You think I can't take your weight? I carried you when you were a baby and I could carry you now.

Sleep paralysis is a strange thing. I'd had dozens of episodes at university when I'd take naps, and when I looked at it, read that's something about the brain being disrupted and waking up before the body, which is why you can't move when you're hallucinating that there's a faceless man climbing across the floor towards you.

It's not putting black lives on a pedestal, I don't even know what that means," I said, my heart beating fast. "It's saying that black lives, at this point, and historically, do not, and have not mattered, and that they should!"I looked first at Gina, then around the room to see if anyone was going to back me up. Instead, I was met with what I'd been trying to pretend hadn't always been a room full of white not-quite-liberals whose opinions, like their money, had been inherited.

She handed the megaphone to a woman next to her and stepped down from the podium. The second woman climbed up and spoke: “Do you know what they want? They want us to riot , they want us to cause havoc, mayhem, they want us to burn ourselves to the ground. But you know what I say? It’s not a riot, it’s an uprising . And we will continue with our uprising until we get the justice we deserve.

Is this what growing into an adult woman is—having to predict and accordingly arrange for the avoidance of sexual harassment?

I wished that well-meaning white liberals would think before they said things that they thought were perfectly innocent.

Being brave isn’t the same as being okay.

CAN YOU TURN THAT OFF, GRANDMA?’ I shouted down. ‘YOU KNOW I AM STRUGGLING.’There was a long pause.‘Who yuh tink yuh talking to?’ my grandmother shouted back. ‘Yuh tink say you can be DJ inna my house cause of a man?

Why are people always complaining about the dead period between Christmas and the New Year? It’s complete bliss.

My eyes must spend at least fifty per cent of any given day rolled to the back of my head.