How to Fix a Broken Record: Thoughts on Vinyl Records, Awkward Relationships, and Learning to Be Myself

by Amena Brown

For me, this journey meant that if I was truly going to love myself, I had to learn to love my hair too. I had to accept that God didn’t make any mistakes when he made my hair to curl up in the rain or to stand up and out.

I asked them to write about what they thought about the word princess. I was curious to see if they had the same complicated relationship I had with this word. Some found it easy to identify with fairy tales; some, like me, couldn’t bring themselves to believe in fairy tales based on the harsh realities they had experienced. We tried an experiment. I asked them to invent their own princess and kingdom. We used our pens to describe what our version of a princess would be like, what the rules of our kingdom would be, how we would treat the people who lived there.

my classmates and I were all swapping yearbooks, mostly signing things we didn’t mean or things we’d regret later.

heartbreak taught me love could be disappointing with the same force that it could be blissful.

I saw him leaning against a wall at an arts event, as if his lean was holding the whole party together.

follow arbitrary age requirements for one’s uterus,

We lamented where our present lives had failed to meet our expectations.

She will find your respectful hand in the small of her back so much sexier than a strange first-date hand attempting the squeeze on her inner thigh.

It’s interesting how dancing brings out all the places we don’t trust our partner with our rhythm, our feet, or our heart.

Even after I’ve read the seventeenth web page about how to sleep better at night, Google is terrible at helping me find true peace for my soul. As many links as Google can offer me on how to be more lovable, more kissable, or how to be a better wife or a better house guest, it can’t show me how to find the kind of love that isn’t dependent on my looks, mood, or status. Google can’t tell me who I am. It can’t pinpoint my identity for me. Only God can do that.

I learned God was more interested in my being with him than in what I could do for him.