BARE

Bare is not vulnerability. At least, not in the way we have come to understand it. Vulnerability is often something we choose to show, a conscious revealing of ourselves to others. Bare is something far more intimate and far more confronting. Bare is what remains when there is nothing left to hide behind. It is the version of you that exists beneath the roles, beneath the titles, beneath the expectations, beneath the wounds, beneath the stories you inherited about who you should be and who you were told you could never become. It is the moment you stop negotiating your worth, stop seeking permission to exist, stop shaping yourself into something more digestible for the comfort of others. Bare is not exposure to the world. It is exposure to yourself. It is standing face to face with your own truth and realizing that everything you spent years trying to earn was already yours. It is the sacred and often painful process of stripping away everything that is not authentically you until all that remains is your essence, unedited, unperformed, and undeniably true.

Bare is the space between who I was told to be and who I actually am. It is the place where identity can no longer survive on faking it, approval, expectation, titles, roles, accomplishments, or the opinions of others. It is what remains when every borrowed belief, every inherited story, every mask created for protection, belonging, survival, or acceptance begins to fall away. Bare is not exposure. It is revelation. It is the uncomfortable and sacred recognition that much of what we call "self" is often a collection of adaptations we developed to navigate the world rather than the truth of who we are. To be bare is to stand in the presence of your own essence without reaching for something to cover it, explain it, justify it, improve it, or make it more acceptable. It is the moment you stop asking, "Who do I need to become?" and begin asking,

"Who was I before the world told me who I had to be?"

I WAS NOT OKAY.

I need you to understand that before we go any further. Not the version of "not okay" that we throw around casually when we are tired or overwhelmed or having a hard week. I mean I was not okay in the truest, most cellular sense of the word. I was crying every day. Not because something specific had happened. Not because I could point to a single event and say "that is where it started." I was crying because decades of holding everything together, decades of being the strong one, the capable one, the one who could carry it all without flinching, had finally come due. And the bill was enormous.

I was having panic attacks. I was having nightmares. I was waking up in a body that felt like it had been storing something for a very long time and had finally run out of room to keep storing it. And the most disorienting part of all of it was that I, of all people, was the one sitting in it.

I have sat with people in some of the most tender and broken moments of their lives. I have guided, held space, walked alongside people through grief, trauma, and the slow and painful process of returning to themselves. I know this work. I have dedicated my life to this work. And still, my own body presented me with the bill and it did not care about any of that. It just said: enough. We are done pretending.

I was the true test. I was the real client. And I had been failing myself for years.

So I went into what I call my dragon cave. My cave is beautiful and peaceful, but there is catch to being in the cave. It is just you, alone, with everything you have spent years running from, and the understanding that you are not leaving until you have gone all the way through it. I grieved in there. I fell apart every single day. And every single day I made the decision to get back up, not because I felt ready or strong or healed, but because I knew that getting to the other side of this was not optional. I am a healer. I could not keep asking other people to do what I was refusing to do for myself.

WHAT THE SILENCE ACTUALLY FELT LIKE

People see the absence and they fill it with whatever story makes sense to them. I understand that. But what I want you to know is that going quiet was the most terrifying and the most necessary thing I have ever done. It felt like freedom and destruction at the same time, in the most beautiful poetic way. I grieved things I had never allowed myself to grieve before. Old wounds. Old versions of myself that had worked so hard and been so unseen, and deserved so much more from me than I ever gave them. I fell apart and I kept falling apart, but somewhere in all of that falling I found something I had not expected to find.

I found out that I had been negotiating my own existence for as long as I could remember.

Not my work. My work is real and it is mine. I stand behind every single piece of it. But I had been negotiating myself. The way I showed up. The way I spoke. The way I moved through rooms. I had been pre-editing Ericka before anyone even had the chance to respond to her, because I had already internalized what the response was going to be. I already knew what they thought. I’ve heard it enough times that it did not need to be said out loud anymore. I just carried it, and let it do its work from the inside.

Not pretty. Fat. Too Black. Not Black enough. Trying to be white.

I am not going to spend this essay dwelling in where those words came from, because I already have a book on that called The Fat Black Ugly Girl. I have done that work and I know exactly where they came from, and I have made my peace with it. What I want to talk about is what it took to stop letting them be the loudest thing in the room. Because they do not disappear. That is the thing nobody tells you. You do the work and they do not disappear, they just lose their authority. And the process of stripping them of that authority is what bare actually is. It is not a moment. It is not a decision you make once. It is every single day choosing yourself over the version of you that was built to survive other people's opinions.

I want to personally thank the people in my life who held space for me, who loved me through it, prayed for me, and helped me in ways that I will never forget as long as I have breath, and after. I love you deeper than any ocean. And I thank you for being such a bright light, when mine was dimmed.

WHAT I KNOW NOW

I have nothing to lose by being myself. I want you to really hear that, not as something I read, heard or borrowed from someone else, but as something I arrived at after sitting in my own fire long enough to understand that “putting on my clown nose” was costing me far more than the truth ever could. People are going to have opinions regardless. They are going to see what they want to see, say what they are going to say, and form their conclusions with or without my input. So if the judgment is coming either way, then I am going to give them something real to respond to. I am going to give them me. The actual me. Not the edited version. Not the pre-approved version. Me.

And here is what I found on the other side of that decision: I have everything to gain.

I gained myself back. I’ve set boundaries that I work on everyday. I gained the version of my life that was sitting there waiting for me to stop apologizing for wanting it. I gained the mornings where I look at my own face and the first voice I hear is mine. Not theirs, but mine. And I am ok with the healed version of me not being nice, and possibly being the villian in other people’s stories. It is not because I am intentionally being vicious. It is because I no longer tolerate bullshit.

Bare is not a brand moment. It is not a caption, concept, or a rebrand. Bare is what I am right now in this season, and it is what this space is going to reflect going forward. I am not finished. I am not fully figured out. I am not arriving here with everything resolved and tied up cleanly. I am arriving here as I am, because I finally understand that waiting until I am finished is just another way of hiding, and I am done hiding.

I am back. I am not the same. And I am not explaining either one any further than that.

Welcome back to my home. Better yet, WELCOME TO MY ATELIER!