nu dawn, nu day, nu daily dispatch

welcome to PROCESSING THE PROCESS

haiii beloveds! it’s definitely not been 4-ish months since my last posts (that are now archived because they’ll be popping up somewhere special soon)! it’s definitely not been that long because time is not real, but it is running like it’s training to beat Sha’Carri Richardson in the next olympic games.

updating my “this her” pic. happi nu year, according to gregory’s calendar.

i’ve missed y’all !! so much so… i’m making a grand re-introduction with a series that will keep me accountable to this shared space AND help me show up to my writing practice daily:

1950 photo of Côte d’Ivoire femme by Michel Huet, words were added by me

listen while reading: WAIT x DOECHII

☼ a preface…

i get all my best ideas in the shower / while washing dishes / usually at night.

the consistent trend here is water. call it flow state i guess, but really great ideas downloading into my mind when my hands are wet is truly ~inconvenient~¹ because now i have to do that mental tap dance of saying the ideas repeatedly until i’m done showering or washing dishes to dry my hands and write them down. does this happen to anyone else? let me know in le comments.

also, yes, i do have a lot of water in my astrological chart, so maybe that would explain my woo woo relationship with water. but omg imagine… if i lived near a body of water? tuh, i’d be unstoppable… and… no one would ever see me. like ever. hahahaha. or it’d be like “have y’all seen nu?” and someone will be like “did you check the water?” and there i’d be, swishing around like a mermaid stopping by for a spell before swimming off into the sunset.

i have actually been told (by those with most gifted eyes and wisened spirits) that i have a certain transient-ness about me. and i’ve come to believe and see it, too; like when people try to place me or figure me out but it’s literally impossicant² because i’m an enigma even to myself. i have an essay on this, actually. well, it’s more of a prosem³. i wrote it when i realized how manipulative it is for someone to tell you “i know you better than you know yourself”. usually adults do this to children. this isn’t an essay about the mental-emotional abuse of children as an unprotected class, though. soooo, let’s get to the proper introductions, shall we?

🌀 welcome to PROCESSING THE PROCESS 🌀

—a daily dispatch⁴ of the things that are making me go *ooh* / *ahh* / *umm* / *AGHHHHHHHH* / and *that’s weird af can we talk about how that’s weird af*?

PROCESSING THE PROCESS is

• my way of stopping (HALTING!) all this overthinking i do when it comes to sharing my writing, my thoughts, my personality, my GIFTSSS and mySELF. like what in the name of selfish self-sabotage has been going on here? to not share the delight that is me. to deny people the pleasure of my company. it ends 2day!! word to mother Zora Neale Hurston:

PROCESSING THE PROCESS is also

• my way of practicing and trying in public. gone are the days where i only share the highlights of my life. y’all gonna get these lowlights. y’all gonna get the low, the mid, the L’s (okay those are all pejorative terms but that’s life, everything doesn’t just go bad. it goes bad in 50 shades, tastes, textures, sounds, rhythms and you just gotta tell people you’re “fine” when they ask. what in the actual F is our society?!). and you’ll get the highlights, too, of course, but i ain’t forcing it. to keep it a buck. you know my favorite thing to say dramatically in my high school french classes was j’ai suffre ! and… i be suffre-ing. and i will no longer be made to feel like a party pooper for being honest about my state of (un)wellness. p.s. this party sucks and the music be lit, but no one dances anymore so i’m leaving! gonna throw a party where we can be real about our feelings and shiii.

• a daily personal public dispatch serving as an archive of what i’m engaging with / thinking about / contextualizing / and of course **processing**. the processing part is really important to me because i’m trying to do that thing where instead of learning a little about a lot of things, i dive in and learn deeply about a few things at a time. this is gonna be so hard as a blackberry-internet-tween⁵, but that’s why this is a what??? PROCESSSSS yessss!!! ahhh don’t y’all just love my cleverness?
  

  i’m still figuring out the structure for this but for now, you can expect these daily dispatches to include a hodgepodge medley of:

  • music i’ve been stimming

  • youtube videos recently watched

  • books i’m reading

  • things my friends say that are blowing my mind cuz when are my friends not blowing my mind

  • essays/articles i’m reading

  • practices i’m developing

  • things i’m unlearning + letting go of

the daily dispatches will consistently have —and most likely start with—a MIND / BODY / SOUL check-in. i want to make a cute graph for this so please give me verbal or written applause when you see it. i work very hard please i need the words of affirmation. tell me you’re proud of me!! lest i cryyyy.

꩜ spiraling onwards, sideways, down+up-wards ꩜

this dispatch is coming to me as a practice i need to take up in the midst of social media app bans and the anti critical race theory movement, jenohsides,(amongst so many other trifling things) because truly, there’s no better time than NOW! in fact, i should’ve started since yesteryear. the alarms have been alarming!!!

i’ve also been thinking a lot about the oral history class i took my last semester of college. it was a grad course (and i was in undergrad, ooh look at me smarty pants hehe) and i LOVED it. i completely bombed my final paper though because i had a habit⁶ of putting all my papers off until the last minute. anddd, i could tell from my professor’s notes (that i didn’t actually open and read until months later) that she was disappointed in the work i’d done. because i’d done better work before. and in summary: i didn’t understand the assignment, like it was not giving. but i was thinking about that class and how one of the most important things we talked about was how lowercase h history matters just as much (if not more) than capital H History.

lowercase h history = oral histories. histories that are shared and preserved usually outside of academia, but of course, there are oral historians trained in and doing this work in academia (after all, i took this class in college with a professor who was an oral historian).

i’ve been thinking a lot about cultures (like my own) where oral traditions are/were the way of passing down history until colonization said otherwise. said people with no written history were history-less. all while burning and looting homes and places of worship, and showcasing the so-called “primitive artifacts” in museums thousands of miles away from their site of creation. very odd behavior. to just show up somewhere and be like “whatever you’ve been doing here for thousands of years…mmm just doesn’t fit my fancy. just doesn’t make sense so i’mma show you how it’s really done. oh, and imma take this with me so we can make a circus of what you call sacred.⁷” very sinister behavior, if ya ask me.

dang, i do be going on tangents.

HENNYWAYS,

this concept of a personal public archive (which is not new at all, like that’s basically what sharing pictures and videos on social media is but i needed a word for it that makes sense to me cuz i’m a writer and this is what i do so lemmealonewahhhhh) planted itself into my brain / heart / soul and said “go, flow, grow”.

---

✨writing start time: 11:31pm, wed 16 jan 2025
💫writing+editing end time: 00:22am, thu 17 jan 2025

author's note 💌

just wanted to use this space as a p.s. to shoutout my friend Abdul, who recently spoke serious life into me about making time to write despite capitalism / financial debt / emotional dysregulation. despite j’ai suffre!

a few months ago, Abdoul also sent me a pic of my substack and said “we miss you over here”, and that, dearly beloveds is what keeps a writer like me going. to know that someone, somewhere, is thinking about the words i’ve not yet written, and looking forward to —with excited anticipation— receiving them.

thank you, Abdoul. and everyone else who reads my work / shares / and talks about these thoughts i be mothering. your love is felt, and i’m eternally grateful to you.

until the next fresh ‘stack,
(tomorrow!)

courageously yours,
nu🧚🏿‍♀️

1. convenience is capitalism’s minion servant deluding us into believing that inconvenience is a bad thing. to be inconvenienced is to be wisened into patience, to learn adaptability, to surrender to service, to consider a need other than your own, —for a friend / for art / for an idea that makes your soul sing. and what is so bad about that? no more apologies for “the inconvenience”. the inconvenient is inevitable, dare-say-i NECESSARY?

2. impossible + can’t = impossicant

3. prose + poem = prosem

4. as a meandering student of Seeda School, ayana zaire cotton’s teachings have been extremely important in my ability to weave theory and praxis together. and while she encourages worldbuilders to create a weekly dispatch, i’ve adapted this framework to meet my own urgent needs for structure and serious play.

5. i’m too old to be an ipad baby. so blackberry internet tween it is. my first phone was a blueberry with a magenta case, and it slid up to reveal a physical mini keyboard. i wish i still had it as an artifact. #y2knostalgia

6. it was less of a habit, and more like i was in survival mode with little to no support. working while being a full-time student is not for the weak. nor for the seemingly “strong Black woman” —a label i reject with all the ancestors in me.

7. i really want to rewatch SHOGUN and do a live reaction because the interactions between the Anjin, the Portuguese Catholics, and the Japanese soldiers were some of the realest depictions of colonial thought and how colonizers really just call(ed) everyone who had customs and ways of life that differed from their own “savages”.