2022

Real Name. No Gimmick.

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Welcome?

Yes. That feels like a good place to start.

We’re undergoing some surgical enhancements around these parts. Some nips and tucks here, a few injections on the backend there (about those multiple emails to subscribers while I beefed up my archives—my bad), and a brand new face.

Speaking of said face, let’s start with the name.

Straight to the point. No explanations required. Shouts to My Third House Life for carrying me out of the Skinny Black Girl era—your service is appreciated—but going forward under a version of my given name feels good. Especially considering that my first-ever post, “A Funky Introduction” on Confessions of a Skinny Black Chick at Blogspot dot com in 2007, was a nod to an A Tribe Called Quest lyric.

Now, the content.

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Notes to Self on My 39th Birthday

/ a girl named rob / 4 Comments

You know all those “poor Millennials who never got the world they were promised” memes you post as a coping mechanism? That entire idea loses its charm when met with “Okay, but you’re 40.” Nobody cares, ma’am. Figure it out.

Yes, there is more to life than working, putting a roof over your head, and paying bills. But you love to let these practical matters go to ruin while diving headlong into existential nonsense.  Focusing on the tangible >>>> crafting the perfect life narrative.

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Today? I’ve Got Nothin’

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Back in the day, before everything was terrible, I wrote about politics. Often. If the 2008 iteration of The Skinny Black Girl still existed, you’d see my gushing Millennial love letters to Barack Obama and the world he wanted to build. He caught me at just the right time. Twenty-five. The granddaughter of a Selma, Alabama native who moved to Cleveland in the 1940s for a better life. A recent graduate of one of the oldest HBCUs in the nation, raised on A Different World and The Fresh Prince,[1] with a full-throated belief in Black Excellence. I’d seen Roots. Watched hours of PBS’s Eyes on the Prize in freshman lit class (taught by a real life Freedom Rider). Sat stunned and wrecked in the weeks following Hurricane Katrina as the U.S. government abandoned people who looked like me.

But on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, I thought America was done breaking my heart.

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On the Third Anniversary

/ a girl named rob / 3 Comments

It’s been three years since I had my fallopian tubes removed (a.k.a. elective tubal saplingectomy surgery). 

Other than the initial consultation with my doctor (she trusted me to make decisions about my body without question — shocking behavior), the process was unremarkable: a few hours in a hospital on the really good drugs, a few days of rest and taking it slow, and tiny twin incisions on my lower abdomen that, three years later, are almost gone. ¡Voila! A vision made real: no bebes, ever. 

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Curiosity. Empathy. Kindness.

/ a girl named rob / 1 Comment

This summer, I went back to church. 

Spirituality and religion were big questions in the early days of Skinny Black Girl. I was 24, a not-baptized, but regular service-attending Christian, coming to grips with not desiring marriage or children. Nor did I plan to stop fornicating. I didn’t just like sex. Sex was heady, powerful, an art form. I never felt more womanly than when losing myself in giving and receiving pleasure. I could channel aspects of my personality that otherwise lie dormant. Praise and worship were one thing, but nothing moved me in the spirit like the mind-body union of sex. When friends asked “So, what? You’re never gonna get married and just keep sleeping with people?” it haunted me every Sunday I refused to ask for deliverance from the flesh. 

“We all have faults,” another friend said during one of my final showdowns, “but we try to change to be more like Jesus.” 

“I don’t want to change to fit a religion,” I replied. “I need a religion that fits me.” 

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