"My mom, for the longest time, was not capable of seeing me as a separate entity, which i think is a beautiful thing on one level. It means you love me so much, you love me like yourself but what happens when you don’t love yourself? What happens when your self-esteem is not so high? How are you loving me then? You’re my parent and I’m reliant on you to provide me with certain things but if you can’t provide those things for yourself, how can you provide them for me? A lot of people have children and they don’t understand that having children is not something you just want, it something you ready yourself for. You take care of yourself so that you can have a child, so you can give something to a child. Most people wondering the earth today are here by accident and no one would ever say it."

"I feel like what really amplified this joy that I have is my queerness and how I came full term into accepting it. I had to unlearn homophobia, even though I was always gay, I had to unlearn so many things. I grew up very religious, and I remember the moment when I realized ‘Oh I cant be gay’, my dad was like ‘God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve’. And I knew in that moment I have to hate gay people. I was probably about 7 years old when I knew I had these feelings for girls; all my friends were handing out valentines to boys and was like 'Eeh can I give them to my best friend?’. I tried to ignore those feelings but every time I tried, as I got older, as a teenager, I still would find myself attracted to girls and would even have these little girlfriends. When I was 15, I had a girlfriend, even though she wasn’t actually my girlfriend because she had a boyfriend. One day near the 4 train, he said 'I know that you're talking to my girlfriend’, and he literally punched me so hard in the face. From there I said ‘I cant do this, this is bad, this is going to get me hurt, Im going to hurt people, I cant do this’ and I decided Im going to date guys. I got married to a man, I had a kid, and I told myself im going to be in this zone. But even in that time of being married to a man, there was infidelity because I cheated on him with a woman. I was so pained, because it wasn’t just about being with a women and having sex with a woman, I was trapped, I needed to be free. I am now. I have a partner, we’ve been together for 2 years. This was about my freedom and I felt like if I didn’t acknowledge it, I was going to die. So finally I said fuck religion, fuck everybody, If you don’t love me, fuck you, Im a black lesbian woman and everyone has to get over it. I came out during the time my mother got deported, so it was a weird time for everybody, there was so much pain. I shaved my head after she got deported, it used to be super long, everyone was like “What are you doing??” then I just showed up with a girlfriend. When I went to go visit my mom, I brought my girlfriend with me and she was like ‘That doesn’t matter, I accept you'"