If you’ve been here for a moment, you’ve been exposed to the creation of Nicole over the last decade. You met me, when I was in love and committed to the person I was sure was the love of my life. I was the full time caretaker of the Bonnie and the Clyde. I was just a girl trying to figure life out, and who’s biggest goal was getting married to that image of the man, because I could not see the actual man.

You watched that relationship crash and burn and watched me wonder if I would survive that fourth loss.

You tuned into the comedy of the Bonnie & Clyde show, tapping into my love, frustration, joy and desperation as life around us changed.

You saw me take a chance on love again, picking two very wrong people for me, but taking that chance anyway.

You watched the results of admitting that love was not what I desired or deserved, and my entire world crumble when I chose me.

You watched my struggle to hand onto the idea of the only thing I knew, watched me survive the realization that there would be no return to that life, watched me regain my health and strength and look the future in the eyes and resign myself to seeing it, living it, not just being affected by it.

A year ago you watched me shed the ‘final’ chains of my oppression and tap into the power I never admitted to having. You saw me ready to roar into the 20s kicking ass, taking names and creating the life I thought was meant for others.

You saw me that that chance – again – at love, because you’ve been here long enough to know that love is that which inspires and propels me. You watched me in a new city, on New Year’s leaning into all the lessons 2019 and the 40+ before taught me, and you met Daddy. Then 2020 arrived and said:

I mean it didn’t start OFF like it is today. COVID-19 hadn’t arrived, race riots weren’t a thing and the US military wasn’t patrolling the streets of the nation’s capital.

January took me to Next Level and set into motion the course of events which brought me to this porch. Slowly though 2020 began to show her ass, and frankly it’s not as cute as mine.

Even though I am in this moment living through something that is going to change this land I live in, the things that I proclaimed for 2020 are still achievable. They can be surpassed even, and will. There is much happening out here beyond my total control. Truth be told, we don’t yet know on which side the coin will land…heads or tails. I have hope that it will be heads, I am preparing for heads, but know that tails is a thing. The things which remain in my control are independent of a free state or police state. While I allowed myself to absorb what is happening, I lost sight of that.

As I witness social and political action foreign to my existence here, I am reminded….for the woman I am, nothing has changed.

I am still that woman, the one who braless stood in front of all eight police officers the other day and by the strength of my presence willed them to stand down. I mean we see police tossing old men to the ground and stepping over their prone bodies, but that was not my fate. They fell back. I wake daily a Black woman in this nation, the fact that I get to go to sleep that same day is a testament to my exceptionalism. So it’s okay that I took the time off to process, mourn, plan and accept. What would not be ‘okay’ is to lose the goal in sight.

So I won’t. It’s time, my time.

I’m legit excited for you to see it. I’m legit excited to carve this place and expand. I am proud in advance of the result of it.

I have a Vizion 🙂