December's Letter: Part Two

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“Why can’t things just stay the same?” I shouted helplessly, defeated at the sight of my favorite park in Los Angeles, completely destroyed. This tiny slither of park in Baldwin Hills became my first LA love during my initial trip. A few hours from the airport, the boy who broke my heart and I were driving around Leimert Park, a neighborhood that he believed I would love because of how Black it was, but that I hated because of how homophobic it also was. But this park, a tiny triangle in the middle of the Black Beverly Hills, was perfect. I remember lying in the grass with him and laughing–rolling on my back and clutching my body kind of laughter–until I was hoarse and red in the face. I remember a huge, stupid fight that we had in the car a few days later that caused me to storm off, slamming the door and walking into the night. I returned to this park for years after that initial visit, never passing through LA without at least spending a few hours reading a book at a table under a tree. And when the boy who broke my heart was officially out of my life I would go there to be near him, calling him from the air like a ghost. I would fantasize about him driving by, quietly walking up behind me, placing his hand on my back, sitting down beside me and apologizing for everything. I took my friends there and got pissed when one of them, who’d been ignoring my texts, pulled up with some random girl. I mourned a friend’s suicide there, had countless calls with my mama there, and cried more than I’ve cried in whole years of my life seated right there. So when I got out of the car the other day with my Substack Bestie AISHA MIRZA, I could barely believe my eyes. They had ruined it, scooped the guts out of the place and put monstrous concrete slabs and stone pavement everywhere for the gentrifiers to walk their dogs. And this wasn’t chic design, it was as if an elementary school child who wanted to become an architect won a contest to redesign my haven. Horrible, ugly, awful, painful.

But if I’m being honest, everything from those first years in LA, all the things that I’d been chasing and avoiding, had started to change. My beloved beach in Malibu had become nearly un-walkable after the eerie, post storm appearance of hundreds of thousands of sticks littering the grounds. The lifeguard’s tower had been removed and every time I’ve gone back over the last 15 months there’s been some kind of photoshoot happening around us. This tiny little undiscovered piece of the best part of our time together was in ruins.

Earlier this year, while missing him with an exceptionally pointed agony, I stalked his Instagram. I saw that he had cut off his locs and I was knocked into despondence. When we met he adored my locs; he loved them so much in fact that he wanted to dread his hair and wear it in the same style, so I connected him to my hairstylist. Over the entirety of our relationship I watched his beautiful hair flourish, often tending to his scalp myself. When it was over between us I scorched the earth of the hair salon like a maniac, forbidding my stylist to ever have us on the books on the same day. I asked her never to bring him up to me, but she always did. She was always so sad about how things had ended between us. His locs were an extension of our relationship, an outgrowth from our bond. Seeing him on Instagram, pretending to be happy, his long hair now a thing of the past, broke a new part of me, when I was so sure that there were no more new parts to break. And not only was I out of his life, he’d cut me out at the roots.

At the park I told Aisha an abridged version of our story. It’s always so painful to revisit the highs and lows of us. Talking about him led me back to pictures and videos of that time. The pictures we took at Tom’s for my 31st birthday, with his arms wrapped around me. The pictures of us during our hike up to the Hollywood sign. The picture of us on the beach, his head resting on my shoulder, my head on his. The picture in front of Manhattanville the morning I was leaving town to have a cottage-core week with the gays in Vermont. The video of him cooking me grits in my old apartment. The video of him sleeping on my couch and looking especially beautiful with his fake nose ring. And the last photo that I made of us, him in a navy blue suit and powder blue button up shirt, me in some random green situation, both of us wearing our neon green sunglasses from our first trip to LA before heading to dinner at Tartina. How unbelievably happy we were. And now I march toward another year without him in my life, another year of feeling ashamed that I cannot just move on.

The other night, my sweet friend Dart took me to the beach after dinner. I needed something visually romantic to pair with my first listen to SZA’s new album. When we arrived, I realized that it was the only other beach that the boy who broke my heart had taken me to. We sat in silence, listening to Crybaby on repeat and watching the planes zig zagging across the purple black sky. I cried softly, gulping in air arhythmically, the waves calmly lapping, more white noise than susurration. I was so grateful to be next to my beautiful friend who let me have this moment without words. I returned to my favorite memory of us, the boy who broke my heart and I, on the beach in Malibu. Him staring out toward the horizon, the sun ever-present in his eyes, and me staring up at him, helplessly in love. And as always, our eyes meet and we smile at each other.

The morning of the friends and family screening in Baltimore, I found out that I was approved for Mounjaro. Recently, at long last, I got some decent health insurance and I felt like it was time to try something more radical with my weight loss.

Over the years I’ve written publicly about my relationship to food and to my body. I started making self-portraits in 2016 to counter the endless erasure I felt and still feel out in the world. This body and I have had a long journey, but over the past two years all sorts of things have started to happen to it, all of which are directly related to obesity. I know so many people who are having great success on semaglutides like Ozempic and Mounjaro, so I started to think more seriously about it.

Back in 2022 my doctor, the Russian, who routinely squashed any probing questions I had about my health with a sharp and incisive, “you fat,” tried to get me to take Ozempic. However, she could barely explain what the hell it was. It was a “brand new” medication and I was too apprehensive. Sometimes I have deep regrets about turning it down as I would likely be in a different place had I started taking it back then.

As I’ve considered this measure and the lifestyle changes attached to it, I’ve been thinking a lot about my high school friend Myron. Myron was a very large kid and he was terribly kind. He was smart, well rounded, and had these big brown eyes, always buried behind a pair of smudgy wire framed glasses. Everybody liked Myron, the queer kids, the goths, the anime nerds, the dancers, the dope boys, the hot girls, and our group, a diverse sampling from each of the aforementioned cadres. Myron was a neutral zone, a person who could find something exciting and fascinating about anyone he spoke to. After we graduated high school, he got a job in the main office and remained there for ten years. Every time I returned for a visit he was right there, smiling that bright smile and offering his usual soft spoken encouragement. In the summer of 2020 he died of a heart attack. He was just a few months older than me. When I found out the news I was distraught. A video had started to make the rounds on Facebook, made a few weeks before his death. It was of Myron sitting on his front steps and singing a gospel song. He just wanted to spread joy during a chaotic time in the world. I watched that video over and over for days, memorizing the song, his gestures, internalizing his voice. After a while I saw myself in the video, dead from a heart attack at 30 years old. I wondered if that death was more noble than the darker one I’d been playing in the back of my mind for more than 18 years.

I attended his funeral a few days later. I was in and out in under five minutes. I just couldn’t. Besides, it was the height of the pandemic and it was a packed house. He wore bright, pastel blue and white. He appeared larger than he ever was in my memory, but that beautiful face was always the same, those big brown eyes now sewn shut. I placed my hand on his, told him that I loved him and that I was sorry, and then I rushed out. I barely made it into my Uber before collapsing into a fit of tears. A few weeks later I was enrolled in a program at Montefiore to have bariatric surgery.

For months I took classes, read books, and ticked boxes so that my insurance would approve the surgery, but I also heard horror stories about people losing their hair and dying from overeating after having one of the surgeries that permanently shrunk and rerouted the stomach. After a while I grew weary and backed out of the surgery.

And now there’s Ozempic.

The discourse around these weight loss drugs has often felt like too much to bear. The easy way out rhetoric, the focus on thin people with too much money who want to be thinner, public figures abusing this medication and sending the wrong message to young people--the “what about the children” method of shaming and manipulating a public consciousness is as old and tired as every other method of fear-mongering, but to stupid people on both sides, it’s evergreen. All of this is meant to create stigma and facilitate shame. In reality, people don’t want weight loss to be so easy and accessible, as accessible as effective healthcare can get in America. People don’t want it to be easier to lose weight because then they’d wonder why they themselves worked so hard, denied themselves so much. What will happen to their gym rat personalities if they can just drop weight with an injectable? Another layer of this is that people want, no, need to be able to see you struggle with weight, to see you suffering in the gym as a representation of their own anti-body goals, their own unruly example of what happens if they stop pushing themselves so hard. They need someone to humiliate and condescend to or the power dynamics of our world would collapse. In fact, that orange pile of shit’s senile, nepo-baby head of the FDA is debating the merits of these weight loss drugs as we speak. So this rhetoric, these shame-centric ideas could have real ramifications for the availability of these drugs.

For some reason my insurance denied my doctor’s initial request for Mounjaro. So, for a week I was on pins and needles, but then it was approved. There was a prescription waiting for me at CVS. I was so eager, borderline excited, but mostly nervous. Here was a very clear before-and-after waiting for me at the pharmacy. I have been fat for 30 years of my life. Over the past five years I’ve done the agonizing labor of reimagining a life where I never find romantic love, a life where the greatest love that feels possible and within the reach of even my imagination, is platonic. I have tried to settle into this idea, to love it into enoughness, when all the while suffocating the part of myself that is hungry for romance, desperate to find true love and have it reciprocated. All of this because I am fat, because fatness sometimes feels like all I am and all I can ever be. All of this because the evidence of my life and the lives of the other fat femmes that I know have been nearly barren when it comes to examples of healthy, romantic love. And now, a new possibility, a new song, a new future feels close at hand. And then, a few hours later, I received another email from my doctor, this one announcing that I have type two diabetes.

Later that evening, as the film about my life and my work played in the other room, I stood away in the distance and cried about this new reality that threatened to swallow me whole. I leaned my head against the window that looked out onto York Road and life went on as it always does. A dark-skinned man was pacing up and down the block in a ragged black coat, selling flowers. An elderly woman in puffy mittens and a tight gray bun struggled to get her grocery cart onto the bus. And I was there thinking about Myron.

I wondered if Myron had lived, just a bit longer, if he too would have been able to get on Mounjaro. Would it have saved his life? I wondered if this is what gay men who survived the AIDS crisis felt when the first effective, lifesaving medications received FDA approval. The life raft of it all, the survivors’ guilt. And to know that medications like Ozempic could have been made available 40 years ago punctuates this sense of unnecessary loss. As my voice wafted in faintly from the other room, reciting poems and prose about the boy that broke my heart, I imagined all the possible terrors to come. I imagined going blind from the diabetes. I thought about what would happen if I lost my foot or both of my feet. When the roar of applause began, the shouts and whistles from my dearest loved ones shocked me out of my grief state. I wiped my eyes and walked inside. I hadn’t told anyone about my diagnosis, I hadn’t even said the words aloud to myself. When I sat down for the Q+A so many beautiful questions emerged, distracting me from this complex mélange of gratitude and doom. However, one question in particular will live on in near infamy in my mind.

A white woman writer who had read a beautiful story nearly 30 minutes before, asked me about my body. Her question was, essentially, “You talk about your body in the film, honoring your body and photographing your body so that you don’t disappear. With the advent of Ozempic, a drug that could make so many people thin, I wondered if you had any thoughts about where we are in America with so many people leaning toward the same body?”

I was stunned.

I don’t think that this person meant any harm by asking this question. Over the past few weeks, I’ve gone over it again and again in my mind, trying to describe why it felt so offensive, wishing I’d answered it differently. Ultimately, I believe the question was meant in earnest, but was terribly inappropriate. As you can imagine, given the news of the day and my own pending weight loss journey, I felt like I’d been struck by lightning. My mother and grandmother were sitting right across from this woman. I hadn’t told my mother about my diabetes diagnosis and was trying to navigate whether or not I would. What I was planning to discuss with her was my upcoming weight loss. My mother comes from a generation of Black women who would assume that any gay person who loses a great deal of weight quickly was likely sick with AIDS. This is a gruesome and painful assumption, but one that makes sense given the history. I was planning to have a conversation with her soon and I already knew how she’d respond: “You are beautiful the way that you are and you better know it. But whatever you decide to do, just be safe.” So, when this woman asked me this question I really struggled. I don’t remember what I said in response. I did tell a half truth, saying that I was pre-diabetic (which was true, in my mind, less than 24 hours before). In essence, I said that these are diabetic medications, so critiquing people for taking a medication that would help them live longer and healthier lives is not something I would ever do. I also said that thinness is not aspirational and this I believe in full.

The following day, at a poetry reading in Baltimore, honoring the work of the Cave Canem poets, it seemed that I wasn’t the only person with diabetes on the brain. Four different poets had poems that featured talk of diabetes. One had a poem that was solely about it. My friend Tanya, who sat to my left and who I’d told about my diagnosis that morning, rubbed my knee at the first two mentions of the illness, a show of great love, support, and tenderness.

I’m still processing everything. I’ve been eating healthier over the past few weeks but slipped a bit during the lead up to Christmas. I’ve told most of my close girls and they’ve all been incredible.

The other morning, over brunch at Re/Creation with Erik and Michael, I told them about my new illness. I talked about my fears and my anxieties. I told them that I did believe that I would be able to change my eating habits but that what I was really struggling with was the fact that my body had criminalized eating sweets, the one vice that I had. I have never drank alcohol, I’ve never smoked or done any kind of drugs. I have had my moments of being a whore but otherwise I’ve endeavored toward safe and healthy sexual practices. The single thing - a latte here, a slice of cake there - that has brought me pleasure in a life of unquantifiable unhappiness, has now been outlawed by my own body. Banned. What a great shame. Erik, holding space for me as stoically and empathetically as one would expect of her, said, “You’re speaking about all of this with a lot of sadness and negativity. What is one thing that you’re excited about or looking forward to on this journey?” I paused, slightly singed by the question. I pondered for a moment and happened across a thought that nearly brought me to tears. Of all the things that I’m looking forward to on this weight loss journey, one possibility that shimmers brightly in mind is being able to cross my legs. I haven’t been able to cross my legs in nearly 25 years and back then, crossing them would have been read as too feminine. I have always loved and envied the chic, erudite folks who sit with their legs crossed. It’s such an elegant gesture that so many people understand as normal, and I’ve been kept, or kept myself, away from it for a quarter century. I can feel the shame in my sinews as I type this.

So much of this is about shame and shame is a ravenous, all-consuming beast of a thing. Shame is the connective tissue for so much of my life and trauma, and even as a person who tries to live boldly and fearlessly, shame is what I struggle against most fiercely. No matter how loving, supportive, and kind my community is, they can never really understand the full picture of how deep it runs, but every day I try to exercise a tiny bit of shame from my life. And the struggle is very lonely.

I want to create some ceremony around my first Mounjaro shot, to acknowledge the momentousness of the occasion. When I fly home from LA I’m going up to trek up to New York and do the shot there. Elliott’s birthday is on the 31^st and Malcolm just got a new job at a vet’s office, another step closer to her dream of becoming a vet. This year has been so stormy and although there is still some challenging bitter sweetness attached to taking this medication, I want to honor the moment. It feels like the beginning of a new chapter in my life, one that I’ve been working toward for the past four years and one that so many fat people weren’t lucky enough to live to see. I’m not naive enough to believe that this medication is a magic potion, but I do believe that I’ll rise to the occasion of its benefits.

I’ve always believed that J.Cole and I had a spiritual connection, but I’ve never understood why. He is my favorite rapper, yes, but I’ve always seen so much of myself in him. Recently he released an audio series called Inevitable, that traces his life and career from his early days in Fayetteville, North Carolina to the end of the tour for his third album, 2014 Forest Hills Drive. It may be the best thing I’ve ever listened to that wasn’t music. For over 20 hours I was hooked. I cried profusely, oftentimes in the same moments that brought Cole to tears, and I’d find myself laughing at these stories as if he was in the room sharing them with me. Cole’s interlocutors for the series are his friend and partner Ibrahim as well as his documentarian, Scott Lazer.

After listening to the audio series I gained greater clarity on just how much we have in common. We both have a great love for stand-up comics, admiring their processes and their commitment to craft. We both believed in ourselves to the point of delusion in order to make it as far as we have in our respective fields. We’ve both struggled to hold on to our ethics in the midst of industries trying to reduce us into something formulaic. We’ve both fought to hold tight to our identities when many of our peers have compromised themselves for greater financial success. The list goes on and on, and I was so happy to have these feelings of kinship affirmed.

Forest Hills Drive is currently celebrating its 10 year anniversary. This period also marks 10 years since I left Baltimore for New York to pursue my dreams (another thing he and I have in common). The release of our beautiful film, Exposures marks this anniversary with great introspection, insight, and care and feels in deep conversation with Cole’s series.

I’ve been thinking so much about that time, about how integral that album was as a soundtrack to my ambitions. How vividly I remember crying on the 4 train heading to Harlem while listening to the intro. How when I started to have feelings for a certain friend, I’d change the lyrics from January 28th to January 29th, the friend’s birthday. I remember sitting in the car with Emir, fighting back tears while we listened to Love Yourz and getting hype as fuck in the car with Tone while we listened to Apparently. Above all others, this album got me through those early years. Listening to Cole speak about how badly he wanted to make a classic record and what he went through to do it, feels in line with my own journey toward mastery and learning and redefining what it means to be a “master photographer.” I know that I’m nowhere near masterful just yet, but what a luminous way to mark 10 years of that pursuit.

2024, for the second year in a row, has been the slowest year of my career. Some days, I feel like my star is fading, like interest in my work is drying up. I feel like I’ve siloed myself by moving to Philly. I’m watching my peers get all of this deserved praise and opportunity and I wonder if this shit is over for me. Cole felt the same way. When Drake released So Far Gone and Kendrick dropped G.K.M.C., he felt completely left behind and it broke his heart. His label didn’t believe in him fully and it seemed like nobody really had his back where it counted. None of this was actually true and in my case it’s probably not true either. But that’s how it felt to Cole and that’s how it feels for me some days.

And then there are other days, with other feelings.

Recently, I walked into Reparations Club to buy a book and I saw my Seen Journal magazine cover on the shelf. Right next to it was Elliott’s Seen Journal cover and next to that, a copy of Carla William’s book Tender which I wrote about last year for The New Yorker. And on the next shelf was a copy of Black Archives which features a photo of me as a child and another of my grandmother when she was much younger. On the next shelf was a copy of Black Futures which features some of my photographs of Black Arrabers in Baltimore. I was startled by the cosmic nature of it all.

A few nights later I was sitting in the park talking with my sister Angel about dreaming new dreams and our ever-expanding ideas of success, a successful life and a successful career. This is all we ever talk about, two Baltimore dreamers loving each other out of the darkness and into our most vivid selves. We were deep in the weeds, the sky an unbearably stunning pinkish blue, one of those dreamy LA sunsets, when a lovely woman walked by with her two dogs. I smiled as the dogs got closer and she, very calmly, said, “I love your photography. It is really wonderful.” I was so astounded by this kindness that all I could do was clutch my chest and say thank you repeatedly. Before I could even process the gesture, Angel was in tears. She told me, through sobbing breaths, that that was a whisper from God. She assured me that this was a reminder that I am doing the right things, that we were in the right place at the right time to receive this affirmation. She was right. We drove to two closed coffee shops before landing at a very unappealing strip mall situation that made me a too sweet iced matcha latte. If we hadn’t done everything just right we simply wouldn’t have received that woman’s words. And the irony of what we were discussing before she walked up, is not lost on me. I was touched so deeply by this experience, but even more by the thought that I am making a difference, even when it feels like I’m less than a blip in this field. I make work for Black people and Black people have routinely told me that they see me and that they value me.

A friend asked me last week about my plans for next year and I didn’t really know what to say. I’m still having a hard time dreaming new dreams because so many of the old ones just won’t die. With all that I’ve learned about this industry, I still want to be a working photographer. With all that I’ve learned about celebrity culture and its violences, I still want to move to Los Angeles to photograph album covers and unit stills. I still keep a list a mile long of dream subjects. I still want to photograph for so many magazines that seemingly have no interest in what I do. I still want to make a film. I still want to feel truly supported as an artist, by institutions that understand my worth and see my potential. With all that this past ten years has shown me, given me, and stolen from me, I’m still here, navigating a galaxy of grief and just a tiny bit worse for the wear.

I’ve written to you all before about feeling like I was in an endless period of transition. I thought that the transition would end when I left New York but after I moved to Philadelphia I found myself wondering, why does it still feel like I’m transitioning, why is this version of me still dying? When will this period, this era, this chapter, come to an end? How do you know when it’s over and how do you mark the end of a period like that, one that gave you everything that you have and made you most of the things that you are. One that lauded you as a master then reduced you to a whisper? Well, friends, I have to tell you that at long last, this chapter is through. The film, the move, the heartbreak, the career shifts, all capped off with a shot of Mounjaro to the stomach. We are onto something new, and prayerfully, something better. Happy New Year, sweet friends! Thank you for granting me an audience and for offering me your eyes and your hearts.