Episode 2: Stop Listening to This Nigga. Tune Him Out.

Don’t mind me while I rant.

Some voices I know to listen to. Others should be ignored. The more you ignore, the less privy you are to other people’s expectations of you. You stop wondering if your expectations make sense compared to theirs while learning how to recognize freedoms that are rightfully yours.

When you don’t listen to the outside world but instead to what naturally comes to you, you soon learn that the only person’s mind you should ever try to change should be your own. No more constantly arguing with other people when you succumb to the need to project. Focus on changing your own mind, and training it prioritize what is in your own best interest.

I was taught not to trust myself. And I used to think I was the only person who was ever intentionally taught to think this way.

Now I’ve reached a point where I hear whatever I want to think, he says. Trusting myself and my own opinions starts arguments. This is the most vulnerable I’ve ever been. If I were religious, I’d be a sinner. A sinner who’d finally reached the defining moment in their lives where they desperately sought God in their worst moments, moments when no one would ever want to be alone.

That’s how my mom had always put it. More people simply didn’t turn to God enough. That would save marriages, she said, and make people who didn’t love you — but should — love you. Submitting to God would make the good ones stay.

This is why you should only actively listen to what’s inside of you, to protect yourself from well-meaning harm. Listen only to what’s inside you. Learn to hear your own voice more loudly in your head.

Ultimately, you have influence on everything around you. Everything and everyone you interact with. The most important influence to cultivate is one that protects and aggrandizes you. Because in world like this, you have only yourself. No one is looking for you. And no one is coming to save you.

What kind of influence are you on yourself? Do you know?

You live up to what you prioritize. And I lived for him. I could kill myself knowing that and I sometimes struggle to want to live.

But after the world has had their say, I finally get to define how I see myself. I embrace the chance to tell people how and why I became this way. I defined myself anymore by his standards, or the use he thinks I serve.

When it comes down to it, we all just want people to pay attention to us. We want those people to be more important than those we already know. The more important and more cultured they are, the better we are. Yet somehow, we have no use for those we’re willing to admit are the smartest people we know.

Why wouldn’t I want to be desired? Why wouldn’t I want there to be somewhere where I was in-demand?

When nobody wants you, you live in denial, constantly denying the fact you’re as good as dead to your fellow humans. As an undesirable, the existence in which you know yourself to be worthwhile and experience being treated as exists only to you know. To the people who don’t want you, you’re not real. Your value isn’t real. And your feelings and thoughts are not valid, so they’ll never be important. They let you know that nothing positive you believe about yourself is objective.

After a while, you deny yourself as you know yourself to be true.

You become a mental projection, something 3D-printed bobbing along in the sensory deprivation tank that is someone else’s mind.

Probably this man’s mind, the first one you find yourself thinking of.

Recognizing you you’re only real in this projected state is frightening. You’re so scared, so you’d rather keep the company you’ve known.

If you get out, you know for sure that surviving means knowing how to get of your head in order to break out of their mind. Survival means escaping thoughts you know to be true while accepting that believing them no longer serves you. It’s forming a relationship with the truth that very few black women ever talk about when it comes to our men.

Let me ask you something, ladies: How much weight does any man carry in defining what makes a valuable woman?

Did I come back for a gaslighting piece of shit who has no respect for me?

Or is what I’m seeing what was there all along?

Did he need to reek of a putrid lack of integrity for me to finally move on?

Whatever problem he perceives, somehow, I’m part of what caused it, despite him always promising the world, then changing his mind without telling me. He led me on for months and seemingly felt not a damn thing about it.

What he can’t deny or ignore, and what he won’t confront, he blames on me in order to feel faultless. When he does admit fault, his faults always pale in comparison to mine, even after he’s been neglecting and disrespecting me for a decade.

He’s so emotionally unstable that the easiest feeling for him to feel is anger. Being angry is easier than being empathetic. Always.

To him, being angry keeps him vigilant and is the safest bet, though he does nothing to channel his anger other than to destroy himself and devastate those around him, the women who trust him most.

His dumbass doesn’t even believe a true gender wage gap exists. According to him, most women simply choose lower paying jobs. And the jobs women typically do aren’t in higher demand.

What can I say he’s even worth at this point? Did I really hate myself this much, this time?