I want to know the sound of your silence. I want to know what it is to pray with you. I want to know how God knew that we should be together, when they said that this skin wasn't capable of love. I want to know how he knew that I needed to love you. I want to love you because they say that we ain't allowed to. And we always love doing the shit we aint allowed to do, so I'm gonna love you. I'm gonna love you in the daytime. I want to know what it is to be loved in the night. I want to know what it is when these scars look something like holy.

                                                                            -Poet Amy Leon

When I think of bae, I think of this poem. If you've read my previous posts, you would know that "bae" has yet to find me lol. But all in the same, I want this poem to be the explanation of my feelings for him.

Can y'all guess the first question that I get asked when someone finds out I'm divorced?

Will you ever get married again?

My response used to be: Yeah, maybe one day.

I have always been a lover of love. Sometimes so much that I overlooked the shortcomings just so I could feel loved. After my divorce, I wanted to feel love but not be in it. I found myself playing sideline. (OK. Stop judging!!!) Lol, but I can honestly say that I am not embarrassed by it. I won't try to justify what I did, or act like I didn't know about the girlfriend. Like I said, I wanted to feel love without being in it. I was too scared to be vulnerable, so my solution was to be with someone that I couldn't attach myself to.

I lied to myself. I told y'all I was a lover of love and anyone who is cannot simply stop. I looked up one day and 3 years had passed and I loved him. I was in love with another woman's man. I know it's horrible. I was that chick we all talked about. I was no better than the girl who fell in love with my ex-husband.

I became the woman I hated.

It took a lot for me to break away. The sex and the "love" numbed my pain. It had become somewhat of an addiction. It wasn't until I decided to actually live through my pain, that I began to heal.

I look back on those years, and wish I would've done things differently. But that's life. We sometimes make decisions based on one moment and one moment alone. It makes me feel good RIGHT NOW. It makes me forget RIGHT NOW. So although I am sorry that I did those things, I am not ashamed of them.

Insert "Love on The Brain" and fast forward to now LOL.

So after all of that went down with Firefighter, I decided to be celibate. My only reason behind it was to find a way to love myself, and make sure that I am WHOLE all by myself. That was 8 months ago, and I'll change my mind whenever I see fit lol. I needed time to detox and get rid of those soul ties. I needed time to refocus.

I came to the conclusion that I loved those 3 men because they all numbed some sort of pain for me. Ex-husband was daddy issues, but I really did love him. "Dude with the girl" was numbing the pain from my divorce. That was more of a placebo love. "Firefighter" came at time when I felt like I was losing everyone. I loved him because he was there.

I realized that SEX, LOVE, AND PAIN were three strands of the same braid for me, and with prayer, I unraveled it.

Last Friday, I was at an event and was asked the same question, "Would you ever get married again?"

I answered, "To my KING, in a heartbeat."

So today, I pray for my KING, not knowing if we have met or not. I pray for his strength. I pray for his safety. I pray for his heart and his mind. I pray for him like I pray for myself. I pray for him because I need him to understand that I am WHOLE without him, but that doesn't make me need him any less. I pray that he understands that he is WHOLE without me or anyone else for that matter. I pray for a union where the scars look holy.

XoXo,

Yannie

In 2012, I was twenty-two, newly divorced, and a single mother of three. Now with kids to raise, no job to be found, and no vehicle I finally had to decide what life I wanted to live. To say I was going through a hardship is a huge understatement. It wasn’t just the feeling of being at the bottom, it was the struggle of knowing that I had to put all the pieces back together again. I decided that I wouldn’t allow myself to ever be without again. BIND was born from the struggle and  is about overcoming it.

At the time, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I wasn’t sure how my skills and desires could build a life for my new and changing family. So I turned to something I had been doing since I was 14, hair.  I graduated from Paul Mitchell in 2014, and was officially a licensed cosmetologist.

-INSERT HAPPY DANCE-

I focused on styling hair initially, but started to fall more and more in love with doing makeup. I loved the instant transformation and confidence booster it was. The only issue I had was the lack of representation in the beauty industry and finding makeup that truly enhanced that #BLACKGIRLMAGIC.

So, while driving to work in the summer of 2014, God showed me his plan for me. He showed me BIND and all that it would eventually encompass. So yes, I have been working for 3 years on products catering to brown skin.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

It basically boils down to the melanin. Women of color have so many different skin shades and undertones that a lot of the products available to us tend to make us too dark, too light, or ashy.

ALL OF WHICH ARE A NO GO LOL.

So I worked with my chemist and manufacturer developing products with rich undertones and high pigment concentrations. I wish it was a more scientific way to describe how I chose the colors and products, but it was really just brown eyes looking at brown skin differently.

Every single thing about BIND is personal to me. I am involved in and behind every decision made, down to packaging lol. I want to build something that all WOC can feel connected to and be a part of. Something that is for us by us. Something to call our own. BIND is more than a cosmetics line. It is a brand. It is a sisterhood.

XoXo,

Yannie