Grace Sandra

02/20/2025

If you struggle with negative self-talk, this episode is for YOU! Learning to practice self-compassion has been life-changing for me ✨

Self-Compassion is REALLY important for healing. So many of us are caught in negative self-talk & it makes it impossible for us to heal. In episode 17 of my ...

02/06/2025

If you ever felt like you’ve lost your voice completely this episode is for you. On being silenced and reclaiming your voice…

In episode 15, I'm exploring the journey of reclaiming one's voice after experiencing trauma. Sharing my personal story of abuse, the deep-rooted effects of ...

01/29/2025

In epi 14, I'm discussing how these IG memes won't heal us... going a little deeper into pop psychology vs REAL *actual* psychology.

Have you ever found yourself trapped in a cycle of love and pain that you just can't seem to escape? In episode 14, I'm uncovering the truth behind trauma bo...

01/29/2025

Yes, this is happening quick. Germany fell to fascism in just 53 days. Orangutan understands the (Project 2025) assignment.

12/30/2024

Today I turn 40-ATE! 🎉 As I celebrate this last trip around the Sun, I’ve been reflecting on what it honor it is to be gifted with the blessing of aging, which so many don’t have the privilege of doing.

I’m thankful that with each year I feel stronger, more resilient, more in touch with who I really am, more in love with myself in healthy ways, more self-aware, more able to be kind to myself and others, more wholehearted, wiser, more protective of myself (which was deeply needed). This last year has made me really proud of myself! I’ve been OUT HERE TRYNA SURVIVE & DID IT! 🤭

The 18-year-old me, the 28-year-old me and the 38 year-old me are so proud of where we’ve gone in circumstances we didn’t think we’d survive. I have no enemies, and I hate no one (other than the orange dufus & Net@nYAHOO). I have not allowed the evil that was done to me, consume me nor become me.

Outside of perimenopause being a raggedy @$$ b-tch I’m living at peace with myself, which is also something that not a lot of people have the privilege to say as they age.

I’m grateful God gave me another year! Thank you so much if you ride with me! 🤎

If ya wanna give buy me for a coffee for my birthday: Cashapp - $GraceSandra
Venmo - -Sandra-7

📸: me
Hairs: me
Makeup: me
styling: me 💁🏽‍♀️

12/25/2024

Merry everything from my family to yours! 🎅🏿🎁🎄🧑🏾‍🎄🥂

12/03/2024

Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing.

It is making a spreadsheet of debt, enforcing a morning routine, cooking yourself healthy meals & no longer running from your problems & calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing; like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a 2nd job so you can have a savings or figure out a way to accept yourself so you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

A world in which self-care has to be a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so exhausted that we need reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

True self-care is not baths & cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

That often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

It often means looking your failures & disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so you can live in a way that other people can’t.

It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with fake friends. It is deciding how much anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were trained to think before you even knew what was happening.

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself & making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that baths & cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.

-Brianna Wiest on

11/24/2024

All ready for a solo date! 🥂Got cute & everything! Ever since I decided to stop dating men & date myself I’m tryna be intentional in the same way I would be with somebody son. 😫 In many ways, it is more peaceful to enjoy my own company than face the absolute disappointment of 92.8% of the available 40+ cishet men. 😫😭😂

I’m just out here tryna survive the dating scene in an intentional season of… not dating until further notice. 🤎

It’s rough out here for a g. 🥴

10/27/2024

Amanda Seales is perceived as whiny & the prollem *because* of her activism & her REFUSAL to do anything other than be an advocate for Black women, Palestinians & the collective.

Like her, I’d rather go down being passionate for what I believe in & doing the actual work of being a person called to service of humanity than be a bull-s**tter & a hater, worried about some damb hair & nails while there’s a whole gen0c1de happening.

People with no lives, no morals, no values, no meaningful impact on any one human talk sh-t about her & other public facing activists & will die without reaching a damb ‘goal’ in their lives but owning a few $4k handbags.🙄

The real flex is being a woman who stands for something, who makes a meaningful impact, who lives in service of liberation & who isn’t (necessarily) nice, tidy, pretty, kind, put together, etc. I’ll stand 10 toes down on that one. Wealth alone is not a flex. Stand for something, dammit!

Wasting your life talking sh-t on the Shade Room about actual activists is not a flex, Sis.

History remembers the women who created absolute chaos while they were alive. ☺️

This isn’t about Amanda Seales per se. The chaos she’s creating is because she’s in pursuit of advocacy.

Hell I wish my activism was causing more of a kerfuffle outside of losing followers & being intimidating to weak men 🫠😫.

Ijs. 🤷🏽‍♀️ We have ONE beautiful precious life to stand in solidarity with others. ONE.

10/25/2024

This last week PMDD had me in a chokehold.

For awareness, PMDD is Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, I'd describe it as PMS on crack. Women's symptoms with PMDD vary widely but mine show up as pretty extreme anxiety, depression & unaliving ideations. It's gruesome. I developed PMDD shortly after I had Rhys (15 yrs. ago) but noticed that these last few years have been unbearable month-to-month. I had a stretch of 16 months where I experienced unaliving ideations for 2 days every month until it finally culminated in a very near attempt March 2023.

As it turns out -for s**ts & giggles- Perimenopause makes PMDD & all other existing brain conditions much worse. Which is frankly the greatest f-ckery known to womanhood. Perimenopause which is known for its monthly-ish hormonal rollercoasters causes a great deal of havoc. Our brain is just not meant for these huge estrogen spikes & depletions every month. Or ever!

Everything I was all ready dealing with ADHD, Complex PTSD & PMDD have worsened as a result of Perimenopause. I've been white-knuckling all of this for years & been *mostly okay,* but now I'm seeking to be medicated for ALL OF IT. It's all unmanageable now. Completely. Wildly unmanageable.

Losing a week each month to this creates a s**t ton of shame & vulnerability in many ways.

I'm sharing for a few reasons.

1. I never knew about PMDD for my 1st 7 years with it & it's a truly disturbing condition. IYKYK. I hope other women can & will seek help if needed.

2. My generation as a Geriatric Millenial lol (Or a young Gen X'er lol) have had to enter Perimenopause without a lot of information about what it's about to happen.... most of y'all young millenials will have the benefit of us older women giving yall the heads up. I wish I knew I was in Perimenopause 6 years ago. It can last up to 10!

Finally, & I always say this: Please be kind. You never know what someone is going through. This past week has sucked in so many ways.

I'm so grateful for people around me who offer me kindness & softness lately. Admitting to weaknesses like this, is not easy. And a lot of women suffer in silence.

If you see me IRL, hug me.

I'm just out here tryna survive perimenopause & ADHD. Lawd!

10/08/2024

I’m at the age where I can date the Boomers, the Gen X’ers, the Millennials AND the eldest Gen Z’s 🤷🏽‍♀️

Tho I would rather mop the ocean than date a Boomer. They are the single most toxic generation of cishet men on this planet.

Here’s the order:

Most toxic cishet men: boomers, then Gen X then Millennials then Gen Z’s. So there’s some hope for the next generation. 😫

10/01/2024

I had the WORST 1st meet-up/Facetime date last night. I think this may have been my WORST 1st date ever. And I didn't think anything could top the time I went out for coffee with an *actual* rocket scientist who proceeded to quite literally try to explain rocket science to me as if I were one of his Doctoral students. I was so bored I was angry. I am NEVER rude on dates & I was tempted to just get up & walk out. But last night may have been worse...

So. What had happened was... earlier this year, I was gifted a year free of a matchmaking service. Basically, you tell them all about you & what you want. They work to find you someone in the continental U.S. & introduce you. Chilllllleeeeee 8 months went by without a single match. (This is not because my breath stank or I am inherently unlovable... it's challenging to find men in the 40-55 range who either don't have children AND don't want their own children --bc my uterus shop is closed for business AND who are location flexible. OR men whose children are old enough that they are no longer co-parenting locally OR old enough that he's willing to relocate for a relationship. OR someone willing to do long-distance for the forseeable future due to the ages & stages of my children & potentially his).

By the by, these are fairly big issues for those of dating after divorce/children. Having to solve all of that before even finding out if there's basic compatibility is annoying and seemingly impossible. I digress.

8 months later, a match is made. Hurrah. He's 48 yr old midwesterner, raised in Detroit like myself. No kids, never been married. Doesn't want any kids & the ability to relocate. The only major life style differences between us that is not necessarily my preference is that he's an Athiest. I am a EXvangelical, divested & decolonized, liberal, Jesus-following Christian.

So. Facetime date is arranged. After exchanging various pleasantries, etc. we get into a discussion about race & dating. This brutha spent an abnormal amount of time trying to convince me I should still consider dating white men & insinuating I am racist for preferring to date Black men. For some reason, we kept on this asinine conversation for far too long & then he proceeds to tell me how much he enjoys dating whyte women. I am wondering what I, a Black woman, am supposed to do with the information that you -A Black man- like pink p***y?! It was odd.

Then, as if that wasn't intolerable enough we start talking about God, religion, the Bible & Hell. I've been pretty open to dating men who are athiests, Buddists, Muslim, etc. I can hold in tension varying beliefs as long as there is consideration and respect.

But he was one of those ahiests who can't fix their lips to talk about "God believers" without being belittling & without the assumption that *anyone* who believes in God or any sort of higher power isn't stupid or beneath him. His angst & anger was obvious. It was disrespectful as hell. He was belittling & awful. Naturally, I fought back, because I am me.

That led to a vigorous argument on the existence of hell. We spent 20 minutes arguing about whether hell was a real place or not. Might I add, NEITHER OF US believe in an actual, literal fiery pit and yet there we were an Athiest & a Christian arguing vehemently on a first date about whether or not a place exists that neither or us believe in. Chillllllllllleeeeeee I was tired.

Midnight came along & he was just starting to wax eloquent on the problem of evil & the existence of a good God when I interrupted him with, "as lovely as this has been I'm tired & i have to go," he had the nerve to smile & at me & tell me how great it was meeting me & he'll talk to me tomorrow. Y'all. I had all ready blocked him on EVERYTHING before we hung up. The moment I said goodbye, I blocked his number, deleted the text thread & apologized to my matchmaker for wasting her time.

I didn't used to believe in hell. Now I do. It was last night.

09/24/2024

Whenever I write a long @$$ response on someone else's post, I share it to my feed too. Today's response was on tipping. My encouragement to be a part of the solution of living in these dysphoric days....

Employers EVERYWHERE need to pay a living wage, from WalMart to the servers at Applebee's, BUT UNTIL THEY DO tipping at minimum 15%- 20% is a kind way to care for service workers & those not earning a living wage.

My patience for this issue was born out of being a server at Ponderosa, Red Lobster & Fishbones back when I was in college & then I did ANOTHER stint at Red Lobster after my divorce & I've done SEVERAL tip-only jobs on & off ever since my mental health issues prevented me from being able to do anything more than really simple jobs.

Even as a college educated two-degree holding "professional" gig work/tip work has saved my life. My point is... even when folks tip well, it ends up being roughly $22k-$32k/yr. if that.

People live off that & survive off that. I've tried to live & survive off that. My time & service was not worth any less than anyone else's.

I try to see tipping as more as an issue of how I can contribute personally to the problem of living in an individualistic capitalist society. I can either do my part & help folks live & be worthy of the service their providing me or I can complain about it.

My tipping 20% or more is the bare minimum, basic thing I can do, personally & morally. Having lived through this s**t, trust me those tips are highly appreciated.

Be good humans yall. Tip people 20% or more. The majority of people are not making it due to corporate greed. If you've been blessed with enough, don't be a selfish b***y hole.

Have a nice Tuesday.