All the hardest, coldest people you meet were once as soft as water.

And that’s the tragedy of living.

In the last couple of decades or so, something has happened to the American dream. I don’t quite know what it is, and it’s still not very clear in my mind. Confusion has replaced patriotism. The intellect has replaced love. If something doesn’t make money, no one is interested. Everything is for sale. Emotions are sold. Sex is sold. Everything is sex. Cars, women, clothes, your face, your hands, your shoes! Look at the ads, at television. My emotions aren’t for sale. My thoughts can’t be bought. They’re mine. I don’t want movies that sell me something. I don’t want to be told how to feel.

I often hear black girls complain that their hair is difficult to control, and it’s precisely because we are not meant to control it.

I have always found that jeans hurt my body with waistlines digging into my stomach as I try to exhale.

T shirts that cut into my arms, bras that dig into my flesh leaving scars that remain today.

We were not the architects of this system, of course these things won’t fit us when they come from people who refuse to acknowledge that we exist. We know this because we see their runways, their print ads, their magazines. We are not wrong.

Beige is not the definition of ‘nude’, my hair does not need to be restrained, it needs to be liberated. My hair isn’t so thick, I didn’t go through puberty too early, my mama is not ‘plus sized’ - these statement all use an invented standard of whiteness and then define me in relation to that standard.

Fuck mainstream. Fuck counter culture and sub culture. We are our own mainstream. We are our own culture.

Fuck standards and constructions of normal. Nothing ever grew by being measured. We grow by being nurtured and affirmed for who we are as we are. Standards are always relative.

-Kim Katrin Crosby