AYEDNICOLE

The Exhausting Expectation to “Just Ignore It”

Why did it take me so long to speak?

Because when you go through stuff, you are constantly told to ignore it.

Ignore the petty malice.
Ignore the petty energy.
Ignore the slick statements.
Ignore the shade.
Don’t clap back.
Don’t give people a reaction.
Be the bigger person.

But eventually, that gets frustrating.

Eventually, I had to ask myself: Why should I keep ignoring it?

Why should I allow people to try to bully me because they see me being able to be a part of prestigious organizations? Because I’ve participated in service and Student Government Association? Because I’ve been able to grow into a corporate career? Because I like education, reading, writing, music, business and learning?

I also understand something about myself that other people may deliberately misunderstand: when I am angry, when I am showing rage, or when I am checking somebody, I am talking to that person.

I am not talking to a building.

I am not talking to an organization.

I am not talking to symbols.

I am not talking to letters.

I am addressing the direct person who tried me.

That distinction matters.

“If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.” — Romans 12:18

Notice the language: if it be possible.

Peace does not require pretending something never happened.

The Polite Girl Has a Breaking Point

When you turn the other cheek for so long, people begin to see that you’re a nice young woman. They see that you’re trying to remember how your mother and father raised you.

What they don’t know is that there is another side of you that exists when you really have to turn up.

Throughout what I experienced in college and later in my adult life, something kept bothering me: people could interpret my silence however they wanted.

Silence became weakness.

Kindness became permission.

Grace became something people thought they could exploit.

And because I wasn’t immediately responding to everything, some people seemed to believe there would never be a response.

They were wrong.

Same Hue Does Not Mean Same Heart

One of the hardest lessons I’ve had to accept is that everybody who looks like me does not necessarily think like me, live like me or have the same intentions toward other people that I do.

We may be the same hue, but I don’t look like them, and I don’t act like them.

And I know that statement can offend somebody.

Someone can immediately translate it into:

Oh, she thinks she’s better than us.

But sometimes that reaction itself demonstrates my larger point about comprehension.

I use diction. I use metaphors. I use similes. I use quotations. I use cultural references. I connect experiences together. I like school. I like reading. I like interpreting what I’m reading. I like asking what something actually means.

That does not make somebody else less human.

But I am also not going to pretend character doesn’t matter just because saying so makes somebody uncomfortable.

Quite frankly, if somebody deliberately goes through life hurting, manipulating and deceiving people, I can confidently say I strive to live better than that behavior.

That’s different from saying I’m a more valuable human being.

God doesn’t require me to reduce myself to make destructive behavior look respectable.

“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” — Matthew 6:21

You can know Scripture and still miss its purpose if you’re only learning the words so you can use them against somebody else.

God is not a manipulation strategy.

Education, Comprehension and the Danger of Assumptions

Growing up in Florida also made me think about education differently.

I remember the FCAT era. Florida literally categorized achievement across Levels 1 through 5. Those numbers became part of the educational language many Florida children grew up hearing.

But as an adult, I’ve learned something more important than any standardized-test number:

A score cannot tell you somebody’s heart.

And somebody’s neighborhood cannot tell you their intelligence.

What concerns me is what happens when people stop listening long enough to comprehend what another person is actually saying.

I don’t read somebody’s words thinking:

How can I twist this?

I read to understand.

There is a difference between comprehension and manipulation.

That distinction has become especially important as I prepare myself for the possibility of entering the legal profession.

Not everybody wants to practice criminal law.

Not everybody wants to become a lawyer to learn how to manipulate technicalities.

Not everybody wants to protect people simply because they came from the same backyard.

I want to understand law because I’ve experienced what it feels like to desperately want clarity, protection and fairness.

That is a completely different motivation.

When Law Stops Feeling Like Justice

Some of my experiences with people who have pursued or practiced law have forced me to ask difficult questions about what happens when education is combined with unresolved resentment, rivalry or ego.

My experiences involving Tia Coleman, for example, have influenced how I think about the enormous responsibility attached to becoming an attorney.

I can describe what I experienced, preserve documentation where appropriate and explain how those interactions affected me.

But the larger lesson is bigger than one person.

A law degree cannot give somebody a clean heart.

Prestige cannot do that.

A title cannot do that.

An organization cannot do that.

Money cannot do that.

And neither can Instagram.

If anything, education should increase the responsibility someone feels toward truth.

That is part of what I want to carry with me into law school.

I don’t want to enter law school with revenge as my curriculum.

I want to enter understanding what happens when genuine people encounter systems and personalities that know how to weaponize procedure better than the average person knows how to defend herself against it.

I Wasn’t Silent Because I Couldn’t Speak

This is perhaps the biggest misconception.

People know I’m articulate.

They know I’m passionate.

They know I care about people.

That’s why I share my stories.

So eventually the question becomes:

Why did she take so long to express herself?

Because I needed to focus on me.

I needed to focus on my health.

I needed to focus on bouncing back from negativity.

My parents are getting older, and I care about them.

I take honor thy father and thy mother seriously—even during moments when they may think I don’t.

Sometimes honoring how you were raised means putting aside the bullshit long enough to continue building your life.

I take my craft seriously.

I take building my catalog of music seriously.

I take seriously the possibility that one day another young woman will hear something I’ve created and understand how to use her own voice.

People want you to be open because sometimes they can learn from you.

Sometimes they can take from you.

Sometimes they can study you.

But they don’t always want to give you the opportunity to shine from your own diamond and your own light.

That is why I had to learn that access to my vulnerability is not automatic.

The Life of the Party Who Didn’t Get the Invitation

I’ll never forget a conversation with my soror/cousin, who serves as an electoral commissioner.

She asked me:

“Are you the person that is the life of the party but doesn’t get the invite to the party?”

I said yes.

That’s me.

And something clicked.

Not because a family member told me who I was, but because she put words around something I had already experienced.

My Southern roots come with passion.

South Carolina.

Memphis.

And honorary roots I’ve developed through Atlanta, Georgia.

There is something beautiful to me about Southern Black expression—the ability to speak, laugh, debate, learn, worship, create and be intelligent without treating intelligence like somebody is trying to show off.

I have also encountered white educators, colleagues and community members in Southern spaces who genuinely wanted Black and Brown students to shine without taking that shine away from them.

And I’ve experienced the opposite.

Bigotry exists.

Racism exists.

So does prejudice within our own communities.

And those experiences taught me that I cannot spend my entire life translating myself for people committed to misunderstanding me.

Story Versus Experience

Sometimes people become so obsessed with technicalities that they miss the human being standing in front of them.

They’ll challenge story versus experience.

They’ll challenge a word instead of listening to the sentence.

They approach everything as though somebody must be lying and therefore the truth has to be extracted through confrontation.

But some people really are living in their truth.

That’s what makes law so powerful—and potentially so dangerous.

When people understand systems better than the people they’re confronting, those systems can feel terrifying.

I’ve experienced situations where police, legal paperwork, disputes and accusations became part of circumstances I never imagined would enter my life.

Those experiences changed me.

They are also why I believe genuine people need to understand systems too.

Not so we can become deceptive.

So deception stops having a monopoly on strategy.

The Part of Healing That Isn’t Pretty

Here is something uncomfortable that belongs in my story too.

I did want to kill people.

That is part of my healing process.

I am not saying that because violence is glamorous. It isn’t.

I am saying it because rage was real.

And part of why I did not come out and speak so early about everything was because I needed time for that rage to stop speaking for me.

I needed God to continue ordering my steps.

I needed God to move me out of the way.

Because if I had spoken too soon, I might have spoken entirely from fury instead of understanding what surviving everything was actually teaching me.

“The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and he delighteth in his way.” — Psalm 37:23

Maybe God’s final say wasn’t giving anybody a show.

Maybe it wasn’t clout.

Maybe it wasn’t revenge.

Maybe His final say was allowing me to live long enough, grow enough and heal enough to finally articulate what happened without letting what happened become who I am.

Justice for All Means God Gets the Final Say

I’ve experienced malice from people within my own community.

I’ve experienced racism from white people in corporate environments.

I’ve experienced cultural conflict with people from other backgrounds.

I’ve experienced people making assumptions about me because I am a Black woman who comes from a successful two-parent, upper-middle-class household.

None of that means an entire race, ethnicity, city or political group is one thing.

It means prejudice can come from more than one direction—and I refuse to reproduce the same prejudice that hurt me.

My family did not build our lives on somebody else’s destruction.

My parents taught us to work.

They taught us education.

They taught us responsibility.

And as I think about justice, that’s what keeps bringing me back to God.

God has the final say.

That does not mean death.

That does not mean revenge.

It means He allowed me to move when I needed to move.

He allowed me to tell my real story.

He allowed me to speak my real truth.

He allowed me to open my mind and heart enough to understand that I should not suffocate myself while I’m going through something.

And maybe telling that truth can help another young girl growing up right now.

To My Future Children

To my future children:

Your mama loves you like my mama loves me and your Auntie Myiah.

Your dad loves you and will protect you the way my dad protected me and Myiah.

I want you to know that strength doesn’t mean never getting angry.

It doesn’t mean never crying.

It doesn’t mean allowing somebody to bully you.

And it doesn’t mean destroying somebody because they hurt you.

Sometimes strength is surviving long enough to understand what the pain was trying to teach you.

To My Beautiful Baby Sister 🥹

Myiah,

My beautiful baby sister.

I’m crying writing this because we aren’t in the same city, but we’re making it.

We’re keeping our mama’s, aunties’, cousins’, uncles’ and grandmas’ prayers alive.

I used to be sad that we got distant, but I understand now.

It wasn’t by force.

It was by God.

God got us out of Jacksonville and gave us room to thrive.

Not because we hated our family.

But because our family prepared us to soar—just like they soared from their own hometowns.

I love you more than Alpha Kappa Alpha.

You don’t have to be my soror.

You’re my blood sister.

I am always here for you, and I love you.

I cannot wait to see you do amazing things when you’re done with school.

You’re an amazing artist.

You’re beautifully talented without me having to open the door for you all the way.

You pushed it down, girl.

Let’s keep knocking them down.

Jacksonville may have hurt you.

That Mexican ex may have hurt you.

But God has the final say.

We Are More Than Survival

We are better than Jacksonville, Florida standards of survival mantras that get placed on our own people.

That’s why the joke’s on coons.

And we ain’t that.

I don’t want survival to be the highest expectation Black children inherit.

I want education.

Ownership.

Travel.

Art.

Family.

Business.

Peace.

Faith.

Careers.

Freedom.

And the ability to walk away from environments that require you to shrink just to belong.

So, Why Did It Take Me So Long to Speak?

Because I needed enough distance to understand the difference between speaking and reacting.

Because I had to learn that silence could protect me for a season without becoming my permanent address.

Because I had to protect my health.

Because I love my parents.

Because I love my sister.

Because I love my future children before I’ve even met them.

Because I love my craft.

Because I had to learn that anger can tell you something is wrong without being allowed to decide what you do next.

And because God knew there would come a time when I could tell my story without giving anybody else ownership over its ending.

I am not speaking now because I want a show.

I am not speaking because I need clout.

I’m speaking because I finally understand that turning the other cheek does not mean cutting out your tongue.

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” — Ecclesiastes 3:1

There was a season for my silence.

There was a season for healing.

And now there is a season for my voice.

God has the final say.

And for me, His final say was not death.

It was life.

It was movement.

It was growth.

It was discernment.

It was getting me out of the way long enough to understand what I was supposed to do with everything I survived.

And now I can speak.