The honest-to-God truth, this random ass encounter motivated the hell outta me. So here’s the picture : it’s My friend’s birthday dinner was tonight and while I was a reasonable hour and twenty minutes, I get there and it’s a beautiful table full of melanated people there to love on my bro. we got outside for a smoke break and a young lady comes with me. We start smoking and she asks her friend, “how do my eyebrows and hair look?” Her friend hyped her up as a good friend should. Then I followed up with a simple, “ you look beautiful.” She laughed off our compliments and later went on to reveal how she is a recent breast cancer survivor and has lost hair in the process of recovery. Of course, after I heard that context, I’m ready to plan an award and recognition ceremony in this woman’s honor. I start telling her she’s beautiful and her hair looks fine. Then she got very vulnerable with me. She said “I came out last week with no wig on and nobody talked to me. So, I wanted to put on a wig this time to be seen.” My heart sank to my toes. I asked for consent first , but I gave that woman the biggest hug and told her, “I see your beautiful soul and kind spirit.” Then I got very ethnic, “Fuck these people. Everyone has their own shit to worry about. The last thing they should be doing is worrying about you. You are a warrior and survivor, you can do whatever you want. You are one of one.” I went on a Beyoncé lyric rant ,but I wanted her to feel seen so bad. I wanted her to feel loved so badly. I wanted her to feel like she a community, even if it was a party of one, to validate her experience.  

Then I had to remember, that desperation and gratitude can’t dwell in the same space. So what did I do? I said, “Hey, I’m working on being more self-reflective this month and I think it would be great if you tried this exercise with me.” So we proceeded to do a vowel check and when we got to A I told her, “you should really bring awareness to your negative self-talk and accepting compliments.” Negative self-talk has been the main issue in my self-compassion journey, so completely related to her when she struggled so hard to accept the compliments from us. As we worked through the rest of the vowel check I could see her gain some happiness and she ended the vowel excited to eat the restaurant’s famous shrimp and grits. We finished smoking and walked inside for 7 uninterrupted mins of crushing southern-style food. 

The moral of the encounter, I realized how impactful this vowel check series could be. Not just for me, but for everyone. Not for the satisfaction of following another challenge, but for the joy of feeling like you aren’t alone. So cheers to feeling nervous and anxious and all those other little adjectives that make our heart beat fast and our palms sweaty. Cheers to the growing community and #31DaysOfReflection. 

If you want the template for social media, please go click here. Comment your own vowel check below and let’s grow in community.