I'm Judging You (5 page)

Now, you're probably saying I'm bogus or a flake. You're right. I am not ride-or-die. Those are some pretty limiting choices: So if I'm not riding, I gotta die? Can I get off and take the bus? Is “Let's talk about it” an option? What about “ride, or pause this if we need to”?

There are people whose partners have been sentenced to twenty years in jail and they're waiting for them. That is adorable and commendable. However, if you weren't with me shooting in the gym, or we weren't childhood sweethearts and BFFs, or I don't have your big-headed kids, I am certainly not gonna waste my best years as you sit in jail or engage in hijinks. Our love story will need to be paused until further notice. I am not doing a countdown for your freedom day, sitting by the gate for years. That's unfair. Shoot, I might be the mother of your kids, and if me “riding” ain't in the best interest of our spawns then I'm still getting off at the next stop and calling my friends to come pick me up. I'm “ride-or-surely-you-understand-why-I'm-done-here.”

The way my loyalty is set up, you might get one Get Out of Jail Free card because we go together really tough and I love you, but what I will not be doing is enabling dysfunction by always being there when you royally mess up. Sorry not sorry. Don't be catching no cases on my dime. I got my Global Entry status and TSA PreCheck to protect. We are too grown for me to be constantly tied to your bad behavior. Who has time for that?

Far too many people allow this ride-or-die thing to keep them in expired relationships. If you constantly have to play ombudsman for your beloved, you're in a co-dependent prison of your own making. People will keep doing what they can get away with. When the relationship has soured, it should be like cutting off your mooching son's credit cards. Fly, little birdie! Get the hell out my nest!

To be ultrareal, ride-or-die expectations usually fall on the shoulders of women who often don't get the same level of commitment from their men. Men do not get told repeatedly to stand by their women no matter how much drama they bring into their lives. They get the message that they always have more choices. Meanwhile, women are told to stand beside and behind our partners in spite of their foolishness.

I can be loyal, but loyalty isn't blind commitment to cosigning on stupidity and bad decisions. Once my life starts being affected by your tomfoolery, I might have to moonwalk out. Some people have gone to jail for their boos, and I applaud them for their courage. That could not be me. If it comes down to me or you,
trust
I'm picking me. I can't fight, and my hair products are out here, so as you see, it would be harder for me inside. Thanks for understanding!

If we're both mature and grown, neither of us would want to put our partner in a situation that would put their livelihood and happiness in jeopardy. If you're constantly acting a fool, it means you aren't considering me in your actions, because clearly you don't care how they could affect your loved ones.

Call me simple, but I think baehood needs to come in less dramatic packages. My love motto is that my relationship should push me to be a better person. My partner should encourage me, challenge me, seduce me, and build me. I will aim to do the same. At any point in time, one person might be holding the other up, because isn't that part of being a team? You might have an off day, but your teammate picks up the slack. That's fine. There are times you'll both have an off day. Recalibrate and come back. Maybe the off day becomes an off week or off months. That's when you have to determine if you need to be on the same team at all.

If, of course, during the off week one of you goes and does something they weren't supposed to, like Ross did to Rachel, and a break baby happens, then all bets are off. Can we talk about break babies? OMG. Talk about true pettiness. You're having a rough time with your boo, so you go and have sex with someone else? Petty. But a break baby means you went and had sex with someone who is not your partner without taking proper safety precautions.
You didn't use a condom?
What in the hell is wrong with you?! I get that you might be distraught, but come on, bruh. Come on, sis. The
least
you can do is make sure you wrapped up. Not only are you being careless about yourself, you're also being careless with your partner's health. Break babies are beautiful. (Because all babies are beautiful. Even when they're funny looking, especially in those first few weeks when most of them look like baked potatoes
—
still beautiful human beings.) However, in the words of Dorothy Zbornak, the Sorceress of Shade, “CONDOMS, ROSE! CONDOMS!” Being on a temporary break doesn't mean you need to go dip your stick into anyone, or have your love pocket
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dipped into with no protection.

Break babies are extreme, but baehood can go bad in much simpler ways. I've never been the type to check a significant other's phone or text messages or ask where they're going. I don't care where you're going, and I trust that you won't show up and act out. We've set certain boundaries and expectations in our relationship, and it is your prerogative to keep those in check. It is up to you to know what you can and cannot do. If you cannot tell me about it, then odds are you weren't supposed to do it and you feel guilty. That in itself is wrong. I did not attend any academies, so it is not my job to police you or try to catch you in any act. If I get to the point where I feel the need to do that, I'd just rather walk away, because it means you've lost my trust, and without that we have nothing left. Our foundation is cracked, and I'm not living in a shaky house. Leave if you can no longer be secure in what you've built. Fake forgiving-and-forgetting is pointless if you will always resent that person, or hold it over their head. I know myself. It's really hard for me to get over betrayals or lack of trust. Jesus forgives; I pout. This is why it's better for me to end things, because I will feel some type of way about you for a while. I would rather get that out of my system by myself than force a relationship to continue.

I do what's right for me, but of course after the breakup happens I'll be on my couch for weeks eating all the rice and ice cream and watching movies about why love sucks. I might even call you once to tell you how much you suck. But I cope.

You can do bad all by yourself, ladies and gentlepeople.

 

4. Under the Knife

You know how I know we've all crossed over the point of no return from doing the most with the absolute least? Anal bleach exists.

The day I saw an ad for anal bleach, I knew we had passed the point of no return, done a double backflip to the beginning, and run three more victory laps. We are at the point where we are so bent on perfection that we will lighten the inner sanctums of our assholes to achieve better beauty. The anus is the hole the body's garbage comes out of. We expect THAT to be pleasing to look at, too? I know for some it is a venue of pleasure (not that there's anything wrong with that), but
still
. Fascinating.

Can we stop? Can my prostate mouth be dark and brooding in peace? Why do we need our butt nostrils cosmetically whitened? Does my derriere tunnel really need to shine bright like a diamond? Come on, everybody. Do you do a photo shoot after the anal bleaching to show it off, or is this just for your own enjoyment? Like, when you're walking down the street, newly bottom-brightened, are you smiling to yourself with the satisfaction of your own personal “Let there be light”?
Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's anal bleach!

Gahtdambit, everyone. Why are we doing this? Who is this really for? People say “I did it for myself,” but that's not correct. Unless you're really staring at your asshole in a mirror, day in and day out, disappointed that it has never reached its true fluorescent potential naturally, then that's not that accurate. When we die, will anyone exclaim over how light our anuses were in their rousing eulogies? Will the great loves of our lives remember fondly how pale our yansh-holes were?
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Who gives a flying fuck? We're doing all of these things because we live in a world that has dropped a metric ton of pressure on us to be beautiful and made the definition of that beauty incredibly narrow and impressively unreachable. I am judging us for our shallowness, our impossible beauty standards, and our desperation to reach them.

Some people frown upon women using makeup to enhance their features and to feel more beautiful. I enjoy makeup as much as the next person, although I will say some of the ways we paint our faces gives me pause, like when we draw on our eyebrows and they end up looking like EKGs or other vital signs. But I don't think it's necessarily harmful. Here's what is: Do a Google Images search for the word “beauty.” What comes up are pages and pages of pictures of white women. Even our number one search engine, no matter how algorithmic and formulaic its methods, equates beauty with lightness. If you yearn to be considered beautiful, wouldn't something like that lead you to think that to be beautiful you need to have less melanin in your skin? Around the globe, “White is right” is the message, and caste systems exist based on color; usually at the bottom of the ladder are Black and brown people. Folks face acute discrimination because of their darker skin, and there's a major color complex that can be seen globally, across many cultures.

Centuries of hailing whiteness as the goal have gotten too many people believing that their dark skin nullifies their beauty. There are few things that make my heart as sad as the reminder that there are people in the world who are unhappy enough about their skin color that they'd cosmetically lighten themselves. Our skin is our natural coat and our largest organ. Our skin carries our history, whether white or Black or yellow. Our skin is part of our cultural heritage and is important in defining who we are.

Too many people believe that their dark skin voids their beauty. Some have been teased about their color by family, enough to where they start believing that something is wrong with the richness of their skin. The media thrusts those who are fair-skinned into the spotlight; even photography leans toward the preference of lighter-skinned people. All around us, the message is that the darker you are, the more inconvenient your beauty is. So I get how people could internalize all of that enough to where they artificially lighten their skin.

Skin lightening is a global issue, but I can only speak to my experience as a Nigerian. In Nigeria, bleaching is not uncommon. I do not want to speak out of turn in saying it has been normalized, but it sure feels like it. Folks refer to it as “toning” to make themselves feel better. Stores are littered with “toning creams” and ads with light, bright women, encouraging you to get your lightening on. Now, imagine that: a country where Black is the default, and yet people still feel pressure to lighten their skin. Even in a country full of Black people, we still cannot get away from colorism and the effects of our “white is right” ideas. Of course, there's the fact that Nigeria is a country that was colonized by the British until it gained independence in 1960. My mother was five years old when colonialism slinked back to Great Britain, but I have no doubt that its effects linger, and one of the ways they do is through the color complex the country is struggling with.

It is always jarring to see bleaching up close, no matter how common it is. People you've known your entire life but haven't seen in a year might show up looking like Casper the Friendly Ghost when they were previously the color of a Snickers bar, and no one can address the pink, bleached elephant in the room. We're all just supposed to carry on like you didn't run an eraser across your entire body. Meanwhile, I'm trying not to stare at your knuckles, which often refuse to take. It's like knuckles try to keep the hope alive, to remind you that you're lying like bad concrete. Knuckles are stubborn as hell. They are all about that telling-on-you life, and I appreciate it. The rest of you might be ivory, but those knuckles are a dead ebony giveaway.

You know I have no act-right and can't fix my face for a damb thing. Don't roll up to me without warning me that you became the Coke Zero version of yourself. Can I get a heads-up, so that when I see you I don't do a slow head tilt trying to figure out if I got cataracts, because surely this milky version of yourself must be an error in my visual field? Don't surprise me by showing up looking all Michael Ealy when you used to be the color of Forest Whitaker. Your feet will be on a mission to betray you, too, because they maintain their old color. They are also stubborn as hell, I've learned. When your face and your feet and hands look like they belong to different people, I know that Team Bad Decisions will never run out of members.

Gels and cream lighteners are often purchased off the shelf, or sometimes even mixed at home. Far too many people bleach without a dermatologist's assistance, so the opportunity for error is vast. Folks are outside with green undertones in their skin, green veins showing through, dark feet and knuckles, and a yellow face, looking like a walking Jamaican flag. It is such a mess. You did all that just so you could look like Joseph's Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, with skin of various shades, none that looks as good as your original one? Because when you decide to do this at home, without the care of a dermatologist, you
will
miss a spot. Or you'll get a bad formula and end up looking like a Dalmatian. People are out here looking like the Ghost of Fail Past, Present,
and
Future. Jesus be some protection against skin cancer, too, because chemical removal of melanin cannot be healthy in the long run.

Surely there's gotta be consequences to forcefully removing melanin from your skin with chemicals. I can only imagine that some of the folks who are doing this will end up looking like raw chicken in twenty to thirty years after their skin gives up on them from decades of lightening. Because bleaching your skin isn't something you do for one or two years and then stop. No. Melanin is resilient. It wants to come back and show out, so those who commit to being light against their natural complexion have to continue using creams to maintain the color. Melanin serves a purpose. It's nature's blessing and protection. It is natural SPF, and you're opting to remove it from your skin. Self-hate is a vainglorious vagabond, iSweaterGawd.
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