported over in some ways to how people publicly showed up on gay dating apps. Without the ability to explicitly filter OUT for race, you started to see a pool of everyone. A pool that also included those who would never look your way on the street or who might pretend not to see you while in a club.

I do not want a Black partner who does not like being Black. I also don’t want to a non-Black partner who doesn’t like being their own race. But for Black men, it is often the case that the ones who are in my financial income bracket, educational bracket, or attractiveness bracket, where I experience what some call “preference not prejudice.” As a result, I’ve had to learn to look for a few subtle signals on profiles to learn who to avoid messaging (on hookup apps where double opt-in is not required) or swiping right optimistically.

A few of the tells:

• No POCs or Black people in their group photos. This one is usually the most reliable indicator. Who they surround themselves with can be a great measure of who they perceive as valuable. I ground this in the reality of you have 6 to 9 pictures on any given dating app, so you get to choose what you want to communicate about who your friend group is.

• Circuit parties & body focus. In the hyper competitive, performatively masculine world of Queer culture, whiteness is often an aspirational focus. White Queerness and capitalism go hand in hand: the most currency belongs to those who are well resourced enough to afford the time to work out extensively and/or the genetics to be physically sculpted. Black gay men who find themselves in circuit scenes by default will be in the minority in a sea of mostly white gays. That is often a willing choice either through comfort or acceptance. Black gay men with fantastic bodies are welcomed into white queer spaces as high-value, mirroring the white ideal aesthetic but also as a utility for the white gay to access. It is a dynamic that most Black gay men over 25 have observed or experienced enough for it to not be surprising: there is rarely an out of shape Black gay in a sea of white friends. Therefore, some Black gay men extensively focus on their body and its presentation on their dating profiles. It can be the ticket to social mobility in places like NYC, LA, Miami and other cities where queer culture centers materialism. In places like Chicago, DC, or Atlanta, you can find Black queer men with amazing bodies who only choose Black men. It doesn’t mean it is more inclusive outside of race, but these “body boys” are less likely to be focusing on the commodification of their body as an offering to white society.

• Non-contemporary styling and trends. There is a certain mustache that all Black gays who date other Black men know is the universal sign for “this Black guy does not date other Black men.” There’s also when he has an edge up or haircut that is not of the contemporary era. Imagine a man in 2020-something with an eraser top. Or a Killmonger haircut more than a decade after Black Panther has left theatres. The important thing is that mustache or other styling itself is not the only tell, it’s the context within which that choice is made. It is often evidence they are not in community with other Black people who would tell them that the chosen style is outdated or outside of the norm. And yes, there are alt-Black people who enjoy being “anti” or an individual, this often takes on something else. Donald Glover’s facial hair is a great example. A man who has a Steve Harvey mustache could be a good example, but with Steve’s bald head and clothing choices (and mannerisms), he wouldn’t register as a “love is love” and “I don’t see color or have a preference” Black gay.

Confusing Political “Choices”

One of the recurring points of confusion for me on apps like Hinge, which is one of the few apps where you can actually list and see someone’s political affiliation, are the politically abstinent and moderates.

Given that you can omit a political leaning, or you can put other if you don’t vote or have a set of politics that does not neatly fit into the provided choices, putting “Not Political” is confusing to me. To not participate in politics in this climate is more than just saying “voting doesn’t matter,” for me it is saying “I am putting my fingers in my ears and pretending not hear.” And while that is fine for them, I don’t know what we could talk about if my potential partner is completely indifferent or apolitical about policies that impact me even if they rightly or wrongly believe they are privileged enough to be immune from policy choices. While I’m sure there is a case to be made for dating someone with divergent political beliefs (not for me), I could not be with someone who would not take actions to defend my rights. As I rarely match with or see non-Black men, it is also confusing to me when I see this on a Black man’s profile. You of all people have a politicized life and the mental gymnastics I would require to zip my lip would not work.

I am not sure which is more frustrating to see from my Black gay men: moderate or conservative. I think they are effectively the same on apps. In my mind, a conservative is at least standing on business about what they believe if I agree or not. To be clear, a Black gay conservative is almost never looking for a Black partner, so I am not worried that it is a reality I would need to confront. But a Black gay who indicates “Moderate” on their profile seems like someone who is open to conservatives and does not want to be viewed as a liberal. Again, other and not filling out that area are choices. Moderate feels like the ultimate: I will betray my politics for the other things that matter. And good for them, I just know that political compatibility is important for me.

Status Signals & Material Goods

Yes, I in theory could afford material goods and high-status experiences, but I am a high-comfort, value-seeker. I take the bus, love the public library, and hardly order Ubers unless they are being expensed. And I indicate that on my dating profile to counteract the Harvard and corporate job of it all.

The ick category for me is a status-seeker and signaler. I understand that we all have different priorities and needs, so this is not about their inherent value as a person but as a match for me. Here are some of the status signals that make clear no matter how attractive the person is online, unless we met in person and they demonstrated interest in me…it would not work.

• First & business class. I love that you live a life of comfort and ease where flying in business or first is possible. At the same time, putting that on your profile as one of your few pictures tells me what you are sharing as what matters to you. Does anyone look particularly good in an airplane photo? What else does it signal because what you desire, can access, or what you hope to maintain? Love that for them, but unless the profile details something about you paid with points or some other balance, I am going to assume our spending behaviors are not aligned.

• High-end labels. Half of the time I do not recognize what is designer clothing because that’s just not in the range of what fits me or what I would choose to wear. In many such cases, it’s the gaudy excess of LV, Channel, Gucci or other very well known brands. It is rarely the quiet luxury of form, fit, and understated fashion. For me, luxury clothing feels like a waste of money even if you look nice. Again, this is a values alignment and priority issue. It is unfortunate, but I’ve often seen these profiles have the fewest words, suggesting the clothing and beauty of the person are saying enough to lead to a like or a match.

• Highly curated vacation pictures. I love a good photo, but we’ve entered an age where people are curating their photos in such a way that it is akin to the em dash in writing. While technically correct and fine, the pervasiveness of a particular style signals…artificiality. You went to France and you’re at the Louvre. You are on a beach vacation and the beach is perfect and so is the photo. It tells me what you might value are aesthetics and likely have fine taste, or you follow the pack and do what is expected. Do you have a point of view? When I vacation, I like to learn the history of a place. And while I do take photos like everyone else, I would not message I went to France with a picture of the Louvre because that is obvious, too on the nose, overly accessible. It also makes me wonder how much time did you spend to get the perfect picture. Again, this matters to a lot of people. As someone who has once been friends with this type of person and has been on vacations around these type of people, I am NOT going to be the photographer for your one-person shoots. And that’s the thing: none of this behavior is achievable solo, it always requires someone willing to be the executor of “the vision.” Nope, not me.

I am lucky that guys in these categories rarely like me first, so it is a non-issue. But as I think about how to be mindful of who I swipe on to protect how the algorithm categorizes me (you get dinged for shooting above your range or poor match ratio).

What This Means For Me

I have to find the balance between saying what I don’t like and who I want. Recently, I deleted Hinge for a week and came back with new pictures and prompts. While a better profile or a new user boost might get you more attention, conversion is still subject to the quality of men in the dating pool.

In the spirit of transparency, here’s what my profile looks like. I’d say feel free to share with potential prospects who could be a fit and/or ask questions in the comments.

Does this feel familiar or like something you’ve heard from your friends on the dating scene?

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Once you attend a Beyoncé concert or watch the elaborate spectacle of most major female artists, the pattern that emerges is hard to unsee. In pop, Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, and Post Malone have massive streams and the ability to fill concert seats. Their productions are sparse, yet they charge top dollar. Meanwhile Taylor Swift, P!nk, and Lady Gaga are among the pop stars who elevate the art of a concert performance.

The gap between what female artists are paid and what they are expected to deliver has been widening for a decade. It is structural and a remnant of a previously segregated music landscape: starting with racial segregation, then genre segregation in radio and music videos.

Male artists, as the financial pace setters for pricing, effectively retain more net income by reducing the production expense associated with performing. A cynic might say that male artists are making the more financially sound decision, but female artists are not afforded that grace without punishment.

Women are held to a higher production bar across entertainment, not just music. You can see it in sports like the WNBA and tennis as well. In music, the baseline expectation for men is simple: show up and perform. For women, it’s everything at once: vocals, choreography, visuals, and concept work layered together.

Case Study: Coachella 2026

Coachella is the clearest example of the double standard in music: the hidden tax on genre and gender for concert prices. Justin Bieber and Sabrina Carpenter were headliners for Coachella 2026: if you looked at their concert sets and production, you would not guess which was paid $5M and which was paid $10M.

This essay is not arguing that fees should be identical. It is arguing that compensation alone does not explain the asymmetry in production expectations. It does not explain why female artists routinely spend more money, employ more people, rehearse longer, and create more visually ambitious productions while operating within similar or smaller compensation ranges.

Pyrotechnics & Career Accelerators

The production gap between male and female artists is an economic issue, a disparity that is impacted by gender, race, and genre. For every $100 a male artists charges for his concert, he might keep say $75 after expenses related to a sparse production that is hardware-heavy. For that same $100 (if the market is willing to bear those prices and views women’s concerts as equally worthy), a female artist is taking home significantly less than $75 because her human-centered production is more varied, complex and costly.

The production gap can be divided in several ways, but in this essay I focus on the binary of hardware vs human production. These differences are not neutral: they have financial, cultural and career implications.

Hardware

• Equipment: LED walls, lighting rigs, projections, pyrotechnics, staging systems

• Costs: usually fixed; rented once and reused across tour legs

Human Production

• Personnel: dancers, choreographers, stylists, vocal coaches, wardrobe staff

• Costs: rehearsal time, personnel expenses; scale with complexity of number of cities and countries

• Personnel costs include hotels, insurance, per diems, and transportation

I do not believe female artists are making suboptimal financial decisions, instead I think they have fewer alternatives. We see this across caliber and size of artists, which suggests that this is not about individual choices but rather systemic choices. I don’t think the financial gap is about talent. I think it reflects what the market is willing to pay, but that still doesn’t explain why the expectations attached to men and women are so different.

Male artists disproportionately rely on hardware-heavy production, while female artists disproportionately rely on human-heavy production systems. Drake’s It’s All a Blur tour was described as one of the largest arena touring operations ever assembled. Taylor Swift’s Eras touring operation spanned X cities with significant operational complexity. Drake’s production was machine-heavy, Taylor’s was more human-heavy.

Cardi B’s 2018 Coachella set makes the underlying structure visible. She reportedly spent around $300,000 of her own money on production for a performance where she earned roughly $70,000 in fees. This is an example of an artist understanding the expectation being placed on her. A male rapper can walk onstage in jeans and a white tee with minimal staging and still be perceived as legitimate.

Female artists like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift are career accelerators: dancers, choreographers and even bodyguards. Beyoncé’s dance captain, Amari Marshall, leveraged visibility and expertise to direct the choreographer for musical group, FLO. Sean Bankhead, choreographer for Normani, Cardi B and Victoria Monét, initially started as a backup dancer. Even Beyoncé’s bodyguard, Julius, is a well known entity within the BeyHive. Other dancers like Parris Goebel, JaQuel Knight, Fatima Robinson, and Laurieann Gibson worked for major artists like Diddy, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and so many more.

The Comment That Launched A Re-Brand

The audience (in person and) on the internet often play an outsized role with the rise of social media: anyone with a large following or funny insight can gain traction with a critique that is biting, fair, mean, or humorous. Dua Lipa became a case study in what happens when female performance changes the trajectory of a career, but at a cost that has normalized the gendered gap in performance expectations if the critique is funny enough.

“I love her lack of energy, go girl give us nothing” is a foundational pillar of internet fan responses. These critiques and quips that live on are most often about female artists, largely in part because the most vocal online fans “support” female artists.

Female artists are expected to continuously escalate their craft as performers, while men are afforded the privilege to stagnate and rarely face comparisons to the greatest male performing pop artist. Who was the last great male headliner that became the standard for a top-notch performance within pop? Male performers are not growing in the craft of performance, while women are growing the craft the industry at large.

Male artists are never compared to Michael Jackson, but female artists are often compared to those who influenced them. Think about how many artists have been compared to Madonna (Lady Gaga), Beyonce (Chloe, Normani), Mariah (Ariana Grande), Rihanna (Tyla) or Janet Jackson (Britney Spears). In online fandom, we know who the daughters of the greats are. Chloe is in the shoes of Beyonce, Beyonce is in the shoes of Tina Turner and Diana Ross. Where is the musical male lineage going next?

Twice As Hard: Trapped By Your Own Excellence

Beychella did not emerge in a vacuum. Beyoncé was the first Black woman to headline Coachella and approached the performance carrying the burden of historical representation. She transformed what a festival headliner is expected to deliver the same way Michael Jackson transformed what a music video should be, the same way Whitney Houston transformed what a singer is and what The National Anthem could be. They all had to. Black artists often have to over deliver and out perform their peers in order to get equal standing or footing. It is an ingrained survival strategy that can at times work against Black artists.

After Beyoncé, female headliners took one of two paths: silent excellence or operating within the racial-gender hierarchy.

Then Bennett doubled Grande’s dancer count from twelve on tour to twenty-four for the festival.

Three years later in 2022, Billie Eilish became the youngest headliner in Coachella’s history. At the end of her set, she told the crowd “I’m sorry I’m not Beyoncé” and opened her set saying she should not be headlining this. Eilish’s response can be read as humility and modesty, but it can also be read within a racial and gendered power structure. The statement unintentionally demonstrates how white women can position themselves adjacent to Black female excellence without inheriting the same expectation burden.

Not one male headliner has ever walked off that stage and said “I’m sorry I’m not Michael Jackson.” Not Frank Ocean, whose set was called “disappointing” and “aimless” when he headlined. Not Justin Bieber. Not Drake. No male artist has named the measuring stick and said he was not enough.

Male artists are allowed individuality, while women are measured against the highest-performing woman alive. Or the most streamed woman (Taylor Swift). Or the most Number 1 hits (Mariah, who is still not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame).

Concluding Thoughts & Taking Action

The market is not just pricing talent differently, but also demonstrating a structural and gendered, racial issue. Once the spectacle of large production becomes attached to femininity, women stop being allowed to be artistically minimal. Women are often required to prove worthiness through labor, spectacle, and risk before they are granted the same visibility. And Black women, especially, are often expected to redefine the medium itself before they are remembered.

1: Count performance elements, grade across gender

• When female performers are discussed, ask what all they were required to do at once. Was the criticism about: vocals, choreography, staging, outfit, concept, or breath control while dancing?

• Count how many things she was doing at once, then ask what percent she executed well and then compare her to her male peers, then grade on a curve.

2: Shake the bigotry of low expectations

• Women are not inherently “better performers,” they are expected to (and rise to that expectation) to work hard and excel. The higher standard for women is too often enforced and retained by audiences.

• If a female artist scales back production, the response should reflect how much she has likely performed over the duration of her career. Allow her to be minimal in the same way that male artists are.

3: Be consistent in your critique

• If you cannot grade women within their context, then start explicitly and vocally expecting more of male performers.

• Male performers are rarely evaluated on staging, choreography, visual ambition, theatricality, costume design, transitions, or innovation.

• Ask why vibes are enough, why he’s giving us nothing, why he doesn’t have any meaningful creativity in his production.

4: Consider who is sharing the pie

• Pay attention to who creates work for others: female performers are often creating entire labor ecosystems around their shows.

• Female artists are frequently creating longer tables while receiving a smaller percentage of the meal. That should matter when we discuss who is “worth” what when it comes to the price of a concert ticket or festival headliner.

5: Stop measuring women against the bar of excellence

• Women are already compared to each other, but we do not need to compare every individual female artist to be compared to the one with the most streams, the most #1 hits, the highest touring revenue.

• If you cannot do that, then do the same for men. We rarely see staging comparisons or the numbers game within the male fandoms.

6: Interrupt the race-gender structure

• When white women position themselves adjacent to Black female excellence through faux humility or self-comparison, ask what function that comparison is serving. “I’m not Beyoncé” sounds humble on the surface. But it is also racial hierarchy when the comparative options are both female artists.

• The question should not be: “Why aren’t all women Beyoncé?” The question should be: “Why are Black women expected to become Beyoncé-level exceptional before the culture fully remembers them?”

7: Call out journalists and those with large platforms

• Journalists and critics should have balanced coverage. If you see an imbalance, call it out. When coverage of female performers disproportionately leads with criticism while male performers receive softer framing, speak up publicly. Tweet it, leave a comment on the article. If you worry about doxxing, then create an anonymous or throwaway account.

• Not because criticism is unfair, but because imbalance becomes normalization. If women are being reviewed as full productions while men are reviewed as personalities, that distinction shapes audience expectation over time.

One of the recent men I was exploring a partnership with gave me feedback that was not shocking in what he said, but more shocking was that my experience was not the default. Not because I think my way is the best way, I just had no idea how people were operating in the other condition.

Think about these questions below and what your expectation is of the other person.

The suitor I was engaging said “you just let the conversation end and never picked up back up.” Another man told me “finally you respond” after I responded to one of his story posts. I was truly confused in both scenarios, but I asked questions because I truly could not understand how disinterest was the assumption.

I started to think about how many men I might have led to believe I was not interested. But that did not make sense. I am a highly intentional dater and communicator, how could someone assume I was not interested if I did not communicate that explicitly or do the slow communication fade?

What I stumbled upon was the difference between closed and continuous/open conversation bids.

What Are Conversation Bids

A conversation bid is an attempt at connection that can take various forms, from the subtle (an exasperated sigh) to physical (a hand placed on a partner’s thigh) to direct, verbal (“hey come over”). We send bids in many ways in romantic and platonic contexts, but romantic bids are perhaps the more confusing if interest can be perceived as one-sided or unmet. I assume for friendship, you’ll see each other more than once and you can get multiple at-bats before you realize that friendship is not meant to be.

In early dating, especially in online dating where so much context is collapsed or missing, bids to determine interest can be confusing. In gay dating, primarily online, you have apps that require dual interest signals (you both swipe right on Tinder, you return a like on Hinge) and apps that do not (Grindr, other hookup apps).

If you’re a gay man online, you’re constantly trying to assess if this person is actually interested in you or just making conversation online. One might think: if they are speaking to me, they must be interested in me. But I assure you that is just not always the case so gay men often develop a filter or system to figure out what each message means: a bid to connect or exploration or satisfying boredom.

Closed Loop Conversations

A closed conversation loop or bid usually has a clearer structure: open question, back and forth conversation, and an end point. Think of it as similar to a tennis match where points roll up to games which roll up to sets which roll up to matches.

Once a point is answered, a new point is raised by either side. At some point if you realize one side is doing all of the raising of points, you might decide the interest in one-sided and disengage. If you’re the only person hitting back the ball, you’re not longer playing tennis with a partner, you’re playing solo.

It is very possible I’m predisposed to this type of conversation expectation because I like structure, clarity, and direct communication. If there are no responses from the other side, I just stop. But in the case of the men who gave me feedback, there were never any new points raised. The conversational flow seemed to resolve without any new pick up.

The man who told me “have a good trip in DC!” seemed like he had nothing else to say. Was I supposed to come back to the conversation and tell him how my trip was unsolicited? Was I supposed to check in with him and ask how he was doing? He was already miles away from where I was staying, what reasonable expectation could he have had that I would follow up if we were never going to see each other in person?

I infer what I assume are closing gestures in conversation and mentally move on. I think: I just ended my serve, now it is yours. Or if there is nothing else to cover in conversation, what is there to pick up? The weather has come, rained out the match and we both are going home.

Alas, I would learn that what works in email culture at work, transactional exchanges where two parties are effectively negotiating, etc is not universal!

Open / Continuous Conversations

I had to turn to my good friend, GenAI, to understand the disconnect. I really struggled to understand what other parties expected from me. And I was shocked to learn a few things. In fairness, the first suitor did explain to me that normally people pick up the conversation the next day with a pulse check or getting the temperature with a friendly check in. Again, all very, very insightful for me to learn.

An open/continuous conversation loop prioritizes continuity and connection a way that is less rigidly structured. Messaging is not a game of tennis, but rather a game of pickup basketball or another game where the tally is not really as structured as point-game-set-match. The conversational thread has an openness that can always be returned to, a plate that remains warm but never fully cools.

In this conversational model, the “rules” are not actually as clear of who does what. Or maybe they are but I never learned those rules. I think I grew up with very tit-tat, this-for-that which is indeed how transactions flow. But that model is not how my platonic or familial conversations always flow. I do not mind double or triple text friends. I will tell you a million of my thoughts and if I think we are solid, I do not think about the back and forth of a tennis match.

The Disconnect

I will try to avoid ranking models of conversation, but I have defaults for different stages of connection and familiarity based on my experience and how I operate. It was not until recently that I’ve had to consider maybe I have been sending unintended signals this whole time.

While I would love to say you should be with people who communicate as you do, being a gay man is not easy. You might deal with shame and hits to your self-esteem from family, church, or other forms of trauma resolved or otherwise. And there is also this very strange dynamic in gay hookup apps where people assume that because they think you’re hot, everyone must also think the same and therefore you are in high demand. It is this very odd creation of scarcity and taking yourself out of the game that I’ve found myself at times doing when I think “there’s no way this man would even respond to me.” And in my early gay years I would even say that explicitly. It is why I find it so…interesting when men who are much older than I was are saying it this late in the game.

My Path Forward

That said, I also think from what I’ve seen on TikTok and other forms of media that we have to sometimes tell people how we want to be loved. We cannot expect our manual to have a perfect reader out there who can do exactly as we need. And in the instances where that has been the case of someone who knows me fully well, they are too old to be with me, they are losing themselves to overly accommodate me, or I feel that the imbalance in the dynamic actually unattractive.

And before you say “you just can’t win,” think about someone who wants an equal. I want the creative abrasion that comes from figuring each other out. But I think online platforms have allowed a lot of hiding or covering of ourselves in ways that meeting people in person do not allow. I like to feel held and hold, I desire romantic egalitarianism. I am fully divested for romantic hierarchies.

My assumption is that we have each learned our ways of communicating, connecting, and relating through family, friends, and work. And it is probably the case that I’ve surrounded myself with mostly closed loop communicators or was punished at work for not being closed loop. So your friends from work or school become the reinforcement of your style and we drift into our pockets of preference.

Why any of this matters is that I like and prefer Black men who understand and appreciate the struggles of working class people. My communication style and the apps that I choose (the Black ones) suggest I actually need to do the work to be flexible to understand this communication style if I continue to desire Black romantic partnership.

I still remember the therapist I had in 2016/2017 telling me that I could not “wait until I was perfect” to then enter a relationship. He said: people grow, develop and heal in relationship.

So I am now accepting that what I think of as completion could be viewed as silence or disinterest. But it is also important for me to ensure that whatever labor comes from a continuous loop conversations is not draining. I can allow myself to make accommodations within reason. After all, the first suitor that I mentioned, we spent about 4 months getting to know each other despite different styles. And it was a worthwhile experience because I learned more about what I like and do not like, where my line of “this is not enough” or “this is too much” is, and many more ways of self-improvement.

Where do you land?

Even if you’re married or off-the-market, answer how you recall or you assume. If it depends, drop some context in the comments below!

Does this feel familiar or like something you’ve heard from your friends on the dating scene?

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If you feel like commenting or reaching out because something resonated, please feel empowered to do so, I write for connection and reaction. I have loved when friends have shared what connected for them or given me new perspectives.

In this final April 2026 post, I wanted to dedicate this reflection to honoring my mother’s memory by introducing you to her. My mother loved meeting my friends and she heard names and saw pictures. I remember finding a photo album of pictures I had texted her of me and my friends that she had printed out.

Below are the questions people sent to me.

One of the things I loved most about my mother was her follow through, dedication to quality/high standards, and showing up. If my mother told me she would come see me, she did it. If she told me she would come to help me clean up my apartment, she made she it was never half done. She was incredibly quality-oriented at work, leading the state audit of the social services agency where she worked as the secretary for 30+ years.

When she went to small claims court, the judge complimented her on making 3 copies of all of her materials in folders that were organized. Even in her passing, she gave me the passcodes, passwords, and details I needed to be able to execute in her absence. She maintained a file cabinet at home where each of her children and grandchildren had a folder with our birth certificates, old school concert programs, and health records. When we had to go through her stuff, it was so easy to just parcel out who needed what.

I think my favorite quality of my mother’s was that she was a cycle breaker. If she thought her own childhood was not ideal, then she made sure to make sure I did not follow in the same path. For example, she was “the smart” family member in our extended family. It meant she was expected to type up, create, and print programs for events; run administrative errands for my grandmother (and her sisters’) social club and fish fry events; and generally serve as the replacement for what Google and AI is today.

My mother was the useful, self-directed, highly responsible child. Over burdened in too many ways. She refused to allow the extended family to leverage me in the same way. No one in my extended family or hometown has really known where I live, work, how much I make, etc. My mother was a guardian of my information to make sure no one could over utilize me. And at the same time she was also hesitate to leverage my knowledge for her own benefit. It is just one of those things where I was so lucky to have a parent who refused to repeat the cycle of harm she experienced.

My mom was a person of the people. Her job was to answer phones and greet people. She also served as a union delegate because she does not know how not to surface a problem and come with a solution. For better or worse (in corporate), she was an advocate. She was an advocate for me who I always knew was in my corner no matter what.

She would always say: did you try your hardest? She never told me to work harder or do more, I was just influenced by her standards and what I think she believed I was capable of doing. It’s hard to think you can’t when you know there’s someone who believes you can do ANYTHING. I am similar, I believe in people and their capacity as a manager, friend, romantic partner. I just think effort and a high bar is what allows people to thrive.

My mother had terrible boundaries. She was too useful, too helpful, and too optimistic about other people. I would listen to her talk about her “friends” at work and think “these people are not your friends.” And I would tell her as such. With my uncle, brother, and grandmother, I think that my mother gave too much for the sake of family. I remember being shaped by seeing how much she wanted to be accepted warmly by her first cousins (they all grew up in the same town) and aunts. I resolved to never put “family” above my pride or needs.

I want to say a few years ago I read Nedra Tawwab Glover’s book about boundaries. I told my mom about it. She read it. And we discussed it chapter by chapter over time. And towards the end of her life she finally started to put her foot down. At work, she told them she would not let them leverage the worksheet she created to pass the state audit (which if passed meant a 2-year green light instead of just a 1-year one) because they would not give her a raise. She removed herself from a meeting saying “I’m the only non-management person (she was in a union), I don’t think this conversation pertains to me.”

My mom started to put her foot down towards the end of her life and after reading the book at work and in her personal life. She started to put up better boundaries with other family members who were highly extractive. I would have loved for her to do it sooner and more, but I’m happy she did it before she left this domain.

My mother was also super reactive at times. Never with me really. I think I learned her moods but I also did not try to upset her or show up incompetent. She would react in ways that felt disproportionate and I would say “but if I said the same thing you wouldn’t react that way.” But I later learned that my mom was just always being squeezed and her reactions were not to “the thing” but a building up of the things. Either she tried to address it or she stayed in places where she was not respected. I can’t fault her for that, but I would have loved if she believed in herself as much as other people did.

I also would have loved for her to view her 50s as a chance to reset and go live her life for herself and no one else. But she was just afraid at times I think to “start over” but I really wanted her to go and live her best life. For her to be so busy and thriving that she would tell me, my brother and everyone else in her life that she couldn’t because she had her own stuff going on.

My mother loved to dance and crack jokes. I think that’s something we both shared and were like two sides of the same coin bickering because of how similar we are. Being super organized, analytical, and solutions-oriented is something I think I got from my mother and her alone. She had to get things done or they wouldn’t get done.

So I learned (or was acclimated into) her very outcome-orientation. She would say “you can complain until you’re blue in the face” as a way to say “what are you going to do to fix your own situation.” As a result, I’ve just never been a complainer who didn’t have a solution at the ready.

To see us together is to see two spirits that just got each other even when we were in battles of attrition. Whew, one thing she used to do was the silent treatment. That’s where I learned how easy it is to just stop talking to people. I did not realize until reading more about it that that strategy is not healthy, but we had one really long stretch of not speaking to each other because we are both so stubborn.

I think my mother loved to see her children and grandchildren happy. She was so great at making our lives happier and easier. I know that’s what put a smile on her face. She also loved music. She would show up to pick me up from the train station or from after practice BUMPING the music. She loved good R&B from all generations.

Omg, she also loved a nautical theme. She decorated the outside of where we lived with nautical accoutrement despite us living in the projects (townhouses with very small yards). She loved the preppy aesthetic. If she could have dressed me my whole life, I’d only have rugby shirts, nice sweaters, and other clothes that connote sharp, classic style.

My mother did not like incompetence or poorly laid plans. That was never really a problem for me because same. But one thing she did not enjoy was faulty logic. Do not give her excuses or explanations that did not make sense.

My girl loved to window shop and deal hunt. She never met a coupon she didn’t clip and save. Never met a shopping strip be it Old Navy, Chicos, Macys etc where she would not go and peruse for ideas or just to experience.

She also loved coming to the city (NYC) and just walking around. I remember I took her to DC and NOLA (just the two of us) and she loved the times when I would be asleep and she could just go explore on her own. I think she loved seeing the world and what was different with a few anchors.

My mom always thought I was so “strong” for what I would say, speaking up for myself or doing in terms of solo travel. And that’s funny because she set the foundation for me to be that way. So I think she would a tiny bit scared for me, but really proud of me doing what she maybe wished she had the courage to do. So I think she actually appreciated that I allowed myself to be less constrained than she was.

In terms of naughty or silly, she was so chill when I was an adult. As long as it was “safe,” then she was fine with it. But we laughed together a lot. So I never would have needed to hold much back unless I was truly embarrassed and wouldn’t tell even a close friend. If someone was going to find a reason to help me feel less bad about something, it was my mom.

My mom wanted to be a math teacher. Or a lawyer. But growing up on non-diverse Long Island, she was discouraged from most of her ambitions. But she was a teacher and lawyer for me at least.

Similar to above, I would have loved for her to live her life more after I graduated college and gone and seen the world. And discovered her own strength that everyone else saw.

My mom’s way of showing love was different for everyone I think. With me, it was being present fully and genuinely. I cannot recall my mother not paying attention to what I was saying. I don’t have one memory of her ignoring me or me leaving a conversation feeling unheard. She may not have understood what I meant, but she always heard everything I had to say.

I think my mom was also great at just randomly doing things for me that I did not know that I needed. It could be a care package with hats, gloves, fuzzy socks, hand warmers, etc when I was in college or as an adult. It could be a new button down or a beard bonnet. Her gift giving was so great. Now there was a period where she would buy me stuff and I had to tell her I did not want it. She used to say “you can just keep it in the back of your closet” and I would say “no”.

So we came up with a few rules. Everything had to be returnable. I did not like certain colors or patterns for stripes or cuts. I just hated feeling obligated to keep things I knew I would not wear. She got so great at getting me gifts after I was an adult. It was never tied to my birthday or Christmas exclusively, but when she thought I needed it. So I always felt like her gifts came from a place of deep thought instead of performance or circumstances of the holidays. And I would be sure to tell her which of the things she brought me were well received by other people (e.g. work shirts) or had amazing utility like the electric blanket she brought me.

But ultimately I think how I felt the most loved by my mother was in the time she gave to me. Every interaction with my mother as we improved our relationship was quality. She was committed to being a good mother. She was just great. The gap that I feel is from how next to no one in my life is a consistent presence. No partner, no children, or even a company that has lasted more than 4 years. It is really hard to lose a stabilizing anchor.

My grandmother used money to show love. And that never resonated with me. So of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, I never received love in the way she preferred to express it. What I did enjoy in the time I had with my grandmother was watching her cook and bake. We had such great conversations about something she valued and treated as a craft. Cooking was important to her and I got to witness it from an early age up until about 10 when we left the big family house.

My grandmother showed her love for the community and God by cooking for the church weekly. I respected her commitment to faith and her obligations to pay tithes and then give out of her wallet separately to cook. She felt her ability to cook was God-given, so she fed his children.

My grandfather showed his love for me in a way that still comforts me. He would come pick me up in middle school, parts of high school and maybe elementary school. He was come to the house and drive me the 0.25 or 0.5 miles to the bus stop and sit with me in his truck. He didn’t talk a ton but he always had on the quiet storm. He showed his love with his presence and consistency. If he said he was going to do something, there was never an excuse.

My grandpa used to put up the Christmas decorations at my grandparents house, fix things on my mom’s car, detail my grandmother’s green Cadillac. I guess he was an acts of services person. Between him and my mom, they were my grandmother’s executive and operations office to make her social events executable. He used to bring home leftovers from work of dessert trays or sandwiches.

Oh and for graduations and any big events, he always insisted he take us for suit shopping. That man ensured we looked good, matched our ties and suits and shoes. He was a sharp dresser and I think his sense of cooooordinating with a partner is something I hope to recreate when the time comes.

My mother and my maternal grandfather are the two people I think about the most when I think about what it means to be loved as me, fully. No conditions or edits required of me.

My grandfather was a good partner to my grandmother in my eyes, though he was not a great father in the before times. I am thankful I got the improved version of him. I think he also did a good job of defending his family when his more colorist siblings and mother had issues with my grandmother and his children. A light skin man who we can vouch for!

We didn’t have any special names for each other. I have an internal family name, but that was not particular to me and my mom.

I think my mother valued her children most. She would always say as long as she could provide a roof, her children would have one. She was a fearless mama bear for her children. I think she valued that she still had a relationship with both of her children despite how different we are. She withstood more than I ever would, but she took her job as a mother seriously. She saw her own childhood and made sure her children would leave this earth feeling 110% loved, heard, supported, and affirmed. She was always going to be in our corner.

I am so proud of my mother for many things. I really have to look inside myself and be reminded that all of the good qualities I have are because she planted them there. Do you know how wonderful it is to see yourself in the mirror and realize your mother made all of that possible? Every flower that bloomed is from the seed she planted, watered, sang to, nurtured.

That means not only was she a good mother but she was also someone who valued growth. My mom made me believed “if they wanted to, they would.” And sadly that’s just not true of most people. My mother wanted us to have a better relationship, so she did what she needed to make it happen. Any feedback I gave her, she eventually took it in.

I remember being so shocked one time when I was hedging to avoid hurting her feelings and she said “get it out and we’ll clean it up later.” My mother had become proactive in wanting us to just get along really well and if it meant I could speak more plainly, she put her ego aside.

On balance, my mother wanted us to have a 100% perfect relationship without any friction or tears. And I respect why she wanted that. But our frictions were truly from a SUPER connected dynamic. She didn’t really always understand we butted heads because we were so aligned on the meaningless stuff. We fussed over the margins.

My mother made so much of herself with so few resources. I was so awed by how much she made happen of her own accord. Anything you think of my capability, my mother did it with far fewer resources and even more systemic barriers in her way.

One mundane memory that comes to mind is my mother’s focus on productivity in spite of it all. I had asked her to come over to help me organize and tidy up my apartment. I wanted us to chit chat and have a good ole, sit down kiki. And she was like “No you can sit, but I’m going to get started washing these dishes and you can put on Anita Baker, and we can talk.”

And that was not her being passive aggressive or dismissive. She was going to listen to every single thing I had to say while helping me. She would even let me take a nap from being tired (really overwhelmed) while she worked. I had a dishwasher but she said the dish washing for soothing for her.

My mother tended to my brother and his children a lot and often times felt like I didn’t ask for much. So the way she showed up for me as an adult was even more meaningful. Her apologies were always in changed in behavior, I never needed the words.

If you feel like commenting or reaching out because something resonated, please feel empowered to do so, I write for connection and reaction. I have loved when friends have shared what connected for them or given me new perspectives.

When I reflect on who my mother was and what she meant to me, I have so many memories that capture our dynamic. I remember spending my 36th birthday in New Orleans with my mother in the last year of her life. I remember conversations we had in front of others who thought we were peers because my mother looked younger than her actual age and because of the way we respected each other. I also remember a childhood where my curiosity was shaped, cultivated, and reinforced.

Throughout most of my childhood I only wanted three types of toys: moving, building, or learning.

In the ideal world, most of my toys fit more than one of those categories. My moving toys included remote controlled cars and matchbox-style cars on “electrified” tracks that delighted me to no end. My building toys included K’Nex and Erector sets: I can still visualize and feel the hard plastic snapping or cool metal of the four and five-hole metal pieces that were the building blocks of varied constructions. My learning toys included Puzz3D, Brain Quest, and VTech “laptops.” I have so many fond memories of building Big Ben, trying to master The White House, and successfully mastering the puzzle “toy” that allowed you to build horizontally and vertically!

Each Christmas my mother would have us write a list of what we wanted. We’d turn to the Toys R’ Us catalog, circling items and putting them on our list. Because my birthday is one month after Christmas and I never had a super long list, I almost always received most of my list eventually. And if I did not, I honestly cannot remember being upset about not getting toys. I was so content with the moving, building, and learning toys that I already had, it made each new yearly addition icing on top of an already perfect cake.

At the core, all of the toys I had were learning toys: I learned about mechanics, physics, trivia, spatial thinking, creativity, and more. Childhood, or at least mine, was a sea of endless learning and curiosity that started with my mother. Her life’s dream was to be a math teacher, but that ambition never fully came to fruition. Instead, I was the lucky recipient of a teacher-hearted parent who made growing up feel like the perfect classroom.

From an early age, my mother cultivated a behavior of learning as a practice. I don’t recall my mother answering questions for me. It was not because she could not, but she did something much more cunning: she used the Jedi mind trick of teaching me to self-solve. I don’t recall my mother ever tiring of my questions, instead she just turned those inquiries into clear movement: either to the big place of books or the proximal reference hub.

As a very young child, I remember many trips to the library that continued through high school. I still remember “Tiki Tiki Timbo” as one of the books we read together and sitting in the library. I also remember from childhood through my high school years, my mother was always willing to come with me to the library to search for books. Whether it was for a book report, preparation for state testing, or just reading for leisure. I developed a respect for the library: I’ve never not had a public library card in all of my years of living.

If we were not at the library, my mother was directing me to a set of reference books that became the early sources of my wonder. Instead of directly answering questions, my mother would frequently tell me I should look it up. We had a red, super heavy dictionary with finger cutouts (known as index notches) that I remember turning to to randomly look up words. But the love of my reference life was the set of encyclopedia that was green and off-white, a hard bound set that had some letters thicker than others in the 20+ book set. I remember it like it was yesterday, there was a diagram of the nervous system or some internal body system that was a plastic overlay. I had no clue what most of those things were, but I loved to just look at the images and read for the sake of expansion and curiosity.

I think I fell in love with learning for the sake of learning. I developed a belief that there was always an answer to any question. And that even if you did not have a specific question there was just so much to be learned by opening up a page and feasting with your eyes and brain.

One of my most favorite Christmas memories involved a VTech laptop, the hunt for a toy that seemed hopeless, and my mother solidifying her place as a superhero.

For this particular Christmas, there was a new laptop that I saw in the Toys R’ Us catalogue. These mini laptops allow children to practice spelling, learn new vocabulary, and do basic math problems. I think this was sometime in the late 1990s when I was somewhere between and eight and ten years old (no, there were not connected to the internet because the internet did not exist back then). In some households, this could read as punishment, but for me this was heaven.

For this year, I was so hopeful each time we walked into any of the Long Island Toys R’ Us locations in search of the VTech Smart Start. Each visit yielded the same outcome: out of stock. I was disappointed after each visit, but I had so many other learning toys already that it was more disappointment in looking for a rare treasure — a bonus that would only enrich your life but not lessen it in any material way. I cannot tell you if it was two stores or more, but I was certain all hope was lost for that particular treasure. I still had my trivia games, my building and moving toys. Life was going to be just fine.

When it came time to open up Christmas gifts that year, I was in state of pure awe and admiration. My mother the superhero did the impossible. Of course she did, she was my mother.

My mother, the brilliant and resourceful woman that she is, told me that she would call each of the stores to see which ones had the laptops in stock. And she purposefully took me to the ones that were out of stock. At that age, this is like hearing your mother singlehandedly played all members of a heist film like Ocean’s Eleven. She had already purchased the laptop, it sitting in her trunk on each visit we went to on this journey.

It had been an elaborate ruse all along. I just remembering thinking: wow, this woman is so smart, what can’t she do. Even if I never got that laptop, I still would have loved my mother because of how much effort she showed in taking me to each of those stores to look for it. It was never about the gift itself when I really think about what my mother means to me. It has always been about how she has shown up for me, and how her love has always been active. It’s never been in the words, but always in her actions.

My mother’s love for me was teaching me to be a critical thinker, to be someone who could always self-direct if I was uncertain, to be curious, and to appreciate a good hunt. In this case the hunt was for a particular laptop, but that desire to hunt for the truth and treasure in my adult life looks like the satisfaction at figuring out a tough coding problem, or figuring out a customer insight.

When I reflect on my mother’s love for me I am reminded of a few things.

She never had to threaten me or take away a learning toy from me. Learning was not something that was a negotiating chip: it was just purely for my advancement. I still remember learning how to spell s-a-t-e-l-l-i-t-e from that laptop. Imagine your every positive memory of learning and curiosity so tenderly tied together by your mother and what they can do for how you value knowledge.

I never had a want for material things even though some of those material things were conduits to me learning more. I could always tell my mother what I learned, show her what I built, or just talk about what was on my heart or mind. As I sit here thinking about it in this very moment, learning was actually connectedness and quality time with my mother. It was also the effort to care and invest in others. The way I engage others and manage people and teams is fully informed these foundations and principles: people should want to enjoy the lesson for their own benefit.

And I think it took me writing this reflection to understand that my mother remains with me each and every time I learn something new, express curiosity about others, or take the steps to figure out a problem.