Show Your Teeth: What Your Whimsy Can't Survive Without
<p>I know what people see when they look at me. They see someone intense, who doesn’t hesitate, who has probably always been this way. And they’re not wrong. I’m not a person who is big on giving grace just for the sake of giving grace, and I know that gets me a bit of a bad rap, which I am totally ok with. I’m the type of woman who has been thrown to the wolves and came back leading the pack. My Nana (a very dangerous yet loving woman) taught me that at a super young age. I remember me, my baby sister & cousins getting a lecture before school that if anyone tried us “<em>you make em hurt so bad that they will never think of hurting you again</em>” essentially I was taught that at the first sight of disrespect you eradicate it before it becomes too big to handle. Now Nana may have meant that in terms of bullies putting hands on us but there was nuance there. There are many ways to remove a threat to your well being that doesn’t equate to being physically violent - and yet at some moments in life that may be exactly what you need to do. <strong>Discernment is key here.</strong> When I seek out justice or retribution, I receive it — because I come letting people know that if I need to be <em>deadly</em>, I will. For my well-being, peace, community, whatever it is I’m fighting for. I will <strong>not</strong> hold that back.</p><p>And because I am a fully embodied multifaceted Black woman there is another side to me that people don’t always see: I am as equally cutie patootie as I am bad b***h. I am very much a whimsical la-la girl. I LOVE that about me. And I can be that way — fully, without apology — because I have no problem showing my teeth. I don’t lose sleep over it & have never felt bad about it. I’m not concerned if someone says I’m too much or too aggressive. At all. Those two sides have always lived in me at the same time. <em>And this piece is for the girl who has that same duality inside of her but hasn’t let both sides fully breathe yet</em>. The girl who is bubbly and joyful and half-glass-full but has been told in a thousand different ways that her softness is the only version of her that’s welcome or allowed.</p><p><p>The Dark Divines is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my art, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></p><p>That is a conversation I will probably <em>always</em> be having thanks to patriarchy (eye roll) so I wanted to put it here, plainly: <strong>it is okay for you to show your teeth. Actually, in order to fully get everything you want from this lifetime, you will have to</strong>.</p><p>I was raised by women who showed their teeth all the time. And I saw how it protected them, how it allowed them to live in a way of freedom that most Black people didn’t even know existed. That forever shifted my understanding of what it means to call in matriarchy, the real deal not the weird whitewashed version trending currently. But to call that in, you have to be able to show your teeth. You have to be able to protect your being, inner God, higher self & inner child. You cannot do that without showing that you can bite back.</p><p><strong>I have this strong belief that Black women are like wolves.</strong></p><p> I’ve felt this since I was a child. I actually got an A+ on an essay where I defended the so-called Big Bad Wolf in the Three Little Pigs — those pigs sounded like terrorists to me, like Karens before the word Karen was a thing, harassing a wolf that was just trying to live in its natural habitat and survive. Anyways I’ve always had this kinship with wolves because I see how they’re portrayed in media as vile, irrational creatures that are always out for blood, with no warmth or care in their bodies. Things to be terrified of, to eradicate.</p><p>And it always bothered me because reading <em>Women Who Run with the Wolves</em> confirmed what I already felt: wolves love and care for their community deeply. They only become vicious if you attack what they love. They are sweet, loving, intelligent creatures. That reminds me so much of Black women in particular. I’m not saying all women. I’m saying Black women. I said what I said. We are portrayed in media the exact same way as wolves, wicked and dangerous. Yet we are the exact same way as wolves — nurturing, community-oriented, instinctually protective of our young.</p><p>Even those of us who have dealt with immense trauma. Part of our healing and spiritual journey is coming back home to that understanding: we are designed to take care of ourselves, and by taking care of ourselves, we take care of our communities. That is why I believe deeply that <strong>Black women who are fully embodied, who can operate in their light and their dark, will absolutely shift this world forward.</strong> Not save — I’m not calling us into becoming super mammies. My goal is for us to really live out our lives exactly how we see them in our mind’s eye, to be so clear in that decision that we fearlessly live it out loud. And that requires showing teeth.</p><p>But society has tried to defang us. Remove our canines, our claws, so we would cower and be afraid of extinction and stop operating in our natural way of wildness. Too many of us have stopped showing our teeth because of it. Whether that’s through assimilation and just wanting to succeed with capitalism/racism/sexism or any of the myriad things we have to deal with as intersectional beings we are constantly told not to show our teeth. And when you grow up with that understanding, it is dangerous. It is you forcing your bigness into something so small that it is crushing you. There are parts of you that are being unseen and compressed and pressured into a shape that is not your Divine self. Hell not even your fully human self. You’re operating from a space of smallness. And I don’t want that for us anymore.</p><p><strong>It can cost you everything to not show your teeth</strong>.</p><p> Even just hesitating a bit. It impacts your confidence. It becomes detrimental to your dynamics because people aren’t fully aware of all you are. You end up actively suppressing your bigness, so you make choices from a place of fear or desperation instead of power. And suppressing your true feelings, especially as a Black woman, can literally make you sick. </p><p>There was an article that went viral from the Atlanta Tribune ‘<em>Silent Rage Is A Hidden Health Crisis Among Women Of Color, Fueling Autoimmune Disorders’</em> and it laid out that the ‘angry Black woman’ stereotype pressures us to suppress our emotions to avoid being labeled, and that cultural silencing is making it a matter of life and death. Women of color who frequently suppress their anger are 70% more likely to develop conditions linked to heart attacks. Women account for nearly 80% of autoimmune disease cases. And the traits that get rewarded in us by society like agreeability, extreme selflessness, suppression of anger — are the same traits making us chronically ill. Your body will say what your mouth has been forced not to express. That’s clearly what the research is showing us.</p><p>I have witnessed incredibly bright, brilliant women go through pain and humiliation simply because they were taught to be nice first. That leads to something else that happens when you swallow your teeth for too long you start questioning other women who you actively see using their teeth. Women who do know who they are, who are aware of their power, who do not hesitate to remove whatever is in the way of their joy — you start projecting yourself onto them.</p><p>You start thinking, well, I did this, so they might go down this road too. But you’re not considering the fact that a woman who is comfortable showing her teeth is fully aware of what she’s experiencing precisely because she is not hesitant. She’s clear. And when you can’t see that in her because you can’t see it in yourself, it makes it very hard to be in circles with women who are actually showing up and living life. It costs you proper community and support, sisterhood. Because if you’re constantly projecting and not taking the time to allow another woman to be who she is because you are realizing that you are not all of who you are, you will push away the very women you need around you.</p><p><strong><em>There’s a deep wound underneath all of this, and for many of us it starts with our mothers.</em></strong></p><p> We talk sooo much about daddy wounds (<em>which I think is hilarious because it just speaks to patriarchy</em>) but it’s the mother wounds that tend to cause us the most pain. Because we lived inside of a body that we didn’t really get to know, or that we only knew in one capacity. We didn’t get to see the full dimension of who that person was, whether or not we know our biological mother. And that disconnect can create a real disassociation from your fullness and your power.</p><p>If you were <strong>a golden child,</strong> a goody two shoes (<em>I know that’s exactly what I was</em>) you learned early what it meant to make yourself small so that your existence felt worth the sacrifice. I knew at an early age that my mother had sacrificed a lot for me to exist, and my main goal as a child was to make it worth it. I know that sounds heartbreaking. But that is something I intuitively felt the need to do because I was really grateful for my mom, I loved her and I could see, even at a young age, that she was suffering.</p><p>Or maybe you were <strong>the weird girl</strong>, samesies. And depending on your environment, that weirdness might have actually shielded you from some of what society was trying to force on you — but you still felt the pressure of people wanting you to assimilate and be normal. Whether it was because being normal gave you more access to community or resources as a child, the pressure was there to not be too weird. To tone it down & fit somewhere recognizable.</p><p>Or maybe you were <strong>the rebellious one.</strong> Who questioned authority, had her own thought process, was outspoken in a way that made the adults around her uncomfortable. And eventually that got weathered out of you — either you fell in line, or you were isolated and became an outlier to your own tribe. And that kind of exile as a child is devastating.</p><p><strong><em>Any one of those veins of bubbly Black girl origin can lead you to the same place: not wanting to show your teeth anymore.</em></strong></p><p>There’s the narrative of children should be seen and not heard. Lyvonne Briggs talks about this in <em>Sensual Faith</em> — how dangerous it is to continue that narrative, but also understanding where it comes from, especially for Black Americans. Keeping your child quiet was a way of trying to keep them safe, making sure the white terrorists we had to coexist with weren’t going to harm our children any more than they already were being harmed. bell hooks speaks about this as well in <em>Sisters of the Yam</em>. That narrative of being quiet, being proper that could easily have been the beginning moment where you stopped showing your teeth. There are so many spaces where the fierceness got trained out of you for survival’s sake, corrupting protection into a pattern.</p><p>But showing your teeth is one of the first ways you get to expand. That snarl, <em>that dog in you</em>, it shows people: I am not to be played with. Whether I am wounded or not, whether I grew up in suburbia or in the hood, you are <strong><em>not</em></strong> to play with me. You can not minimize me, my feelings or my expression of self. You could NEVER tell me that I am not enough. And if you do, there are dire consequences for you. I am fearless in protecting myself, my loved ones, my ideologies, the fullness of who I am as a Black femme. Yes, the snarl is probably aggression. But it is rooted in you being assertive and making sure you have dominance over your own life. And because of that, it leads to expansion.</p><p><strong>Showing your teeth is also an act of healing your inner child.</strong></p><p>When you are able to protect yourself, it does so much for your reparenting experience — and many of us will have to do that on our healing journey, especially if you are someone trying to become fully embodied and get comfortable with your darker urges and desires. Part of reparenting is becoming the protector you needed as a child.</p><p>Women who are fully embodied never hesitate to show their teeth. What I mean by that is they don’t need more than one reason, more than one experience with somebody, to take what that person has done to them at face value. It reminds me of Maya Angelou (<em>a woman who was deeply embodied</em>) and her statement: “<em>When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.</em>“ I absolutely live and breathe by that. It has saved me a lot of heartache, it has allowed me to change my conditions, to ensure that nobody takes from me and that I never doubt myself just because someone thought they could push further.</p><p>And sure, sometimes people are just having a bad day. That’s true. <strong>But if we’re always operating out of making sure other people are at ease in the lives they’re living, we’re never really checking in to see if we’re at peace in our own.</strong> I’d rather make sure my house is in order first, and then extend that courtesy outward. What I will NEVER be okay with is when someone isn’t comfortable where they’re at, they think they can make me feel uncomfortable too. <em>Aht aht</em>. It does not benefit you to ever give someone the benefit of the doubt. Especially people you don’t know.</p><p>And I know someone will say: but what about turning the other cheek? People love to invoke that s**t. They love to hold up Jesus, Gandhi, Mother Teresa like they all belong in the same sentence, as though they all represent the same thing. They don’t.</p><p>Let’s start with Christ. Jesus made a whip out of cords and flipped tables in the temple (Matthew 21:12, John 2:15). He was about THAT life, ok? He showed his teeth often and with good reason — and it didn’t stop the people who loved and valued him from doing so. The haters were everywhere and they were loud, and he still had community, devotion, and people who would ride for him.<strong> Because showing your teeth doesn’t repel love. It clarifies who’s actually capable of giving it.</strong></p><p>Now. Gandhi and Mother Teresa are a different conversation entirely and should never have been in the same sentence as Christ. People hold them up as pillars of grace and nonviolence, but what they actually practiced was performance. The appearance of being passive and loving while doing real harm behind closed doors. Gandhi, the man who is considered to be a “North Star” for nonviolence, was documented in his own autobiography dragging his wife Kasturba out of the house by her wrist, and later in life subjected his teenage grandnieces to what multiple historians have identified as sexual abuse under the guise of “celibacy experiments.” Mother Teresa’s legacy carries its own well-documented record of harm. These are not people who turned the other cheek.<em> These are people who performed niceness while being genuinely terrible — and their mythology was used to teach you that silence and submission equal goodness. That is propaganda.</em> That is media being used to oppress and suppress. And that brand of performative passivity has nothing to do with the whimsy Black girl either. You are not performing softness. You <em>are</em> soft. And that is exactly why you need your teeth.</p><p><strong>There is an inherent ugliness to showing your teeth that pushes people away from doing it. Particularly Black women.</strong></p><p>Because we were taught that having access to some form of pretty privilege benefits us — and that is true. I use my pretty privilege often. However, I have never minimized the so-called ugliness. The wofulness. The blood dripping from your teeth after you tear into somebody. I acknowledge that too, and in itself, it is beautiful. Women are not just prim and proper. It is not just the civilized side. It’s also the wild woman. The woman with dirt under her nails, with hairy legs and unbrushed hair. The woman who may have an undesirable societal feature like crooked teeth or not the idealistic body type. There is beauty in the full spectrum of what we are, even the parts that are considered taboo. Especially those parts.</p><p>The more you practice showing your teeth, the better you can discern when it’s appropriate to bite back and when to hold someone close because they actually need it. And yes, there will be times when you bite back and it’s the wrong call. That might require a little more compassion on your end. You’ll learn that in the moment. But you have to try first. You have to be aware of your teeth. You have to sharpen them and that means becoming more clever, having more wit, really studying yourself to know what you like and what you don’t like. These are the things that help you discern when it’s time.</p><p><strong>If you’re someone who is hesitant about showing your teeth, about standing up for yourself, about backing your beliefs — it’s probably because you haven’t studied yourself enough to know when and how and where.</strong></p><p>There are layers to why that is, especially if you are a Black woman from the United States. We are such intuitive beings, but we have been forced to operate from a space of logic and intellect first. And the reason that’s dangerous is because most of the schools of thought and education systems we learned through were built by white people. There is a s**t ton of decolonization that has to happen in your education to realize that you could never really lead with intellect alone. It is a disservice to you to use one without the other.<strong><em> Intuition is foundational for Black women. When you lead with your intuition and then layer on your intellect, you experience levels of embodiment that change everything.</em></strong></p><p>With that internal adjustment you begin wielding personal alchemy. The thing that was meant to be poisonous, meant to deplete you — when you are fully embodied, you repurpose its energy to benefit you. You can feed off of it and transform it into something life-bringing and nourishing. Like sipping on your baby daddy’s tears or siphoning energy from a man that is being dishonest. These are things that get looked down on, that get called cruel or unnecessary. And usually it’s because the person judging is afraid to show their teeth. They are afraid to get to the wild, gory gritty all that comes with being a woman. But that grittiness is where the power is. That is what showing your teeth actually unlocks not just the ability to protect yourself, but the ability to take what was thrown at you and make it feed your life instead of drain it.</p><p>So as you move through this season, as you’re reclaiming your access to the dark feminine, as you’re choosing to show up as your full self, embrace the duality. You can be whimsy and wicked when needed. <em>Will it piss people off? </em>Absolutely. But they were already mad that you’re as soft, happy, and bubbly as you are. <em>So why not double down for the plot?</em></p><p><strong>Here is what’s on the other side of showing your teeth</strong></p><p>you are fully in your body and power with a clear understanding of your intuition and what is actually possible for you. It’s like unlocking the final boss version of yourself because you know that if you need to protect yourself, you absolutely will. You also know that the universe and your Ancestors will protect you too. If you need to have access to your prosperity, you know you will go for it, you will allow it to come to you, and you will not let <em>anyone</em> get in the way. And the universe and your Ancestors and your spirit teams will show up with that same level of fierceness and determination. And your play — because you understand that you can protect yourself, it allows you to be softer. It allows you to play with the power dynamics between yourself and others. It is a completely different experience mentally, spiritually, and physically when you allow yourself to show your teeth. It is you being shameless & unhinged. It is also you understanding that within that, you know how to operate in society when it makes sense for you to do so, and you know you can stand against society, stand by yourself and your own beliefs, anytime, anywhere. Ultimately you just have more access to fluidity. And it really is like a superpower.</p><p>Protect your deservingness of pleasure and play and prosperity. By any means necessary. If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready. <strong>Show your teeth.</strong> You don’t always have to use them. But people need to know they’re there, that they’re sharp, and that you will not hesitate if needed. </p><p><strong><em>Love you deep babes.</em></strong></p><p></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. 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