It's Time To Be Wholistically Me
Happy New Year, everyone! I know I’m technically about two weeks late,but Sesame went back to school last week, which means I can finally really get back to work. In keeping the tradition from the last few years, I decided to focus my first post for 2019 on my word of the year.
My word for 2019 started as a conversation with one of my fellow blogger friends, Abby Norman. I mentioned that I was struggling with this idea that in order to be a successful blogger, I have to “niche down.” She told me that the reason people follow me is because of my personality not because I only talk about one or two things. They follow me because I share the entirety of myself and not just what’s in at the moment or what will make me money. A few weeks after our conversation, I went to Puerto Rico for a retreat with Mothering Justice. It was on that work retreat where the word wholistic came to my mind.
Wholistic (not to be confused with holistic, despite it being a variant of the latter) is used to emphasis the “whole” of an item. In my case, I’m focusing on being my WHOLE self this year.
As I reflect on my prior words of the year, from choosing to say “yes” to things that scared me in 2016, to working on my “confidence” in 2017, to setting “boundaries” in 2018, they were all leading me to being my “wholistic” self. I needed to say yes to things that scared me in order to force myself out of my comfort zone, and boy did I ever that year. Saying yes led to me working on my confidence so no matter what, I wouldn’t start saying no just because I was afraid of failure. Building confidence gave me the strength to set the boundaries I needed to work on my mental health, and developing those boundaries helped me stand in my truth, which has led me here… to being whole.
… And to knowing motherhood is not something I need to hide in order to succeed because it’s a part of who I am. Motherhood helped guide me to social justice work. While I am good at social justice writing, guess what? I’m good at so many other things, and I need to explore them too. And it’s okay to share those explorations with my audience.
I’ve never wanted my social media to look like a highlight reel or one-dimensional, and when I try to force myself into carefully planned niches, I feel suffocated. It’s why academia didn’t fit well… why motherhood felt too tight… and social justice writing felt suffocating. So, if a brand or company doesn’t work with me because I share my whole self, well that’s their loss.
I know that I’m not alone in this overwhelming pressure that society places on women to be “one thing” or at least portray the image of one thing. However, we are SO many things all the time and there’s nothing wrong with sharing our entire selves with the world.
I need to be all of me all the time. I need to be the Black woman I was on a retreat in Puerto Rico who didn’t codeswitch… who breastfed during a meeting… who spent time drawing palm trees while listening in meetings… who rocked a baby while writing.
I am going to be all of me starting right now and forever, you’re getting the WHOLE Danielle – writer, mother, activist, wife, artist, and whatever else I choose to be.
