**I am going to be a guest on Abiola Abrams’ LSD: Love, Sex and Dating tonight at 10pm EST! You can watch it live at Shovio.com! I will also be Tweeting a bunch throughout. Please join us!**

Happy Black Girl Day! (What’s that? Click here for answers!)

My theme for HBGD this month is gratitude. When I started writing about 5 years ago, I wasn’t really sure what the end result would be. I knew I wanted to be an essayist, but I’ve never taken any writing classes and I didn’t see how I could really become a legitimate writer. I didn’t quite know how I could get people to read my stuff, either. I just kept at it until things started to gel and I managed to figure out some things about shameless self-promotion and marketing.

Fast forward to now and things are looking promising. The site traffic here is pretty darn respectable. Blind Iwas the first site to ever put me on and I’m still part of the team (much love and respect to the fam) and I also contribute for Clutch, Soul Train, and Essence Online.Plus, I’m part of The Fresh Xpress network and I have a new column debuting very soon (more on that in a second).

All of that came from people supporting me, challenging me, sharing my work with others, sending me hate mail, telling me they were going to start dating one of my friends and then dump her to spite me and prove a point (ok, only one batsh*t crazy reader did that), encouraging me, telling me to hang it up, etc, etc. I’m still rather poor, but I am seeing my dreams come in to fruition and I am very, VERY happy for that. A lot of people have a blog just to have one and no shade to them, but my social media/online presense is more than just “Oh, I just wanna share my thoughts” or some way for me to make new friends. I bust my as$ to keep up this site and my other writing and it means a lot to me that people enjoy what I do. So thank YOU for everything!

I am also grateful for freedom. My entire life, I’ve been known as a little bit of a rebel or someone who marched to the beat of her own drummer.  When I was younger, I had some awareness of this and I didn’t like it. I didn’t change to conform, but I resented the occasional discomfort or dissonance that occured. As an adult, I don’t worry much over those things and I realize that a lot of my ‘out of the box’-ness is my committment to freedom. I am bound by certain loyalties, as most of us are, and I do subcribe to and/or play along with plenty of social mores. But I’m not chained, lovelies, I am free. I use my voice, my body and my life as I see fit. “Free, Black and grown“, as Star Jones would say. And I love it! 

Speaking of feeling free, I am embarking upon a new path in my writers journey and freedom is certainly the name of the game with this here. I am going to be doing a sex column for Madame Noire: Girl On Top. It will be a super fun adventure in s*x positivity*: I’ll share some stories, tips, advice, interesting info making s*x fun! Stay tuned!

Happy Black Girl Day, everyone! Take the time to talk to a sister today and let her know why you are grateful for her presence in your life. Take a moment to examine why you are a Happy Black Girl and appreciate that part of your existence. We have so many spaces to mourn, make sure you make some room to celebrate!

PS: DC folks, the lovely PBG is hosting her monthly HBGD happy hour! Go and have three gin and tonics on my behalf!!!

*I know that some of y’all have trouble with the site getting blocked at work, so I am trying to be careful with words that can be caught up by content fiters.