In the season finale, I finally figured it out. From forming a second business prematurely, to getting laid off a third time, to grieving some sh*t my body needed to release, I was ready to go full throttle with storytelling as a living.

What I didn’t understand, until I navigated that darkness I mentioned in episode two, was that grief wasn’t limited to losing a loved one. My body was grieving some things that my mind was slow to catch up with.

And then the music stopped. In a game of musical chairs, I was left without a seat. But the game wasn’t musical chairs, it was my health. I had experienced a bout of debilitating back pains in 2021 that took me down.

In the words of Jay-Z, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.” I studied entrepreneurship in undergrad because my natural inclination was to always be in charge of some sh*t. But I still had a lot to learn.

Being unemployed [for a third time] in New York crushed me and this time around, the additional bump in benefits, because of the pandemic, was gone. There were more rules and monitoring than before. I was embarrassed by being unemployed at my “big old age” in my late 30s.

I thought I had my career path figured out in my early 30s. I was making decent money as a freelance contractor at Viacom in New York and I had never thought about leaving my TV production gig until it exhausted me.

Having immigrant parents, getting a good education was over emphasized in our household. Lucky for me, I was down for traditional schooling, having gone to a four year college then grad school.

As an Afro-Caribbean woman, I’ve had to navigate multiple worlds beyond my comfort and rarely with enough language.

This season, I did something different. I got a little more personal and vulnerable and decided to share stories about the nuances of being a Black woman still navigating various aspects of my life in ways I didn’t expect to or want to.