One of the reasons I go out so much is to be a better writer. I never know what will inspire me and I keep my mind and ears open to all manner of situations in the hopes that I will get a good thought off of it.
The fight party on Saturday was a source of great inspiration for my writing. I was talking with Halle, and she was telling me about her new beau. He’s apparently gorgeous and when she’s with him, she notices a lot of women checking for him. They look at him, then look at her and she gets the feeling that a lot of folks wonder why he’s with her.
I looked at her like she was stupid. She’s beautiful, has dimples so deep you could save water in them if ever there was a drought. She’s not a size six and her tummy isn’t flat and her hair doesn’t hang half-way down her back. But evidently, she’s a dime to her dude if he’s with her. If there’s anything I’ve learned from hanging out with an all-guy crew, it’s the average man doesn’t hand out the girlfriend title to just any woman who wants the position.
She was telling me how she was taking the day off to prep herself for his upcoming birthday dinner - hair, nails, make-up the works. And I got that she was doing it so she felt fly, so I let it ride. What I wanted to tell her in all my newly acquired relationship guru wisdom is that none of that really matters.
I think women –myself included—get so caught up in impressing the man we’re dealing with that we forget to be the woman we were when he met us. We’re always trying to change and switch up and keep it fresh, which is good. But we forget to keep the same things-- like confidence-- that attracted the man to us in the first place.
He approached her because he saw something he liked. Whether it was the size of her hips or the aura that surrounds her, or both. My guess is that he came over because she is a confident woman with her shit together. (She’s pretty, but I don’t give much credence to that. New York is full of beautiful people.) She’s far from stuck up, but she carries herself like she is a prize—which she is. And I hated that she was letting looks from other women make her doubt that she belonged on her man’s arm. She was trying to keep her man interested by getting done up, but I think she’d be better off just staying who she is—a confident, beautiful woman… with mad swag.
Her comment struck me because I’m dealing with a similar issue. I hang out with someone who knows me well and occasionally we walk that fine line between friendship and more than friends. It’s the case that as I begin to think of him as something more than “just” a friend, I’m switching up. Instead of just saying what I would usually say or doing what I would usually do, I’m questioning everything I say and do before I do it. Instead of just being the me that he came to like, I’ve turned to this weird place of trying to give the best impression of me. I’m self-censoring when being off-kilter and unpredictable is one of my best traits—-albeit depending on who you ask.
I know what I should do-— just be me. But it’s not as easy as it sounds when you want someone to keep liking you. I realized what was happening and I had to break out some Erykah to re-up my swag, re-enhance my belief in the phenomenal force that I am (See? It’s working.) There’s nothing like singing in the mirror, “You’re booty might be bigger, but I can still pull your n*gga” to get your mind back where it’s supposed to be.
I hope Halle reads this and does the same.