Here's to Being Black, Bold, and Broke

Introducing myself is hard, it’s like doing those awkward icebreakers in a room full of strangers. Sharing your basic information and a forced random not long enough thought out fact, like “Hi, my name is Raven. I’m 22 years old, my favorite color is yellow and a random fact about me is I went skydiving at 17.” It’s stressful because how much do you share? What do you share? And in what feels like five seconds you have to try and come up with something interesting but not crazy so you don’t scare the room. 

I plan to share more than my basic information here as you will get to know me better through each post. As I imagine many of my readers in the beginning will be friends, family, and  acquaintances (if you are so nosy to read, which I encourage you to do). So for this first post I want to give a glimpse as to how I got here, making this blog. 

If you don’t know by my many Instagram, Facebook, and if you are so privileged, Twitter posts I currently live in France, and have since October. I spent all of my senior year of college putting all of my eggs into a red, white and blue basket that wasn’t 50 stars studded, to find a way to live in France. Thankfully, my dreams turned into reality with the program TAPIF which I will talk about more in a later post. In the few short months I’ve been out here MANY things in my life have changed like my location of course, and my relationship status – RIP to a five year relationship. Through these changes, particularly the heartbreak, I’ve been able to find out things about myself, my wants and desires, goals for the future, hobbies and interests. 

The wants and desires fluctuate depending on the phases of the moon, whether I’ve cried or not, if Mercury is in retrograde (because I am HUGE astrology believer) and again, whether I’ve cried or not that day. 

But an interest that hasn’t wavered is that in writing, it was one I had before everything felt as though it fell apart. I wrote all through college of course, but when you’re in an academic setting and it feels as though there’s a gun to your head to do something, you can never fully tell what you do or don’t like. It was during a summer program in Ann Arbor about two years ago and thanks to my dear friend Jomar who writes poetry, I refound my love for writing. 

It began with writing poems as well, about love, frustration, grief, whatever I was feeling intensely. And before that, the occasional journal entry, in addition to my academic work. But since being in France, I’ve found that I write a lot, especially in my journal. Now one might say that your emotions and delusions you write down in a Dollar Tree notebook don’t make you a writer but to them I would say, optimistic delusions have to get you somewhere right?

So here I am writing this post, fully trusting in my delusions that I can pull off being a blogger, and I can. This post will be the first of many spanning from topics like which Sex in the City character I believe I am most like to poems on heartbreak, my experiences abroad, being a Black woman, living boldly and all while being the brokest I hope to ever be in my life (these early 20s are BRUTAL). 

This blog ultimately is for me and that might sound selfish but hell, I’m 22, of course I’m a bit selfish. But it’s to help me, to heal me through all this unknown transition, to focus me, to challenge me, and to make me more talented than I already am. 

As a reader I’m excited for you to join me on this journey. I appreciate you for taking the time to read through this and whatever other mess I conjure up, and to know that though I’m writing the posts I want, I plan in the future to take suggestions also on what you want to know and read. Thank you for reading and cheers to the next post! Xx