Milestones & Other Stories

Happy Friday, huns!

I hope you are well and sitting somewhere adequately air-conditioned, sipping on your fave cold drink.

Those of you who have been with me here for a while will know that getting back into driving has been sitting on my goals list for years and became a much more intentional goal last year.

I learned to drive nearly 15 years ago and then, after passing my test, somehow just never got back behind the wheel, lol. I shared some of the ups and frowns of my refresher lessons with my paid subscriber babes a little while ago, but this past week I finally decided to bite the bullet and drive by myself.

And I did ittttt.

Honestly, I was shook.

But I did it.

And do you know what? It was actually quite nice not having anyone in the car telling me what to do, looool. I know that sounds bad, but after months of lessons there was something really empowering about realising that I could make decisions for myself and trust them.

Also, other drivers were significantly nicer to me because I wasn’t driving around in a car covered in L plates. Even when I was driving perfectly well during lessons, there always seemed to be somebody desperate to overtake me simply because I existed. Suddenly, in a normal-looking car, everyone (mostly) had manners.

I’d still love to do my Pass Plus at some point, especially to build confidence on motorways and dual carriageways. But I realised that if I kept waiting until I felt completely ready, there would always be another reason not to do it.

So I did it scared.

And honestly, I’m really proud of myself.

If you’re putting something off because you don’t feel quite ready yet, consider this your gentle encouragement. Sometimes confidence doesn’t come before the thing. Sometimes it comes because you finally do it.

I have been obsessed with “Daddy Died” by earthsignchels. A small trigger warning here, as we are entering parental-loss territory.

There is something about the song, its performance, and its visuals that captures a grief that is furious, tender, and slightly untethered all at once. The companion text to it, in my mind, is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief, written after the death of her father. At one point she writes:

“A thing like this, dreaded for so long, finally arrives and among the avalanche of emotions there is a bitter and unbearable relief. It comes as a form of aggression, this relief, bringing with it strangely pugnacious thoughts. Enemies beware: the worst has happened. My father is gone. My madness will now bare itself.”

earthsignchels sings, “My daddy died, so I don’t take no sh*t from n***as,” and I think both works touch something true about grief. It can unmoor you. When one of the worst things you can imagine has happened, your relationship to fear changes. Not that grief makes you invincible, because it absolutely does not. It can still prowl around you like a lion, threatening to undo you when you least expect it. But it can also strip away a certain need to be palatable, to be approved of, or to treat every outside voice as if it has the power to define you. The worst has happened, and yet you are still here. Not untouched. Not unafraid. But perhaps a little less willing to be ruled by things that once seemed so big.

There is also a kind of grief that feels maddening because it is the shape of a deep, active love. Not beautiful because someone has died, obvs, but moving because it reveals what their presence meant.

My own experience of losing my father has felt quieter and more complicated. He died when I was young, and the news arrived with a kind of hollowness because he was there but not really there. So perhaps my own grief is not only about losing him. It is also about losing the possibility of what I might have wanted a father-daughter relationship to be. The love, closeness, safety, or ordinary presence that was never really there to miss in the same way.

I think that is partly why this song and Adichie’s writing have stayed with me. They speak to a loss that feels total and immediate, and I find myself moved by the magnitude of that love, even as my own grief has taken a different shape.

Notes on Grief is only around 40 pages, but it is one you might resonate with if you are grieving in any form.

(I also loved earthsignchels’ Colors performance - that deserves its own shoutout too).

I have been loving the string of Tiny Desk concerts released during Black Music Month. Eve’s was cool and confident. Joe’s was nostalgic in exactly the right way. (I haven’t listened to Fred Hammond’s yet but I’m excited that it even exists.) But my favourite has been Floetry’s, which has honestly catapulted itself into my top five Tiny Desks of all time.

I loved seeing them back together. The voices, the chemistry, the songs. It felt like a little gift.

And finally! I’ve updated my shop and everything is now organised into cute collections: The Classics, Diaspora Domestics, The Culture Drop, and The Summer Drop.

So whether you’re after something nostalgic, something for the kitchen, or just something cute for yourself, there should be a little something in there for you.

As a subscriber, you can enjoy 15% off until 5th July with the code:

SUBSUMMER15

For my paid subscriber babes, there’s an extra little thank you below. You can enjoy 20% off with the code: