Society Suffocates Creativity

Over the past weekend, 'The Chocolate Project, an initiative that promotes love and sisterhood in the black femme community, hosted a panel with different creative individual's. The panelists spoke about different issues within the creative industry that many Black femme's experience.

Breaking out of society's box:

Society tends to box people into choosing one thing, one career, one identity. 'As I Makeda', one of the panelists, says

"society has a way of if you're Black and your christian you can't do this, if you're a Black woman that looks like Meg thee stallion there is no way you can light sage and mediate...it doesn't make sense because we're always evolving."

I really resonated when Makeda pointed out that we as human beings are ALWAYS evolving. You know when those Snapchat memories from "one year ago" pop up? It's insane to me that the person in this selfie is actually me. I don't know why it's difficult for people to understand that Black women are not subjected to just one thing. Society is suffocating creativity by supporting the notion that in order to find "success" you must choose one thing and be really good at it. I remember wanting to double major in film and communications until I saw the amount of classes and extra year it would take for me to finish. Yeah, no thank you.

There is this feeling of judgement that I've definitely received from others toward wanting to start/learn a new creative endeavor.

"Girl what do you know about ___?"

"You know learning this is probably more work than you think"

"Being successful in this industry takes real talent"

Like....dang

I think it would be a better use of time and energy to uplift one another in our community instead of finding reasons to box each other in, society already does that.