Today I’m sharing a post that was written quite some months ago, because it feels especially relevant. Just this week one of the wonderful women I mention in this post reached out to me through a belated Christmas card and suddenly all the memories and nostalgia came flooding back. Real life mail can be so emotional sometimes. Anyway, while I am busy doing homework on this sunny Sunday, do enjoy this short reflection on gratefulness and belonging. 

~*~

I am thinking about gratitude.

How grateful I am for the women on LiveJournal who raised me, nurtured my budding social awareness, adopted this internet orphan, were my tribe in a time when I desperately needed to belong somewhere.

When I talk about my strange fixation with white women it probably started here. With these amazing wives and mothers (white and black) on LJ who lived and breathed feminism in an era before that word was so conflicted. They showed me that women could do anything. These women who coded and built their own websites, designed amazing graphics, wrote powerful stories, raised strong families. They showed me a version of life that I never would have known if I was left up to the devices of day to day Jamaica.

So I am eternally grateful for these women and the indelible marks they have carved on my path to adulthood. They didn’t have to accept this ‘little black girl from country’ as one of their own but they did, and I felt empowered to be among them. Not because they were elite (they were not) or foreign (mostly) or feminists (all), but because they admired and respected me the same way I did them. And that was a powerful lesson.