Ep 47: Pretty Privilege Can Get You Chosen But Rarely Loved

A man tells me, “You’re not like those other Black girls,” and suddenly the real conversation isn’t about compliments at all. It’s about misogyny, colorism, and the quiet ways “pretty privilege” can become a trap that asks us to shrink other women just to feel chosen. I’m pulling the lens inward and telling the truth from the inside looking out: getting attention is easy, but getting real love can still feel impossible. 

I take you back to a night when I was a teenager and male attention got so intense it turned into a literal line of men handing me their numbers. It felt powerful until it didn’t. Later, kneeling on my bedroom floor with a pile of scraps of paper, I realized how empty attention can be when it’s disconnected from care, safety, and genuine interest. That moment becomes a mirror for modern dating culture, where “options” stack up fast but emotional availability stays rare. 

We get into the halo effect, dating psychology, and why attraction often leads to projection. When a man decides he wants you before he knows you, he may love bomb, chase a fantasy, and fight the reality of who you actually are. I also talk about how privilege intersects with race and proximity to whiteness, how social media DMs amplify pursuit, and why power and emotional maturity are not the same thing. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by attention but still unseen, you’re not alone. 

Subscribe for more honest conversations, share this with a friend who’s navigating the dating streets, and leave a review so more people can find the show. What’s one moment that taught you the difference between being desired and being loved?

Transcript

The Comment That Starts It

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Oh well you're not like those other black girls. Sir, what do you mean by that? What what what do you mean? What do you mean? So we hear a lot about pretty privilege on the internet, on these internet stories, pretty privilege, light skin privilege, white privilege, all the privileges, okay? And a lot of people say in terms of pretty privilege that if you are beautiful, life is easier and then you get better opportunities and basically that you have your pick of men. But there's something I feel like people don't talk about too much, but I feel like people don't talk often enough about if you get a lot of attention but not a lot of love. And having a lot of options doesn't necessarily mean you have better ones. So today I want to talk about pretty privilege from the inside looking out. Cause yeah. But before I do all that, let me introduce the podcast and myself. My name is Grace Sandra. I'm a writer, author, activist, and podcaster. And this is the Out Here Trying to Survive podcast, where I talk about everything from trauma, culture, survival, and what it means to be a black woman and survive, not just survive, but thrive. I'm your host, Grace Sandra, and welcome to episode 47. So I started thinking about this after watching the Love is Blind reunion, and I saw a bunch of people debating about one of the women from the show, Brittany, who's with No Neg Devante, and how, you know, she was clearly very beautiful and chasing this man who was just not all that into her. It was pretty obvious for all of us looking from the outside in. And I heard someone say something really interesting in one of the comment commentaries from a YouTuber I really like, and I will actually tag her below. Her name is Stephco, and she gives cultural commentary, and I saw something she said that really triggered this idea for me. Actually, both the pretty privilege idea and this topic about Brittany. Basically, she was like, Brittany is beautiful, like she's kind of conventionally attractive, she has beautiful brown skin, she's got really pretty long hair, she's got like a voluptuous woman's body, you know, she got a nice little shape or whatever. Things that most of us assume that most men want or are looking for. Okay, so you can tell just by looking at her, she's a pretty girl. And so Steph was like, you know, she might not be doing too well in Ohio. Like, she would probably do really well in Houston, she would probably do really well in New York City, she would do probably well where there's more black men with dating because she said she's just not finding great options in Ohio. I'm not sure what city she's in. I'm not from Ohio or know anything Ohio. So anyway, even if I did know, I mean, I know a little town called Worcester because I grew up with a woman who grew up in Worcester. So I know Worcester is like a small little white Amish town, but that's really all I know. But anyway, when Steph said that, I was like, my immediate thought was like, well, yeah, she could probably do better in that she might have a lot more men kind of like coming or swirling around her. But does that mean she's gonna do better as in how those men are treating her or who they are to her? Or I I don't know that she's better off. Maybe in having more options that are men of color, but I don't know if she'll do better. That was that was like my initial thought. And this is coming from my perspective as someone who has benefited from some level of pretty privilege, like light skin privilege, and even proximity to whiteness privilege, because I grew up with a white mother and white siblings. And as someone who has benefit from the intersectionality of those three dynamics, I have seen m ex my experience and my experience, only I'm speaking for no other people, especially other biracial people. Uh I w I don't even want to speak on behalf of the light skins, because and I you can see looking at me like I'm pasty, pasty white, and I'm paler than I am than ever, because it's the middle of winter in Michigan. Okay, I don't even speak on behalf of the light skins, but let me say, on behalf of me, that having some level of light skin and or pretty privilege has meant, yes, I think more options, but it doesn't necessarily mean better ones. But first, let me tell y'all a story. When I was about 17 years old, that was when I first experienced what could be called like maybe the proof of pretty privilege. It was the first time that I really realized like something is going on with me. Now I got I did get a lot of attention growing up in boys telling me I was pretty and things like that. But at the same time, it was kind of hard to tell because like a lot of the girls were getting attention, you know, like boys, boys gonna be boys, right? They were gonna be thirsty and Holland artists from every witch wear out of car windows, you know. But I did get a lot of like younger boys when I and I'm talking between like 11, 16-ish, you know, telling me I was really beautiful all the time and hearing that all the time. And I was like, okay, I'm cute, but this is what happened that pushed over them. I was like, I think I'm real cute. So I went to this festival downtown with my girl Charmaine, and we and for some reason I think I looked really cute that night, like in hindsight. I'm like, oh yeah, I probably was like really giving off the like super sexy girl vibes, which I was only 17, so I probably shouldn't have been, but whatever. Anyway, I had on these like black booty shorts, I had on these like lace-up sandals that went all the way up to my knee, like super sexy Sileto lace-ups that were like wrapped around my leg. And then I had on this crop top that ended right under my titties and just across the top, like in huge silver sequent letters, it said sexy. And then I had on an arm. Do you remember back in the day? This was in the 90s, I had on like this arm bracelet, like that like wrapped around my arm fully. My hair was downy here, it was really long and wavy, and it was all my real hair. And I just and it was sun, it was the middle of summer, so I look sun-kissed, and I was just looking good that night. And I remember leaving the house, and my girl Charmaine was like, Damn, girl, you look really good tonight. I'm like, Thank you. I'm feeling really cute tonight, like feeling myself. And so we are walking, and everywhere I went, everyone was yelling, sexy, hey, sexy, yo, sexy. And you know, obviously it was written on my shirt, but it was like non-stop. Dude was trying to talk to me, and I was like, What is going on? Because let me be clear, even though I had gone out before, I had never gotten like that level of attention, it was just crazy level of attention. And at one point, y'all, I'm not even kidding, you can ask my girl Charme. Well, we're not friends anymore, but you could ask her if we were. But at one point, there was a line of guys lined up to talk to me and give me their number. And a police officer came over and was just like, What is going on? And I think that people thought at that point that I was a celebrity because the police officer stood next to me. He just literally stood next to me like he was doing something, and I was just like, What's going on? And my girl Charmaine was like, I was like, Okay, I guess. And so I started giving autographs and the guys were just give handing me their number. And don't forget, y'all, this was like 1995. Nobody had cell phones at that point. Like, we didn't have pagers. I mean, I think Charmaine had a pager. I didn't have a pager yet. We didn't, there was no internet. People just handed each other numbers. Like, that's how you did things back then. Somebody would walk up to you, they'd be like, Hey, can I have your number? And if you didn't like the guy, you would give him like one number off. And if you did like him, you would give him your real number. And sometimes they would give you their phone number, but they didn't really want to do that because they know you're just gonna throw it away. So they were usually trying to get your number. It was just like that's all we had. It was a landline, y'all. That's all we had was a landline. So people were writing out their number and coming up to me in a line, and the line had got like 40 men deep, and I was like, I don't understand. Now at the time I wasn't processing, like, I think I might have some sort of pretty privilege going on right now. I just was I just was in shock. I was feeling good though, like, because again, this was the first time anything ever like that had ever happened to me. So I was just like, Oh, I thought I was cute tonight. I'm real I'm Let's be looking real good. Must be looking juicy, juicy. It did feel really powerful, I will say that. But when I got home that night, something happened that completely changed the way that I understood attention. Before I when that night was happening, and after the line dissipated, I was still getting like hundreds of people yelling sexy at me, men just coming up to me, offering their number and things like that. So what I had did was a little system. If I liked the guy, if I thought he was cute, I put it in my right pocket. And if I didn't think he was cute, I put his number in my left back pocket. Okay, that was my system. And when I got home really late, I remember sitting kneeling on the floor, and I took all of the numbers out of my pockets and put them on the floor in front of me. And there was like probably a pile of like 80 to 90 little pieces of paper. Some with a phone number, some with just a name and a phone number, but no other context clues. And I put them in a pile. But the problem was I didn't remember who was who. I didn't remember that I even had the system. So it was like, was that the guy? Because there was like a few of them, and I was like, oh, they're look, they was looking real hella good. Like I definitely want to contact them later. But all the guys who were cute, all the guys who seemed nice, I didn't remember who was who. I didn't, and obviously, and also y'all keep in mind, I was like 17 or maybe 18 years old at that point. Like, I don't know how old any of these men were at all. Let's just keep that in mind. They were all on the floor in front of my knees, and I didn't know who was whose number. They were all just numbers. I remember just sitting at the numbers and not knowing who was who, and realizing something that I didn't have language for at the time is that I had literally just spent a night being pursued by l probably over a hundred men, and somehow I felt more alone than when the night started, and I just started crying. I literally just started crying. I think because it was the come down of feeling high. I had never been high before. Drugs, alcohol, I had never been high on anything, nothing like that, but like feeling like a celebrity for one night and then coming home and realizing this was all useless. I don't not even have one cute boy to call. And I don't think I gave my number to anyone. And I realized looking back now, y'all, that that pile of numbers was basically like the 1990s version of a dating app. And that night made me start wondering something. Again, this is in hindsight. I started wondering it, but I didn't have any sort of language for it at the time. But it does kind of coalesce into where I'm at now. What if pretty privilege doesn't make dating any easier for women? It just creates like an illusion, this illusion of better options. And again, this has been my experience, but I feel like my experience of walking through the world as someone who people who men think is maybe conventionally attractive and conventionally beautiful has given me this idea, like, oh, you got girl, you got options, which I do. And I have always had really good options and men who are very attractive, who are seen as very attractive, who have money, who are very successful, who are career-driven, really nice men, really sweet men. Like I definitely have had options, but I've been divorced twice and I've been in a couple of healthy relationships that ended peacefully, but your girl has not been lucky in love. Now, growing up, I always believed that people who are prettier or just more attractive women, especially, definitely have easier lives, have more opportunities and better dating prospects. And I think there is some truth to that for you know, for sure. I'm not gonna and I'm definitely let me let me just tell you this right now. I'm definitely not gonna sit here and be like, oh whoa, it's me. I've been viewed as pretty my whole life. Like, I'm not gonna do that to y'all. Nor myself. I have no there is no victimization about being perceived as pretty, but and I have seen the ways that I've benefited from it for sure. Everything from getting pulled over and the officer letting me go and asking for my phone number. I think that happened a couple times when I used to live in Detroit, is that I got pulled over and then hit on, and just seeing how people have treated me differently than other people. Also, I have seen how men have used my attractiveness to try to get me to participate in their misogyny. So let me give you an example. There are men who've said to me, as you can imagine as a very light-skinned black woman, who said to me, like, Oh, well, you're not like those other black girls. Sir, what do you mean by that? What what what do you mean? What do you mean? What do you mean? And they will try, but basically they're starting, they're kicking up into their misogyny, and they really want me to join them in it. And when I clocked that, the first time that ever happened to me actually was with my black ass ex-husband, and he had said that to me. And what they I had never heard it before, and I was just like confused, but it it did something in me, like my bot my whole body felt it. Like, that's not right. I didn't know exactly what he meant, but I was like, that's not that's not right. And if it's one thing about me, I'm a girls girl, I'm never going to participate in misogyny. You can miss me with that, and I'm never gonna let a man invite me to participate in to misogyny. So if a man says it to me, he's automatically a no. If he says anything of the sort, anything of the variety of you're different than other women, you're not like other women, you're not as loud as other women, you're not as you don't have much of an attitude as other women, or any of that, like done. But anyway, I have thought about, I guess I'll say I have wondered, even though all of these privileges exist and I think I have experienced them, I have wondered if there is an emotional cost to the whole pretty privileged life-scale privilege thing. And to explain that, let me talk about a psychological concept called the Halo effect. It's basically the idea that when someone is perceived as attractive, people think that there are other positive things about them. That when someone thinks you're attractive, they perceive that you are more trustworthy, that you're smarter, that you're kinder, or that you're more interesting. But here's the thing the halo effect doesn't just affect how people view attractive women, it also affects how they pursue attractive women. So when a man sees a woman that he finds very attractive, he starts projecting a whole story onto her before he even knows her. Pretty privilege doesn't just attract attention, it attracts projection. When someone decides that they want you before they know you, they will love bomb the hell out of you, but they are not falling in love with you. They are falling in love with the story they have written about you. And let me tell you, that has happened to me in 2025. There were two different men who I had a significant relationship with in some way. That both of them, I think, did that. Now, again, this was something like I'm still learning in hindsight in my big age. But the first one, C, he saw me on Instagram stories, and over the summer I was doing like a ton of bikini content because me and my me and my daughter really go to the pool a lot at our apartment complex. So I was just posting a ton of bikini shots and just me being cute and sexy and me and my daughter playing and stuff like that. And I was just getting a lot of attention this past summer on Facebook, especially. Facebook was like, Oh, she's showing her titties, let me just push this content out. So I was getting a ton of DMs, a ton of friend requests, and a ton of men being like, Oh my god, ooh, girl, you look good. So C was one of those men, although he came at me very respectfully and how he slid into the DMs. And he was attractive and I could tell he was wealthy and really nice and seemed like a genuinely good guy. And we started talking and realized we had some compatibility and we started dating. But it was later on that he told me. He said something along the lines of like, Yeah, as soon as I saw you, as soon as I saw some pictures of you, I was like, Oh, I know I had to have you. I knew that I had to be in your life, I knew that you were going to be this or that. But he told me that like a month in, and it was just interesting. I'd never had a man say it so clearly as C did, but I kind of like was like, Well, whatever, because we clearly do have a lot in common, and I did find him to be a very sweet man. And honestly, that whole situation ended peacefully. We are still literally friends. So I've known C for nine months now, and he still is a pretty good guy. So when he said that, it didn't like strike me as like a super red flag. I just thought, that's interesting, but it didn't sit well with me. And sometimes when things don't sit well with me, y'all, you know I tell y'all just listen to your intuition. I just be listening to my intuition, like, I'll figure it out. I don't know what, I don't know why it doesn't exactly sit well, but I will figure it out one of these days. And then directly following C, so we kind of took a break. We dated, then we stopped dating. I dated somebody else, and then me and C came back together. No, we're not dating. That's a whole other story. But the after the first time C and I stopped dating, there was another guy who was in that time frame, like when p Facebook was pushing out like my bikini shots all over the place. And he said something so similar to me. And I don't know how much time had gone by, but he basically said, like, when I saw you, when I saw your pictures, and when I was watching you on Facebook stories, I was like, That is the woman who I'm gonna marry. That's the woman who I want to be with. I want this woman and I'm gonna have this woman. Anyway, I want this woman and I'm gonna have this woman and I'm going to get her. And basically, he was telling me that story like he was very proud of himself. He was very proud of himself because he tried to get with me several times and I just was not feeling him at first. I thought he was really sweet. I thought he was really nice. He seemed like a good guy. Again, he came at me very respectfully. He didn't slide in the DMs like, oh, damn, girl, let me say yo titties. I mean, he slid in the DMs very respectfully, like, hey, I noticed we have some mutual friends. I noticed we have some mutual interest. I noticed we both went to seminary, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it was a very respectful, but he just kept trying, and I just was like, no, I'm not really interested right now. I was just coming off of dating C, so I kind of wanted to take a break. And he just really kept pushing and pushing. Now, as it turns out later, that ended up being what I didn't like about him is he does not give up. When he wants something, he goes after it, and he did not give up. So when he told me that, I was just like, This is the second time I've heard this sentiment this year. That is interesting. And again, I just took some time to reflect on it because at the time with him, I kind of thought it was a little bit cute, maybe just a little bit, like, oh, you saw me and you knew I was the one. In part because I think that's like what like itching ears wanted to hear. Like, oh, you the pick Misha that I've tried to bury very low. I've tried to bury the pick Misha in me. And I really feel like I have. But sometimes she can like come up from the grave a little bit. And I think she came up a little bit from the grave when he said that because there was something in me that was happy to be chosen by him. Again, this was he told me this while we were supposedly falling in love and really enjoying one another in a very honeymoon stage of a very new relationship. So I didn't let it get to me too much, but as time went on, it got to me. Because what I realized as time went on with he and I is that we weren't as compatible as we originally thought we were, as I thought we were. And I realized that he was trying to make something work so hard because he saw me as a beautiful woman that he thinks is so beautiful and so amazing, and he projected a story onto me about who I was, and the story that he projected onto me, y'all, was wild. It was wildly different from who I actually am, and I don't think he wanted to accept that. And so it became something that ended up growing a lot of contempt in me because I'm like, you keep saying these things, like he said something like you'd be a wonderful politician's wife because he really wants to go be a senator and then a president, all this other stuff. And I'm like, but I wouldn't though. Like you decided that about me very early on, but I I wouldn't be a wonderful politician's wife. I would actually be the worst because I don't ever want to be a politician's wife. I don't ever want to be on a campaign trail campaigning for my husband. Like, no, you don't do you know me at all, my brother? Do you? You you must not. You must you really must not. But then once I realized that that dynamic was at play, I'm like, oh, I think this has been at play with a lot of men in my life. I think a lot of men that I have been with or have been in some sort of close relationship with, including both of the men I married, I think they looked at me and decided what they wanted to be true about me because they were so attracted to me. Something to consider. Again, I'm not going to deny that pretty privilege, I think, has gotten me more options in terms of men who do have money and and have a lot of money and or men who are perceived as successful or good men. But as someone who's been out here in these Dayton Street, y'all for several years now, I got divorced in 2020. And I've been out here in these Dayton streets really trying to date, really trying to see if I could find an actual like lifelong partner, whether we forgot either ever got married or not. And what I have found is that having a lot of options, even a lot of options I'm not even looking for, they're still emotionally unavailable, dishonest, not ready for partnership, and not emotionally intelligent. It's so bad I got off of dating apps fully. I was like, I can't I can no longer deal with all of this. I cannot deal with this. Pretty privileged will definitely give. You in the room with powerful men, it'll get you the seat at the dining table for a very expensive dinner. It'll it will get you the flowers and the gifts and things like that for sure. But power and emotional maturity are really not the same thing. And I'm just as disappointed, y'all. I I'm just as disappointed in some of the wealthier or maybe more established or maybe older as I was when I was like hanging out with the Y Ns, y'all. The Y-n. It's the same, it's the same disappointment. Another thing is that it can feel very overwhelming. It can feel overwhelming sometimes. And I don't think sometimes for people who don't get that, I can see why it would be you would feel like I would love that. There was a guy one time. Oh, I feel so sad. I had put something online on my Facebook story or something like that about how I was sick of men coming in my DMs being like, damn, babe, you look beautiful. Let me do this and that. And there was a guy who responded back to me, and he was like, you know, I would just one time love to hear a woman say that I was attractive. Like, at least you get to hear it. At least you get to hear people tell you you're attractive. I never hear it anywhere ever. And so I responded back to him and I was like, Hey, you are a handsome king and don't let nobody tell you different. I definitely wanted to give him a compliment, but I also was understanding that people who are coming from the opposite end of this might not feel it, but it definitely can be overwhelming. And like most things in life, as humans, once you get a lot of something, it doesn't give you the boost or the excitement anymore. It's kind of like how people say what happens to people who win the lottery, or people who have any really good thing happened to you, you it evens out. Like at first, you're like, oh my god, I'm really excited. I got this whatever, this new thing, this new shiny thing, this new car, or a a small fortune. But then it normalizes and it evens out. And I feel like that's sometimes what I think people perceive about women who are perceived as really attractive, and we get a lot of male attention, and it's like, yeah, and at one point that was really exciting and really fun. And now it's just like I'm so fucking over this. I'm really over this. And last year that happened to me again. Like I said, I was posting all these like bikini content in my Instagram stories, which push to my Facebook stories, and Facebook just put me on the radar for every single available man between I think 35 and 55. It must have like targeted that demographic to show my account to. And I was getting, I'm not even kidding, no exaggeration, hundreds of DMs. For two weeks in a row, I got a hundred or so DMs per week. It was an overwhelming amount of DMs. Like every day I would go to my message request in my messenger, and there would be like another 50 or 60 messages. And I was like, I don't even know if I should read all these. Most most of them were respectful, and a lot of them were just fire emojis and like, oh girl, you know, and some of them were very disrespectful. But I got, I think around that time I got like a thousand friend requests from all men. They were all black men too. Facebook was like, I'm not, we we are not playing around with the men we want to see this woman's titties. If Grace gonna show her titties, then we we gonna show it to the right people, and it was overwhelming. To be honest with y'all, it really was. It felt like that night in 1995 when I had hundreds of men yelling sexy at me. Attention is abundant and emotional maturity is rare. Dick is abundant, emotional intelligence is rare. I also, like I said before, pretty privilege doesn't exist in a vacuum. It definitely intersects with race and colorism and culture and class, and for me, being a black woman and also, you know, a biracial woman who has light skin privilege, and I've had proximity to whiteness through my mom, and then my mom sending me to like a PWI and going to a church, a white church, most of my life, and being able to code switch pretty well growing up. I knew how to act white with the white kids at school to fit in. I also knew how to act black to be the circus clown that they knew they wanted me to be. I also knew how to come home and act like a neutral, well, kind of neutral biracial white kid and then go out into my black neighborhood and act black or be perceived as something different. Like I knew how to basically mask a bunch of different characters as a biracial kid living in two environments that were neither was diverse in an all-black neighborhood or a white school, white family, white church, and no one around me that I knew of at least knew how to code switch like that. That also made me kind of powerful too, y'all. I'm not even not even gonna lie. And so even though I could kind of pretend a little bit, it still didn't erase the system that I was living inside, which basically rewarded me for being the right character at the right time. And let me tell you, I realized growing up that depending on how pretty I made myself look on any given day or what I did to be pretty, I could influence people. I realized that that was a little bit of a not a superpower, but like a power. I also realized it was something I could hide behind because a lot of times people just assumed that if I was pretty, I was dumb. And I did grow grow up thinking I was dumb, by the way. So that it was kind of like, well, let me just go into that role then. Like you want me to be pretty but dumb, and if I want to hide, then I'll just go there. And that is also a privilege. You know what I'm saying? Like I realized how to wield the way I looked to get what I wanted in a situation, and it's complicated for me for my life because I was also raised in a really traumatic, I also had a really traumatic childhood, so I was trying to figure out anything I could do to survive. I was dealing with racial abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, and poverty and being raised by a mom who was schizophrenic and not all the way there. And I think I was just trying to figure out like how the hell do I survive at all? And realizing like I do have this whole pretty thing going on. I do see that like depending on how I look, it changes how people respond to me. So I just think it's interesting because I I wonder if I had been raised in an environment that was maybe a little bit normal, just a scooch normal, if I would have deferred less on being pretty or sexy. I might have pursued other interests, which honestly would have been great. I might have actually thought I was smart. You know, I didn't really think I was smart until I was like in my well into my late 30s. It's crazy. But anyway, I'm on a tangent. Again, I am really grateful that I have been perceived as pretty and or beautiful. And there are times that that has been in a genuine way really beautiful to experience. Even more so when someone feels like I'm beautiful on the inside and the outside. But and while I don't want to pretend that, you know, that hasn't opened any doors for me. The one thing, at least these last few years have taught me in terms of just being a single woman out here in these Dayton streets, is that I still experienced the same fuck shit from men that Beyonce experienced when Jay-Z was unfaithful to her. That Holly Berry experienced with her first three husbands, that J-Lo experienced with Alex, whatever his name is, the New York Yankees. There are many women in this world who are perceived as beautiful that have still gotten physically assaulted, cheated on, lied. I mean, I think I just want to keep that at the forefront of this conversation. And also, I have wondered before if I would have been less pretty, perceived as pretty as a younger girl, if I would have had less issues. You know, one of my friends told me who was she was considered heavy by she was a white girl, so by the white boys. You know the white boys, especially back in the 80s. The 80s and 90s, the white boy was like, You cannot be a size four five, six. You gotta be a a zero two. So she was like a you know, 12-14. So these little white boys wasn't messing with her, and she was kind of invisible. And later on, she was like, Yeah, that was actually kind of good for me. I read. She read a lot. I remember thinking, like, girl, why you read all the time? She was reading, you know, three or four fiction books a week. And I looked back, was I reading? No, I was out here in these Dayton streets kissing, kissing, making out all over the making all over the city of Detroit. So yeah, sometimes I think about that younger version of me sitting on the floor of my bedroom, surrounded by this absolute giant pile of crumpled up pieces of paper from men who thought I was beautiful, and at the time thinking the problem was that I had no idea of who to choose, and not realizing that any of them had nothing to offer me, and that it was only from desire. Also, all those men were probably way older than me at the time, and them desiring me does not mean that they ever plan to love me in any sort of real or meaningful way. She ain't know that, but I do. I do now, and I see y'all. I see what y'all be doing out here. I see y'all. Pretty privilege will open you some doors, but it does not tell you who is safe once you walk through those doors because the world will desire you long before it truly sees who you are. Thank you all so much for being here. I appreciate you. I know you can be anywhere on these internet streets. So if you're here with me, thank you so much. If you're not yet, would you please subscribe? If you're on YouTube, subscribe, please give me a like, hype me up, send me some hype points. If you're an Apple, please, please, please leave me a review on Apple. It's very notoriously difficult to get podcasts shared. So a review really, really helps the work that I'm doing. Also, I'm coming out with a journal, the Out Here Trying to Survive signature journal that I've been working on for kind of a while now, actually. And I'm hoping it'll be out in the next two weeks. If you want to be the first to know, sign up here on my Substack on the screen. But it's basically Substack.com backslash out here trying to survive, same name as the podcast, and you will hear about it first. Finally, did y'all know I have a book? The book is Grace Axley Memoirs of Love, Faith, Loss, and Black Womanhood. So if you like this podcast, you will probably like the book because it's a storytelling book about experience I've had with Love, Faith, Loss, and Black Womanhood. I'm thankful you spent some time with me today. I will see y'all in the next episode. Bye.