Amena Brown:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to a new episode of HER with Amena Brown, this week. And as of the day this episode is airing, it is the day after Valentine's day. So I hope at the very least, if you're able, you would get some discounted candy today, because this is your time. Valentine's Day is fine and all, but really, the 15th as a holiday, of being able to go and get candy at a discount is a really important day. That day and November 1st, being the day after Halloween, these are two really important candy days right there. So I hope you are taking advantage of that. And in honor of it being the day after Valentine's Day, I was working through the episode ideas with my assistant Leigh and I was like, "Oh, this episode's going to fall the day after Valentine's Day." I was like, "I wonder if I should do a love poem or a breakup poem." And Leigh was like, "Definitely a breakup poem." She was like, "There's enough love poems out there."
Amena Brown:
So I reached deep into the Amena Brown poetry archives, for a poem that I very, very rarely ever do in public. So you are hearing this here first only, I don't know. So I wanted to dig deep into these archives, that we might take the day after Valentine's Day to discuss my business and how I processed this breakup in my late 20s, bless my heart. Normally when we do a Behind The Poetry episode, I have a recording, but this is the first time that I don't have one because I have never recorded this poem before. So I literally was writing this poem post breaking up with someone, actually that's not accurate, I was writing this poem post being broken up with, which I think is a very different scenario. So this poem does not have a creative title, I just called it a breakup poem because that's just the truth. So here's the poem, and then let's go behind the poetry.
Amena Brown:
He said, "We need to talk." Studies show "we need to talk" is never followed by marriage proposal, never ends with grandiose professions of love. We were breaking up. I was about to sit across the table and look into the eyes of a man I had come to love, watch him point to his heart and say, "Love don't live here anymore." Maybe it never did, I would wonder, as film reel of kisses and conversations held in whispers would run through my mind for months to come. We were civil. As always, he was cool, calm, and I was trying so hard to be strong. Hadn't I been prepared for this? For weeks he had been distant, contemplating how two people so different could somehow gain passports into each other's world.
Amena Brown:
I pep talked to myself into believing I could leave the dream of all the sweet and unique things that made him him, that made him mine, that time would heal all wounds. And I've heard people say it hurts like hell and I've never been there to know how much hell hurts. It must burn, it must sting like needles pricking the bottom of eyelids makes you cry, like watching a horrible situation unfold right before your eyes, helpless to stop it. It hurt like hell and there was no way to stop it. Sometimes I play the what if game, with no 50/50, no lifeline, just if, then statements. If I knew then what I know now, would we even have tried? Would we have put our friendship on the line, letting curiosity deal us roulette, placing bets on feelings we hoped could grow from seeds to trees, become stunted at seedling roots entangling. Now dangling twisted casualties of our love experiment gone wrong.
Amena Brown:
Hoping a friendship would keep us as each other's option, should we ever discover how to love each other the way we said we wanted to be loved. I had to go through the painful process of getting over him, until I ran out of random excuses to call him. Until I could look at him and not want to hold or be held by him. Until I could see him with another woman and not think she'll never be better for you than me. Until I could be honest with myself, say, "He doesn't want me anymore," without my voice trembling or my eyes watering. Until I could stop hoping he'd come to his senses and forget about this whole breaking up thing. Until I could move on. Letting him go left me alone with unknown variable X, with too many daytime minutes to ask why, with A to Z memories of him and how I could learn to be me again without such an important letter, but I did it.
Amena Brown:
I grew up and who knew I could be become a little less selfish, a little more honest and a lot more vulnerable. So gratitude to God and thanks to him. I never thought I would appreciate this guy for walking away, but I do. And even though I do, and I will and writing out our wills and finding the will to stay in step, no matter where our paths might intercept, I'm a better woman because of you. And all that thinking and crying you left me to do. And I don't blame you, you had your reasons.
Amena Brown:
And you and I can leave those reasons where they lie and sometimes visit them, leaving lessons like blooms at the tomb of maybe what we probably could have been someday. And one day, some other man will become the he I'll smile about, and he will not be you. But he will be loved better because of you, because I got to practice loving with you, that in the end, hurt doesn't have to win unless we want it to. To prove hope is a better bag to carry than bitterness. That a closed fist is never open to receiving anything. That a narrow mind is never open to seeing anything, that if a broken heart refuses to mend, it will never learn to love again. But I learned to love you, and I'll learn to love again.
Amena Brown:
Okay, well, let's just get deep in my business. I try, at least every few months to give you one episode where you can get deep in my business, if that is something you have desired in your life, to be deep into my business. So first question is what made me write this poem? And this poem was written when I was 28 years old, if I'm remembering right, it was written post my first adult exclusive dating relationship, that of course consequentially became my first adult breakup. And the real life story behind writing this poem, I have to start back a little bit before actually getting to this relationship, so that you will understand why this relationship was such a huge deal to 20-something Amena. So I really didn't have much dating history. I think I dated two guys in high school. One of them, I told y'all a little story about in the episode that I did on That Time I...Went to Spelman, and he was what I would consider to have been my high school boyfriend, but we were not allowed to go anywhere.
Amena Brown:
When I say we were not allowed, I think his parents would've allowed us. My mom was not allowing us to go places together besides church and family gatherings. So I can probably count on one hand the amount of times me and that high school boyfriend, and not just one hand, actually, one finger, the amount of times me and that high school boyfriend actually were in a room alone together for an extended period of time. And the one time I can think, that we were in his room, we were in his room, we were alone there, but it was for a short period of time in his parents house while his parents were home. So I use dating very loosely to describe that relationship. And then I went on my first real date towards the end of high school, and I think I'm actually going to do a separate episode about that.
Amena Brown:
So I'll tell y'all about that because it really is a wonderful and sweet story to me. So that was high school. And then before I went to college, I'm not sure, I'm trying to think back. It's like, when I think back on that, I can't remember if I decided before going to college, that I wasn't going to date anyone. I think initially my plan was to try not to date anyone my first year, because in the episode where I was talking you through what it was like for me attending Spelman for undergrad, I felt what I would think is good pressure. That I had a lot of people behind me, supporting me, that I shouldn't just go to college and squander the opportunity. And I felt like I obviously didn't know a lot about dating, I felt like that would be a huge distraction.
Amena Brown:
And so it was my initial goal to not date through the first year. And then I got involved in a campus ministry and all of the other women in the campus ministry were not dating, and they had committed to not dating through college because they were being raised in similar ways to how I was raised. We were being taught at that time, that dating was to get to marrying someone. It wasn't something that you did that could be fun or casual or a way to get to know people, dating had a lot of pressure on it. It was like if you were dating someone, you had to be thinking about do you want to marry this person? Do you want this person to be the other parent to your children? It was a very heavy situation.
Amena Brown:
So I did not date all through college, and then by the time I got into my mid 20s, I had a really hard experience with church. I had started going to a church when I moved here to Atlanta as a first year student at Spelman, and went to that church from being 18 until I was 25. And it was a really tough situation because it was a church that I really loved and I had been going to church there during my really formative years, these years of me being in college and trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life and what I felt passionate about, how did my Christian faith apply to my real life. And so there were a lot of things about going to church there that had been really helpful for me. But as I continued going to church there, it was becoming very evident that there was some unhealthy things going on with the leadership there, with the climate of how the church was, and it turned out to be the healthiest thing for me to leave.
Amena Brown:
So at 25, I had a church breakup. I really want to say that might have been my not only first, but only church breakup that I ever had in this manner, where I had to leave a church. I've had churches where it just worked out because I moved or other life transitions, that I left one church to go to another church. But that experience in my 20s was the only time that I was going to a church and chose to leave there because it had become this terribly unhealthy place. And after that church breakup, I decided to stop going to church for a while. And that was really against the advice of a lot of, the people that would've been considered like my elders in a way, that knew that I was leaving the church. They were very like, "Don't be idle too long, go find another church." There was this phrase that many of you that grew up in church may have heard people say, where they'll be like, "You need to go to another church and get planted."
Amena Brown:
And I just wanted to be like, "I'm a human, I don't need to get planted." But what they meant was it could be bad for you if you were out there without a church to go to every Sunday. But what they didn't understand about me at the time, is that I had been involved in local church ministry since I was 13 years old. And not just volunteering every now and then, I had been in leadership in some capacity in church since I was 13, from 13, right up until that church break up at 25, without any breaks. So for me, it wasn't just, oh, I don't want to go to church on Sunday, it was that I had been going to church four times a week. I was probably at church enough that if they had been paying me, that would've been enough hours for at least a part-time job, but I wasn't getting paid anything.
Amena Brown:
And so for me, it was nice to have a break from not having all the meetings that came with volunteering at church, and not having all the leadership responsibilities that I had with all the work I was doing there. And it really was an opportunity for me to find myself, because one of the unhealthy things about the church I was leaving, was that the leadership really didn't feel like you should have a social life outside of the church. It was really being preached to us that if you're single, you should want to be as heavily involved in the church as possible, so that your spouse can, especially ... I should be very specific here, this was being preached to single women. I don't know what was being said to the single men in our church setting.
Amena Brown:
And other friends that did not go to the same church I went to had these experiences at other churches. But they would basically be saying, if you're a single woman, the best thing for you is to be super heavily involved in the church, because if you're looking to get married, that's how, not just not how you're going to find someone, that's how someone's going to find you. You're going to be so heavily involved here that the person God has for you is going to be sent here to this church. And that happened for a few people, but by and large, the majority of us that were single women at that time, that's not at all, for those of us that did get married, that's not at all how we met our spouses and partners, that's not at all how that went.
Amena Brown:
And so I think because there was a lot of that kind of conversation, we really dumped our lives into the church. I didn't really have a lot of friends that I was friends with outside of the church environment. And if any of us had ideas of social life things that we liked to go to, then the church would be like, "Why don't you create that here, make it an environment that we have here, then we can have more control over it, and it can be this Christian environment." And at the time, we really thought we were doing a good thing. And after the whole church breakup thing, I discovered how really isolated I was. So it was this weird sense of feeling disoriented because I didn't have all that time that I was spending at church to anchor me, but it was also this interesting time of having to find own voice and my own wants and needs and desires.
Amena Brown:
And I just took some time away from church for quite a while. And then a part of that meant I gained a social life. I was writing as a freelancer on the music scene of Atlanta at the time, so I went to quite a few music shows and I had reconnected with the poetry scene, I was going back out to open mics and I was going to art gallery openings and just a lot of stuff that I really loved, but never had time to do because I was always at church. So the plus to that was, I was having a lot more fun, I was getting to enjoy my life a lot more. One of the awkward parts about it though, was I was meeting a lot of other people who were in my age group or even a little older, and I was getting outside of my bubble.
Amena Brown:
So I was starting to realize that there were certain things that other people my age had already experienced or already felt comfortable with. And I was super uncomfortable with everything because I mean, simple things like, we were told when we were in leadership at the church I was going to, that we couldn't drink. And then I would meet other writers or meet other artists, and they would invite me out to these happy hours, where we would all hang out together, and I would be the only one there not drinking. And not really because I had made a decision that I just don't like drinking or that drinking's not best from me. I didn't know. I didn't have any drinks when I turned 21. I really didn't end up having my first ever drink until I was actually 27 years old.
Amena Brown:
So it still took me, y'all, a couple of years of hanging out with my new friends and being at happy hour and just drinking a soda, because I didn't know anything about wine, about cocktails, about beer. I was just utterly uncomfortable, even that as a simple example. And then the more we would get to know each other and start talking about who we were attracted to, who we had a crush on, who wanted to date this person, who was single, who was in a relationship, all these things. I was just starting to realize that there was just a lot about life that I didn't know, because no one had ever given me any tools or instructions about that. The only thing I knew about dating was you just want to date and find somebody you marry. But at the same time, we were also being told not to casually date.
Amena Brown:
So I just remember that time of life, realizing that I felt developmentally behind when I was with people that were my same age, that had had very different life experiences than I had being in church all the time. So I didn't, at the time, feel like I needed to just run myself ragged gaining all the experiences that I felt I'd missed, but I did feel like there were some areas I wanted to grow and mature, and I wanted to know myself and what I wanted in those areas of my life. So I'm typically a person that's more risk averse, so I was trying to find some dip my toe in the water ways to begin dating and to not fear casual dating, that it was okay to go to coffee, to go to dinner with someone, just get to know them and that not every interaction I had with a man, had to mean this has to be the husband I marry, the father of my children, all those things.
Amena Brown:
So this guy that I'm writing about in this breakup poem that we're talking about today, I met him during this era of time, where I was going out to these different arts events. And even my sense of fashion y'all, and being able to not being afraid of dressing in a way that was attractive to me, or that was flattering to my figure. All those things were not things that I was encouraged to do in a church environment. So it was really a big learning time, that three years right there for me, that 25 to 28 time.
Amena Brown:
So I met this guy at an arts event and we immediately had this thing where you meet someone and you just click with them. We very immediately had that. And did all of the exchange numbers, I don't know if I would call what we went on a date, but we went to hang out and eat some food. It didn't feel a date to me because I felt like he was investigating what was up with me, and I was definitely feeling a little shy going into it. So I just remember us going to a Moe's and sitting in there and talking, getting to each other, I don't know, y'all maybe it was a date and I just didn't realize it was. And we talked in Moe's till Moe's closed down. And I think from that conversation, we're both with realizing things about each other.
Amena Brown:
I'm realizing that for me, he feels a little bit dangerous because he's someone who grew up in church, who still goes to church, but he didn't have the same relationship to church, and to this very rigid Christian religion, like I had been raised with. So there were a lot of ways that he was sort of like, "Here are the parts of this religion that I take, and here are the parts of this religion that I don't take." And that was a very dangerous feeling, compared to the types of guys that I would've met in church, who, by the way, never asked me to go out on dates, none of them.
Amena Brown:
And then I think he was realizing like, oh, this girl is a real church girl, and I think he was like, "I'm interested in getting to know her, but I'm also feeling a little apprehensive about dating someone that is so new to everything." And so we talked for a little while and surmised that it was probably best, this was more his initiation than mine, but he was like, "I think it's probably best that we just stay friends because I just don't see a girl like you needing to be dating a man like me. I don't know, that doesn't seem like it's going to work out." And so I took him at his word and then we entered the friend zone.
Amena Brown:
But let me tell you, it's different entering the friend zone with someone that you already have this attraction or chemistry to. And I'm a person who loves a When Harry Met Sally or the movie Brown Sugar romance narrative. That has always been something that I have always been really attracted to, which is meeting someone that you become friends with and then totally falling in love with them, because I love the foundation of the friendship, the foundation of you being who you are without thinking about impressing that person. That was not the friendship situation that me and this dude were in. We were in a friendship that was immediately tainted with the fact that we both thought of each other as more than friends, we were just letting each other exist in the friend space, but we did not see each other as homies or anything like that.
Amena Brown:
So we went through some time where he was dating other people, I was dating other people, because we were both artists, we would run into each other at different things and both feel a little salty, seeing the other person be with somebody else. Even though we clearly had made a decision to remain friends, it was still sticky a little bit. It was sort of like seeing him with someone or him seeing me with someone felt like, "What is this person doing here? What are you doing dating them?" But we were refusing at the time to date each other. And we finally arrived at a point where we both were single and weren't in any relationships. And by this time, I've been out here dating a little bit, getting to know myself and figuring out what do I want out of relationships? How do I want to handle that, not just parroting the things that I was taught?
Amena Brown:
And so I felt like, "Look, I'm tired of all of this weird energy between us. If we're both single and "ready to me mingle," why don't we just try dating and not in a bad way, get it over with, but just to me, let's just figure it out. And if it's not meant to be, if we're not supposed to date, then we can really be friends without all of the whatever weird energy this is." Or which was this second part I'm about to say was what my hope was, what young Amena's hope was at the time, "Or we'll discover we're meant for each other. We'll discover this thing should never have been a friendship, that there's a life story in it for us."
Amena Brown:
So he was interested, but a little hesitant, but I think we both were just like, you know what, let's give it a try. So we dated and y'all to be honest thinking about it, it wasn't like I dated this man for two years. I think we only honestly dated a few months. But I'm giving y'all the context about my dating history to tell you that five months feels like forever to a girl that has never been in any exclusive dating relationship. Five months was forever to me. I do not think it felt like that to him because he was more experienced than me in relationships, he was older than me as well. So I am certain that that did not feel as monumental to him as it felt to me, but that few months was everything to me. And I think as I was going through the process of dating him, hanging out with him, this is my first adult exclusive relationship where I had an apartment and he lived in a house.
Amena Brown:
We had residences to go and visit one another and things that we could go do in the city. So all of that was so different from having your little high school boyfriend that you're going to go to Sonic and go to the movies and stand on the porch of your mother's house. So in a way, I realized during the time that I was dating him, that there were so many layers to how I was being raised to think about dating, having been a girl that was growing up in church and growing up in a Christian home that was trying to use the principles that we were learning in church. And so a part of that was, I think we were being implicitly taught to fear our own emotions and to not trust in our feelings or our emotions, to, in a way, see our feelings and emotions as wicked, as things that could totally lead us astray.
Amena Brown:
And listen, I'm not saying your feelings can't lead you astray, but that threw out the good stuff with the bathwater, because that throughout no one's saying to us that it can be a beautiful experience to fall in love with someone. No adult ever said that to me or in front of me. As a high schooler, I was being taught that basically to fall in was super dangerous. Because basically you fall in love, you have sex, you get pregnant, you get a STD and then now you're the central character of some Christian Church skit. It all just got so strange. And I feared feeling those feelings for someone, I feared that those feelings would just run away with me, instead of me being able to see that those feelings are a beautiful part of being human, that you can fall in love with someone.
Amena Brown:
And we would also hear these statements when we would talk about, hear people, hear adults talking about marriage, when I was growing up. And there were times that they joked about marriage and particularly sex and marriage being fun and things like that. But I feel like for the most part, a lot of what I heard about being married in church, really was boiling down to the fact that love wasn't a feeling, that love was a decision that you had to make every day. And on a level, I get that because myself now having been in a 10 year plus now marriage to my own husband, who is not thankfully the man that I was writing about it in this, the young Amena was writing about in this poem, I hadn't even met him yet. But I can understand that sentiment of this idea, that to decide to spend your life with someone as a spouse, as a life partner is not the skipping through the roses feeling every day, I can understand that.
Amena Brown:
But in a way it was almost like they erred on the side of telling us that, without also being able to share with us that it's a gorgeous feeling to fall in love, it's beautiful. And even in a marriage, even in a life partnership with someone that you've been with years and years, you can still have those feelings of flutter sometimes, that that's a beautiful part of being human, that that does not make the experience any less righteous or any less holy in this way. So I was finding myself falling in love with this man over these few months that we dated. And I almost feel like it was hard for me to let myself fall in love with him fully or really truly, probably admit to myself that I was falling in love with him. And the scene at the beginning of this poem is very accurate to what happened.
Amena Brown:
He had been out of town and came back in town. He had been out of town and had not been as communicative. And one thing I learned about myself in my dating history in general, before I married my husband, is that I really can't be with a man who can't communicate with me. I really, really can't. That's top, top, that was top, top of the list, of my dating list before I met my husband. Because I can take you going through things, you struggling with this or that, but dating someone that can, at times, fall off the face of the earth a little bit and just go away for periods of time and you don't know, "Hey, I'm just going to take some time to myself." You don't know anything. And so he was starting to have some moments like that, that were giving me the clue that something was up with him, and that I felt that that was very much connected to his thoughts about this relationship.
Amena Brown:
And one of the things, and I wrote about this extensively in my book, How to Fix a Broken Record, so I won't go into huge amounts of detail here. But I think one of the things that was interesting at the time, was yes, I had grown up in church, which means I had grown up with the idea that sex should be reserved for marriage. Well, then I went through this church breakup, so I had these years where I wasn't going to church, I wasn't heavily involved in church ministry and activities like I had been. So I was really having to evaluate the choices that I was making to say to myself, is this a choice I make because it's the only thing I know, because it's what I was told, or am I making that choice because that's what I really want to do. And I realized while dating this man that even though yes, it had been preached to me that I should wait until I get married to have sex.
Amena Brown:
And I grew up in the era of, I kissed dating goodbye, and True Love Waits and all those things, I realized while I was dating him that I actually wanted to wait, that at the very least I could say in this experience with him, that I wasn't ready to have sex. And that was hard for 20 something me to admit, because I had felt so naive compared to my peers. But I just realized, even though I'm in love with this man, even though I might lose this relationship because I'm just not ready, I'm just not ready. And all of the things I would do to try to push myself to be ready, just did not feel like the right thing for me. And to his credit, he understood that, and he was really patient with that, but he was all also, in this way, he was very direct with me, to say, "I have never been in a relationship with someone where sex was not a part of that relationship. And I don't know that that's feasible for me."
Amena Brown:
And in his time being distant from me, I think he was trying to contemplate that. And so we were both at this strange crossroads where I was like, "I'm not ready," and he was, "I've been ready, and I think it's better for this relationship to not have disastrous ending, for me to walk away now because I can't sustain this relationship. I want to respect that you're not ready, and the best way for me to respect that is to break up with you." So it was such a weird feeling to finally allow myself to get past my fear of falling in love with a man, and saying it to y'all sounds strange, it sounds strange to think that falling in love with a man was a thing that I feared, but it was because the way I was raised, there was a lot of danger connected to that act. And I finally let myself fall in love with him, which is just such a beautiful thing, and then to realize we both have differing thoughts on this and this is not going to work out.
Amena Brown:
So to have my first time falling in love as an adult woman, and then to have my first breakup, felt very vicious in my 20 something self. And I didn't have any concept of how you deal with that because I didn't have a high school boyfriend that I went out on dates with and experienced that breakup at 17. Here I was 28 years old, 10 years post when most of my friends were having their first breakup. And I am just ... I think I'm heartbroken over it because it's new, it's a new experience. I don't know anything about it, but also because I was being raised to think that every dating experience should end in marriage, I really didn't have an alternate version of that story. I didn't have the alternate version that you could date someone and you could love them, they could love you, and y'all could have various sundry reasons why you break up and now to deal with that heartbreak.
Amena Brown:
But I think we were being taught in a way, under the ideas of I kissed dating goodbye, was this idea that heartbreak was a thing to avoid. And of course, nobody wants their heart to be broken, but heartbreak is unfortunately a part of our human condition. It's a thing that across language, across generation, across race and culture, it's a thing we share as human beings. We all know it, however it entered our lives. And it's not necessarily something that has to be this big thing of danger, as a human, if you work hard to avoid all heartbreak, you're going to avoid some other things too. You're going to end up avoiding possibly getting a chance to get closer to people, getting a chance to actually fully live your life.
Amena Brown:
So that heartbreak was tough, yo, a breakup hurts in a way that if you've never experienced it yourself, it's really difficult for anyone to describe it to you. I felt like eating everything and eating nothing, all at the same time. It sometimes felt like my body physically actually hurt, that that's how much my heart was broken. That this whole thing that had been great to me in certain regards, was just over. And that moment where, when you've been dating someone and you're talking to them all the time, you're hanging out with them all the time, and then you go through that breakup. And I remember one time I text him after the breakup, something had come up that I don't know if I ever thought it was funny or made me think about him, and I messaged him.
Amena Brown:
And when you're dating someone, you're used to getting the immediate text back and long text exchanges and all that. I remember a while went by and then after whatever I said, he said something really short and that was all. And it felt curt in comparison to what our previous communications had been like. And all of that rocks your world after a breakup, it be hard. I remember I asked one of my friends like, "How long is this going to hurt me?" And she was like, "Oh, it could be a few months, it could be a year." And I was like, "A year?" I was hoping a few weeks I would feel better, and it just takes a lot of time healing from a relationship ending. And in my case, this was not a very long relationship, but because of my history, it was very loaded, it was a lot more to me than just a few months.
Amena Brown:
So normally I would talk about here what was the real life story behind performing the poem for the first time. And truthfully, I think I've only done this poem in public one or two times, y'all, I don't think. Number one, because he and I had mutual friends and we knew each other on the local artist scene here in Atlanta, I was very hesitant to just go to any open mic event and read this because I didn't know he'd be there, I didn't know if friends, mutual friends of ours would be there, that would know that I was talking about him, even if he wasn't there.
Amena Brown:
So I think the times that I've ever read this poem in public, they were all out of town. And many of you know, because I've talked about it a lot here on the podcast, that in the previous iteration of my career, outside of the last few years now, I was working primarily in a lot of Christian spaces, mostly white, very conservative spaces. But every now and then, especially at colleges or sometimes at youth events, I would get these long sets of time to perform, or my husband and I would perform together.
Amena Brown:
And we would get hour sets, hour and 15 minutes, sometimes 90 minute sets that we would get a chance to do. And every now and then I would love to bring out love poems, and every now and then I bring out this breakup poem in these environments, and this is the reason why. I felt like in the narrative that I was being taught, and because I was going to a lot of churches, I knew that it wasn't just how I grew up, that a lot of kids in church were still growing up with this same narrative, that basically the best life for you to have was you should get married, have no dating history, have no sexual history. That the only thing you know about falling in love is to your spouse.
Amena Brown:
And some people had that experience, and for some people that experience was good for them. I think the danger in it is that that wasn't going to be the narrative for most of us. And I also think the danger in it was villainizing the idea of being a human that has history, that has people you dated before, that has people you had sex with, that has people maybe you were married to before, that that's a part of being an adult human, that you're going to come into different times of your life with your own story, with your history. Some of your history will be super great, some of it'll be terrible and hard and painful and traumatic, but that's a part of it. And I think in a way, for those of us who had history in various ways, then it was like when we would hear that preach to us, well, if I do have history, what does that mean?
Amena Brown:
That means there's no love for me in this life, that means I won't be able to be in blah, blah, blah, types of relationship that I want to be in. And so I decided, here we are going into these very conservative spaces and we are being invited in for a day or two, and then we're going to go home. So that means we can get away with saying some things on stage that the people who work with these kids or these college students, or these single people all the time are going to get in way more trouble for saying. The most that will happen to me is that they'll decide they didn't like what I said, they won't invite me back. And so sometimes I would read to the kids, love poems that I'd written about my husband, because I didn't get a chance to hear a lot growing up, of what it sounds like to love someone intimately, what it sounds like to be in love.
Amena Brown:
And I thought it's important for kids, especially in those environments, to hear that, to know that that's okay, that that's beautiful. And every now and then I would break out this poem and read it because I think too, when you're a teenager and sometimes in college as well, you are going through your own times of having crushes, of falling in love, of having your heart broken by the person that you had a crush on. And then if you're in church environments, a lot of adults are still trying to separate their history as if it's bad to be a person that has history. And so they can't or don't always say to you, "Hey, I know you had a crush on that person and your heart is totally broken now because blah, blah, blah happened. But I remember having a crush before too, and I remember being in love before too."
Amena Brown:
And I started saying to the kids, when we would be in those environments, "You might fall in love many times in your life," because I wanted them to know that. I am married to a man that I love, I love him. I actually like him still as a person, after being married to him 10 years and being to together over 11 years now, I still really like him a lot. And it's not bad that we both had other people in our lives that we loved before, it doesn't mean that that's bad. It may have actually added some layers to who we are now, that we had those experiences. So I always thought that that was important, and I think the small amount of times I've ever read this poem in public was probably an environment like that.
Amena Brown:
How do I feel about the poem today? I have talked to y'all, I think, about this on a few episodes, that in my process of writing poetry, I am not a poet that writes a lot out of catharsis. I don't write a lot out of, I was angry, I was sad, these emotions that in this last probably 10 to 15 years of my writing life, in my professional writing life, those things are not what has drawn me to the page. It's a lot more of, sometimes it's things I've experienced in my life, sometimes it's things I wonder about and I want to explore the question in a poem, but that doesn't mean that I don't write poems out of my feelings. It's just true that a lot of the poems I have written out of my feelings, they never see the light of day to the public.
Amena Brown:
Sometimes I write them to people, I have written many poems to my husband that are only for my husband's eyes, that I never intend to publish any place for anyone to see, except for him. I've written a couple of poems for other people that are just for them, and I don't intend for those to be in the public. And I've written some poems for myself that were this sense of needing to go into the poem and work out the feelings and emotions. And this poem was one of those, and it wasn't something I wrote thinking that I would ever share it publicly. But then I looked back on it and thought, man, I'm glad Amena at whatever age I was writing this, 28 or whatever I was, I'm glad I wrote that because as soon as I went to read it in preparing this episode to share with y'all, it was like I could remember what that first apartment looked like.
Amena Brown:
I can remember how it felt to realize I was in love with someone and to also realize I was in love with someone that I was not going to continue having this relationship with. I can remember how visceral that heartbreak felt. And I'm so glad that previous me wrote that out so that me at whatever stage of life I'm in, can look back on that and always have this time capsule of myself. I think that's the powerful thing about writing, whether you write as a professional or not, even the things that we journal or write in our note app on our phones or whatever, all of those things are these capsules for us to be able to speak back to ourselves in these powerful ways.
Amena Brown:
And I'll tell you this one last story. The pastor of the church that I was growing up in, the church I grew up in was pastored by a couple. And I went to a women's retreat in my 20s with my mom, we went back to the women's retreat of this church where I had grown up. And it was a really wonderful experience, I grew up in an all Black church. So imagine that we are at this very fancy retreat place in Austin and we were all just out, hanging out by the pool, all generations of Black women that went to this church I grew up in. And I was sitting by the pool, dangling my feet in the pool, just having chill conversation with other church women. And it's one of my most beautiful memories because we were just all talking about life and about men and dating and all these things that in a normal church setting, I wouldn't get a chance to hear from these elder women.
Amena Brown:
And later on, my pastor had asked me, she wanted to know how I was doing, and sometimes she would ask me what I was reading. And she asked me was anything going on exciting in my life right now. And I had a crush on a boy and I started to tell her, and of course I had a big crush on him. I was probably in my mid 20s at this point. And I'm smiling and telling her and she said, "You know what, enjoy it." She said, "It's a beautiful feeling." She said, "Everyone should have that feeling at least once in their life." And that was vindicating for me, having grown up hearing so much danger about dating and emotions and feelings. And to hear this woman who had pastored all of us, encouraged me to enjoy those feelings, and those moments, was such a beautiful memory for me.
Amena Brown:
So I hope as you have listened to this, and maybe you're eating your discounted Valentine's Day candy, I hope that it encourages you to give grace to whatever your history is, as it relates to love and dating and sex and all the things that go into our romantic and sexual lives. I hope that you can give your previous self a lot of grace for all the things that your previous self was learning at the time. And I hope that you can see the beauty in your history, even in the hard things that took place there and who it made you to be. And I hope above all things, that you always have a lot of love for yourself because you going to be with you, you going to fall in love maybe, with a lot of people in your life, but you only have one you, so make sure you give a lot of love to that you, I'll see y'all next week.
Amena Brown:
HER with Amena Brown, is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions, as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.