Amen. Aśe. And All That Shit.

There is a box at my door when I get home.There is almost always a box at my door when I get home.It’s a lamp today. It was a pan yesterday. The day before that, it was a set of sheets from a woman two states over. Someone I’ve never met. Some stranger who sent me that box because I said out loud, in a video, that I had been sleeping on the floor in Queens.Someone else saw the same video and sent me a voucher worth a thousand dollars for my living space.A thousand dollars.From a video.That’s how my entire apartment came to be. Box by box. Person by person.I did not buy the couch I’m sitting on as I type this. It was bought for me. I came to this city with almost nothing in my pockets, and things began showing up quietly while I was sleeping.I want to tell you it feels like grace.It does.It also feels like drowning.Both. At once.Because there’s a voice in the back of my head, and the voice tells me:You should not be here.You should not have to talk about any of this.A true nigga should have manifested better.Don’t speak broke energy over yourself, king.It’s just a season.It’s just God doing a new thing.Yep.Okay.Well.I am broke.The rent is paid, but it takes a lot of money for New York City to give you shelter, and everything else becomes an expensive fight over what remains.Food.Transportation.Being alive in New York.I qualify for food stamps. I need more work. I need somebody with tools to assemble everything that arrived in those boxes, because the boxes themselves are beginning to feel heavy.Not metaphorically.Not a season of pruning.Not just God doing a new thing.Just money. More work. Food. And somebody to actually do the assembly.I’m not supposed to say that.I’m not supposed to mention it.The Gospel of SilenceThat’s the first thing you learn here.There’s a whole religion built around not talking about lack.Watch your words.What you say creates your reality.Don’t claim that you’re broke.Raise your vibration.Shift your mindset.Don’t lower your frequency.Your money has already arrived.You just have a block.Believe like you already have it.You’ll attract it.It’s everywhere.Every timeline. Every comment section. Every guy trying to sell you something.Do not speak broke energy over your life.As if the problem with my bank account is my choice of words.Let me explain why this doesn’t work.I’ve heard this gospel before.I have delivered that gospel myself.I grew up in Word of Faith, and before I turned twenty, I was already delivering this message. I stood in front of audiences and talked about speaking life over my circumstances.“The joy of the Lord is my strength,” I used to tell people. “I don’t have to rely on what I feel. I draw from the Lord and speak life.”I am not broke.I am waiting for my season.I am manifesting abundance.I am blessed so I can become a blessing.I am not sick.I am healed. I just haven’t received it yet.I am in my healing process.That kind of s**t.I believed in that gospel. I lived it for years.So when the manifesters arrive, I recognize the voice immediately because that voice used to be mine.Same message. Just without Jesus.Word of Faith for the gym crowd.Now it’s a webinar instead of a sermon. Instead of an altar call, there’s a checkout button at the end.They didn’t even need to reinvent the wheel.They stole my content.It wasn’t just abundance, either. They stole the whole thing, including the struggle.They tell people not only to deny lack, but to believe struggle itself has value. God put you in it for a reason. The universe is building something inside you while you’re there.Take any situation, any struggle, any difficult season, and turn it into a sermon about what God is teaching you.I delivered both messages.Deny the struggle or sanctify it.Both cons have verses they rely on.Mine had the widow.The WidowYou know the widow.She’s the poor woman who gives her last two coins in the temple. Jesus watches her and tells everyone that she has given more than anybody else. They gave out of their abundance. She gave out of her need.We interpret the passage as a lesson about giving everything to God.None of the sermons I preached ever mentioned the most obvious fact.The woman left the temple with absolutely nothing.We admired her generosity.None of us offered her bread.Nobody told her to put the money back in her pocket.We praised the act of giving while ignoring the woman herself and what she needed.Spiritualize poverty so you never have to do anything about it.And I’m not just a recipient of that gospel.I preached it myself.Offerings weren’t a special occasion. They happened during every service.Mine too.And you want to know what I did during mine?Yes.I used the widow.Again.I preached it a hundred times.This woman gave from her need, folks. Not her leftovers. She gave it all.I let that message sink into the room and watched people reach into their purses to give more than they originally intended.And I felt God bless me because I was getting high from people’s money.Even now, I remember an older woman sitting in the back, her purse resting on her lap, searching for the last dollar she had and preparing to give it to me.I thought it was nobility.That’s what I fear now.I had heard stories of people giving their electric-bill money because God would bless them tenfold. I had witnessed Giving Sundays where the congregation rejoiced over the hundreds of thousands of dollars God had provided.I knew firsthand that it was all the same story.People had needs.Preachers had sermons.And the people with needs weren’t going to get anything.Because that preacher was me too.I preached this message. I took people’s last pennies and told them heaven was watching.And that was my problem.Not that I knew I was conning them.That I believed I loved them.That was the con we inherited.Spiritualize poverty so we never have to fix it.Sanctified and StuckThis is the same principle as “don’t speak broke energy.”It’s just packaged differently.Both require the same thing from us.Silence.Because the moment you speak lack out loud, you are no longer an inspirational story.You are broke.You need help.And somebody in the room may have to deal with that.Lack spoken aloud demands something from other people.Lack kept silent asks nothing of anyone.That man suffered quietly. He made sure his pain never disturbed the comfort of the people around him.But when the silence breaks because you have become too broke to hide it, when denial no longer works, another message is waiting for you.God is teaching you something through this situation.Don’t interrupt Him.It is both comfort and prison.Now seeking help is not only weakness. It is interrupting the lesson.So you don’t reach out. You don’t let the lack affect anybody else. You believe God is shaping you into somebody strong enough to withstand it.Sanctified and stuck.For years, I delivered my sermons, looked at the widow, and admired her faith.I thought I would never be her.But this is who I became.Now it’s me with only two coins.The widow.Me, being told to drop them quietly and let people admire how strong I am for never mentioning that I need help.I used to take people’s last pennies and tell them God was watching.Now I’m the one leaving the temple with nothing while everybody nods approvingly at how well I’m handling it.The woman in that passage was not just a spiritual message.She was a woman nobody helped.We turned her into a sermon because a sermon demanded less from us than feeding a hungry woman.Now I know that from the inside.What Abundance Actually Looks LikeSo what did I try instead?I said it out loud.On camera. In DMs. To my brother. To whoever else was around.I was broke.I was sleeping on the floor.I needed help building a life in New York.And guess what?Here is what abundance actually looked like:Boxes on my doorstep.Another pan. Another lamp. More clothes. A woman two states over sending me sheets because I said out loud that I had been sleeping on the floor.No shifting vibrations.No raising frequencies.I spoke my lack, and people responded.People helped me. Most of them gave whatever they had available to give.This wasn’t the silence of my old sermons. Nobody was being promised a miracle in exchange for their suffering. The money and resources were being transferred directly to where the need was.Somebody recognized the need and responded to it.Community is what manifestation preachers are pretending to be.What helped me was not changing the words in my mouth.It was the reaction of other people.And this is where I could stop.The triumphant ending.Healing. Growth. I finally learned how to receive.Except.The words come easily now.I can say, “I’m broke.”I can say, “I need help.”The problem is that I still don’t know how to be helped without feeling indebted.Because every gift arrives carrying the weight of a debt.Everything is coming in boxes, and while every box contains kindness, every box also feels like a record of something somebody has done for me.Something I owe them.Because theology is not the only thing I carry.Some lessons came from experience.An open hand is still capable of grabbing you.I used to preach sermons about speaking life.Now here I am, speaking brokenness over my circumstances.Speaking it loudly. Speaking it publicly. Without hesitation.Broke.I said it.The sky didn’t fall.The money didn’t run away.Boxes came.The AppAnd this is the part I can’t gloss over.There are boxes all over my apartment right now. Half-finished furniture sitting wherever it was delivered.I have a voucher worth a thousand dollars.I also have an app on my phone that could send somebody to assemble everything, remove what I don’t need, and leave the apartment finished while I’m gone.I could come home and find a perfectly furnished room without lifting a finger.And I didn’t open the app.The problem is not only that receiving help makes me feel indebted.There is still a preacher inside me who believes I am supposed to remain in the struggle.That I am supposed to learn something here.That a life created for me without my suffering or participation cannot really belong to me.Days passed.I kept intending to click the app.I would look at the boxes, look at my phone, and just…not do it.Until I found myself sitting on the floor among them.And I saw it.While I was pretending I had to build everything alone, people were already reaching toward me.Strangers. Friends. People I never would have thought to ask.Nobody expected anything from me.Except this:That I say I needed help.So I said it.The help is already here.And only now, as I type this and think through all of it, am I opening the app.It still takes effort to place the order.I still hesitate.Part of me still feels like I’m cheating God.I understand.I am clicking anyway.Send this to somebody who knows how to suffer in silence.Subscribe for essays about faith, masculinity, relationships, culture, and the parts of ourselves we were taught to hide. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

Author’s note: This one touches family, faith, sex, and the old machinery of abandonment. I am not writing it to make anybody the villain. I am writing it because sometimes the story that makes us look good is still hiding the wound.The train is packed and I am holding the pole like everybody else, pretending I am fine.I am not fine. A few days ago a woman called me a hoe and meant it.Here is where I am supposed to tell you about her so you take my side. I can feel the pull of it. So let me do the other thing instead.We had never met. Not once, not in person, not in all the time we had known each other. She lived in another city and the whole friendship lived inside a screen. Voice notes. Late texts. Phone calls where she had heard me cry before. The particular closeness you can build with somebody who knows your pain, but has never had to stand in the same room with your life.She had bought me a train ticket to come see her. I had not asked for it. We fell out the same day she bought it, and somehow I ended up owing money on top of everything else.A trip I never took.A debt I did not plan.She called me a hoe most days. It was a bit we had. Then one afternoon, a mutual friend of hers messaged me out of nowhere, told me I was handsome, and I asked her who the woman was.Just asked.And the bit stopped being a bit.If I came to her city and chose somebody else, she said, my bag would be on the porch. Stay where I was going to go do it.Now watch how fast I can build the case.Unreasonable expectations. Internet frame. A threat over a simple question. I was moving. We never had a plan. Every line of that is true, and I had it assembled in about four sentences, sealed, the jury already nodding me home.That is what I actually want to talk about.Not her.The speed.Because the one thing I have never had trouble proving is that it was not me.So I am on the F, late to my brother, putting myself on trial anyway. Verdict already overturned and I am still standing in the courtroom. That should have told me something right there.A free man does not keep re-arguing his own innocence at midnight on a train.She got the cheap word wrong. Hoe is about appetite. About taking. Anybody who knows me would laugh, because I have spent my whole life scared to take up the room I am already standing in.But getting the word wrong is not the same as seeing nothing.I am thinking about sex.Not the fun way. Not the human, messy way people pretend they are above until the right text comes at the wrong hour.Somewhere between two stops, my body hands me a receipt I have been ducking for years.Every woman I have actually been with, I was working.And I mean been with. In a room. In a relationship. In something with consequences. Not the woman whose words followed me onto the train. That is a different essay and a different wound. I mean the ones who could actually see me. The ones I kept coming back to. The ones I could have really lost.That is what gives it away.I did not perform because it did not matter.I performed because it did.The audition got louder the more I cared. I worked hardest exactly where the love was real, because real is where leaving would actually cost me something.My father left.But even that sentence is too clean.Before he left, violence had already entered our house in ways a child should never have to understand. My mother carried some of that cost in her body.He was a violent man. He called me a stupid ass kid enough times that I learned early how a word can be a hand too. The house did not lose a father the day he left. The house had been living around his weather for years.He got an apartment after that. We saw him every other weekend, or whenever he had time, which was not the same thing.He canceled a lot.That is one of the ways a child learns math. You count the weekends. You count the promises. You count the number of times you put your shoes on for a man who never pulled up.Then one day he came by and told us he was moving to Cleveland to go work with his younger brother.A city. A job. A brother. A whole new life with our names left off the lease.And here is the part I do not get to skip, much as it would read cleaner without it.He was crying when he said it.Tears in his eyes. He looked like a man who did not want to be doing the thing he was doing. He seemed sorry. He seemed like he meant it.That is what has confused me my whole life. It would be easier if he had been cold. If he had read it to us like a weather report and walked out flat. You can hate a flat man and be done with him.But he cried.And he left anyway.A man can fill a house with fear and still have water in his eyes when he tells his kids goodbye. Both things can sit in the same body at the same time. I know because I watched them sit there.I do not know what he told himself.I only know what it taught me.It taught me that a man’s wanting could become a door. That you could want something bad enough to open one, walk through it, and not come back.Maybe not ever.So I built a whole self around not being the man who walks through that door.I would not be careless. I would not be selfish. I would not let my hunger leave a body on the floor behind me.What I did not notice, for about thirty years, is that there is more than one way to use a door.And then the church got its hands on me and turned the body into a crime scene.I came up Oneness Pentecostal. Seventeen years of the flesh being the enemy. Desire was something you crucified before it crucified you. Your body was a snitch, always trying to drag your soul somewhere hot.I learned to distrust myself before I had words for myself.But it started before the theology got abstract.When I was twelve, my pastor told me I was going to be the youth pastor one day. He was close enough to feel like another father. He saw something in me and he named it, and a twelve-year-old believes whatever a man like that believes about him.So I became special.Chosen.And chosen means you cannot slip. Chosen means nobody can ever see you slip.In church, we sat through abstinence classes. Adults showed us the STDs, told us God wanted us to have the best sex of our lives, but only if we waited, only if we obeyed.The message ate its own tail.God loves your body. Your body is dangerous. Control it.Then I was sixteen, watching porn in my room, and the history on the computer got found. I lied. The lie did not matter, because a few days later I was in church and my pastor was running altar call.I went up after a sermon that had cracked something open in me. I went seeking. He waved me over. Picked me out of the room.Put his hand on my head.Leaned in close.Quiet, so only I could hear it.Take away his desire for porn. His struggles with lust.I felt my face go hot. That specific exposure that happens in your body when somebody claims to know a thing about you that you never told them.And before I could even land on the fear, he got ahead of it.Nobody told me anything. That was what he wanted me to believe. It was the Holy Spirit that told me.He knew exactly what he had done. Knew it because he felt me flinch under his palm. And he sealed it between us. Made it a secret. Made it ours.I learned something in that second that I am still trying to unlearn.That a man I trusted could take me at my most open, coming forward, seeking, soft, and use his nearness and a whisper and a claim on God to make me doubt my own body. To make my own wanting feel like it was not mine. Like it belonged to God, to him, to whoever could pray it back out of me.When I left the faith, I left that God.But I did not leave that hand on my head.I carried that out in my own body and I have been carrying it ever since.So I learned to perform for women. To prove I was safe. To prove my wanting was not the dirty thing that man had whispered over me and sealed shut. To be so attentive, so careful, so good that no man would ever again need to lay a hand on my head and pray.There is a night I keep going back to.I will not tell you who.She told me she had never felt any of this before. That nobody had done to her what I was doing. And her body was telling on her, doing things she said it had never done.And God help me, I loved hearing it.Not only because I wanted her to feel good. I have to be honest about the rest.I loved that it was me.I loved being the first.I loved being the one her body had apparently been waiting on the whole time without knowing it.Because if I was the only one who had ever taken her there, then I could not be replaced.That is what I was chasing in that bed. Not her. My own permanence.I was reading her like a verdict.Not guilty.Necessary.Stay.And the whole time, if you had asked me what I wanted, whether I was even in the room, I could not have told you.I never once checked.I was not in the bed. I was in the booth. Watching the levels. Making sure the one sound I needed kept coming through clean.I came without ever arriving.I can see it now in rooms I did not want to look at.In church, I preached and served and became the young man people pointed to and said, look what God is doing. I learned to be useful to rooms that did not really know me. I learned to turn my own abandonment into a testimony and call it purpose.In relationships, I became fluent in weather. I could feel a woman start to pull away before she knew she was doing it. I could feel the air change and feel myself change with it. Funnier. Softer. Sexier. More available. Less needy. More impressive. Less trouble.I was good at the shape-shifting, so I called it love.In the work, the consulting and the strategy and the systems, I can walk into anybody’s chaos and make myself the one who knows how to fix it, name it, sell it, carry it.In the nanny work. The house. The kids. The need to be helpful, easy, worth the space I take up. The fear that needing anything turns me into a burden.The quiet arithmetic under all of it.If I give enough, maybe I get to stay.Useful is a beautiful coat to hide abandonment in. From a distance it looks like character. It looks like love. It looks like service, like excellence, like being the man who pays attention, who knows what you need before you say it.Underneath it, some of the time, is a kid at a table cutting a deal.If I am good enough, you will stay.If I give enough, you will not go.That is the wage I have worked for everywhere.Being chosen.And for a long time that was the whole story I told. The noble over-giver. The man who loves so hard and so carefully that leaving him would be a crime.The wound with good manners.It is a flattering story.That is the first thing that should have made me suspicious of it.Because here is the part the flattering story leaves out.I believe in ethical nonmonogamy. That part is real. I have felt the truth of more than one honest connection at the same time. I still do.The mistake was thinking a real belief could not also carry an old wound underneath it.So I tried it. I told myself that if I spread my vulnerability around, if I refused to make any one person the whole answer, I could finally break the thing. Stop needing to be irreplaceable to a single human being.But the pattern was running underneath the belief the whole time.I kept a line open. Always. Even inside the connections that mattered, there was another conversation, another maybe, another door I had not closed.And I called it polyamory.Maybe it was.But I know myself well enough now to ask the uglier question.Was I doing it because I believed in it, or because I could not stand to have all of me in one place where one person leaving could take all of me with them?If nobody could ever fully have me, then nobody could ever fully leave me.And then one of them left anyway.It does not matter which one. It hurt like it was the only one. It hurt like all the open doors and the spread-out weight and the careful math had bought me nothing, because underneath every bit of it I was still standing there exposed.Still auditioning.Still terrified.In the exact position I had built the whole architecture to make impossible.So the framework that was supposed to save me from needing to be irreplaceable could not save me either.The wound was older than the belief.It ran under everything I built on top of it.Here is what I see now that I could not see while the story was still flattering.I told you my father used his wanting to leave. And that I was his opposite. He walked out the door, and I stayed. I stayed by being so useful that nobody would ever want me to go.But that is only half of me.And it is the half that makes me look good.Because the over-giving and the open doors are not two different things. They are the same gesture pointing two directions.Useful everywhere.Belonging nowhere.Giving to everyone.Fully had by no one.Present in every room and arriving in none of them.I made myself indispensable and uncatchable at the same time, then called one love and the other freedom. Both were the same scared kid making sure he was never the one standing in the doorway watching somebody go.My father left through a door.I never told you the rest.I just stopped walking all the way through them.I keep every one cracked, in every room, with every person, so that nothing can ever close around me hard enough to hurt when it opens again.That is an exit too.A slow one.A quiet one.The kind nobody can ever set out on a porch with your bag.He left by leaving.I leave by never arriving.Different doors. Same house. Same blood.Naming a thing is not the same as being free of it.Naming is just the first honest interruption.I do not want to be ruled by the man who left. Not by copying him and not by being his mirror. Both of those are still just orbiting him.I want something cleaner.I want wanting that is not an apology. Generosity that is not keeping a secret score. Sex that is not a job interview for permanence. Love that does not need me to vanish into being useful.I want to stop confusing being chosen with being safe.And I want to be able to walk all the way into a room and let the door shut behind me without feeling the walls start to close.That is harder than shame.Shame is easy. Shame hands you a costume and lets you call yourself terrible instead of doing the slow work of changing.Accountability is quieter.It says look again.It says tell the truth without making yourself the villain or the hero.It says stop performing your own growth.And yes. I hear it.Even this.Remember the top of the train, how fast I built the case? Four sentences, airtight, the jury nodding.I just did it again for all these words.The good man, explaining himself so well and so fairly and so beautifully that you could never leave him over it.Even my honesty has a door propped open in it.I am going to let that be true and keep going anyway. Because the other option is to keep the whole essay so safe that it never lands either.And I am tired of coming without arriving.Nothing dramatic happened on that train.I did not get healed between stops. I did not walk into my brother’s place glowing, the trauma folded and put away.Please.I was still late. Still tired. Still me.But I saw it.My stop is coming. I am going to climb the stairs and knock, and the kids are going to scream my name before the door is even open, and I am going to feel that old warm thing.Useful.Needed.Safe for a second.And I am going to let myself feel it.I am not going to stand in the hallway auditing my own heart.I am just going to try to notice the difference. Between showing up because they need me, and showing up because I do not know who I am if nobody does.That is all I have right now.Not the answer.The noticing.The train is slowing down.I am not my father. I am not free of him either.But maybe it starts here. Not in being nothing like him. In being myself without needing him as the shadow I measure clean against.The doors open.For once, I do not look for the other one.I go in. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

Before this is an essay, it is an apology.That matters.Because it is very easy to make language beautiful around something you should have simply owned. It is easy to turn harm into reflection before you have sat in the plainness of it. So let me start there.I said something I should not have said.I spoke about someone’s private information in a conversation where I was trying to defend myself. I was correcting a lie. I was trying to make clear that something people thought happened did not happen.That part was mine to say.The rest was not.There is a particular kind of panic that hits when somebody tells a story about you that is not true.Not just a misunderstanding.A story.One of those stories that starts moving faster than your actual life. A story with your name in it, your character in it, your intentions in it, but somehow you are the last person allowed to speak. People start reacting to a version of you that you never agreed to become. You can feel the room forming an opinion before you get a sentence out.And if you have ever been misrepresented badly enough, you know what happens next.Your body gets loud.Your chest tightens. Your jaw locks. Your mind starts gathering evidence like it is preparing for trial.Dates.Screenshots.Details.Context.Anything that can prove you are not what they said you are.Because being lied on does something to a person.It makes you want to drag the truth into the middle of the room and make everybody look at it.I have been there.I have felt that heat.The rage of knowing someone is painting you with a brush they had no right to touch. The exhaustion of feeling like you always have to defend your name before you can even be a person. The shame of realizing a rumor does not have to be true to damage you.It only has to be interesting.So when somebody thought something happened that did not happen, I corrected it.I had the right to do that.If someone believes something happened between me and another person, and it did not, I am allowed to say, “No. That is not true.”That part is clean.That part belongs to me.I do not have to let a lie sit on my chest just because correcting it may make somebody uncomfortable. I do not have to swallow a false version of myself to preserve the peace. There is nothing noble about letting a rumor build a house in your name.But here is where I crossed the line.In trying to explain what did not happen between me and someone else, I mentioned something private about them.I did not need to.The denial was enough.That is the part I have to sit with.Not because I was evil. That would almost make the story easier. Villain does villain thing. Everybody knows where to stand.But most harm does not arrive wearing a villain costume.Sometimes harm shows up in panic.Sometimes it comes out of a need to be believed.Sometimes it comes from a person who is hurt, scared, defensive, and trying to prove they are not the monster someone made them sound like.That does not excuse it.It just makes it honest.The truth is, I was not wrong for wanting to correct the lie.I was wrong for using a truth that was not mine to correct it.That is the line.And it is a hard line because defensiveness is very convincing when you are inside it.Defensiveness tells you, “They started it.”Defensiveness tells you, “You are just explaining.”Defensiveness tells you, “They already knew.”Defensiveness tells you, “You have a right to clear your name.”And sometimes defensiveness is half right.That is what makes it dangerous.Because yes, I did have a right to clear my name.But I did not have a right to make someone else’s private information part of my defense.Those are not the same thing.I can say what happened.I can say what did not happen.I can say what I did, what I did not do, what I meant, what I refuse to be accused of.But I do not get to take a private part of someone else’s life and place it on the table just because it helps my case.Even if I am hurt.Even if the rumor is unfair.Even if somebody else is moving messy.Even if I feel cornered.Especially if I feel cornered.That is when character gets tested.Not when I am calm. Anybody can have morals when their nervous system is quiet. Anybody can sound mature when nobody is questioning their name. Anybody can preach boundaries when their back is not against the wall.The real question is:Who do I become when I feel misunderstood?Do I stay disciplined?Do I tell the truth without becoming reckless?Do I protect my name without violating somebody else’s dignity?Do I stop at what is mine to say?That last one is the hardest.Because when you feel falsely accused, every fact starts looking available. Every detail starts looking useful. You stop asking, “Is this mine?” and start asking, “Will this prove I am right?”That is how people become unsafe without meaning to.Not always through malice.Sometimes through urgency.Sometimes through fear.Sometimes through that desperate human desire to not be seen as the bad guy.But not everything true is ours to tell.That sentence has been sitting with me.Not everything true is ours to tell.Truth is not automatically righteous just because it is accurate. Timing matters. Ownership matters. Consent matters. Purpose matters. You can tell the truth in a way that still betrays someone. You can be factually correct and morally wrong at the same time.That is uncomfortable.It should be.Because accountability is not always about admitting you lied.Sometimes accountability is admitting you told the truth in a way you had no right to.That is a different kind of weight.It is easier to apologize when the thing you did was obviously ugly. It is harder when part of you still wants to explain why you did it. When part of you still wants the court transcript read out loud. When part of you wants everybody to know, “I was hurt too. I was being talked about too. I was not just out here being careless for no reason.”And maybe all of that is true.But accountability is not where I go to prove I had a reason.Accountability is where I go to stop hiding behind it.I had a reason.I also crossed a line.Both can be true.That is the part adulthood keeps trying to teach me, whether I like it or not. Two truths can stand in the same room without canceling each other out.I can be wronged and wrong.I can be hurt and harmful.I can be defending myself and still go too far.I can owe myself protection and owe someone else remorse.There is no clean victim story here. No clean villain story either. Just a human story. The kind where fear moves faster than wisdom. The kind where you do not realize until after the damage is done that your survival instinct grabbed something sacred and used it like a shield.And I hate that.I hate that I let my need to be understood override somebody else’s right to privacy.I hate that I took something personal and made it useful.I hate that in trying to correct one harm, I created another.But hating myself is not accountability either.That is another trick.Shame loves to dress up like growth. It says, “If you feel bad enough, you have changed.” But feeling terrible is not the same as becoming trustworthy. Punishing myself does not repair the line I crossed. It just keeps me centered in the story.The work is quieter than that.The work is saying:I should not have said that.I will not say it again.I will not use someone’s private information to defend myself.I will learn how to tell the truth with boundaries.I will practice stopping at the part that belongs to me.That sounds simple, but it is not easy.Especially for people who have spent their lives feeling misread.When you are used to being misunderstood, restraint can feel like surrender. Silence can feel like guilt. Not giving every detail can feel like letting the lie win.But restraint is not the same as silence.Discipline is not the same as self-abandonment.I can defend myself cleanly.I can say, “That is not true,” without emptying the whole drawer.I can correct the record without turning someone else’s life into supporting evidence.I can protect my name without making my integrity smaller.That is the lesson here.Not that I should let people say whatever they want about me.No.I do not believe that.My name matters. My reputation matters. My truth matters. I am not interested in becoming the kind of person who lets false stories sit comfortably in the room because I am afraid of being direct.But my name is not the only thing that matters.Somebody else’s privacy matters too.Somebody else’s dignity matters too.Somebody else’s body is not my receipt.And if I have to violate that to prove I am innocent, then I am not moving from innocence anymore.I am moving from fear.That is the part I want to remember.Fear makes terrible editors of us.Fear cuts out context. Fear exaggerates stakes. Fear tells us every conversation is a courtroom and every person is a jury. Fear convinces us that if we do not explain everything right now, we will be trapped forever inside somebody else’s version of events.But I do not want fear writing my character.I do not want panic choosing my words.I do not want to become someone people have to be careful around because when I feel attacked, private things become public things.That is not who I want to be.So the standard has to be higher than “I was hurt.”The standard has to be higher than “It was true.”The standard has to be higher than “They already knew.”The standard has to be:Was it mine to say?And if it was not, I leave it alone.Even angry.Even embarrassed.Even accused.Even when leaving it alone makes my explanation less complete.That is the cost of integrity sometimes.You do not always get to use every fact that would help you.You do not always get to be fully understood by people who are committed to misunderstanding you.You do not always get to clear your name without restraint.Sometimes the cleanest version of your truth is also the shortest.“No. That did not happen.”And then stop.No borrowed secrets.No private details.No turning pain into a press release.Just the truth that belongs to you.I had the right to correct the lie.I did not have the right to expose the truth.That fact was not mine.And next time, I leave it where it belongs. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

Ask me how I’m doing. Go ahead.I’ll show you a magic trick.“I’m good.”See that?Didn’t even think about it. The words left my mouth before my brain got a vote.I could be three days behind on sleep, two weeks behind on grief, and one missed call away from falling apart, and I will still hit you with “I’m good” like it’s a reflex.Because it is.I been training for that answer my whole life.Let me tell you how I learned the trick.I met my last girl doing audio pages.If you don’t know what that is, congratulations on your healthy relationship with the internet. I was making explicit audio. Grown folks content. That’s how she found me. That’s literally the door she walked through to get to me.You know what she asked me to do once we got together?Stop making explicit audio.You know what I did?I stopped making explicit audio.She asked. I agreed.That part matters.The thing that brought her to me became the thing she needed gone, and I deleted it like it was nothing.Then I made us a couples account.Took the platform that was mine and made it ours. Took the voice that was mine and made it ours. I adjusted everything. The content, the schedule, the boundaries, the man.By the end, I was doing what she wanted on a page built from what I used to want, and I called that love.It wasn’t the first time.My marriage was seven years of the same trick with different props.Adjust here. Bend there. Pay this bill. Carry that weight. Become so necessary that leaving me would be a logistics problem.I didn’t ask, “Do you love me?”I asked, “What do you need me to be?”Then I became it fast, before anybody could notice I was somebody else first.I thought I was being a good man.A provider.Flexible.Easy to love.I was auditioning.And the cruel part about auditioning is that even when you get picked, you still don’t feel chosen.Here’s where my father comes in, because you knew he was coming.He left.That’s the short version, and honestly, the long version isn’t much longer.He left, and a little boy in Omaha did the math that little boys do when fathers leave.The math goes like this:If he left, something about me wasn’t enough to stay for.That math is wrong.Every therapist, every book, every grown version of me knows that math is wrong. But you can’t logic your way out of an equation you solved at an age when you still believed in the tooth fairy.So I built a system on top of the bad math.The system had three rules.Rule one: be whatever shape they need.A shape that fits don’t get left.Rule two: be indispensable.Pay the bills. Solve the problems. Carry the load. Make leaving you expensive.Rule three: never, ever need anything.Needy people get left. Be the one who has it figured out. Be the rescuer, never the rescued.When they ask how you’re doing, you know the answer.I’m good.I ran that system for decades.Ran it in my marriage.Ran it in church, where I found a whole institution happy to take a young man who would bend into any shape and call his bending “servanthood.”Seventeen years I gave them.Ran it in friendships where I was everybody’s strong friend, a job title with no benefits and no backup.And here’s the part that took me thirty-seven years to see.The system doesn’t work.Not “the system is unhealthy but effective.”No.It does not work.Every relationship where I performed myself into the right shape ended anyway.The marriage ended.The girl from the audio pages, gone.The church, gone, and I’m the one who left that one, but only after it nearly took everything.I bent into every shape I thought would keep me safe, and people still left.Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about shapeshifting:People can’t stay with you if you never showed up.They were never with me.They were with the shape.And you can’t be loved in a costume.You can only be tolerated in one.A woman told me recently, “Josh, don’t play with me.”I had asked her about going to church with her.Me.The deconstructed agnostic with the Substack literally called Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t.Asked about church like maybe I could fit into that shape too. Like maybe pew-shaped Josh could get this one to stay.She saw it immediately.Called it out in five words.Don’t play with me.I first heard it as rejection.Later, I understood it as a gift.Because what she was actually saying was:I don’t want the shape. Where’s the man?I been thinking about that question ever since.And here’s the part that still surprises me: the more honest I am about what I want, the less dramatic everything gets.I thought honesty would make women disappear.Turns out, a lot of women respect it.Some even prefer it.Not because they want every single thing I want, but because at least they know where the man is standing.Here’s what I know now.Or at least what I’m practicing knowing, because knowing and practicing are different sports.Performing okayness was supposed to protect me from being left.All it did was guarantee I’d be alone, even in rooms full of people.Even in a marriage.Even in a church of hundreds who knew my name and not one true thing about me.But when I drop the performance, something happens that the system never predicted.I become human.Visible.People get to see the actual me, mess and all, and make a real decision.Some of them will leave.That’s the terrifying part.But their leaving becomes information instead of injury.It filters.The ones who can’t handle the unfine parts of me clear out, and what’s left is people who chose me with their eyes open.My actual people.Not fans of a shape.People.And the wildest part is this: when I stop saying “I’m good” by reflex, I can finally say what’s true.Which means I can finally ask for what I need.Which means help becomes possible for the first time in my life.You can’t hand a drowning man a rope if he keeps yelling that he’s just swimming.I been just swimming for thirty-seven years, y’all.My father left, and I made it mean I had to earn staying.Every relationship since has been me working that job.Clocking in.Performing okayness.Sending the wage of myself to people who never asked for the whole check.I’m not healed.Let’s be clear.Last week I caught myself rearranging my whole personality for a woman I’d known for four days.The reflex is still in my hands.I’ll probably say “I’m good” to somebody tomorrow and mean none of it.But now I see the trick while I’m doing it.The magician watching his own hands.That’s not the same as free.It’s the door, though.And I’m standing in it. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

The dryers in New York tried to kill me.I’m not being dramatic. First load of laundry in the new apartment. I set the timer like I’m still in Omaha, like me and the machine got an understanding. We did not have an understanding. I came back and my clothes were hot enough to fry an egg on. Damn near took the skin off my hands pulling them out. The dryers out here are a different breed. Everything out here is a different breed.Then there’s the trash. The city got codes about it. People been helping me build out my apartment, sending gifts, showing up for me, which means boxes. A lot of boxes. So I put my trash out doing my best, and my complex got on my ass about it. Came back and somebody had picked the box up and set it right in front of my door. Right there. Welcome to New York.Nobody softens anything here. Back home somebody might pull you aside, make it a conversation. Out here they put the box at your door and keep it moving. It ain’t mean. It’s just honest. But it’ll have you feeling like the city is trying to push you out before you even unpacked.So that’s the city. Hard. Fast. Honest in a way that stings.And then there’s the apartment where my brother is raising two kids by himself.I’m there most days now. That’s the gig. Uncle. Nanny. Whatever you want to call it. I show up, I handle the chores, I help with the kids. The little one is three. His sister is eight.The little one is a whole person already. Got opinions. I put Doritos on his plate one morning and that boy looked at me like I betrayed the family name. Took every single Dorito off, one by one, set them to the side. Hell no. He likes to stack. Lines his toys up in order, everything in its place. He reminds me of my brother as a baby. A little calmer, maybe. But when he gets to having his fits, I know exactly whose blood that is.His sister is older. Smarter than the room half the time. And she’d been having a hard time with chores. At first I thought she just didn’t want to do them. Then I watched. She’s doing the work by herself while the little one runs around doing spins in the living room. Five year gap between them. She doesn’t have a teammate. She’s just the one stuck doing the thing while the baby gets to be the baby.And that caught me. Because I had a teammate. Her name is Arianna.We’re fifteen months apart. Grew up side by side. The chores that should have been miserable weren’t, because she was there. We worked. Even when we couldn’t stand each other we still moved like a team. You don’t notice it when you have it. You think that’s just how life is. Somebody beside you, doing the thing with you, so you never do it alone.I don’t have that with her now.And I want to be honest about why, because the easy version is to say I lost her. I didn’t lose her. Nobody died. She’s right there. Cedar Rapids. A lawyer. Married. A daughter. A whole life I could put in a car and drive to in a day. The door’s not locked. I’m just not walking through it.We had a falling out. One big thing, and I’ll keep the thing to myself, because the thing isn’t the point. The point is neither of us does the real reaching. When I do call, I’m trying to get to her. I want to know how she’s doing, who she is now. But she puts her daughter on the phone, and we both let that be enough. The kid does the talking so we don’t have to. And she doesn’t call me, ever. We’re polite. That’s the worst word for it. Polite. And I don’t even carry bad feelings about her. I’m proud of her. She did everything she said she would and she did it well. Ask me to name one thing wrong with my sister and I can’t, except the one thing, and the one thing was somehow enough to swallow the rest.Here’s the part I’m only now saying out loud. I’m the older brother. I have always known how to love her by having something to offer. By showing up with something in my hands. And right now I’m rebuilding my whole life, my hands are empty, and I don’t know how to come to her with nothing. The relationship ran on what I could give. The fuel ran out, and instead of learning a new way to stand there empty, I just stopped coming.I build frameworks for a living. I don’t have one for my own sister.I keep wondering where I learned you can do that. Just stop coming.I think it’s my father. He left. He went quiet. And the world kept turning and everybody kept breathing and somehow it was “okay.” That was the lesson, even if nobody ever said it out loud. You can disappear on the people you love and they will survive it. Me and Arianna learned it so clean that we can do it to each other now and it doesn’t even feel like an emergency. It feels like a Tuesday.So if I tell the whole truth about what I’m doing in that apartment with those kids, it’s this. I’m handing them one inheritance and living out the other.The good one came from Arianna. From all those years side by side. Presence. Teamwork. Showing up so the other person doesn’t carry it alone. That’s what I give the kids. I get on the floor with the little one. I make his sister a teammate. I put on music, I ask her what she thinks, I make sure she gets a reward when the baby does, because she’s holding it down and somebody should see her.The other one came from my father. And I’m living that one out with my sister. Right now. Today. The silence. The not-coming.Same hands. Same week. One reaching down to meet two kids, one refusing to dial a phone.And here’s the part that undoes me. Those kids already taught me the way out. Because with them, I don’t show up with anything in my hands. I just show up. I get on the floor. Presence is the whole offering. They never once needed me to bring a gift. They needed me there. A three-year-old taught me you don’t have to have something to offer to be worth showing up for.I just haven’t handed that lesson to myself. I’m still standing outside Arianna’s door thinking I need to arrive with something, when the kids already proved I don’t.People keep asking how the move is going. I tell them about the dryers and the trash and the box at my door. All of it true. The city’s gonna stay hard.But the city was never going to teach me what home is. The kids did. Home is the team. Home is the person beside you doing the thing so you don’t do it alone. And I’m out here building a new team with two kids who aren’t even mine, partly because I can’t figure out how to walk back to the first one.I don’t know if my niece will remember any of this. I don’t remember every chore I did next to my sister. I just remember she was there. Maybe that’s all the kid keeps. That somebody was there.I hope it’s enough for her. I hope I do better by her than I’m doing by the sister who taught me how.Because I know the door’s open. I know the way through. A three-year-old handed me the map.And I still haven’t had the conversation.I keep telling myself I will. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

Content note: childhood sexual violation, silence, survival.Okwu does not usually show up when I am angry.Anger is too easy.He shows up when I feel erased.When somebody tells a story about me that makes me smaller than I am. When my name moves through a room I am not in. When somebody makes a decision, places my shadow behind it, and lets the rumor travel until I start sounding controlling. Crazy. Dangerous. Difficult.That is when I feel him stand up.Quiet at first.Shoulders down. Eyes open. Already working.He does not ask if I am hurt. He does not ask if I am scared. He does not ask if I need a second.He says, Move. I got this.And most of the time, I want to let him.Because he is good at it.He knows how to make a room feel me. He knows how to make a sentence sharp and still walk away clean. He knows how to make somebody regret underestimating me. He knows how to take the thing people tried to use against me and make it look like power.I do not always like admitting that.Sometimes I do not just want to be understood.Sometimes I want to make myself undeniable in a way that makes people nervous.And I like him.That is the part people might want me to clean up, but I am not going to.I like the part of me that nobody can play with. I like the part that walks in and changes the temperature. I like the part that survived what softness could not. I like the part that can turn a room around with a look, a joke, a bar, a sentence, or a silence held a little too long.I like him because he had me.But liking him does not mean he gets to drive every time.The apology was not the repairA while back, I found out somebody had put a decision they made on me.Something about another friendship. Something they chose.But my name was moving through the story.By the time it got back to me, the story had stopped treating me like a person.I had become the excuse.I had become the reason.I had become the shadow behind somebody else’s choice.So when we talked, she apologized.Then she kept apologizing.And I kept saying I heard her.She said she did not like that I kept dismissing her apology.I told her, “I am not dismissing it. I just do not accept it.”And I meant that.There is a difference between hearing an apology and letting it fix something it did not repair.There is a difference between feeling sorry and correcting the story as loudly as you let it spread.But even while I knew I was right, I could feel something in me enjoying the control.Not peace.Control.That is the part I have to watch.This did not start with gossipBecause this did not start with gossip.It started in a classroom.I was in kindergarten. We sat in a circle, close enough for everybody to see everybody. Little chairs. Little bodies. Crayons somewhere nearby. Colorful walls.All the stuff adults use to pretend a room is safe.A boy next to me started touching me.I told.The teacher saw enough to know something was wrong. Heard enough to know something had happened. Understood enough to hush it.And then she kept it quiet.She did not protect me.She did not tell my parents.She did not make the room stop.She chose the room.That is the part that stayed.Not just what happened to me.What happened after I spoke.That is a different wound.Pain teaches you one thing.Silence teaches you another.I learned that telling the truth does not mean somebody is coming. I learned that speaking up does not mean the room will move. I learned that an adult can know enough to act and still choose the easier thing: keeping everything quiet.I did not have language for that.I had a body.And my body understood.When Josh speaks up, people do not listen.So something else in me stood up.I did not know his name then.I know it now.Okwu.The word. The spoken thing. The one who would not be silenced.He was not evil.He was loyal.He was the part of me that said, Since they will not protect you, I will make sure nobody can ignore you.That is where the voice came from.Not the stage. Not the pulpit. Not the booth. Not the essays. Not the jokes. Not the bars.The voice came from a child who learned quiet had power and decided quiet would never win twice.The protector became a weaponOkwu learned how to keep people off me.He learned how to speak before the room could swallow me. How to attack before anyone could attack me. How to turn charisma into armor, humor into distance, talent into leverage, language into a room key, presence into a warning.He learned how to make people respect me.And sometimes, if people would not offer respect, fear would do.That saved me.It also made me dangerous.Because an old protector does not always know when the war is over.He sees dismissal and calls it danger.He sees misrepresentation and calls it the classroom.He sees gossip and hears the teacher hushing me again.Then he reaches for whatever will make me feel untouchable.The sharper sentence.The colder exit.The public flex.The private thing I turn into proof.The move that says, You thought you could play with me; now everybody has to watch me win.And it works.That is the problem.Petty works.Power works.Fear works.Getting in somebody’s head works.Making somebody feel small before they can make you feel small works.Revenge always dresses better than fear.It can look like confidence until I am honest about what part of me picked the outfit.Sometimes the flex is not confidence.Sometimes it is a wound looking for an audience.And if I am not careful, I turn the woman into a weapon.I turn the bystander into a target.I punish a room that did not fail me.I have had to look at that straight.I have used talent as proof that nobody can touch me.I have used access as revenge.I have looked at men who could not do what I do, could not rap like me, could not move the way I move, could not get the same attention, and I have wanted them to feel the gap.Not because I needed them to suffer.Because some part of me still needed proof that I was not the powerless one anymore.That is overcompensation.That is the shadow.Not the voice.The voice is mine.Not the confidence.I earned that.Not the fire.That fire kept me alive.The shadow shows up when I make innocent people carry evidence that I survived.I do not want to be that kind of manI do not want to be that kind of man.I know what it feels like when somebody hands me a bill for something I did not do. I know what it feels like to stand there confused while somebody else protects their comfort with my silence. I know what it feels like when people manage the story instead of protecting the child.So I cannot become another version of that.I cannot commit so deeply to never being helpless again that I make other people helpless around me.That is not power.That is fear with better clothes on.The work now is not to kill Okwu.I would never do that.He had me.When nobody else did, he had me.He stood at the door. He learned the exits. He watched the faces. He remembered every room that taught me I was on my own. He made sure I did not disappear.I owe him my life.But I do not owe him the wheel every time I am hurt.He can live in the music.He can live in the writing.He can live in the gym.He can live in comedy.He can live in the way I walk into a room and remember I do not need permission to exist.He can live in the work without turning my life into a battlefield.That is the chair I am giving him.Not a cage.Not a grave.A chair.Somewhere to sit when I need wisdom.Not a throne he takes when I feel threatened.The room chose quietBecause I am not that boy in the classroom anymore.Nobody protected that boy. That boy told the truth and watched an adult choose quiet. That boy learned too early that some people will see you hurt and still ask you not to make a scene.But he made it.I made it.We made it.And now the question is not whether I have a voice.I know I have a voice.The question is whether I can use it without making volume my proof.Whether I can protect myself without performing revenge.Whether I can stay accurate when my body wants to be absolute.Whether I can tell the difference between danger and memory.That is the war now.Not against the world.Against the old reflex that thinks every room is that room.The first time I told the truth, nothing happened.The room chose quiet.But quiet did not bury me.I found my voice.Now I have to stop making every room prove it heard me. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

Author’s note: This essay is about hell, but not really. It is about what happens when knowledge becomes armor.We were drinking frozen margaritas.She had invited her friend over, so it was two of them and one of me. Cold glasses sweating on the table. Something easy playing. The kind of night that does not announce what it is about to be.I had been in the city about a week. I knew almost nobody. My life was in boxes at my brother’s place, and I was still learning the trains. When you are that new somewhere, every room you sit in is a room you are asking permission to stay in.Her friend was not just a friend. They called each other sisters, which is different. There are friends you laugh with, and there are friends who feel responsible for what happens to you after the laughing is over. She was around our age, close enough to know charm does not prove character, and close enough to her to ask the question out loud.You a God-fearing man?I told them the truth, which is that I used to be a pastor. Seventeen years. Youth leader, touring musician, Bible college, seminary, the pulpit, all of it. I said it plain.The friend said okay, like she was filing it somewhere. Then she leaned in.Just tell me you’re not an atheist. You believe in heaven and hell, don’t you.Here is the first thing they ever taught me: whatever you believe, understand why you believe it.That was the whole discipline. That was the love, even. Do not hold a thing you cannot defend. So I went looking. Concordances. Translations laid side by side. Study Bibles with the margins full. Apologetics, which is a churchy word for learning how to win. I sat in rooms full of other believers and argued for hours about the most loving way to hold a hard doctrine. I got good at it. Better than good.They had a verse for it. Rightly dividing the word of truth. To know the word and cut it clean and hand a person the right piece at the right time. That was holy. That made you useful. That made you dangerous in the right way. That made you a man worth keeping around.I was twelve the first time it paid.We had a Bible memorization competition, and I won it. Then I kept winning it. I could hold the verses the other kids fumbled, chapter and reference, clean off the top. The youth pastor watched me do it, and his face changed. Then he said the thing.One day that’s gonna be you. You’re gonna run this youth group when you grow up.My father had been gone two years.So when a grown man put his hand on my shoulder and told me I was going to be somebody, I did not hear a calling. I heard a man who might stay. For the first time since my father left, who I was meant something, and the thing that made it mean something was the word. Knowing it. Holding it. Being the one who could.I had already learned that staying was not free. You earned it. So I learned the verses. All of them. A boy will do anything that makes a man look at him like that.Nobody told me what that command would do if you actually obeyed it. A man trained to ask why he believes will one day ask it about the belief itself. They put the knife in my hand for the faith. I turned the same knife on the faith. They planted the seed of my leaving and called the seed obedience.So when her sister-friend leaned in over the frozen margaritas and asked me to confirm the fire, here is what I did.I told her I don’t believe in hell.And then I could not leave it there.I gave her Sheol: the grave, the pit, the place everybody goes, good and bad, no flame in it at all. I gave her Gehenna: the valley outside Jerusalem where they burned the trash, a real place with a real smell, turned into metaphor and then hardened into doctrine. I gave her Hades, borrowed from the Greeks. I gave her the lake of fire out of a book of visions nobody reads straight.Four versions. Where each one came from. What got translated. What got flattened. What got preached until it sounded older than it was.To a woman who wanted one hell, I handed her four and a reading list. I out-theologied her at her own table. I built a podium out of frozen margaritas and stood behind it.Halfway through, I knew I was doing too much. I could feel the room change. I was not answering her anymore. I was taking apart a theology she may have received through family, grief, songs, funerals, mothers, aunties, and Sunday mornings. I had spent years training for an argument she had not come there to have. She had asked me if I had a center. I showed her I had weapons.But it was not just any table.The church is one of the things that carried us. When my people had nothing, they had a Sunday. They prayed their way through what was built to bury them. The freedom songs came out of that room. The marching came out of that room. The mothers and grandmothers and aunties who kept families alive came out of that room with peppermints in their purses and scripture in their mouths.So when a Black woman asks me if I am God-fearing, she is not always being nosy. And this woman especially was not being nosy. She was her sister in the way Black women sometimes mean sister: chosen, protective, close enough to ask the question nobody else wants to ask. She was not trying to win a debate. She was trying to see if the man at the table had a center.That should have changed how I answered.It did not.I knew what my no might sound like in a room like that. Not like a private conclusion. Like distance. Like danger. Like I had become too educated to still be held by the people who raised me. So I owed her honesty without conquest.But watch what I actually did.I did not answer. I preached.That is the thing I keep having to learn about myself. I walked out of the building and kept the pulpit. When she reached for my center, I reached for the lectern, because the church did not only teach me doctrine. It taught me to never let a true thing stand there naked and cost what it costs. You frame it. You defend it. You witness.The four versions of hell were not knowledge. They were armor. A man can get cut for being a heathen. He cannot get cut for being smart. So I traded the exposed man for the expert and let the expert do the talking. I gave testimony for my unbelief in the exact cadence they trained into me.Same machine. New gospel.And here is the part I cannot wave off: the fluency is real. I am not faking the four versions. I know them. I know them because of who I used to be, which means the truest thing about me is also the wall I hide behind. The rigor they grew in me is the cage I live in now. Nobody beat this into me. They praised it into me. Good is the part that does not wash off.I am the best student in a school I dropped out of.It is the same flinch every time. I can say the true thing. I cannot say it short. I cannot say it and stop. The quiet that comes after a naked sentence is the part that costs, and I have never once let it cost. I fill it. With context. With origins. With nuance. With the most loving way to hold the doctrine. I have been filling that silence my whole life.So picture me at the table. Frozen margarita going to water. Four versions deep. The most fluent man in the room, speaking a language I renounced, standing behind a podium nobody asked me to build.And she still could not see me. Not because she lacked the eyes. Because I had stacked a wall of Hebrew and Greek between her and the one thing I walked in carrying.The truth was never four versions.The truth was four words.I don’t believe in hell.There it is.I’m not going to explain it this time. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

I wrote a short version of this in May, before I understood it. A few field notes, just me catching the reflexes as they fired. This is the long version. The one where I went looking for why.I thought leaving would make me free faster.That was the first thing I got wrong.I thought once the beliefs came apart, the version of me built around them would come apart too. Read the books, trace the history, find the seams in the doctrine, and pull. If the belief came apart in my hands, the self would follow.But a self don’t surrender that quick.A self has habits. Reflexes. Attachments. Old rooms it still knows how to walk into with the lights off.The belief was the first thing I questioned. The person it made me into took way longer to find.I should say this is how it went for me, not how it goes for everybody. I know people who lost the feeling first. The body stopped showing up before the mind had an argument for why. They sat in the same pew and felt nothing where the certainty used to be, and the reading came after, almost like cleanup. For them the formation cracked and the belief fell in behind it. Mine went the other way. I won the argument years before my body got the memo. So when I say belief first, self second, I mean mine. The order ain’t a law. It’s just the one I lived.Deconstructing a belief is a research project. You can do it at a desk. You can do it angry. You find out the verse you built your twenties on was a translation choice. The church councils I had been taught to treat like divine inevitability were rooms full of tired men who took a vote and went home, and the ones who lost the vote got a new name: heretic. The truth was whatever had the numbers that afternoon.I’m not saying every person involved was lying. I’m saying the certainty was more human than I had been allowed to admit.You feel betrayed. Then you feel free. Then you move on to the next brick.It’s clean, at least next to what comes after. It got an ending. You can talk about it at a party and sound smart.Deconstructing a self is a different animal. Nobody warned me about that part. Or maybe they did, and I was too busy enjoying the clarity to hear them.Here’s what I mean. The belief was just the top layer. What I didn’t understand then was that the belief never stayed in my head. It trained my instincts. It organized my whole sense of danger, love, obedience, belonging, shame, and safety.And I ain’t even saying all of it came from church. Some of this just Black survival too. You learn to read a room before you can read a book. You learn to stay understandable. You learn to tuck certain parts of yourself away so don’t nobody punish you for being too much, too loud, too sexual, too angry, too honest. Church gave it scripture. The world gave it consequences. By the time I was grown I couldn’t tell you where one stopped and the other started. They had both been teaching the same lesson: make yourself easy to keep.Underneath the belief was a body that learned how to stand when worship started. Underneath that was a reflex that flinched at certain words. Underneath that was a way of loving people with conditions baked in I never chose. Underneath that was a version of me that only knew how to feel okay when somebody above me was pleased.You can delete the doctrine in an afternoon. The body keep the appointment.I noticed it the first time somebody disagreed with me and my body reacted like I had sinned. Not like I had been misunderstood. Not like we just saw it different. My face went hot. My ears actually rang. I felt my shoulders climb toward my neck and my hands go cold, and there was that drop in my stomach like the second before you get caught. The man across from me was just making a point. My body was bracing to get corrected in front of a room that had been empty three years.That’s when I started to understand. The church can leave before the formation does. You can stop attending and still carry its reflexes into every room you walk in.I left the building in 2021. I’m still finding rooms in myself with the lights on and somebody I used to be still sitting in them.Because when you take the belief out, you don’t get a clean empty space where a free man walks in. You get a hole shaped exactly like the thing you removed, and everything around it still leaning toward where it used to be.The trust I handed out too easy. The certainty I performed when I was scared. The way I turned being useful into rent. The way I tried to become smaller than whatever was about to judge me.None of that was theology. It was formation. It was what the theology trained in me, and what the world co-signed.For a while I thought I was free because I didn’t believe the old answers no more. But I still needed permission the same way. I still confused disagreement with danger. I still said yes with my mouth while my body was already leaving the room. I still tried to earn rest, earn love, earn belonging, earn the right to not be a problem.That was humiliating to admit. I wanted to believe I was free because I had new language. Really I just had new language over the same old fear. I could reject the whole theology and still act like somebody’s approval was oxygen, and hating that I did it ain’t change the fact that I did.I didn’t want healing. I wanted proof that leaving had already made me whole. Because that would mean I escaped the argument before I escaped the formation, and the argument was the only part I knew how to win.And you grieve it. That’s the part I didn’t expect. You grieve the certainty even when you know it was a lie, because the lie still gave you somewhere to stand. You grieve the version of you that fit, even though fitting was killing you slow. You can be right about all of it and still cry in your car, which I did, in a Walgreens parking lot, over a conversation that hadn’t even gone bad.I think I wanted deconstruction to be a debate I could win. It wasn’t. The debate was the warmup.The real work been learning how to be a person without the thing that was holding me up. How to feel safe without somebody telling me I’m safe. How to love without needing somebody to confirm I’m allowed to exist. How to hear my own no after being built to say yes.That take longer than reading, and it cost more than being right.I’m not standing on the other side with a clean testimony about how I lost my religion and found myself. I’m still in it. Some days the old wiring fires and I catch myself performing for a room that ain’t there anymore, trying to make my pain legible enough to be believed, explaining a boundary like a defendant when all I had to do was say it like a man who’s allowed to have one.And it ain’t always the church that pulls the trigger. Last month I was the only Black man in a meeting and I felt my voice go soft and reasonable before I even decided to talk. Watched myself round my own edges down in real time. Shrunk my hands. Smiled a half-second too long. No God in that room. No covering, no correction, no pulpit. Just an old part of me that learned a long time ago which version of me gets to leave a room safe. The church taught me to fear God. The world taught me to fear being misread. My body filed both under the same drawer and never asked me which was which.That’s not failure. That’s just how long it takes to put down something your nervous system picked up before you could spell it.So if you’re in the early part, where the ideas are falling and it feel sharp and clarifying and almost good, I don’t want to take that from you. That part matters. It just wasn’t the expensive part for me.The self comes later.People like to say bring water, like it’s a long hot trail and you’ll be tired but fine. I used to end it that way too. I don’t think it’s that. I think you bring water because you don’t know how far it is. Not because nobody made it. Because the ones who did kept walking, and ain’t circled back yet to tell you what’s out there. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

She never asked me to be her nigga. That fact should clear me. It doesn’t.Because I knew there was a debt forming anyway. I could feel it gathering in the room, in the silence after certain conversations, in the way she waited for me to name something I kept refusing to name. I knew the arrangement had weight. I knew my presence was being counted. I knew my absence was being counted too. And I kept benefiting from not saying that out loud.That is the part I want to be clear about. Not because it makes me look honest, but because it shows how dishonest I was willing to be while technically telling the truth.I told her I wasn’t in a place to commit. True. I told her I was still moving around. True. I told her I didn’t want her holding her breath for something I couldn’t promise. Also true.But truth can still be used as cover. Mine was. I used honesty the way some people use tinted windows. You could see just enough to know somebody was inside, but not enough to hold them accountable for what they were doing in there. I called it clarity.We had done this before. Years earlier, and it ended in pieces. I had to remove her from my space more than once, and each time something between us broke a little further. Then I let her back in and watched it break again. By the time this round started, I wasn’t a man taking a risk. I was a man holding the autopsy report. I knew how fear moved her. I knew how resentment moved through the room when nobody wanted to call it by its name. I knew how we became worse versions of ourselves together. And I walked back in anyway. Not confused, not innocent, not surprised.She kept a ledger. Every woman I spent time with got logged. Every trip. Every night I didn’t call. Every dollar. She built a private accounting I never got to see, then billed me from it later, sideways, as criticism, disappointment, little charges added to the balance of us.And I gave her plenty to count. That is what keeps this from being a clean story. The ledger needed me. It only worked because I supplied the ambiguity. My “I’m not asking for anything” was the exact gap her accounting lived in. She got to keep score. I got to keep moving. We both got to call it something prettier than what it was.She wasn’t running a dynamic on a clear-eyed man who slowly figured her out. She was running it on someone who already knew the terms, who had seen this kind of contract before, who stayed because the access was still worth something to him.The redirects were real too. I would come in with something specific, something she had actually done, and within two minutes I’d be defending myself against something else. Keep me explaining. Keep me proving I wasn’t the problem. Keep me so busy answering for myself that I never got to ask what the argument was protecting. That is not conflict. That is management.And I knew it on sight. Not just because I had survived it, though I had. Because I had run it.I spent years in a church that handled accountability this way. Change the subject. Raise the stakes. Make the person asking the question feel like the question is the sin. I wasn’t only in those rooms. I led some of them. I stood in front of people who came with fair complaints and turned the mirror back on them. I made their doubt the issue instead of the thing they were doubting. I made their pain submit a formal request before I would treat it as real. I was good at it.So when she did it to me, I didn’t have to decode anything. I recognized my own handwriting. That is the part I would leave out if I were still trying to win. My fluency in her trap is a confession about what I used to do to other people. I knew the architecture because I had helped build versions of it. I knew the exits because I had blocked them before.So yes, I could name what was happening. Of course I could. Naming things has never been the hard part for me. Naming things is the thing I do instead of leaving.I paid her rent. I’m leaving that in because it cuts against me. That wasn’t generosity. Not clean generosity. That was me funding a seat I wanted to keep without having to claim it. I can’t pretend I thought I owed her nothing while I was paying her rent. I can’t pretend it was casual while I was making myself useful in ways that kept me welcome. I liked being needed. I liked being wanted without being claimed. I liked having an exit. That is uglier than simply saying I was manipulated. It is also truer.The first time I told her I needed space, she said I wasn’t shit. That I didn’t give a fuck about her. And I felt the old pull to walk it back. A Black man who asks for space is often treated like a Black man preparing to disappear. That script is real. Your needs become evidence against you. Your boundary becomes proof you were always leaving.But a real script is not a pardon. I hid behind it. The script handed me a reason to stay that sounded like care, and I took it. Because leaving would have meant admitting I had known better since the first time. Leaving would have meant giving up the version of myself that could still say, “At least I was honest.”But I wasn’t honest. I was accurate. There is a difference.Honesty would have named the shape of the thing. Honesty would have said, “I know you want more than I am willing to give, and I am still accepting the benefits of your attachment.” Honesty would have said, “I am not confused about what this costs you.” Honesty would have said, “I am using the absence of a title to avoid the presence of responsibility.”I did not say that. I said I wasn’t ready. I said I didn’t want pressure. I said I didn’t want anyone waiting on me. Then I stayed close enough to be waited on.That was the contract. Not the one we said out loud. The one underneath it. The one written in favors, access, resentment, sex, rent, late-night calls, withheld definitions, and the comfort of being able to say nobody technically lied.I ended it eventually. Not in anger. Not in clarity either, because I had clarity for years and clarity never once moved my feet. That is the thing nobody warns you about seeing the structure. Seeing it does not get you out. I walked away from the church years after I knew the doctrine was hollow. I walked away from her years after the first time she showed me who we were together.The distance between knowing and leaving is the whole story. And it was never only a story about her.I used to think the problem was that I kept negotiating a contract I never signed. But I signed this one. I knew the terms. I had read them out loud to other people once, from a stage, and called it ministry. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That Shit. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

I landed in New York with six suitcases and a job I didn’t have a title for.My brother needed help. His kids needed somebody in the apartment when he wasn’t. I’m 38. The job is nanny.Zeke is three. Azzy is eight. They don’t know I just moved here. They don’t know I left a city, a relationship, an apartment, and a friend group I was still tryna figure out how to leave. They know I’m uncle.That’s enough.Zeke calls me Joshy-Wah. His three-year-old version of Joshua. Two syllables he sings together like they’re one word.Joshy-Wah, can I have fruit snack?He says fruit snack instead of snack. He says it all day. He’ll be three feet from a plate of food and ask for fruit snack. I’m still not sure if he knows what the words mean or if it’s just the sound he makes when he wants something.Either way, I open the snack.He also tells me he’s so tired when what he means is he’s bored. Says it wide awake, sitting up, eyes shining, with the gravity of a man who just worked a double shift.Joshy-Wah, I’m so tired.“Tired from what, man? You three.”He looks at me like I asked a dumb question.Can I have fruit snack?“That’s not tired. That’s snacky.”He does not laugh. Comedy is wasted on toddlers. He just stares at me until I open the snack.He’s skinny. Bow-legged. Dark skin, curly hair. He runs across the room with the urgency of a small animal that just spotted something better in the next room. Then he climbs onto me and watches Bluey on his iPad with his head on my chest. He doesn’t put the tablet down.I don’t ask him to.Sometimes he just sits next to me and copies whatever I’m doing. If I’m on my phone, he’s on his iPad. If I pick up a cup, he picks up a cup. He doesn’t say anything.He just wants to be in the same shape as me.Azzy is eight. She watches me. Not the way three-year-olds watch you, looking for what you’ll give them. The eight-year-old kind. The kind where she’s tryna figure out who you are.She told me me and Isaiah look like twins. She’ll sometimes mix us up for a second. I get it. I lost a lot of weight this year. My brother and I have the same face when we’re tired. Later, I catch myself in the hallway mirror and see what she means. Not twins exactly. More like two versions of the same man who learned different ways to carry pressure.She’s into pop music I don’t know. She’ll play a song and I’ll nod like I do. She knows I don’t.We’re cool about it.Yesterday Azzy wouldn’t stop running.Didn’t I say no running? I said.She kept running.Then why are you doing it? Why are you playing tag when you’re not supposed to be running? Do you not respect me?She stopped.The questions stacked. Each one tighter than the last. I heard my daddy in them. I heard my mama in them. I heard every Black uncle and pastor and big cousin who ever needed a child to know they had reached the end of the negotiation. The cadence is older than me. I used it before I decided to.The need inside it was older too.She wasn’t scared.She just stopped.Then she went and sat down with her brother, mad for maybe twelve seconds before asking if we could play music.For the last year I’ve been managed, narrated, talked about. Loved on bad terms. Misread on good ones. Everybody had a version of me.The kids don’t.They just have me.When Zeke wants something, he pulls on my arm and says my name. He doesn’t have a story about whether I’m a good uncle or a complicated uncle or an intense uncle. He has whether or not I’m in the room. Whether or not I respond. Whether or not the fruit snack gets opened.The care is granular.Open the snack. Find the shoe. Locate the show. Hold the door. Wipe the face. Carry the body. Read the book. Read the book again. Read the book again.This is the work.Ain’t nobody got an opinion about it. Nobody’s talking about how I’m doing it. Nobody’s gonna take what I did today and pass it through three rooms till it becomes a different story.Just the snack, the shoe, the show, the door, the face, the body, the book.I’ve been a youth pastor. I’ve been on stages. I’ve been the one who could say the right thing at the right moment to crack open a room. I’ve been good at being public.I’m learning to be good at this.Which is different.When nobody needs me at Isaiah’s, I sit in his recliner and put the TV on low. It’s naptime. The apartment goes quiet in a way that doesn’t feel like rest. It feels like a held breath.Before Isaiah leaves, he gives me the rundown.“They ate already. Chicken’s in the fridge. Zeke’s gonna ask for fruit snacks. Don’t believe him.”Then he’s out the door.I pull out the laptop and get to work. Substack drafts. Marketing emails. Client work. The nanny job has windows. I live the rest of my life inside them.Then I take the train back to my own place.My apartment is half-empty. Furniture is coming this week. The air mattress is here too. Pigeons sit on the AC unit outside my window like they pay rent. Memorial Day fireworks have been going off in the borough for three days straight. Folks tell me they won’t stop till the Fourth of July.I lay down. I put on my iPad. I journal. I text people. I sleep.This is the part of the job description that didn’t make it into the conversation with Isaiah. The going home alone. The empty apartment after the full one. The pigeons. The fireworks. The quiet.It’s fine.The quiet is mine.So is what comes in it.My dad is older. I tried to see him before I left and it didn’t happen. I called. He didn’t answer. I don’t know if I’m gonna get another chance.I’ve been sitting with that.Holding Zeke does something to that grief I haven’t figured out yet. He doesn’t weigh much. He’s three. He puts his head down on my chest like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. And I keep thinking about my dad’s chest. Whether I ever put my head down on it. Whether I would now if I could.I would.I would be a fantastic father.It’s not a hope. It’s information.Whether I want to be one is a different question. I love being alone. I love a quiet apartment, a long morning, a thought I get to follow all the way through. I’m not in a hurry to give that up.But Zeke comes and asks for fruit snack and I give it to him without thinking and the calculus shifts a little.There’s a difference between uncle and father. The kids feel it before you do. They come to me for things because they know Isaiah’s a little tougher. I’m the soft one. I can be silly. I can negotiate. I can let one more episode of Bluey happen. Daddy is structure. Uncle is play.That’s a fine arrangement.It also tells me something about what I would be, if I chose it.The version of me in other people’s mouths can keep moving.I’m not in those rooms.I’m in this one.Zeke is asleep on me. Azzy is reading. The train sounds different at night than it does during the day. The fireworks are still going. There’s a half-eaten bowl of cereal on the counter and I’ll deal with it in a minute.This is what I came here for.I didn’t know it yet when I was packing. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

Sometimes chemistry is not love. Sometimes it is your body recognizing a familiar kind of chaos and calling it fate.In this episode, Josh breaks down the difference between passion and panic, intimacy and intensity, desire and emotional surveillance. He explores how inconsistent affection can make longing feel sacred, how anxiety can disguise itself as connection, and why being wanted is not the same as being well-loved.This is not an anti-passion episode. This is an anti-confusion episode. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

Author’s note: This essay discusses power, consent, kink, religion, masculinity, and emotional responsibility. Details have been blurred to protect privacy. The point is not exposure. The point is what power reveals.The first thing I usually noticed was how fast somebody said yes.Not the outfit. Not the room. Not the fantasy they carried in with them like a lit match.The yes.Sometimes it came too quick. Too eager. Too clean. Like they wanted to skip the part where they had to be a person and get straight to being desired. Like if they could become the fantasy fast enough, nobody would have to ask what hurt them.One night, I stopped before anything really started.I had asked a boundary question. Nothing graphic. Something ordinary enough that most people would have missed the way her answer left her body before she did.“Yes.”Not nervous.Not grounded either.Just automatic.Like a student trying to pass a test.So I asked again, slower.“Do you actually want that, or do you want to be the kind of person who can say yes to that?”The room changed.Not dramatically. Nobody stormed out. Nobody cried. The lights did not flicker like we were in somebody’s prestige drama about desire and damage. But something shifted. Her face got quieter. Her body came back into the room a little bit.That is the part people do not understand.Everybody thinks the Dom is the powerful one because they imagine command. Voice. Posture. Somebody kneeling. Somebody obeying. Whatever movie taught them kink was just trauma in better lighting.But the fantasy is control.The reality is attention.You are watching breath. Shoulders. Eyes. The little flinch somebody swears did not mean anything. You are listening for the difference between arousal and panic, performance and permission, surrender and disappearance.You learn that yes is not enough by itself.Folks will offer you things they do not fully know how to give yet.That was the part nobody told me.The power was never in what I could make someone do.The power was in what I knew not to take.I spent some time as a Dom.That sentence looks louder than it feels. People hear it and immediately start decorating the room in their minds. Leather. Red lights. Danger. Somebody’s secret Tumblr from 2014. And yeah, there were aesthetics. There were roles. There were voices I learned how to use. There were stories I still probably should not tell with names attached.But the truth is quieter than people want it to be.A lot of domination is paperwork without paper.It is negotiation. It is asking questions that interrupt the fantasy long enough to protect it.What do you want?What do you not want?What scares you in a good way?What scares you in a bad way?What have people misunderstood about your body?What do you say when you are overwhelmed?What do you do when you are trying to please somebody instead of telling the truth?That last question matters more than people think.Because people lie with their mouths all the time. Not always maliciously. Sometimes they lie because they want to be wanted. Sometimes they lie because desire has trained them to audition. Sometimes they lie because shame taught them to treat their own limits like bad manners.Sometimes they say yes when what they mean is, “Please don’t stop seeing me as desirable.”And as the Dom, you have to decide what kind of man you are going to be in the presence of that.You can pretend the offer is clean because it benefits you.Or you can pay attention.That is where the actual power begins.Not in the command. Not in the posture. Not in the fact that someone is willing to surrender something to you. Power starts when someone gives you access and you still refuse to confuse permission with wisdom.A lot of men want control because they do not know how to be trusted.That is the part I had to sit with.It would be easy to write this like I was above the whole thing. Like I entered every room as some enlightened, emotionally literate, consent-forward philosopher king with perfect lighting and a working knowledge of everybody’s childhood wounds.That would be cute.It would also be a lie.There were parts of it I liked because they made me feel chosen. Needed. Exceptional.There is a specific kind of validation in being trusted with somebody’s surrender. It can make you feel almost holy if you are not careful. Somebody is not just wanting you. They are placing themselves in your hands and saying, “I believe you will know what to do with me.”That can feed the best parts of you.It can also feed the worst.Sometimes I liked being trusted because it let me avoid being questioned.That is not a pretty admission, but it is true.When you are the one holding the structure, people can mistake your control for clarity. They can mistake your attentiveness for wholeness. They can mistake your ability to read them for proof that you know how to be read.And I liked that.I liked being seen as safe.I liked being Sir.I liked being Daddy.I liked what those names did to the room. How they gave shape to the air. How they made me feel wanted without having to ask for wanting. How they let me stand inside a role that already knew what to do with its hands.That is the part I have to tell the truth about.Because being called Sir or Daddy gave me a script.Ordinary intimacy did not.Ordinary intimacy asked questions I did not always know how to answer.Do you want me when I am not controlling the room?Do you want me when I am unsure?Do you want me when I am not useful, not impressive, not leading, not reading your body like scripture and telling you what comes next?The role let me be wanted without having to wonder if I was loved.And that was easier than I want to admit.Sometimes I wanted credit for refusing what I never should have taken in the first place.That is the ego trap.A scene had rules. Love did not. A scene had language. Love made me improvise. And I have always been better with a script than with an ache.That is a dangerous kind of safety.There were times I liked the clarity too much. The boundaries. The language. The structure. Everybody knew what the room was for. Nobody had to pretend power was not present. Nobody had to do that fake grown-up thing where two people are clearly negotiating desire, ego, abandonment, shame, fantasy, and control, but calling it “just seeing where things go.”I liked that kink told the truth.Power is here.Desire is here.Risk is here.Say what you mean before somebody gets hurt.That clarity mattered to me because I had spent too much of my life in spaces where power wore church clothes.In church, people used soft language for domination.Submission.Covering.Accountability.Leadership.Servanthood.Headship.Discipleship.All these pretty words that could mean care or control depending on who was holding them.I saw people call coercion wisdom.I saw people call fear obedience.I saw people call silence unity.I saw men with no emotional discipline claim spiritual authority over people who were just trying to be loved by God and not abandoned by community.And that thing will mess with you.Because at least in kink, when somebody called me Sir or Daddy, we both knew a role was being played.That sounds crude until you have been in enough respectable rooms where nobody admits the role is a role. Where the man at the front says he is serving while everybody else adjusts their life around his appetite. Where somebody tells you your discomfort is rebellion. Where somebody else’s need for control gets baptized and handed back to you as your responsibility.Kink did not make power harmless.But it did make power visible.And once power is visible, it can be negotiated.That is no small thing.There was a mercy in the stop.The stop was sacred.Not dramatic. Not theatrical. Just stop.Immediately.No sermon. No guilt. No “are you sure?” No “maybe you’re overthinking.” No “don’t ruin the moment.” No spiritual manipulation dressed up like concern.Just stop.The whole universe had to obey that word.That kind of clarity will ruin you for relationships where people punish you for having boundaries.It taught me that consent is not just permission. It is structure. It is pacing. It is the right to change your mind without being treated like you broke the spell.And honestly, that is where a lot of people fail each other outside the room.They want access without maintenance.Desire without conversation.Intensity without accountability.They want the feeling of being trusted, but not the responsibility of becoming trustworthy.I have been guilty of that too.That is the line I cannot skip if I am going to tell the truth.Because I know what it feels like to be wanted for the version of you that performs well.The calm one.The intense one.The one who knows what to say.The one who can hold the room.The one who seems dangerous, but safe enough to confess to.That version of me has opened a lot of doors.It has also kept me from knocking on some.Being a Dom can hide a lonely man beautifully.People do not talk about that part.Control can become a costume for longing. It can make you feel above need because everybody else’s need is louder. You are checking on them. Guiding them. Holding the boundary. Reading the signals. Deciding when to push and when to stop.You get so focused on being the container that you do not have to admit how badly you want to be held by something too.That is why aftercare stayed with me more than the scenes.Not the spectacle.Not the part people would ask about first while pretending not to be nosy.Aftercare.The quiet after.The return.The water. The blanket. The hand on the back. The nervous laugh when somebody came back into themselves. The softness after intensity had done its work. The reminder that the person was not an object, not a fantasy, not a body arranged around my ego.A person.A whole person.Somebody’s child.Somebody’s wound.Somebody trying, like all of us, to figure out how to be wanted without disappearing.That part humbled me.Because anybody can enjoy being obeyed.Not everybody can care for what obedience opens.That is the difference between domination and consumption.Consumption asks, “How much can I get?”The ethical version asks, “How much can I hold without becoming careless?”It is not tender because it avoids intensity.It is tender because it refuses to abandon care once intensity arrives.And tenderness is not weakness.Tenderness is discipline.A man who cannot be tender with power should not be trusted with it.I believe that more now than I did then. Maybe because I have seen too many men treat access like conquest. Too many people confuse being desired with being entitled. Too many rooms where the person with the most power was also the least accountable.The older I get, the less impressed I am by people who can take up space.I care more about what they do with the space they take.Do they make people smaller?Do they make people perform safety for them?Do they need to be feared in order to feel respected?Do they punish honesty when it interrupts the fantasy?Do they only like surrender when it flatters them?Because that is not power.That is hunger with better posture.Real power can hear no and not fall apart. Real power understands that somebody can give you their body and still not owe you their soul.I learned that in rooms people would judge before they understood.I learned that desire is not automatically honest just because it is intense.I learned that people can ask for things they are not ready to receive.I learned that being wanted can still leave you lonely if you are hiding behind the version of yourself that gets wanted.I learned that control is only sexy when everybody can leave.And I learned that sometimes the most powerful thing you can say is no.Not the no that rejects somebody.The no that protects them.No, not like that.No, not while you are trying to prove something.No, not if you are only saying yes because you think I will want you more.No, not if this costs you yourself.There is a mercy in that kind of control.That is the part I keep coming back to.Because my life has been shaped by so many forms of power that did not know how to be merciful. Religious authority. Masculine control. Community pressure. Romantic need. The strange power of being praised, misunderstood, projected onto, and then punished for becoming a person inside the role.So yes, I spent some time as a Dom.And yes, I liked being Sir. I liked being Daddy. I liked the hush those names could put in a room.I liked being trusted with somebody’s surrender because it made me feel like maybe I was not as lost as I actually was.And no, the lesson was not that I am dangerous.Danger without care is cheap.Any reckless man can scare somebody. Any hungry man can take. Any insecure man can call himself dominant if he mistakes volume for authority and fear for respect.That is not rare.That is everywhere.The harder thing is restraint.The harder thing is listening.The harder thing is being trusted with somebody’s surrender and not using it to worship yourself.The lesson was that surrender is sacred when it is chosen, reversible, and protected.The lesson was that power reveals you. It does not create your character. It exposes it. It showed me that sometimes I did not want control because I was strong. Sometimes I wanted it because uncertainty made me feel exposed.People think domination is about what you can make somebody do.It is not.It is about what you can be trusted not to do. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

I’m moving to New York in a few days, and the wild part is the logistics are not even what’s bothering me most.The logistics are loud. Don’t get me wrong.Boxes everywhere. Bills. The lease. The car. The last-minute math. Everything I still have to handle by Tuesday. The little piles around my apartment looking at me like, “So what’s the plan, genius?”That part is stressful.But that ain’t the thing sitting in my chest.The thing sitting in my chest is harder to admit:I’m grieving the death of being known.Not famous.Not important in some grand historical sense. I’m not that far gone. But known in the local way. Known the way a person becomes part of a city’s background noise. Part of the weather. Part of the “oh yeah, him.”Known by rooms.Known by scenes.Known by churches.Known by artists.Known by people who saw me rap before they watched me unravel.Known by people who remember versions of me I have spent years trying to outgrow.There is a kind of identity that only exists because a place keeps saying your name back to you.Omaha did that for me.Not always kindly. Not always accurately. Sometimes not even lovingly. But it did.For years, I built myself here through proximity, usefulness, visibility, and performance. I was in rooms. On stages. In meetings. In churches. In studios. In inboxes. In group chats. In somebody’s mouth, for better or worse.I was the rapper.The pastor.The organizer.The strategist.The intense one.The thoughtful one.The problem.The solution.The person people called when they needed language, a hook, a plan, a verse, a post, a prayer, a concept, a hard conversation, something to make sense of the mess.And that kind of being known can start to feel like belonging if you don’t look too close.I did not always look too close.Because being known gave me something.It gave me proof.It gave me shape.It made my life feel like it had evidence.If enough people knew what I had done, maybe I had done enough.If enough people remembered me, maybe I wouldn’t disappear.If enough people associated me with something meaningful, maybe I could stop worrying that I was only meaningful when I was useful.That is the part that embarrasses me.Because I want to make this sound cleaner than it is.I want to say this is about legacy. Impact. Community. The ache of leaving a place where I gave real years of my life.And it is.But not only.Some of it is ego.Some of it is resentment.Some of it is me wanting my absence to inconvenience people emotionally.There it is.Ugly as hell.But honest.I think part of me wanted Omaha to look up from whatever it was doing and say, “Wait. Him? He leaving?”I wanted the city to pause.Not forever. I’m not that dramatic.Okay.Maybe a little.But I wanted something.A collective exhale. A little reverence. A sign that the years had gathered into more than private compliments, old flyers, public association, half-remembered conversations, and a quiet exit.Instead, the city is doing what cities do.People are going to work. Somebody is planning an event. Somebody is mad at somebody. Somebody is making a flyer. Somebody is starting a podcast. Somebody is becoming visible. Somebody is stepping into a room I used to know how to enter. Somebody is becoming the person people call.Omaha is continuing.Not because it is cruel.Because it is alive.That is the humiliating thing about leaving a place. You find out the place had a whole life outside of your mythology.I knew that intellectually.Emotionally, I think I had made a quiet little agreement with the city.I gave you years.You give me permanence.I gave you talent.You give me memory.I gave you my contradictions.You give me proof that I mattered.But cities do not sign those contracts.People barely do.And if I’m being real, I have spent a lot of my life trying to be unforgettable because I did not always trust love.Being unforgettable feels safer than trusting love.Love can change its mind. Love can get tired. Love can misunderstand you. Love can leave. Love can make you show up without the costume.But being known?Being known has receipts.A show.A title.A reputation.A role.A story somebody tells.A room where your name still means something.You can point to being known and say, “See? I was here.”That is seductive when you have spent years trying to outrun the fear that your presence is conditional.I can see it now in ways I probably couldn’t while I was still in it.There were times I called it service when it was survival.There were times I called it leadership when it was control.There were times I called it community when I mostly wanted to feel necessary.There were times I said I wanted to help, and I did, but I also wanted helping to make me irreplaceable.That ain’t the whole truth.But it is part of it.And leaving has a way of making the partial truths loud as hell.Because New York does not care who I was in Omaha.That sentence is terrifying and merciful at the same time.New York does not care about my local mythology. It does not care what rooms I used to be in. It does not care who nodded when I walked in or who had opinions after I left. It does not care that I used to be a Christian rapper. It does not care that I planted churches. It does not care that I deconstructed in public. It does not care that I have history here, or that some of that history cost me more than people know.At first, that feels insulting.Then it starts to feel like mercy.Because if nobody knows who I was, nobody can keep handing me old versions of myself and calling it recognition.There is grief in that.There is freedom in it too.And I do not want to romanticize the freedom too fast because I know me.I am not suddenly above wanting people to see me.I still want my work to matter.I still want rooms to feel me.I still want people to understand me with precision.I still want somebody to say, “No, you need to hear him.”I still want to be chosen.A plane ticket does not kill that.But I am starting to understand there is a difference between being seen and needing a place to keep reflecting me back to myself.Omaha gave me a mirror.Sometimes it told the truth. Sometimes it warped me. Sometimes it made me bigger than I was. Sometimes smaller. Sometimes it showed me my gift. Sometimes only my damage. Sometimes it loved me. Sometimes it used me.Sometimes I used it back.That is the part I have to admit too.I cannot make Omaha the villain just because it did not give me the goodbye I imagined.I loved this place and resented it.I served it and needed it.I outgrew parts of it and still wanted approval from the same rooms.I criticized its smallness while benefiting from the intimacy of being legible here.I wanted freedom from its memory while still hoping that memory would treat me generously.That contradiction might be the most honest thing I can carry with me.Because leaving does not make me above the place.It just removes my access to the version of myself that only made sense inside it.There are places here that know me better than some people do.Studios where I tried to turn pain into something with a hook.Church rooms where I said things with certainty I no longer possess.Stages where I performed confidence while holding my private life together with tape and adrenaline.Coffee shops where I tried to look like a man with a plan.Apartments where I became versions of myself I now have to forgive.Streets I drove down while rehearsing arguments with people who were not even in the car.Rooms where people praised me.Rooms where people tolerated me.Rooms where nobody invited me.Rooms where my name got there before I did.That is what I’m leaving.Not just a city.A whole system of recognition.And maybe that is why packing feels so strange.Some things fit in boxes.Some things don’t.The clothes fit. The books fit. The records fit. The documents fit. The dishes, if I decide they’re worth the trouble.But what do you do with the version of yourself that other people’s recognition helped build?What do you do with the part of you that still wants the city to regret not loving you better?What do you do with the man who thought if he became meaningful enough, he would finally feel secure?I don’t have a clean answer.I don’t even trust clean answers right now.Part of me wants to end this with something elegant about rebirth. Something about anonymity being a gift. Something about New York making me new. Something about stepping into my next chapter and leaving old narratives behind.Maybe that will be true.But today?Today it feels less like rebirth and more like social death.And maybe that is not a bad thing.Maybe we do not heal every version of ourselves.Maybe we bury some of them.Not because they were fake.Not because they were wrong.But because we built them for a life we are no longer staying inside.The version of me who needed Omaha to remember him was not pathetic.He was trying to survive.He was trying to matter.He was trying to become real.He was trying to make a life out of talent, pressure, faith, ambition, disappointment, and whatever scraps of belonging he could find.I can honor him without letting him run the next city.That might be the real goodbye.Not goodbye to Omaha.Goodbye to the belief that being known is the same as being held.Goodbye to the idea that usefulness can protect me from loneliness.Goodbye to needing a place to keep proving I existed.I am leaving in a few days.The city will continue.People will eat, argue, post, preach, flirt, gossip, organize, perform, grieve, reinvent themselves, and misunderstand each other in rooms I am no longer in.Somebody might miss me.Somebody might not.Somebody might not know how bad I wanted them to.And I will get on a plane anyway.Not because it does not hurt.Because it does.Because part of me still wants Omaha to turn around.But another part of me, the part I am trying to trust, knows this:If I have to stay somewhere so people keep remembering me, I’m not free yet. Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That S**t. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe

Omaha knew me before I knew myself.That’s the strange thing about leaving a place where your whole life happened in public. People remember the versions of you you’ve already outgrown. Sometimes they remember the versions you’re still trying to forgive.I wrote about leaving for New York in two weeks, public reinvention, community memory, masculinity, faith, being witnessed, and those stables next to the projects on Sorensen I still can’t explain.“Stables on Sorensen.” Get full access to Amen. Aśe. And All That Shit. at amenaseandall.substack.com/subscribe