Speak: Find Your Voice, Trust Your Gut, and Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

by Tunde Oyeneyin

It’s always easier once you get to the destination to forget about the hills and winding roads you had to take to get there,

Openness is how we make the world easier for each other.

We hear what we need to hear when we need to hear it.

“When you are yourself, your people are better able to find you.”

When you speak your mind, it’s like waving a flag people can see from a distance. Some will see it and say, “No, thanks, that’s not for me,” but I guarantee you the people in the back of the line, those people will see it and know to come.

on the other side of pain is growth.

“We don’t just hurt in times like this. We don’t pause our hurt and our pain until the next George Floyd situation. Black people, we hurt in the in-between.”

We protect ourselves from knowing the pain of others, because it’s painful and it’s uncomfortable. It floods our senses until it overwhelms us. But if we want to wake up, we have to be willing to lean into it. From there, we evoke learning, growth, change, and then ultimately, we’re given the power, the freedom to find our voice, to speak

accept and love that. I didn’t give the Speak Up riders a cool-down, because I wanted them to stay in the feeling. I didn’t want it to end or diminish. And when it did, I wanted them to come back to a feeling of hope. “I’m tired, but I can’t let my tired supersede hope,” I said as we started to slow down. “Martin Luther King Jr. was tired. If he had allowed tired to supersede hope, he wouldn’t have led the march in Selma that day. I’m tired, yeah, but I’m more hopeful than I am tired. This time feels different. Let your hope supersede your tired.”

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

And to Ryan Michelle Bathe, who told me, “You can’t lead without empathy. You can be in power without empathy, but I don’t know that you can be a true leader. I don’t think that you can truly hear the concerns of people and then metabolize that in actual items without being able to metabolize people’s fears and hurts and hopes and dreams.”

We can’t speak only to people who look like us, to people who are like-minded. If we do that, then we’re speaking to ourselves. To create change we have to broaden our minds and our reach and our voices. Let’s do it together.

We collect insecurities throughout our lives, without paying attention to who is telling us we are too much or not enough. Their voices become the voice in our own heads, spinning in a loop of self-criticism, and every time we listen to them, we give them power. You are what you think you are, so you have to be mindful of what you think.

my Black skin is illuminated by the sun and it beams in the dark. My Black skin does not shift, and it does not alter. My Black skin is my essence, and it makes me myself.

Self-love follows the same route, starting on the inside and later becoming visible on the outside, and people respond to it. Once we are able to foster our inner beauty, we are able to push it outward and pull it right back in, and the circle continues. In short, love yourself. The world will recognize it and send that love right back to you.