I Write What I Like

Author’s Note: The Pivot Diaries was a series of personal essays about reinvention: leaving, burnout, faith, migration, healing, ambition, womanhood, and becoming.

These essays were also the beginning of questions that continue to shape my work: about gender, power, capitalism, spirituality, identity, race and place. The personal was never just personal — it was a way of thinking through larger systems, stories, and structures in real time.

This Substack has since evolved into Thinking About, but I’ve kept a small selection of these essays public because they remain foundational to my thinking and my voice. This archive is not separate from the work that follows — this is where it all began.

“I think you’re sharing too much.”

“Can I ask a few more questions about what you’ve shared?”

“I had no idea you are so sensitive.”

“You’re so strong.”

……a small sampling of the feedback I’ve received about The Pivot Diaries series over the last six months.

When Steve Biko wrote I Write What I Like, he was speaking to the African continent about colonialism, using his words as weapons. Biko believed liberation began in the mind. That belief is my starting point.

Here’s why I write:

I write because feminist work is not just macro— it’s micro. It’s about the individual days of our lives; the meaning we make out of our memories, the lessons we gather from the highs and lows and all the spaces between… the ways women teach each other to survive and to thrive.

I write because I have skin in the game of women’s liberation. Because patriarchy has taught so many of us silence. Because freedom often begins when a woman dares to tell the truth about her own life and refuses to apologize for existing in full color.

I write as recompense; because I promised God that if I made it out of the darkness, I would show others the light.

I write to pay it forward— because if I knew then what I know now, perhaps I would have made different choices; because I want more women to know the possibilities that are open to them; to know it’s never too late and it’s always okay to change your mind and change course; because I believe if more women told the truth —the whole truth, so help us God— more of us would be free.

I write because I refuse to swallow secrets and because I don’t believe in shame. I write, not for spectacle, but for salvation: each sentence a small rebellion against societal cages; each confession a key turning toward freedom.

I write because it heals me. Because this is how I work out my own salvation. Because sometimes, writing is how I pray.

But most of all, I write because I can. Because I want to. Because, in the immortal words of the icon that is Shereé Whitfield: Who gon’ check me, boo?

I write what I like.