August 16, 2022 • 49 mins
This week I’m telling y’all the story of my journey to 40 and what this new decade is teaching me. WHICH BASICALLY MEANS I AM TELLING Y’ALL MY BUSINESS. If you wanna hear about how dating mishaps in my 20s, health challenges in my mid 30s, and a big career shift in my late 30s, all prepared me for the new journey of my 40s, check out this episode! Please enjoy this episode from the HER Archives.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, y'all, this is the week of my birthday. So
probably as you're listening to this, I am somewhere celebrating,
because that's what I do. I have only had one
(00:29):
year in my adult life so far that I can
think of that I worked on my birthday. And if
you have not listened to my episode here called that
time I quit my job, we should go back and
listen to that because I think of that episode. I
share a bit of the story of why I was
working on my birthday. But normally I treat my birthday
(00:51):
as a holiday. Outside of that year, I take the
day off. I don't like to work on that day.
I actually was supposed to work on my birthday last year,
and then of course ended up not working because the
event got rescheduled and I was home. So this episode
is my hashtag forty a f episode. And if you've
(01:12):
been listening to the podcast, you have probably listened to
my interview with Christie Gomez where she told me the
story of what her experience was like as she turned
forty and what her forties have been like. And as
I was turning forty, I longed for stories like this
to hear from women to hear from black women and
(01:33):
women of color in particular, and so I thought it
would be fitting the week of my birthday to share
what my forty a F Story is since I turned
forty last year during the pandemic, so normally when I
do these episodes, I am wanting to organize this around
a few questions. I want to talk about what my
(01:54):
thirties were like. I want to talk about what did
I think my life would be like when I turned forty,
what my life was actually like when I turned forty,
what has been the theme of my forty so far?
And if I could give advice to a woman about
to turn forty, what I would tell her. So these
are the questions that Christie and I talked about and
(02:15):
I wanted to answer them as well. And you will
hear more episodes here of me interviewing other women of
color about their forty a F stories. And if you
have a forty a F story you want to tell me,
I would love for you to comment on socials. I
want to thank each of you for your comments. I
see you commenting on social media, I see you sharing
the episodes in your Instagram stories and on Twitter. Just
(02:37):
know that it means the world to me because I'm
talking to all of you, but I don't get to
see all of you and interact with all of you,
at least not yet. Eventually we will be having her
with Amina Brown live events when it's safe to do so,
and we can all get together in person. I get
a chance to see you, but in the meantime getting
(02:57):
to see you talking about this in your store. Some
of you have been d M N me seeing your comments.
Just know it means the world to me. I try
as best i can to respond to all of you.
Sometimes I'm not able to, but know if you didn't
hear from me, please charge it to my head or
me being in the bed laying down somewhere. Not that
I am not appreciative, So thank you so so much
(03:19):
for that. So I'd love to hear your forty a
f stories too. What were my thirties like? I got
married when I was thirty one, and if I would
really start the story at the beginning of my thirties
and I wrote about some of this and both of
my books actually, but I can probably give you a
(03:40):
more raw version of that you're on the podcast. So
when I was turning thirty I turned thirty in New
York City with my best friend Adrian, and we both
thought that we were never going to get married, Like
dating had just not been going super great for either
of us, and we were just like, this is it.
(04:01):
We're gonna be nuns, but we're gonna be cool nuns.
We're gonna be like the cool aunt with all the
memorabilia from the places we've traveled. You know. That was
sort of the vibe of me coming into my thirties.
Unbeknownst to me, I actually already knew the man that
I was going to marry, and so I got engaged
on my thirty feet birthday and then we got married
(04:24):
three and a half months later. So I think the
initial part of my early thirties was just you know,
adjusting to married life. At the time that my husband
and I got married, I was still performing on the
road and mostly white Christian environments, and my husband was
a youth pastor at a church a little bit south
(04:45):
of Atlanta. So I think we spent those first you know,
a few years of marriage just trying to get adjusted
to what both of our jobs would require from us.
We started pretty quickly traveling together and performing together. And
so I definitely think part of my thirties was adjusting
to that in the early parts and then us finding
(05:07):
a wonderful rhythm together of how we could do this
thing on stage together. We were recording albums together. I
know I'm very terrible at telling you all I have albums,
but if you've ever heard any of my poetry albums,
all of the music that you hear there is my
husband's creation. So we had a really great opportunity in
(05:29):
my thirties for us to get a chance to create
a lot together, which was wonderful. I think I spent
a lot of my thirties working, to be honest, I
feel like I had a lot of like hectic hustle
kind of schedule and in a lot of ways because
percent of my work was event based and was travel based.
(05:51):
So it wasn't just event based. I was very rarely
doing events in my home city of Atlanta. It was
almost always travel. And the thing about travel that I've
actually really been reflecting on a lot since the pandemic,
because for the most part, I haven't been traveling for
work during the pandemic. I think there were a couple
of times we had to do like some shoots and
(06:14):
different things like that that we had to like go
somewhere in driving distance, shoot for the day, come home
masked and all the everything, sanitizer lights, all everything. But
other than that, um, I haven't been traveling at all
and haven't taken a flight since March. So I feel
like my thirties was mostly very hectic, very on other
(06:35):
people's schedules all the time, you know, just traveling to
this city to that city. I remember Easter weekend was
always a very busy weekend because of the market that
I was in at the time. So sometimes I would
get booked to perform poetry at like a good Friday
service at a church on one side of the country,
(06:56):
do that service, go to bed, and then get up
either in the middle of the night or super early
the next morning, take like the super early flight, or
take a red eye where I flew overnight to get
into the other city to do sound checks rehearsals with
another church, and then perform at what felt like a
thousand services on Easter. I mean it was typically somewhere
(07:18):
between five and seven services, but it was like a
lot of services. And so that was my life, you know.
I was excited in my thirties to be at a
point where I could do this full time, and I
was making pretty good money at the time doing that.
I think the other thing about it, though, is my
schedule really didn't have like any sort of middle ground.
(07:41):
It was very all or nothing kind of experience. So
I was either so busy and had so many dates
that came in that I was just like, I don't
even know how we're gonn you know, like make it
to the end of whatever this run is. And then
there would be these seasons that would come in then
middle of the year where nothing had come in. You know.
(08:03):
We would sometimes have a whole three months in the
summer where we had no gigs, and so we would
go from feeling like super tired, super busy doing all
the things to sort of having this lurch of nothing
coming in financially and also not as much to do,
(08:24):
and that would totally freak us out, especially the first
couple of years that we were married. And then after
a while we tried to sort of take advantage of
that time when it came, because inevitably it always did,
sometimes in the summer, sometimes around the holidays, sometimes at
the beginning of the year. You never knew when it
was going to come, but you knew you were going
to have some months where you weren't traveling, And so
the goal of all that hustling, hopefully was that you
(08:45):
were sort of stacking the money so that when the
slow times came, you could afford to just chill out
or go on a vacation, or be with your family
or see your friends, or work on other creative projects
that you wanted to finish, so that feast or fan
them in part, I remember being very challenging for me
in my thirties, and I will say I experienced a
(09:09):
landmark event in seventeen that sort of shifted me into
my late thirties and changed a lot of what was
going to become my forties too. So this is something
that I've talked about kind of vaguely in some other things.
I've written about this vaguely a little bit in a
book before, and talked about a little bit here, But
(09:29):
for this episode, I wanted to share a little bit
more about that in case there are any of you
that may be dealing with this too. But in my
early thirties, I found out that I had fibroids, and
if you're not familiar with fibroids. Fibroids are benign tumors
that can occur in the unous and I found out
I had them in my early thirties. I didn't really
(09:52):
know anything about that. I you know, had sort of
a very quick conversation with my gynecologist at the time
because is I was just finding out about that right
before I got married, and so she was like, well,
you should, you know, go on your honeymoon and enjoy
your honeymoon. When you come back, you know, we need
to talk about it. And so I ended up having
to have surgery to remove my fibroids in seventeen And
(10:16):
by that time, my fibroids had gotten so large. Like
when I look at pictures of myself from this era
of time and if any of you saw me at
events around that sort of seventeen time frame, I had
to dress to basically hide how large my fibroids were.
(10:38):
So the surgery was very intense. It was very intense,
very invasive procedure, very hard on the body. And you know,
I'm also like into, you know, as as much as
I can be into sort of holistic and more you know,
natural ways to heal the body. And so I had
also done those things, and those things have been helpful
(10:59):
to a point, but I still arrived at this point
of needing to have surgery for the sake of my health,
and that moment right there, like getting home from the hospital,
having complications, having to go back into the hospital, and
then having probably what was supposed to be six to
(11:20):
eight weeks of recovery but ended up believing eight to
ten weeks of recovery. And when I say eight to
ten weeks of recovery, I mean like you can't drive
during that time, you can't exercise, you can't lift anything,
you know, above a very small, you know, number of pounds. Right,
So I had a lot of time to think about
(11:42):
my life and process how did I get here? You know,
how did this happen? What are the changes I need
to make in my life too, try to try to
not end up here again. And one of the things
I discovered is I was actually living a very stressful life. Actually,
remember my mother in law setting me down when we
(12:02):
were all, you know, together as a family. But she
sat me down, just she and nine, and she looked
at me and she said, I'm really worried about you.
You you seem like you were very, very stressed. And
at the time that she said it to me, this
was before I had surgery, I was really frustrated about
the conversation because I was thinking to myself, like, yeah,
(12:23):
I am an entrepreneur, I'm a performing artist. You know
my husband, I own this business together. Like yeah, Like
I live a stressful life. There's nothing about this that
is an easy thing in any way. But after I
had the surgery and had time to really reflect on
the question that she was asking me, I thought to myself,
(12:44):
on a scale of one to ten, prior to having surgery,
how stressed what I have said I was? And I
thought to myself, I think I would have said I
was somewhere between an eight and a nine. And the
body is not really made for you to live at
(13:04):
that level of stress for the long term. The body
is made for us to survive, you know, stresses that
are going to come to us in life. We're not
going to have a life that completely has no stress.
Will have stress sometimes, you know, but the body isn't
really made to survive that level of stress for a
(13:27):
long period. And then what happens over time if you
live a high stress life like that. Like if you're
if you're listening to me right now, and your stress
level is somewhere between eight and at ten all the time,
what happens is it becomes normal to you and then
it actually registers to you like it's a four, but
it's really a nine or a ten for some of us.
(13:50):
Right And so I realized in that recovery time that
when my mother in law had asked me that question,
I was actually a lot more stressed out then I
even knew I was because it was so normal to me.
So I spent that recovery time. This was the year
that I turned thirty seven, So I spent that recovery
time thinking to myself, what are the things in my
(14:13):
life that are causing me stress? And the main thing
that came up was work. It was the work I
was doing. There was something in there that was causing
me stress. So one of the changes that I had
to make as I had to start saying no to
things that were not necessary. So there were some volunteer
things that I was doing um at that time, and
(14:34):
I just had to say no to those things. You know,
had to go back to some people and say, hey,
I know I made this commitment to you and said
that I could do this for that, but I can't
do it now because this is what I have to
do for my health, right, which is very humbling for me,
because I'm very much a doer. I'm very much a
person who would almost like drag herself to keep her word,
which is, you know, in part, a good quality to have,
(14:56):
but you want to also be able to keep your
word to yourself, and your word to yourself is that
you're going to take care of yourself. You'd be gentle
with yourself. You know, you'll be looking out for you too.
And if you're dragging yourself through whatever to keep your
word to people, but in the process of that, you're
not keeping your word to yourself, then it's not fair
(15:16):
to you, right, So I had to start saying no
to those things. One of the other things that I
realized was a stressor for me is how I was
traveling for work. When you're traveling for a living, and
I can really only speak to when you're traveling for
a living as a speaker or performing artist, right, sometimes
(15:37):
there's a little there's a little tension, especially I'll say
for the market. I was traveling and at the time,
which was a Christian environment, right, or a church environment
might be an even better description for that. There's sometimes
were some tensions between what the people that were planning
the event expected from you and what you could actually
(16:02):
deliver or or wanted to deliver, right. So sometimes I
let's say, if I was booked to perform at a
church event on a Saturday morning, right, what I had
been doing before having surgery. Is if I was going
to perform there on a Saturday morning, and the cheapest
flight for me to get there was at six am,
(16:23):
then I would take that six am flight, even though
I wasn't paying for the flight, but I would take
the six am flight, which meant I was getting up
at probably three am in order to leave my house
and get to the airport and get there on time,
do all that, get through traffic if there's traffic, whatever,
and I'm getting there into whatever city at you know,
(16:44):
could be anywhere from seven thirty to nine or ten,
depending on how far I had to fly right, and
I'm getting there just in time to leave the airport,
run right to sound check, eat a quick little late breakfast,
get to the hotel, maybe change clothes, freshen up, speak,
(17:05):
you know, and then depending on the engagement, if I
had to speak more than once that day or whatever.
But pretty much after I finished talking, I would fly
out go home. Well, I realized that a part of
the problem was I needed to stop doing those six
am flights. If I didn't have to, I had to
(17:25):
request from whoever it was that was booking me two
come in the night before so that I could get
in at seven pm the night before, get to the hotel,
drink some water, get some really good sleep so that
i'd be fresh to do what it was they asked
me to do that next morning. But sometimes what would
happened is I would get booked to do an event,
(17:47):
and even if I would request to come in the
night before, the people planning the event might think I
was just at my hotel chilling, that I have time
to go to dinner with these people, or I have
time to attend this social function, which isn't technically a
part of what I've been booked to go there to do,
but they just think it could be a cool idea,
(18:08):
you know, if I could hang out with so and so,
or if I could come to whatever session it was,
and I also think for people who maybe don't do
road life, I think sometimes people that were planning events
thought that the road life was very lonely or thought
that our lives as people who did road life were
(18:29):
very lonely. So they would say things like, Yeah, when
you fly in, you know, you should just come to
one of the sessions. You can just relax. You know,
you don't have to do anything. You could just let
us pour into you. And I would always kind of
chuckle a little bit because I was like, Yeah, road
life itself can be lonely, but my life is not lonely.
(18:52):
I actually have like wonderful people into my life. I
have wonderful community in my life. So this is not
a space where I come to relax. I go on
a vacation to relax, or I go to my best
friend's house and relax. I go to my mama house
and relax. I don't come to this space where it's
mostly strangers and people I'm just meeting to relax. I
(19:14):
came here to work, you know, So me not coming
to this dinner or me not coming to the whatever
social function is attached to this event, is actually for
me to be better and fresher doing what it is
you actually asked me to do at the event, right,
So I had to start saying no in some of
(19:35):
those moments and letting myself not be worried about if
that was awkward for the other person I'm talking to,
and saying those things up front when people would request
me for events that I am going to come in
the night before. I will not be at these such
and such activities, you know, but I will be there
on time for sound check, and I will be there
(19:56):
on time for my time to be on stage. And
a lot of times, y'all can probably tell, if y'all
have been listening to this podcast, a lot of times
I stayed for a long time after I would perform
because I actually loved talking to people at the event
when I could, you know, I loved like doing book signings,
I mean all things that we did willy nilly before
(20:16):
the pandemic. But I would stay. I would do book
signings and just talk to people if they wanted to
talk after the events. I love that part, just getting
to connect with the audience, you know, but just really
deciding and doing a better job deciding what is actually
necessary and if it's not necessary, then maybe we don't
need to do it. And I think the last thing
(20:38):
that I had to assess in that recovery time was
what about this space I'm working in? What is actually
stressing me out? Because I can plan for you know,
the logistics and trying to improve some of those aspects.
But I also really was at the beginning in my
late thirties of discovering that it wasn't just the logistics
(21:01):
of the work I was doing, It was actually the
space where I was working that was causing me high
amounts of stress. And that was stressful for a couple
of reasons. I think one of the reasons it was
stressful on on just a basic level is being a
black woman in a predominantly white space is just stressful, period.
Whether it's church space, whether it's nonprofit, whether it's corporate.
(21:25):
Being the only black woman in that space is stressful
and really for a lot of us as women of color,
being whoever we are in predominantly white spaces has typically
high levels of stress. For us even more stressed, and
sometimes we know or acknowledge in the moment, right So
(21:46):
that was definitely a part of the foundation of why
it was stressful. I think also I was beginning to
realize that, in particular, the industry that I was in,
which at that time was predominantly white Christian and dominantly
very conservative to theologically and politically in some ways, was
also getting stressful for me because I was discovering there
(22:09):
were things that were important to them or things that
they believed in that I didn't, and I wanted more
creative space, I wanted more inclusive space, and I realized
I was longing for something that was never going to
happen inside of that space, and so it was stressful
to re enter there because I was being asked maybe
(22:32):
two speak about something that I don't believe, or speak
on something, and then what I have to say about
it doesn't match the beliefs of the people there that
have started the event or started the organization or whatever
it was. And just realizing that my voice, I felt
like my voice was growing and becoming in a lot
(22:55):
of beautiful ways, and that in those ways that voice
wasn't welcome in its fullness in these spaces. So I
feel like my thirties was this journey to this halt
right here at having this surgery, and after that surgery
that caused a great shift that was sort of leading
(23:19):
me right there into what the beginning of my forties
was going to be. What did I think my life
(23:43):
would be like when I turned forty. Well, I didn't
think we were going to be in a pandemic. Let's
start with that. I did not think that. I don't
know how many of us thought that, but I didn't
think that because my birthdays in May, so I think
a lot of us were thinking in the beginning, like, oh, well,
be on lockdown for maybe two weeks, maybe four weeks,
(24:04):
things will be back to normal, right, And like, over
a year later, we're still not back to normal. Um.
I think when I think about what I thought my
life was going to be like when I turned forty,
I think about two things. Maybe just one thing really,
but probably two things, honestly. Uh. One of them is
that I thought that I was going to be the
(24:24):
mother of like an elementary school kid by the time
I was forty. That's what I thought. I always had
that in my mind. I thought I was going to
spend my thirties child rearing basically, and then by the
time I got into my forties, i'd be, you know,
dealing with like an elementary school kid, or you know,
transitioning into like middle school in the beginning of high
school kid. And when I got into my late thirties,
(24:45):
and I so I started kind of settling in with
me when I turned thirty eight, like, oh, you might
turn forty and you might not have kids, and what
does that mean? And that sort of dovetails to me
how I approached turning thirty. So in my twenties, my
person that I wanted to please or that I wanted
to approve of me was my thirty year old self.
(25:08):
And there were so many like decisions and adventures and
I'm sure mistakes that I made that I was thinking
in my mind, I wonder if my third year old
self is going to be proud of this, or I
think my third year old self is going to be
super proud of me that I made this choice, that
I didn't do this, or that I did do that,
(25:29):
you know. And so then by the time I got
to thirty, I was like, yeah, I'm in there, except
the fact that I'm not married, and I thought I
was gonna be married by the time I was thirty,
so boop, here we are. But I already had such
a sense of adventure that my thirties, even though I
felt like a man, you know, I wished I would
(25:49):
have gotten married by then, But I was also like, oh,
well I haven't and I may not get married. So
if I don't get married, then what do I want
my life to be about? Because my life is about
more than the relationship that I'm in. And even though
ironically I ended up getting married within a year a
year ish of that birthday, I think having that mentality
(26:11):
helped me enter marriage with this greater sense of adventure
and not feeling like because my husband and I were
getting married that that's my identity now is only to
be his wife. But instead I was sort of able
to enter that phase of life like, I'm married to
this man that I love. I actually love keeping company
(26:33):
with him. I love hanging out with him, whether we
go to Walmart or we go across the world somewhere, Like,
I actually really enjoy him as a person. So it's
not that my whole identity has to be built on that.
It's that I had a wonderful life before we got married,
and now I'm married to him. Being married to him
(26:53):
adds to my already wonderful life. That was sort of
how I entered being married. So when I realized in
my late thirties, it was sort of that same moment
of like, okay, I've been envisioning, but for me, I'll say,
it wasn't the age this time I've sort of had
in my head, like what would Amina who becomes a
mom want me to do in this moment, or like
(27:15):
what a meaning that's going to become a mom? Be
proud of me? And I remember I was working through
this in therapy in my late thirties and just reimagining
with my therapist what if I don't have kids, you know,
what what will my life be like? And sort of
coming back to that remembrance that whether or not I
have kids, my life is wonderful. And that was sort
(27:36):
of what I had to come to in my thirties,
whether or not I get married or even at that moment,
you know, find like whoever my person is, you know,
even date somebody really honestly, but that's for another episode.
Whatever that is my life. My life was wonderful before
I married my husband. You know. It wasn't that marying
(27:57):
my husband is what made my miserable life wonderful. It
was that marrying him made an already wonderful life even
more wonderful. Right, So, I think my therapist and I
were working through that, and I just started feeling it
come up in my late thirties and started working through
what's the adventure that can be there for you in
your forties to experience, versus you walking into this decade
(28:20):
thinking about the things you thought you would have experienced
or thought you would have air quotes achieved by this time. Right. So,
I thought my forties was going to be I won't
say boring. I don't think I thought that, but I
thought my forties was gonna be pretty routine. I thought
it was gonna be without actually a lot of adventure
(28:42):
because I thought, you know, probably gonna have some kids
by then, probably gonna be going to PTA meetings or
if they do extracurricular activity, is probably going to be
spending my time doing that, going to be organizing, you know,
what we do with our business and our travels around
their schedules, Right, And realizing as I was getting close
to that birthday that that wasn't going to be the case.
(29:04):
And you know, I have not talked publicly a lot
about you know, what that journey has been for us
behind the scenes. I know that y'all hear me talking
a lot, and that probably makes it seem like I
am not a very private person. And those of you
that have been following my career for a while, you've
see me perform and stuff. I I'm not sure that
I seem like a private person, but I am really
(29:27):
a very private person about my personal life and things
like that. They're just you know, I'm I'm an introvert
at the end of the day. So there are parts
of my life that are good and wonderful and beautiful
that I just love to keep to myself, you know. Um.
And there are parts of my life that have been
terribly hard that I did share with folks, but they
(29:47):
were folks that we're very very close to. Uh, they
weren't things that I shared publicly. So I'm not ready
to share some of all this journey right here. But
one day maybe I will, and I will, and this
will probably would be the place that I will come
back here and be like, Okay, remember episode thirty two. Well,
if you have a listen to a good back, listen
(30:08):
to that, because now I have more tea to share.
But I'm not ready, honestly, to share some of the
tea that goes with that. But that is what I
thought my forties were going to be. And in my
late thirties, I definitely felt myself freaking out that I
was realizing turning forty wasn't gonna look like I thought
it was gonna look. You know what was my life
actually like when I turned forty, Well, it was a pandemic. Okay,
(30:33):
it was a whole pandemic out here. So Matt and
I met, my husband, Matt and I had originally planned
I had my dream dream since I've been an adult,
really has been that on my forty birthday, I wanted
to go to Italy. So originally that was the plan.
Matt and I were going to do that. And y'all,
(30:56):
I don't know if any of y'all have this experience,
but I am one of those people that sometimes I
get like a like a gut feeling, a gumption, a
premonition or something. I get a feeling to do something
or not to do something. And I got a feeling
prior to the pandemic that we shouldn't go to Italy.
And so we talked about it. I mean we because
(31:16):
we were just at the point where it was like
getting to be time to like book flights and find
hotels and and do all that, and I just told Matt,
I don't know, I don't feel like we're supposed to go.
So we didn't had no idea that even if we
had booked all that stuff, we would have still been
grounded here, you know, unable to travel. So then when
(31:36):
I realized, okay, well I'm not going to go to Italy,
my next plan was to go to my Mojo city,
which if y'all have been listening to the podcast, you
know I talked about that in my Her Favorite Things
episode that my Mojo city is New York. And so
I was like, well, I don't feel for some reason,
I don't feel good about traveling internationally. Maybe I'll travel domestically.
And then, of course the pandemic happened, so did not
(32:00):
get to go to New York either. So um my
actual birthday, I cried. Not on my birthday though, but
in the weeks leading up to my birthday, I had
to like shed some like disappointed tears because I realized
it was really hard to think of ways to celebrate
(32:23):
without having a restaurant to go eat at or a
party that you could safely plan and be with the
people that love you, or a place you could go travel,
like I had to just sit down one day and
just talk to Matt and cry my eyes out about
feeling so disappointed about that. And then once I cried
(32:44):
my eyes out, I was able to reimagine, like what
my birthday could be like. And I think that maybe
is my rhythm. Really it's like I need to cry,
I need to process the sorrow, the grief, the disappointment.
And then when I process that, it sort of opened
my brain to reimagine what can we do with what
(33:05):
we have? Right? So I tried to think about if
it weren't a pandemic and I couldn't travel, what would
I do for my birthday? And I was like, well,
I would have gone. I would have gotten a pedicure,
a manicure, I would have gotten a spa facial. I
would have eaten at one of my favorite restaurants. I
would have dressed up. I would have put my makeup on,
(33:26):
I would have did my hair, you know all those things.
And so I did a lot of research, y'all, and
I learned how to give myself a very luxurious pedicure,
manicure facial. I just spent the weeks before my birthday
like ordering various things. We just like used some of
the budget that we had planned to use for the trip,
(33:48):
and I just ordered my little tools I needed to
really do my lux manicure pedicure facial. And so the
night or a day really before my birthday, that's what
I did. And then the day of my birthday, honestly
was a really wonderful birthday. And I think in part,
I was just determined to celebrate because, you know, in
(34:10):
the years between surgery and this birthday, like I had
just been through a whole lot. So I was just
grateful to be here, you know, to celebrate that I'm here,
that I'm well, you know, like I just felt like
there was a lot of life to celebrate, and I
wanted to do that. And my therapist had said something
to me. She said, you know, sometimes when hard things
(34:32):
have happened to you, what ends up happening is you
kind of mark time based on these hard things that
have happened, you know, And she was like, so you
end up being like this is the first Christmas, that
this is the second Christmas, that this is the first
birthday since blah blah blah. And she was like, you know,
it's understandable to do that for a time, but she
was like, I don't want you to lose out on
(34:54):
celebrating yourself because every birthday, anniversary, how to day, or
whatever it is, is the mark of how much time
has passed since a bad thing happened to you. She
was like, I think it's okay for you to say,
this is my birthday, and that's a chance to like
celebrate me and celebrate what I've survived and that I'm
(35:16):
still here. Your anniversary with your husband, that's a time
to celebrate this relationship that you love and where you
feel loved. And so that was very much the energy
around my birthday. Um, when I think about what my
life was actually like, I have to tell y'all that
(35:36):
the year this year so far, because I'm turning forty
one this year, so they this year of being forty
has been professionally probably the best year of my career, y'all.
I mean only like a few months after turning forty,
(35:57):
I got a podcast deal with Seneca Women in I Heart,
which is how you are listening to this right now.
And I also UH signed a deal with la to
be one of the faces of their Face Anything campaign.
I'm one of nine women who are featured in the campaign,
all brilliant and amazing women. And to have had these
(36:21):
two big opportunities come to me after I turned forty,
I feel like like in my faith context, that felt
like a big reminder from God that, yeah, my life
in my forties turned out to be very different than
I imagined. But that didn't mean it couldn't be great
and a surprise and wonderful, you know. I remember when
(36:44):
I was doing the shoot for l A. We did
the shoot for my portion of the Face Anything campaign,
which was part commercial and part print ads as well,
and I did the shoot here in Atlanta with wonderful
team that was working with l A. And I remember
getting to the shoot and I had to do all
(37:05):
the wardrobe stuff, you know, try on all these different outfits,
and the outfit that ended up fitting me the best
was this dress that I would never have walked in
a store and bought. Okay, never would have bought this dress.
It was white, it was fitting like all my curves
and everything like it almost fit me to the point
that I think I would have been too self conscious
(37:25):
to wear it, but I put it on and it
fit me like a glove. And I just went home
after like a very long day of shooting. We probably
were shooting almost twelve hours between video and photography, and
I remember getting home and just thinking to myself, girl,
you just did things that models do at forty years old,
(37:47):
with your forty year old curves, with your forty year
old belly, and I'm so proud of it. I'm so
proud of it. Like my year of turning forty turned
out to be so wonderful and so different than I expected.
I can't say it's better than I expected, because I
(38:10):
don't know what that other life would have been like
if I would have had that life. But I think
when we think about our life, and we think about
these things that we hope our life is going to be,
we only have like an A or a B. We
only have like an either or either my life's going
to be this or my life's gonna be terrible, right,
And we don't always have in our minds like, well,
(38:31):
maybe my life won't be that, but it could still
be great or wonderful or this amazing experience. And that's
really what I experienced like, oh, my life is not
this thing that I imagine it was going to be
when I turned forty. But YO, like it's dope. It's dope.
And my next question is what has been the theme
(38:52):
of my forties so far? And the first thought that
came to my mind, the first thing that I hear
in my mind is I hear in d Ri singing
the Serenity Prayer. And if any of you are n
d I re fans. This is actually on a track
called Loving on her album Testimony, Volume one, Life and Relationship,
(39:13):
and she's singing those words at the beginning of the
Serenity Prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the
things I cannot change, and the courage to change the
things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
And if you haven't heard her singing this, you have
to listen to it. But hearing her sing it's like,
I don't know what she was feeling when she sang it,
(39:33):
but it just sounded like she poured all of this
life experience into when she's sang that. She was pouring
like the joy and the sorrow and the good times
and the hard times all into that, and if I
could put a theme on my forties so far, it
is that balance. I think in my thirties, I was
definitely a person that felt like my hard work could
(39:56):
fix it, My hustle could change it. You know, me
praying harder would you know, make this certain thing or
that certain thing different. Me reading my Bible more minutes
or more hours or more pages or whatever it was,
you know, would make this or that different. And that's
(40:16):
not to say that I don't believe that prayer is powerful, um,
but I believe sometimes I would sort of enter the
space of prayer as my way of controlling things, um
in a way, which is kind of a weird way
to enter prayer, right, But sometimes I know I've done that.
Maybe you have to. And I feel like the years
leading up to turning forty have taught me that sometimes
(40:37):
there is some really hard stuff that happens, and you
can't pray it all away, and you can't fix it.
There were some spaces where I was working, and I
wanted them to be anti racist, and I wanted them
to be inclusive of the l g B t Q community.
(40:59):
I wanted them to be inclusive spaces for everybody, and
it didn't matter how many conversations I had, those spaces
were not going to change. And so I had to
accept that that is not going to change. Right. And
then there were some things that I did have to
(41:20):
have the courage to change, you know, like when I
was telling you all, like learning how to say no
and not feeling like I have to please people all
the time, even in professional situations, especially beyond what you
know the contracts is. But you know, another talk for
another time, you know, But those are things that I
can have the courage to change, to change the way
(41:43):
I work, to live a life that is of a
decreased stress level. And then I love the last part
of that, which is the wisdom to know the difference
that they're just gonna come up, both of those in life,
you know, just gonna be some things that happen and
I can't change it, and there'll be some things that
(42:06):
I can put in the work to make them different
or make them better. But I believe this decade of
my forties is bringing me the wisdom to know the difference.
If I could give advice to a woman about to
turn forty, what would I tell her? I would tell her,
were you if you're listening and you're about to turn forty,
(42:29):
or if you're in your late thirties and you're like,
oh man, what's happening here? I would say, first of all,
when you think about your forty birthday, do something that
you actually love and be around the people that you
actually love and that make you feel loved. I don't
(42:54):
feel like any birthday you should force yourself to do
things because that's what your family members want, or because
that's what your friends said they'd like to do, but
especially on these birthdays that end in zero, or sometimes
for some people, even the ones that end in five, Like,
really think about what do you like to do. And
(43:14):
if you have family members that are determined to plan
a surprise party for you, for example, and you know
you hate surprise parties, just go ahead and say them,
look them in the eyes for real, and be like,
I actually wanted to go to a hotel by myself,
and I love you, and I want us to have
dinner or breakfast or whatever after I have my time
by myself, but I want that time by myself. I
(43:36):
was even talking to one of my really really good
friends when she turned forty, and she and her husband
have a little boy, and she was like, I don't know.
I think I just want to spend my birthday with
like my husband and my son. And I was like,
that's beautiful too. Just do something that you love, plan
to do that you know, within whatever you can afford
(43:57):
to do, or like in my case, we were in
the middle of a pandemics, so I had a lot
of limitations. But I spent that birthday with my favorite person,
which is my husband. My husband put this wonderful video
together of all these people I love singing Happy Birthday
to me, and I faced tims with people that I loved.
(44:17):
I mean, even in that moment, I let myself be
loved on. And I think you should. You should ring
in your forties like that as much as you can,
and not because it's like bad luck if you don't,
or because that's the rest of your year or the
rest of your decade. I I don't really put a
lot of stock in that, but I do think there's
a lot of good energy to doing something for yourself.
(44:39):
And the other thing I would say, if you're about
to turn forty, I would say, you know, release yourself
from the expectations that society puts upon us about what
any of our ages have to look like. I think
there is a lot of pressure on women, you know,
because of the patriarchy on a sleep, but I think
(45:01):
there's a lot of pressure about your relationship status, about
what your uterus is or isn't doing right um for
those of us that have uterus is you know what
I mean? Like, I think I think there's a lot
of pressure about what we're doing relationship wise, what we're
doing about having children, and depending on what environments you're in,
(45:22):
if there's more value placed upon that than your actual
satisfaction with your life or the fullness of your life.
That if you're in a relationship with someone who loves you,
that's dope. You know, if you have children and they're
in your family, your loving them, you're raising them, that's dope.
(45:45):
And those things are dope inside of your whole life.
That those things themselves are not the only thing that
define you. That you get to build your life upon
whatever you decide to build it on, but I hope
that you build it in the fullness of what that means,
(46:05):
whoever you are and however you are right. And I
guess the last thing I would say is don't be
afraid of being surprised of some things that are unexpected
happening to you. Sometimes some of the things that are
unexpected are the worst. They are terrible. Okay, Like one
day I'll come back and regale y'all with some of
(46:27):
those stories that have greeted me in my late thirties
and early forties. But you'll also have some unexpected blessings,
and I think it's good to have room for those,
you know. I think it's good to be open to
that process as well. And aging, even though we have
been taught by so many things and whatever from other people,
(46:52):
like aging is beautiful. It's a beautiful process. It's you
coming into your skin more. It's you knowing who you
are more. It's being willing to still learn even after
you've learned all these other things. It's beautiful. It's not
something that we have to fear. It's a part of
becoming who you are. And that's what you want in
your life. You don't want to become what somebody else
(47:14):
expected of you. You don't want to become smaller than
you actually are. You want to be the full badass you.
That's what i'd say. Anyways, I wanted to thank you
all for listening. And normally at the end of these episodes,
I have an outro, a segment of sorts that I
(47:35):
do to give a crown to another woman of color,
and I want to take this time to give a
crown to you. If you're listening in general, and especially
those of you that are in your forties and beyond
or maybe approaching your forties, I want you to give
yourself a crown, whatever that looks like for you. I
want you to say some good words to yourself today.
(47:57):
I want you to think about what may be your
expectations about the next decade of your life that's approaching.
And I don't want you to think about all of
the things that you haven't done or all of the
you know, air quotes expectations that you haven't met. I
want you to think about what have you accomplished or
(48:18):
even beyond that, like who are you that you're proud of?
And how can you celebrate her today? So whoever you
are listening, you deserve it. Give yourself a crown. Her
(48:44):
with Amina Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Selo
Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast
Network and partnership with I heart Radio. Thanks for listening,
and don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast
by
Hey, y'all, this is the week of my birthday. So
probably as you're listening to this, I am somewhere celebrating,
because that's what I do. I have only had one
(00:29):
year in my adult life so far that I can
think of that I worked on my birthday. And if
you have not listened to my episode here called that
time I quit my job, we should go back and
listen to that because I think of that episode. I
share a bit of the story of why I was
working on my birthday. But normally I treat my birthday
(00:51):
as a holiday. Outside of that year, I take the
day off. I don't like to work on that day.
I actually was supposed to work on my birthday last year,
and then of course ended up not working because the
event got rescheduled and I was home. So this episode
is my hashtag forty a f episode. And if you've
(01:12):
been listening to the podcast, you have probably listened to
my interview with Christie Gomez where she told me the
story of what her experience was like as she turned
forty and what her forties have been like. And as
I was turning forty, I longed for stories like this
to hear from women to hear from black women and
(01:33):
women of color in particular, and so I thought it
would be fitting the week of my birthday to share
what my forty a F Story is since I turned
forty last year during the pandemic, so normally when I
do these episodes, I am wanting to organize this around
a few questions. I want to talk about what my
(01:54):
thirties were like. I want to talk about what did
I think my life would be like when I turned forty,
what my life was actually like when I turned forty,
what has been the theme of my forty so far?
And if I could give advice to a woman about
to turn forty, what I would tell her. So these
are the questions that Christie and I talked about and
(02:15):
I wanted to answer them as well. And you will
hear more episodes here of me interviewing other women of
color about their forty a F stories. And if you
have a forty a F story you want to tell me,
I would love for you to comment on socials. I
want to thank each of you for your comments. I
see you commenting on social media, I see you sharing
the episodes in your Instagram stories and on Twitter. Just
(02:37):
know that it means the world to me because I'm
talking to all of you, but I don't get to
see all of you and interact with all of you,
at least not yet. Eventually we will be having her
with Amina Brown live events when it's safe to do so,
and we can all get together in person. I get
a chance to see you, but in the meantime getting
(02:57):
to see you talking about this in your store. Some
of you have been d M N me seeing your comments.
Just know it means the world to me. I try
as best i can to respond to all of you.
Sometimes I'm not able to, but know if you didn't
hear from me, please charge it to my head or
me being in the bed laying down somewhere. Not that
I am not appreciative, So thank you so so much
(03:19):
for that. So I'd love to hear your forty a
f stories too. What were my thirties like? I got
married when I was thirty one, and if I would
really start the story at the beginning of my thirties
and I wrote about some of this and both of
my books actually, but I can probably give you a
(03:40):
more raw version of that you're on the podcast. So
when I was turning thirty I turned thirty in New
York City with my best friend Adrian, and we both
thought that we were never going to get married, Like
dating had just not been going super great for either
of us, and we were just like, this is it.
(04:01):
We're gonna be nuns, but we're gonna be cool nuns.
We're gonna be like the cool aunt with all the
memorabilia from the places we've traveled. You know. That was
sort of the vibe of me coming into my thirties.
Unbeknownst to me, I actually already knew the man that
I was going to marry, and so I got engaged
on my thirty feet birthday and then we got married
(04:24):
three and a half months later. So I think the
initial part of my early thirties was just you know,
adjusting to married life. At the time that my husband
and I got married, I was still performing on the
road and mostly white Christian environments, and my husband was
a youth pastor at a church a little bit south
(04:45):
of Atlanta. So I think we spent those first you know,
a few years of marriage just trying to get adjusted
to what both of our jobs would require from us.
We started pretty quickly traveling together and performing together. And
so I definitely think part of my thirties was adjusting
to that in the early parts and then us finding
(05:07):
a wonderful rhythm together of how we could do this
thing on stage together. We were recording albums together. I
know I'm very terrible at telling you all I have albums,
but if you've ever heard any of my poetry albums,
all of the music that you hear there is my
husband's creation. So we had a really great opportunity in
(05:29):
my thirties for us to get a chance to create
a lot together, which was wonderful. I think I spent
a lot of my thirties working, to be honest, I
feel like I had a lot of like hectic hustle
kind of schedule and in a lot of ways because
percent of my work was event based and was travel based.
(05:51):
So it wasn't just event based. I was very rarely
doing events in my home city of Atlanta. It was
almost always travel. And the thing about travel that I've
actually really been reflecting on a lot since the pandemic,
because for the most part, I haven't been traveling for
work during the pandemic. I think there were a couple
of times we had to do like some shoots and
(06:14):
different things like that that we had to like go
somewhere in driving distance, shoot for the day, come home
masked and all the everything, sanitizer lights, all everything. But
other than that, um, I haven't been traveling at all
and haven't taken a flight since March. So I feel
like my thirties was mostly very hectic, very on other
(06:35):
people's schedules all the time, you know, just traveling to
this city to that city. I remember Easter weekend was
always a very busy weekend because of the market that
I was in at the time. So sometimes I would
get booked to perform poetry at like a good Friday
service at a church on one side of the country,
(06:56):
do that service, go to bed, and then get up
either in the middle of the night or super early
the next morning, take like the super early flight, or
take a red eye where I flew overnight to get
into the other city to do sound checks rehearsals with
another church, and then perform at what felt like a
thousand services on Easter. I mean it was typically somewhere
(07:18):
between five and seven services, but it was like a
lot of services. And so that was my life, you know.
I was excited in my thirties to be at a
point where I could do this full time, and I
was making pretty good money at the time doing that.
I think the other thing about it, though, is my
schedule really didn't have like any sort of middle ground.
(07:41):
It was very all or nothing kind of experience. So
I was either so busy and had so many dates
that came in that I was just like, I don't
even know how we're gonn you know, like make it
to the end of whatever this run is. And then
there would be these seasons that would come in then
middle of the year where nothing had come in. You know.
(08:03):
We would sometimes have a whole three months in the
summer where we had no gigs, and so we would
go from feeling like super tired, super busy doing all
the things to sort of having this lurch of nothing
coming in financially and also not as much to do,
(08:24):
and that would totally freak us out, especially the first
couple of years that we were married. And then after
a while we tried to sort of take advantage of
that time when it came, because inevitably it always did,
sometimes in the summer, sometimes around the holidays, sometimes at
the beginning of the year. You never knew when it
was going to come, but you knew you were going
to have some months where you weren't traveling, And so
the goal of all that hustling, hopefully was that you
(08:45):
were sort of stacking the money so that when the
slow times came, you could afford to just chill out
or go on a vacation, or be with your family
or see your friends, or work on other creative projects
that you wanted to finish, so that feast or fan
them in part, I remember being very challenging for me
in my thirties, and I will say I experienced a
(09:09):
landmark event in seventeen that sort of shifted me into
my late thirties and changed a lot of what was
going to become my forties too. So this is something
that I've talked about kind of vaguely in some other things.
I've written about this vaguely a little bit in a
book before, and talked about a little bit here, But
(09:29):
for this episode, I wanted to share a little bit
more about that in case there are any of you
that may be dealing with this too. But in my
early thirties, I found out that I had fibroids, and
if you're not familiar with fibroids. Fibroids are benign tumors
that can occur in the unous and I found out
I had them in my early thirties. I didn't really
(09:52):
know anything about that. I you know, had sort of
a very quick conversation with my gynecologist at the time
because is I was just finding out about that right
before I got married, and so she was like, well,
you should, you know, go on your honeymoon and enjoy
your honeymoon. When you come back, you know, we need
to talk about it. And so I ended up having
to have surgery to remove my fibroids in seventeen And
(10:16):
by that time, my fibroids had gotten so large. Like
when I look at pictures of myself from this era
of time and if any of you saw me at
events around that sort of seventeen time frame, I had
to dress to basically hide how large my fibroids were.
(10:38):
So the surgery was very intense. It was very intense,
very invasive procedure, very hard on the body. And you know,
I'm also like into, you know, as as much as
I can be into sort of holistic and more you know,
natural ways to heal the body. And so I had
also done those things, and those things have been helpful
(10:59):
to a point, but I still arrived at this point
of needing to have surgery for the sake of my health,
and that moment right there, like getting home from the hospital,
having complications, having to go back into the hospital, and
then having probably what was supposed to be six to
(11:20):
eight weeks of recovery but ended up believing eight to
ten weeks of recovery. And when I say eight to
ten weeks of recovery, I mean like you can't drive
during that time, you can't exercise, you can't lift anything,
you know, above a very small, you know, number of pounds. Right,
So I had a lot of time to think about
(11:42):
my life and process how did I get here? You know,
how did this happen? What are the changes I need
to make in my life too, try to try to
not end up here again. And one of the things
I discovered is I was actually living a very stressful life. Actually,
remember my mother in law setting me down when we
(12:02):
were all, you know, together as a family. But she
sat me down, just she and nine, and she looked
at me and she said, I'm really worried about you.
You you seem like you were very, very stressed. And
at the time that she said it to me, this
was before I had surgery, I was really frustrated about
the conversation because I was thinking to myself, like, yeah,
(12:23):
I am an entrepreneur, I'm a performing artist. You know
my husband, I own this business together. Like yeah, Like
I live a stressful life. There's nothing about this that
is an easy thing in any way. But after I
had the surgery and had time to really reflect on
the question that she was asking me, I thought to myself,
(12:44):
on a scale of one to ten, prior to having surgery,
how stressed what I have said I was? And I
thought to myself, I think I would have said I
was somewhere between an eight and a nine. And the
body is not really made for you to live at
(13:04):
that level of stress for the long term. The body
is made for us to survive, you know, stresses that
are going to come to us in life. We're not
going to have a life that completely has no stress.
Will have stress sometimes, you know, but the body isn't
really made to survive that level of stress for a
(13:27):
long period. And then what happens over time if you
live a high stress life like that. Like if you're
if you're listening to me right now, and your stress
level is somewhere between eight and at ten all the time,
what happens is it becomes normal to you and then
it actually registers to you like it's a four, but
it's really a nine or a ten for some of us.
(13:50):
Right And so I realized in that recovery time that
when my mother in law had asked me that question,
I was actually a lot more stressed out then I
even knew I was because it was so normal to me.
So I spent that recovery time. This was the year
that I turned thirty seven, So I spent that recovery
time thinking to myself, what are the things in my
(14:13):
life that are causing me stress? And the main thing
that came up was work. It was the work I
was doing. There was something in there that was causing
me stress. So one of the changes that I had
to make as I had to start saying no to
things that were not necessary. So there were some volunteer
things that I was doing um at that time, and
(14:34):
I just had to say no to those things. You know,
had to go back to some people and say, hey,
I know I made this commitment to you and said
that I could do this for that, but I can't
do it now because this is what I have to
do for my health, right, which is very humbling for me,
because I'm very much a doer. I'm very much a
person who would almost like drag herself to keep her word,
which is, you know, in part, a good quality to have,
(14:56):
but you want to also be able to keep your
word to yourself, and your word to yourself is that
you're going to take care of yourself. You'd be gentle
with yourself. You know, you'll be looking out for you too.
And if you're dragging yourself through whatever to keep your
word to people, but in the process of that, you're
not keeping your word to yourself, then it's not fair
(15:16):
to you, right, So I had to start saying no
to those things. One of the other things that I
realized was a stressor for me is how I was
traveling for work. When you're traveling for a living, and
I can really only speak to when you're traveling for
a living as a speaker or performing artist, right, sometimes
(15:37):
there's a little there's a little tension, especially I'll say
for the market. I was traveling and at the time,
which was a Christian environment, right, or a church environment
might be an even better description for that. There's sometimes
were some tensions between what the people that were planning
the event expected from you and what you could actually
(16:02):
deliver or or wanted to deliver, right. So sometimes I
let's say, if I was booked to perform at a
church event on a Saturday morning, right, what I had
been doing before having surgery. Is if I was going
to perform there on a Saturday morning, and the cheapest
flight for me to get there was at six am,
(16:23):
then I would take that six am flight, even though
I wasn't paying for the flight, but I would take
the six am flight, which meant I was getting up
at probably three am in order to leave my house
and get to the airport and get there on time,
do all that, get through traffic if there's traffic, whatever,
and I'm getting there into whatever city at you know,
(16:44):
could be anywhere from seven thirty to nine or ten,
depending on how far I had to fly right, and
I'm getting there just in time to leave the airport,
run right to sound check, eat a quick little late breakfast,
get to the hotel, maybe change clothes, freshen up, speak,
(17:05):
you know, and then depending on the engagement, if I
had to speak more than once that day or whatever.
But pretty much after I finished talking, I would fly
out go home. Well, I realized that a part of
the problem was I needed to stop doing those six
am flights. If I didn't have to, I had to
(17:25):
request from whoever it was that was booking me two
come in the night before so that I could get
in at seven pm the night before, get to the hotel,
drink some water, get some really good sleep so that
i'd be fresh to do what it was they asked
me to do that next morning. But sometimes what would
happened is I would get booked to do an event,
(17:47):
and even if I would request to come in the
night before, the people planning the event might think I
was just at my hotel chilling, that I have time
to go to dinner with these people, or I have
time to attend this social function, which isn't technically a
part of what I've been booked to go there to do,
but they just think it could be a cool idea,
(18:08):
you know, if I could hang out with so and so,
or if I could come to whatever session it was,
and I also think for people who maybe don't do
road life, I think sometimes people that were planning events
thought that the road life was very lonely or thought
that our lives as people who did road life were
(18:29):
very lonely. So they would say things like, Yeah, when
you fly in, you know, you should just come to
one of the sessions. You can just relax. You know,
you don't have to do anything. You could just let
us pour into you. And I would always kind of
chuckle a little bit because I was like, Yeah, road
life itself can be lonely, but my life is not lonely.
(18:52):
I actually have like wonderful people into my life. I
have wonderful community in my life. So this is not
a space where I come to relax. I go on
a vacation to relax, or I go to my best
friend's house and relax. I go to my mama house
and relax. I don't come to this space where it's
mostly strangers and people I'm just meeting to relax. I
(19:14):
came here to work, you know, So me not coming
to this dinner or me not coming to the whatever
social function is attached to this event, is actually for
me to be better and fresher doing what it is
you actually asked me to do at the event, right,
So I had to start saying no in some of
(19:35):
those moments and letting myself not be worried about if
that was awkward for the other person I'm talking to,
and saying those things up front when people would request
me for events that I am going to come in
the night before. I will not be at these such
and such activities, you know, but I will be there
on time for sound check, and I will be there
(19:56):
on time for my time to be on stage. And
a lot of times, y'all can probably tell, if y'all
have been listening to this podcast, a lot of times
I stayed for a long time after I would perform
because I actually loved talking to people at the event
when I could, you know, I loved like doing book signings,
I mean all things that we did willy nilly before
(20:16):
the pandemic. But I would stay. I would do book
signings and just talk to people if they wanted to
talk after the events. I love that part, just getting
to connect with the audience, you know, but just really
deciding and doing a better job deciding what is actually
necessary and if it's not necessary, then maybe we don't
need to do it. And I think the last thing
(20:38):
that I had to assess in that recovery time was
what about this space I'm working in? What is actually
stressing me out? Because I can plan for you know,
the logistics and trying to improve some of those aspects.
But I also really was at the beginning in my
late thirties of discovering that it wasn't just the logistics
(21:01):
of the work I was doing, It was actually the
space where I was working that was causing me high
amounts of stress. And that was stressful for a couple
of reasons. I think one of the reasons it was
stressful on on just a basic level is being a
black woman in a predominantly white space is just stressful, period.
Whether it's church space, whether it's nonprofit, whether it's corporate.
(21:25):
Being the only black woman in that space is stressful
and really for a lot of us as women of color,
being whoever we are in predominantly white spaces has typically
high levels of stress. For us even more stressed, and
sometimes we know or acknowledge in the moment, right So
(21:46):
that was definitely a part of the foundation of why
it was stressful. I think also I was beginning to
realize that, in particular, the industry that I was in,
which at that time was predominantly white Christian and dominantly
very conservative to theologically and politically in some ways, was
also getting stressful for me because I was discovering there
(22:09):
were things that were important to them or things that
they believed in that I didn't, and I wanted more
creative space, I wanted more inclusive space, and I realized
I was longing for something that was never going to
happen inside of that space, and so it was stressful
to re enter there because I was being asked maybe
(22:32):
two speak about something that I don't believe, or speak
on something, and then what I have to say about
it doesn't match the beliefs of the people there that
have started the event or started the organization or whatever
it was. And just realizing that my voice, I felt
like my voice was growing and becoming in a lot
(22:55):
of beautiful ways, and that in those ways that voice
wasn't welcome in its fullness in these spaces. So I
feel like my thirties was this journey to this halt
right here at having this surgery, and after that surgery
that caused a great shift that was sort of leading
(23:19):
me right there into what the beginning of my forties
was going to be. What did I think my life
(23:43):
would be like when I turned forty. Well, I didn't
think we were going to be in a pandemic. Let's
start with that. I did not think that. I don't
know how many of us thought that, but I didn't
think that because my birthdays in May, so I think
a lot of us were thinking in the beginning, like, oh, well,
be on lockdown for maybe two weeks, maybe four weeks,
(24:04):
things will be back to normal, right, And like, over
a year later, we're still not back to normal. Um.
I think when I think about what I thought my
life was going to be like when I turned forty,
I think about two things. Maybe just one thing really,
but probably two things, honestly. Uh. One of them is
that I thought that I was going to be the
(24:24):
mother of like an elementary school kid by the time
I was forty. That's what I thought. I always had
that in my mind. I thought I was going to
spend my thirties child rearing basically, and then by the
time I got into my forties, i'd be, you know,
dealing with like an elementary school kid, or you know,
transitioning into like middle school in the beginning of high
school kid. And when I got into my late thirties,
(24:45):
and I so I started kind of settling in with
me when I turned thirty eight, like, oh, you might
turn forty and you might not have kids, and what
does that mean? And that sort of dovetails to me
how I approached turning thirty. So in my twenties, my
person that I wanted to please or that I wanted
to approve of me was my thirty year old self.
(25:08):
And there were so many like decisions and adventures and
I'm sure mistakes that I made that I was thinking
in my mind, I wonder if my third year old
self is going to be proud of this, or I
think my third year old self is going to be
super proud of me that I made this choice, that
I didn't do this, or that I did do that,
(25:29):
you know. And so then by the time I got
to thirty, I was like, yeah, I'm in there, except
the fact that I'm not married, and I thought I
was gonna be married by the time I was thirty,
so boop, here we are. But I already had such
a sense of adventure that my thirties, even though I
felt like a man, you know, I wished I would
(25:49):
have gotten married by then, But I was also like, oh,
well I haven't and I may not get married. So
if I don't get married, then what do I want
my life to be about? Because my life is about
more than the relationship that I'm in. And even though
ironically I ended up getting married within a year a
year ish of that birthday, I think having that mentality
(26:11):
helped me enter marriage with this greater sense of adventure
and not feeling like because my husband and I were
getting married that that's my identity now is only to
be his wife. But instead I was sort of able
to enter that phase of life like, I'm married to
this man that I love. I actually love keeping company
(26:33):
with him. I love hanging out with him, whether we
go to Walmart or we go across the world somewhere, Like,
I actually really enjoy him as a person. So it's
not that my whole identity has to be built on that.
It's that I had a wonderful life before we got married,
and now I'm married to him. Being married to him
(26:53):
adds to my already wonderful life. That was sort of
how I entered being married. So when I realized in
my late thirties, it was sort of that same moment
of like, okay, I've been envisioning, but for me, I'll say,
it wasn't the age this time I've sort of had
in my head, like what would Amina who becomes a
mom want me to do in this moment, or like
(27:15):
what a meaning that's going to become a mom? Be
proud of me? And I remember I was working through
this in therapy in my late thirties and just reimagining
with my therapist what if I don't have kids, you know,
what what will my life be like? And sort of
coming back to that remembrance that whether or not I
have kids, my life is wonderful. And that was sort
(27:36):
of what I had to come to in my thirties,
whether or not I get married or even at that moment,
you know, find like whoever my person is, you know,
even date somebody really honestly, but that's for another episode.
Whatever that is my life. My life was wonderful before
I married my husband. You know. It wasn't that marying
(27:57):
my husband is what made my miserable life wonderful. It
was that marrying him made an already wonderful life even
more wonderful. Right, So, I think my therapist and I
were working through that, and I just started feeling it
come up in my late thirties and started working through
what's the adventure that can be there for you in
your forties to experience, versus you walking into this decade
(28:20):
thinking about the things you thought you would have experienced
or thought you would have air quotes achieved by this time. Right. So,
I thought my forties was going to be I won't
say boring. I don't think I thought that, but I
thought my forties was gonna be pretty routine. I thought
it was gonna be without actually a lot of adventure
(28:42):
because I thought, you know, probably gonna have some kids
by then, probably gonna be going to PTA meetings or
if they do extracurricular activity, is probably going to be
spending my time doing that, going to be organizing, you know,
what we do with our business and our travels around
their schedules, Right, And realizing as I was getting close
to that birthday that that wasn't going to be the case.
(29:04):
And you know, I have not talked publicly a lot
about you know, what that journey has been for us
behind the scenes. I know that y'all hear me talking
a lot, and that probably makes it seem like I
am not a very private person. And those of you
that have been following my career for a while, you've
see me perform and stuff. I I'm not sure that
I seem like a private person, but I am really
(29:27):
a very private person about my personal life and things
like that. They're just you know, I'm I'm an introvert
at the end of the day. So there are parts
of my life that are good and wonderful and beautiful
that I just love to keep to myself, you know. Um.
And there are parts of my life that have been
terribly hard that I did share with folks, but they
(29:47):
were folks that we're very very close to. Uh, they
weren't things that I shared publicly. So I'm not ready
to share some of all this journey right here. But
one day maybe I will, and I will, and this
will probably would be the place that I will come
back here and be like, Okay, remember episode thirty two. Well,
if you have a listen to a good back, listen
(30:08):
to that, because now I have more tea to share.
But I'm not ready, honestly, to share some of the
tea that goes with that. But that is what I
thought my forties were going to be. And in my
late thirties, I definitely felt myself freaking out that I
was realizing turning forty wasn't gonna look like I thought
it was gonna look. You know what was my life
actually like when I turned forty, Well, it was a pandemic. Okay,
(30:33):
it was a whole pandemic out here. So Matt and
I met, my husband, Matt and I had originally planned
I had my dream dream since I've been an adult,
really has been that on my forty birthday, I wanted
to go to Italy. So originally that was the plan.
Matt and I were going to do that. And y'all,
(30:56):
I don't know if any of y'all have this experience,
but I am one of those people that sometimes I
get like a like a gut feeling, a gumption, a
premonition or something. I get a feeling to do something
or not to do something. And I got a feeling
prior to the pandemic that we shouldn't go to Italy.
And so we talked about it. I mean we because
(31:16):
we were just at the point where it was like
getting to be time to like book flights and find
hotels and and do all that, and I just told Matt,
I don't know, I don't feel like we're supposed to go.
So we didn't had no idea that even if we
had booked all that stuff, we would have still been
grounded here, you know, unable to travel. So then when
(31:36):
I realized, okay, well I'm not going to go to Italy,
my next plan was to go to my Mojo city,
which if y'all have been listening to the podcast, you
know I talked about that in my Her Favorite Things
episode that my Mojo city is New York. And so
I was like, well, I don't feel for some reason,
I don't feel good about traveling internationally. Maybe I'll travel domestically.
And then, of course the pandemic happened, so did not
(32:00):
get to go to New York either. So um my
actual birthday, I cried. Not on my birthday though, but
in the weeks leading up to my birthday, I had
to like shed some like disappointed tears because I realized
it was really hard to think of ways to celebrate
(32:23):
without having a restaurant to go eat at or a
party that you could safely plan and be with the
people that love you, or a place you could go travel,
like I had to just sit down one day and
just talk to Matt and cry my eyes out about
feeling so disappointed about that. And then once I cried
(32:44):
my eyes out, I was able to reimagine, like what
my birthday could be like. And I think that maybe
is my rhythm. Really it's like I need to cry,
I need to process the sorrow, the grief, the disappointment.
And then when I process that, it sort of opened
my brain to reimagine what can we do with what
(33:05):
we have? Right? So I tried to think about if
it weren't a pandemic and I couldn't travel, what would
I do for my birthday? And I was like, well,
I would have gone. I would have gotten a pedicure,
a manicure, I would have gotten a spa facial. I
would have eaten at one of my favorite restaurants. I
would have dressed up. I would have put my makeup on,
(33:26):
I would have did my hair, you know all those things.
And so I did a lot of research, y'all, and
I learned how to give myself a very luxurious pedicure,
manicure facial. I just spent the weeks before my birthday
like ordering various things. We just like used some of
the budget that we had planned to use for the trip,
(33:48):
and I just ordered my little tools I needed to
really do my lux manicure pedicure facial. And so the
night or a day really before my birthday, that's what
I did. And then the day of my birthday, honestly
was a really wonderful birthday. And I think in part,
I was just determined to celebrate because, you know, in
(34:10):
the years between surgery and this birthday, like I had
just been through a whole lot. So I was just
grateful to be here, you know, to celebrate that I'm here,
that I'm well, you know, like I just felt like
there was a lot of life to celebrate, and I
wanted to do that. And my therapist had said something
to me. She said, you know, sometimes when hard things
(34:32):
have happened to you, what ends up happening is you
kind of mark time based on these hard things that
have happened, you know, And she was like, so you
end up being like this is the first Christmas, that
this is the second Christmas, that this is the first
birthday since blah blah blah. And she was like, you know,
it's understandable to do that for a time, but she
was like, I don't want you to lose out on
(34:54):
celebrating yourself because every birthday, anniversary, how to day, or
whatever it is, is the mark of how much time
has passed since a bad thing happened to you. She
was like, I think it's okay for you to say,
this is my birthday, and that's a chance to like
celebrate me and celebrate what I've survived and that I'm
(35:16):
still here. Your anniversary with your husband, that's a time
to celebrate this relationship that you love and where you
feel loved. And so that was very much the energy
around my birthday. Um, when I think about what my
life was actually like, I have to tell y'all that
(35:36):
the year this year so far, because I'm turning forty
one this year, so they this year of being forty
has been professionally probably the best year of my career, y'all.
I mean only like a few months after turning forty,
(35:57):
I got a podcast deal with Seneca Women in I Heart,
which is how you are listening to this right now.
And I also UH signed a deal with la to
be one of the faces of their Face Anything campaign.
I'm one of nine women who are featured in the campaign,
all brilliant and amazing women. And to have had these
(36:21):
two big opportunities come to me after I turned forty,
I feel like like in my faith context, that felt
like a big reminder from God that, yeah, my life
in my forties turned out to be very different than
I imagined. But that didn't mean it couldn't be great
and a surprise and wonderful, you know. I remember when
(36:44):
I was doing the shoot for l A. We did
the shoot for my portion of the Face Anything campaign,
which was part commercial and part print ads as well,
and I did the shoot here in Atlanta with wonderful
team that was working with l A. And I remember
getting to the shoot and I had to do all
(37:05):
the wardrobe stuff, you know, try on all these different outfits,
and the outfit that ended up fitting me the best
was this dress that I would never have walked in
a store and bought. Okay, never would have bought this dress.
It was white, it was fitting like all my curves
and everything like it almost fit me to the point
that I think I would have been too self conscious
(37:25):
to wear it, but I put it on and it
fit me like a glove. And I just went home
after like a very long day of shooting. We probably
were shooting almost twelve hours between video and photography, and
I remember getting home and just thinking to myself, girl,
you just did things that models do at forty years old,
(37:47):
with your forty year old curves, with your forty year
old belly, and I'm so proud of it. I'm so
proud of it. Like my year of turning forty turned
out to be so wonderful and so different than I expected.
I can't say it's better than I expected, because I
(38:10):
don't know what that other life would have been like
if I would have had that life. But I think
when we think about our life, and we think about
these things that we hope our life is going to be,
we only have like an A or a B. We
only have like an either or either my life's going
to be this or my life's gonna be terrible, right,
And we don't always have in our minds like, well,
(38:31):
maybe my life won't be that, but it could still
be great or wonderful or this amazing experience. And that's
really what I experienced like, oh, my life is not
this thing that I imagine it was going to be
when I turned forty. But YO, like it's dope. It's dope.
And my next question is what has been the theme
(38:52):
of my forties so far? And the first thought that
came to my mind, the first thing that I hear
in my mind is I hear in d Ri singing
the Serenity Prayer. And if any of you are n
d I re fans. This is actually on a track
called Loving on her album Testimony, Volume one, Life and Relationship,
(39:13):
and she's singing those words at the beginning of the
Serenity Prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the
things I cannot change, and the courage to change the
things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
And if you haven't heard her singing this, you have
to listen to it. But hearing her sing it's like,
I don't know what she was feeling when she sang it,
(39:33):
but it just sounded like she poured all of this
life experience into when she's sang that. She was pouring
like the joy and the sorrow and the good times
and the hard times all into that, and if I
could put a theme on my forties so far, it
is that balance. I think in my thirties, I was
definitely a person that felt like my hard work could
(39:56):
fix it, My hustle could change it. You know, me
praying harder would you know, make this certain thing or
that certain thing different. Me reading my Bible more minutes
or more hours or more pages or whatever it was,
you know, would make this or that different. And that's
(40:16):
not to say that I don't believe that prayer is powerful, um,
but I believe sometimes I would sort of enter the
space of prayer as my way of controlling things, um
in a way, which is kind of a weird way
to enter prayer, right, But sometimes I know I've done that.
Maybe you have to. And I feel like the years
leading up to turning forty have taught me that sometimes
(40:37):
there is some really hard stuff that happens, and you
can't pray it all away, and you can't fix it.
There were some spaces where I was working, and I
wanted them to be anti racist, and I wanted them
to be inclusive of the l g B t Q community.
(40:59):
I wanted them to be inclusive spaces for everybody, and
it didn't matter how many conversations I had, those spaces
were not going to change. And so I had to
accept that that is not going to change. Right. And
then there were some things that I did have to
(41:20):
have the courage to change, you know, like when I
was telling you all, like learning how to say no
and not feeling like I have to please people all
the time, even in professional situations, especially beyond what you
know the contracts is. But you know, another talk for
another time, you know, But those are things that I
can have the courage to change, to change the way
(41:43):
I work, to live a life that is of a
decreased stress level. And then I love the last part
of that, which is the wisdom to know the difference
that they're just gonna come up, both of those in life,
you know, just gonna be some things that happen and
I can't change it, and there'll be some things that
(42:06):
I can put in the work to make them different
or make them better. But I believe this decade of
my forties is bringing me the wisdom to know the difference.
If I could give advice to a woman about to
turn forty, what would I tell her? I would tell her,
were you if you're listening and you're about to turn forty,
(42:29):
or if you're in your late thirties and you're like,
oh man, what's happening here? I would say, first of all,
when you think about your forty birthday, do something that
you actually love and be around the people that you
actually love and that make you feel loved. I don't
(42:54):
feel like any birthday you should force yourself to do
things because that's what your family members want, or because
that's what your friends said they'd like to do, but
especially on these birthdays that end in zero, or sometimes
for some people, even the ones that end in five, Like,
really think about what do you like to do. And
(43:14):
if you have family members that are determined to plan
a surprise party for you, for example, and you know
you hate surprise parties, just go ahead and say them,
look them in the eyes for real, and be like,
I actually wanted to go to a hotel by myself,
and I love you, and I want us to have
dinner or breakfast or whatever after I have my time
by myself, but I want that time by myself. I
(43:36):
was even talking to one of my really really good
friends when she turned forty, and she and her husband
have a little boy, and she was like, I don't know.
I think I just want to spend my birthday with
like my husband and my son. And I was like,
that's beautiful too. Just do something that you love, plan
to do that you know, within whatever you can afford
(43:57):
to do, or like in my case, we were in
the middle of a pandemics, so I had a lot
of limitations. But I spent that birthday with my favorite person,
which is my husband. My husband put this wonderful video
together of all these people I love singing Happy Birthday
to me, and I faced tims with people that I loved.
(44:17):
I mean, even in that moment, I let myself be
loved on. And I think you should. You should ring
in your forties like that as much as you can,
and not because it's like bad luck if you don't,
or because that's the rest of your year or the
rest of your decade. I I don't really put a
lot of stock in that, but I do think there's
a lot of good energy to doing something for yourself.
(44:39):
And the other thing I would say, if you're about
to turn forty, I would say, you know, release yourself
from the expectations that society puts upon us about what
any of our ages have to look like. I think
there is a lot of pressure on women, you know,
because of the patriarchy on a sleep, but I think
(45:01):
there's a lot of pressure about your relationship status, about
what your uterus is or isn't doing right um for
those of us that have uterus is you know what
I mean? Like, I think I think there's a lot
of pressure about what we're doing relationship wise, what we're
doing about having children, and depending on what environments you're in,
(45:22):
if there's more value placed upon that than your actual
satisfaction with your life or the fullness of your life.
That if you're in a relationship with someone who loves you,
that's dope. You know, if you have children and they're
in your family, your loving them, you're raising them, that's dope.
(45:45):
And those things are dope inside of your whole life.
That those things themselves are not the only thing that
define you. That you get to build your life upon
whatever you decide to build it on, but I hope
that you build it in the fullness of what that means,
(46:05):
whoever you are and however you are right. And I
guess the last thing I would say is don't be
afraid of being surprised of some things that are unexpected
happening to you. Sometimes some of the things that are
unexpected are the worst. They are terrible. Okay, Like one
day I'll come back and regale y'all with some of
(46:27):
those stories that have greeted me in my late thirties
and early forties. But you'll also have some unexpected blessings,
and I think it's good to have room for those,
you know. I think it's good to be open to
that process as well. And aging, even though we have
been taught by so many things and whatever from other people,
(46:52):
like aging is beautiful. It's a beautiful process. It's you
coming into your skin more. It's you knowing who you
are more. It's being willing to still learn even after
you've learned all these other things. It's beautiful. It's not
something that we have to fear. It's a part of
becoming who you are. And that's what you want in
your life. You don't want to become what somebody else
(47:14):
expected of you. You don't want to become smaller than
you actually are. You want to be the full badass you.
That's what i'd say. Anyways, I wanted to thank you
all for listening. And normally at the end of these episodes,
I have an outro, a segment of sorts that I
(47:35):
do to give a crown to another woman of color,
and I want to take this time to give a
crown to you. If you're listening in general, and especially
those of you that are in your forties and beyond
or maybe approaching your forties, I want you to give
yourself a crown, whatever that looks like for you. I
want you to say some good words to yourself today.
(47:57):
I want you to think about what may be your
expectations about the next decade of your life that's approaching.
And I don't want you to think about all of
the things that you haven't done or all of the
you know, air quotes expectations that you haven't met. I
want you to think about what have you accomplished or
(48:18):
even beyond that, like who are you that you're proud of?
And how can you celebrate her today? So whoever you
are listening, you deserve it. Give yourself a crown. Her
(48:44):
with Amina Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Selo
Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast
Network and partnership with I heart Radio. Thanks for listening,
and don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast
by
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