Author: TheAyeshaSite

I want to write children’s books maybe even a series of children’s books where the protagonist is a little black girl. Taye Diggs the author of Chocolate Me and of Mixed Me seems less happy with Chocolate Me! than he does with “Mixed Me” the children’s book he wrote for biracial and multiracial kids. I am very comfortable in my own chocolate skin and so I can bring analysis to these two children’s books that I admit to never have read and only to know about. I don’t know too many Chocolate brown skinned people who are as self accepting, self aware who are actually self love advocates other than myself. If I can be honest usually darker skinned brothers have a built in self hatred where they marry women who are lighter skinned or are of another race but this is because they are self loathing men. All black men are not self loathing but most are in my opinion. Kanye West is one of them. I have no problem with black men who date outside of their race. I’ve had relationships with white men but I don’t hate myself and I’m not trying to get with the lightest skinned man to have babies with. I have been told I was attractive by some white men who have been very nice to me. I wouldn’t marry a man that didn’t adore me and some white men are really handsome and very nice, while others are racist and mean! Most white men I’ve met are nice! When I think of “Mixed Me” I think that this book is for Taye Diggs and his biracial children he had with either a white woman or an Asian woman maybe both. This brother doesn’t really like himself. He is self hating in my opinion. I couldn’t even say this if I wasn’t the self love advocate and beautiful chocolate woman I am! I hope people comment on this post!

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I was at college this past Wednesday in one of my Early Childhood Education classes and one of the young ladies (she is Asian) said “Ayesha is Black and she accepts herself and everything!”. She also said I was quiet and I seemed like a nice person. It’s funny because I am doing my paper on a book called Kwanzaa and Me by Vivian Paley. I feel like she was really surprised that I accept myself and I’m a Black woman. I think she was expecting me to be like other Black women she knows who may be self hating because a lot of  Black women and Black men are self hating or self loathing. Not me though, not Ayesha! That’s not true about me. I sometimes feel like I’m an exception to that “rule” but that makes me feel good in a lot of ways. Despite everything I have been through I can say I like myself and want to be who I am not somebody I’m not.

I am a very important person. I’m not less than anyone else and nobody is better than I am. I see myself as a very important person. I’m not a celebrity but I’m a V.I.P. If I had treated myself the way other people treat me I wouldn’t be good to myself but I am being good to myself. I’m true to myself and I feel like I deserve a rose gold nameplate and name earrings and nice clothes and jewelry and cool hats and lots of bling bling. Nobody is going to love me like me. I remember when I got hired at Mercer as a Mentor for the DREAM program. I knew I had moved up a level from where I was. I will be working at Mercer until May 2017 or December 2017. I haven’t made my mind up yet. This Christmas is Christmas at Mercer and by January 2017 I’ll have 6 credits in my Early Childhood Education major! I cannot wait to take the Praxis Core for Educators tests (3 in all). I am doing so well! I co-facilitate the NAMI Connection support group too once or twice a month! I’m happy.

Of the things that make me who I am two big things I think would be my Black Identity and my college degrees. My parents especially my mom have pushed education since I was a little girl. It was important to both of my parents that I applied myself and did well in school. I was never the type to be a smoker. I tried to quit smoking with the patch back in my 20s but I was not successful at quitting until age 33 when my psychiatrist asked me if I was serious about quitting and she started me on Chantix. In a few months I had no desire to smoke and next July will be my 3-year smoke free with not a puff off a cigarette in three years. I never thought I would become a smoker as a kid. It was because of peer pressure I started smoking at the alternative high school I went to where teenagers got smoking privileges. That was when I guess you could say I became a smoker. My Bachelor’s degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing at age 34 is something I am very proud of. No one can take my degrees away from me. I am working on a second BA in Early Childhood Education starting this Fall 2016. I want to teach at a The Goddard School or a Montessori school when I get my Early Childhood Education degree.

The brokenness was healed or began to heal after I turned thirty. This self assured confident feeling of wholeness and self acceptance really took me by surprise. I had been a broken African American teenage girl with body image issues and people made fun of me about my looks, my skin color and other reasons. When I was in my 20s the major things that happened to me was at the age of 26 I graduated from Mercer and at the age of 27 I became involved with NAMI Mercer the same organization that gives me a place to volunteer and quality of life. This feeling of self acceptance was a feeling that was new to me. It came by surprise to me because as a child I was bullied badly and criticized. For a while it was just me and my mom and then when I was nine or ten years old my step dad Neil became my dad. I remember turning thirty and thinking” I like who I am”. That was a feeling I thought could not be right at first. All the bullying I encountered as a little girl even as a teenage girl and all the struggles in my 20s and now at thirty here I was liking myself and accepting myself and feeling really good about who I am! It’s still a process of continued self acceptance and independence and self reliance for me.

Everyday though I never give in I get strange feelings like I harmed myself. I basically get self harm hallucinations all day until I go to sleep at night. Sometimes I get the feeling like someone is bashing my face in to my laptop. New York Times best selling Memoirist Mary Karr said you can’t write memoir if you can’t literally punch yourself in the face believe that or not. Mary Karr said it! I am a proud African American woman and I’m a Poet and a Memoir writer and an aspiring children’s book author. I am ambitious. I am writing my memoir, Ayesha’s story right now. All of the spiritual abuse is unfair to me. I don’t harm others and I sure as hell don’t want to cause any harm to myself. Schizophrenia is such a tough illness. I’m on a whole new level now that I’m on payroll at Mercer and I refuse to be silenced or abused by anybody. If you’re out there haters you can kiss my ass!

I led the Bowling and Pizza event for the first time in December 2010 after being asked by Erika Reading. I remember a Just Friends member telling me that I did a good job leading the event. I also remember the same Just Friends member telling me he tried to lead the event and he just couldn’t do it but he told me I did a great job. I really believe that God walks with me and wherever I am God is with me. I had an experience one day with the Divine or with God. I know the supernatural peace that washed over me that day at AAMH partial care program was from God. That’s how I know I don’t walk alone. I would’ve snapped if God had not intervened. Divine intervention is real! This December 2016 will be six years since the first time I volunteered to lead a Just Friends event. It’s my “anniversary”!

I am writing my life story from early onset of my Schizophrenia at age fourteen to my life right now in my 30s. The first part of my memoir is my early onset of my mental illness (Schizophrenia) to now me in my 30s and doing so much better having “made peace with my illness” and all of that good stuff. I no longer blame other people for my shortcomings or weakness or struggles. I know that if it was God’s will then there was some reason for my suffering. One day the reason will be known and obvious at some time in the future. If I suffer and have been suffering I believe that there was a reason that I suffered. Nothing just happens there is a reason for everything that happens in life we just don’t always know why but there is always a reason. I got lucky and Edi Giunta liked me enough to support me for my last two semesters at NJCU starting to write my memoir she affectionately calls My Schizophrenia Autobiography. I smile wherever I think of the word idiosyncratic. I will have a memoir soon. By next January I want to have 40,000 words (word count) and by June or the following January I want to have 60,000 words. I’m working on a book length memoir project! I am so happy. So far I have like 55 pages typed written and everything! I will keep going.

Dr. Chakraborty said I could do my Lit assignment on MADONNA’s The English Roses and I wrote a three or four page paper on The English Roses. I love the book. I shared last class about why I love the book so much. I have the twelve book hardcover series of The English Roses for middle grade readers (I’m guessing). I remember The Weiss Center in Grossnickle Hall at NJCU. I went to The Goddard School today from 10am-noon to observe Amelia a special needs toddler and for the next four or five Mondays I will be writing anecdotal records basically writing Amelia’s story and how I see her classroom/school experience. I am going to find a Christian or Catholic preschool to do my other observations. I have to write a paper APA style and I will focus on that ASAP.

I had seen several videos on YouTube about Black Poetry or African American Poetry and one video in particular was done by some East Indian or Middle Eastern people. They were interested in Black Poetry. I found this very interesting and at first I thought of Cave Canem workshops and the Cave Canem Foundation that was founded by Toi Derricote a self loathing light skinned black woman and a black man named Cornelius Eady whose father was hard on him for being his son who was “too dark” to his own father and this is an issue that Cornelius deals with in his poetry about his relationship with his dad as a grown man! I am happy that I got in to two Cave Canem workshops even though I only went to one workshop in the Fall of 2015. I applied for the Cave  Canem Chapbook prize for (2017) and the results will be available by December 31st.