While I am supremely grateful for everything that’s happened to me, I’m still scared of it; I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it. But maybe that’s a good thing. As we get older and we change, finding different paths and new circles and answering new callings, our identities are in various states of flux anyway. All of the identities that I hold and project come from me, and are all legitimate versions of me. I just need to learn how to be comfortable in that and to remind myself that each identity is just as valid as the other.
You know what, though? The more time I spend as People-Facing Candice, the more that identity dominates the rest of them. I kind of . . . like talking to loads of people now, even when it makes me uncomfortable. I don’t mind putting that discomfort aside if it means someone can come away from talking to me and say that I made them feel better or that I answered a burning question they had about why Queenie doesn’t date Black men.
Actual Candice, me, is a very sensitive person. It’s almost unbelievable how soft I am. I’m very quiet, observant, very still, and I prefer to listen than to speak. I usually have my hood up to block out the world and my glasses off so that everything I look at is softer around the edges, less sharp, less in focus. I would rather die than actively upset someone, and in conversations I do actual mental acrobatics to make sure I’m making people as comfortable as possible. Take this sensitive Candice, throw her in the spotlight, and what else could I do but create a whole new persona to deal with being actively recognized and spoken to?
All this identity work goes back to how I see myself. I finally see myself as an author, which took long enough. For a long time, when I was introduced as an author, I’d look confused. I finally see myself as someone who has valid opinions, and I am finding my confidence when it comes to expressing them. I can also now see that identities don’t have to be one or the other. Identities don’t have to be binary. The whole introvert-versus-extrovert label that I’d been so obsessed with adhering to has stopped being as clear-cut to me.
Recently someone told me, not long after meeting me, that they didn’t think I was an introvert at all. They said I struck them as more of an antisocial extrovert. I liked that. It helped me to see that as much as we can adhere to, or hide behind, the social markers of an identity, holding that identity doesn’t really mean anything at all. Because someone will always take you for the version of you that they want, whatever you’re trying to project or whoever you’re trying to be. The idea of identity is hard enough when we’re trying to work out who we are in this world. Add to that the effort of trying to manage the identity you project to people, and you’re done for. No wonder I was so tired.
Chapter 20
Bad Bitches
The internet has several definitions for bad bitch. According to the Urban Dictionary, she is:
Totally mentally gifted and usually fine as hell.
An amusing, inspiring, fun-loving, and independent bosslady who is mentally gifted and also fine as hell.
A female who knows what she wants and knows exactly how to get it. A female who is always ready for anything physically, emotionally, and also intellectually (one being book smart as well as street smart). One who is classy and all about business. Last but certainly not least one who knows how to take care of her man at home and in the streets and remains loyal to him . . . herself, and the game at which she plays.
That is just one of many entries, but the gist is clear. A bad bitch is a lot of things. Probably too many things for one woman to live up to. But she is usually Black—the phrase was popularized in hip-hop and remains a mainstay in rap lyrics from Lil’ Kim and Jay-Z to Lizzo and Cardi B—and always a woman.
I love Black women. I love us with a pure, bottomless, concentrated, no-added-ingredients kind of adoration that goes beyond the love I have for my mother, sister, aunts, or even myself.
It’s an enduring devotion rooted deeply in our stories: the winding, bendy journeys through small setbacks and enormous obstacles that make each of us who we are. The full lives that make each of us bad. Not bad meaning bad, but bad in the Run-DMC sense. Bad meaning good. Better than good. Excellent. Goals. Magic. Bad bitches.
I love us. We are beautiful, powerful queens. Masters of slays. Leaders of movements. Makers of culture and changers of games. We are Michelle Obama’s leadership. Grace Jones’s radicalness. Maxine Waters’s candor. And Tarana Burke’s compassion. Yara Shahidi’s optimism. Dina Asher-Smith’s speed. Serena Williams’s stamina. And Sade’s elegance. Ava DuVernay’s vision. Patrisse Cullors’s activism. Missy Elliott’s innovation. And Meghan Thee Stallion’s knees. We are all these things and more.
But in the course of writing this book and contemplating my own experiences, it’s dawned on me that as we celebrate our heightened visibility in this era of inclusivity, the spotlight moves ever more in the direction of the exceptional, leaving many out.
I have grown tired of conversations that only look at our exceptionalism in relation to misconceptions about us. And I have grown equally tired of conversations in which we must explain our chosen states of being, whether that be self-improving, excelling, and flexing or slowing down, muddling through, and figuring it all out.
White people aren’t expected to slay all day. And when they do, they aren’t asked to defend said excellence. Why should we?
Yes, we slay. But Black girl magic is not just in the headline-making feats but also in the magic of just being. Unbothered. Unencumbered. No questions answered except those asked of ourselves.
It’s about the right to be a superwoman one day. Regular-degular the next. Messy another.
Graduate degrees popping . . . or not. Hair and nails done . . . or not. Skin a little broken out . . . or not. Dream job offers forever out of reach . . . or not. Twerk a little off-rhythm . . . or not. Love life in the toilet . . . or not. Family dynamic a struggle . . . or not. Finances on fleek . . . or the opposite. House and closet Instagrammable . . . or not.
The right to inhabit it all. It’s a luxury that seems to elude most of us. But rather than wait for it to be granted, maybe it’s time to create it for ourselves.
“Sometimes, I wish I was not a bad bitch all the time,” an attractive woman in a support group on the HBO comedy series A Black Lady Sketch Show says, her lace front thick and shiny, her makeup a full beat to Pat McGrath levels of perfection.
The other bad bitches in the group recoil in loud, audible horror, long gel nails clutching virtual pearls.
“I want to wear normal house slippers. Not three-inch-heel house shoes,” another adds.
“Stop whining. Being a bad bitch is an honor. We didn’t choose this life. This life chose us,” a third woman, Afro and smoky eyes full and flawless, says, indignant with outrage.
The other women, including Laverne Cox, lips lacquered in red, arms stacked with bangles, agree.
“There is nothing wrong with being an okay bitch as long as you not a basic bitch,” the group leader, Queen Bad Bitch Angela Bassett, cheekbones contoured and shoulders clad in fur, declares, settling the score.
As the women offload, the camera pans to a secret observation room, and the viewers realize what the bad bitches don’t: They’re not in a support group but in a controlled medical study for Fashion Nova, the top-selling women’s apparel brand known for churning out body-con dresses for the likes of Cardi B, Kim Kardashian, and Nicki Minaj. Each bad bitch has been medicated to acclimate to the undue pressures of bad bitchdom.