Unleashing: Cocoa Butter & Hair Grease
As y’all know, I am a sex and relationship therapist. But within that my focus is on helping women, Black women specifically, to find their authentic selves and to unleash that bit on the world.
We are often required to show up in ways that are inauthentic to us. We are often apologetic about our very existence and also about the choices that we would make and not make. We are taught to be apologetic. We are taught to LIVE apologetic lives. When we are not interested in being pursued by someone, we indulge them because we have been taught to do so. This has added to toxic masculinity because men and masculine people have not been taught to hear and accept a person's “NO.” So they feel entitled and now we feel our personal safety is at risk. We have been taught to tone down how Black we are, lest we make white folk uncomfortable. This has added to the notion of the “rightness” of white supremacy and is why we NEED things like the CROWN Act and the laws that came before it to end segregation and race based discrimination. WE have been complicit in our own genocide. We have helped to create a need for that by not showing up as who we are and allowing white people to either get used to it or move on.
This toning down and learning how to get along in order to be “rewarded” for our work by the white others have led certain Black folk to think that if they continue to behave in these ways there are financial and safety rewards to be reaped. We have created the need for respectability politics as we know them today and the policing that goes on in our community by not accepting that we can and should be different from those who have benefited from white supremacy and that we should love who and how we are anyway, and show up as that.
The therapist in me compels me to write that showing up as you are HARD. That being authentic and naked in your truth, in your authenticity, can be incredibly freeing but can also feel entirely foreign. It’s like a woman who has worn a big tote bag all her life, filled to the brim. When you begin to unpack the bag, it gets lighter, and now you have to get used to that. Initially it feels so much better because you are carrying a lot less. But what about when you downgrade the size of the bag? What about when you realize that the things you have deemed “essential” are not actually essential for where you are going and the work you are about to do. When you leave the bag at home and travel with wallet, phone and keys ONLY. Now that is truly something foreign. Now you are out and walking differently without a big bag as part of your shield and arsenal. Now you have to be in those spaces without using the bag as a crutch. Now those same places you have frequented feel differently because YOU are different in that moment. You can feel naked and exposed. You can feel like you have forgotten something or that something is missing, when in reality you are present, as such NOTHING is missing.
Some folk can be mistaken to think that as a therapist that speaks, preaches, and does therapy on this, that I or other therapists who talk about it, have it all together. WE DON'T. I am a therapist with a therapist because I, too need support and an ear who has no real stakes in my life. Being myself is hard. Showing up as me can be scary. Every time I am asked to keynote or do a workshop, there is a certain level of nervousness that comes over me, because I know that the presentation I have created is a version of the truth: mine. I am inviting people to see the world through my first gen Nigerian-American, Black women, natural hair, dark skin, PhD and licensed eyes. My eyes will never be the eyes of another, because no 2 people have exactly the same experience, even if they are twins and grow up in the same household. Because I have my own experiences, I know that when I talk, type, post, blog, etc. I am showing a little more of who I am. I know that I am a little more exposed. It ultimately asks me to either be ME or to be cultivated, sculpted, not truly me version of me. Making a conscious decision to show up authentically has required a shift.
When you pretend/lie about who you are and are inauthentic about how you show up, you have to remember all the lies you have told. You have to continue to show up in the way that folk would expect because of the lies in how we present yourself, the way we speak, what we say, how we show up etc. But when you show up as you, there is nothing to keep track of because you have truly shown up.
When I first started in private practice, I wanted to be me, but I figured no one would want to work with me if I was truly myself. So in the beginning I wore suits to do therapy. I made sure to wear button ups, nice slacks, etc, no matter how uncomfortable I was. I made sure to make sure my hair was pulled back just a bit with a band or something. In suppressing my hair, and dressing up my darker skin in white supremacist ideas of “professional,” I was suppressing myself just a bit so I could show up. When I had an opinion on something, I wouldn’t say what I was truly thinking and then explain a little, I would go for the middle. That was EXHAUSTING! Not showing up as you, but showing up as some wacky representative of yourself is exhausting. My clothes didn’t make me a professional, my education and training did. My hair didn’t prove my professionalism, it proved that I could give myself a headache by wearing too tight headbands.
So I changed. I slowly started to integrate more t-shirts into my wardrobe. I often traded my itchy “work pants” for jeans. I wore sneakers and sandals, let my hair do what it was gonna do (but still be moisturized), I let ME shine through. When I did that, the change was amazing! It’s almost like it gave my clients permission to be more authentic, too. My comfort with myself and how I showed up, allowed more space for my clients to explore their own comfort with being themselves. When I was myself giving a keynote or doing a workshop, the people in the room showed up. Now some will like you and some won't but you can’t control that. I showed up as myself at a workshop on self care and the response in the room was unbelievable. Why? Because THEY SHOWED UP AUTHENTICALLY TOO!
Remember that if you choose to fake the funk folk will expect you to keep that same energy. Being you is not a crime. Now, I am not saying that every time you will show up as 100% yourself. I know I haven’t! Sometimes we go back to the big tote bag with all the stuff in it. I am saying, though, the more you show up as you, the more foreign that big bag that becomes armor and armory is cumbersome and you wonder why you wear it. The more you show up as you, the more you get to see who you are when you are out in the world.
Most importantly, the more you show up as you, the more the world benefits. Showing up 100% authentically you are part of the reason Cocoa Butter & Hair Grease exists. We examine the past and then we look forward. We love US from the inside out. We heal our hurts, and then we give space for our skin tones to shine exactly as they are. We embrace ourselves and that helps us to change the language we use and the way we feel about our tresses.
Welcome to the Cocoa Butter & Hair Grease space. Let’s embark on a deeper self-love journey together!