If you're anything like me and you've been scrolling online, you might've noticed that they're so many people not only obsessed with this movie but also revisiting Michael Jackson's discography or engaging with his music for the very first time.

It has been an absolute joy to see so many people coming together and the way that Michael Jackson’s music always talked about. I don't think I've had this much fun on any platform online in a very long time.

But with that fun has come some reflection. And I want to share my biggest takeaways from the movie that has not only recontextualized one of my favorite Michael Jackson songs, it's also made me feel so proud that I have found a sense of purpose as a fiction writer (and disney-adult!)

The Power Of Stories

One thing that this movie did especially well was the visual storytelling. As a writer there's a saying show don't tell and I feel like this biopic executed this on a level that was so subtle but yet so beautiful if you were paying attention.

A great example of this is when we first see young Michael on screen and he's sitting on the couch, peering out the window watching the kids play in the snow. It's never stated that it's Christmas but for anyone who's followed Michael Jackson's interviews he has spoken about how there was no Christmas and there were no birthdays in his house.

Do you remember the colors of the shirt young Michael is wearing in that scene?

It's red with green and white patterns. His pants are also a deep shade of green. And the two accent pillows on the couch where young Michael was sitting to look out the window? Yes, they are also red and green—colors largely associated with Christmas, even though it's never explicitly stated that it’s that time of year.

The beginning of the movie does a lot of heavy lifting like this not just in the visuals, but also in how the first set list of songs unfolds and foreshadows Michaels journey.

We begin in 1966 with The Jackson 5 rehearsing Big Boy (released later in 1968) and Michael leading with the lyrics:

Fairy tales, fairy tales
I don't enjoy…
'Cause I'm a big boy now…

This is an omen in the film. It is the first time Michael is asked to verbalize the surrender of his childhood on screen.

It’s also a lie for Michael—well sort of…

The part of the film, where Michael defies Joseph Jackson for the first time was a really hard one to watch. Especially because I had a very similar upbringing myself. The sound of his father’s belt coming off… the screams of little Michael Jackson in the movie… it all brought back some very unpleasant memories. But in the end, it brought back some cathartic ones as well.

Shortly after this scene takes place, Michael is seen running to the bathroom to cry, and then later that night he can be found on the bunkbed under the covers with a sheet over his head, reading a book.

There was an acute kind of kinship that I found in that scene mostly because that’s exactly how I used to cope as a child as well.

If I wasn’t under the covers reading, I would sneak into the closet to read until I passed out and most times that’s where my mother found me in the morning.

And I think this scene is really powerful not just because of my personal attachment to it, but because it really says something about how the stories we read become the stories we tell ourselves and imprint upon our own lives.

There’s even scientific studies that suggests that when a character you love in a book or a movie passes away, your mind does not know the difference between real grief and fictional grief. And this can be seen across all media, even for those sitting in the theater, watching Michael for the first or fifth time. We’re not just watching a story unfold. We’re emotionally engaged and invested.

Peter Pan was a way from Michael to see himself as a child in a world where he did not get to be one. The boy who never got to be a kid meets the boy who never grew up.

The directors and the screenwriters could have introduced us to Michael's connection to Peter Pan starting with Neverland. Why didn't they open the page to the most identifiable part of the story we associate him with?

If you can recall the procession of the pages of the book we are shown throughout the film, you might have noticed that each new page slots itself perfectly between specific milestones in Michael's life.

The first milestone we get to witness is the most important. For me it really operated in two distinct ways.

First, it illustrates the inception of story—the moment we the audience gets to see the story that Michael tells himself. But it also doesn't allow us to be at the beginning with him.

He's already written in the book and he reads with the kind of enthusiasm that implies that he's done it so many times before.

I think this is one of the most clever choices on the filmmakers part to tell the story because it conditions us to think about Michael in a way that there is so much more to his story that we do not know and that we were not there for.

For us it feels like a beginning or an origin of something, but for Michael, both the character and the human being, there's more to his story than we could ever know.

When he's under the covers and he's reading Peter Pan, it is on a page where he is labeled Hook as Joseph Jackson, open to the part of the book where Peter Pan overpowers Hook, and essentially defeats him, and becomes the hero of the story.

We, the viewers, hold in our minds that this is how Michael begins to see himself as someone who will eventually overpower hook. Earlier we witness Michael singing the lyrics to Big Boy, here is where that foreshadowing pays off and opens a new loop for us.

The reason I said that it was a lie sort of is because Peter Pan is not considered a fairytale as much as it is literary fantasy. This scene completely contradicts the lyrics ‘fairytales I do not enjoy’ from the song Big Boy because the film shows us that Michael enjoys ‘fairytales’ very much.

It forces us to see Michael not through Joseph’s eyes, but as he should’ve been seen—as a child—a child who is not a big boy, but who is just a little kid wanting to be a boy just as Peter Pan was.

The filmmakers also trusts us to be familiar with Pan’s story and everything that happens before we get to this place in the book the same way there's so much more that happens in the film before Michael finally stands up to Joseph. This then becomes the essential foreshadowing of the entire movie in one scene.

Michael's emancipation from his father and his tyrannical ways did not start with his first solo album. It started with him seeing himself as Peter Pan defeating Hook.

That was the story that planted the seed for how he would eventually become the hero of his own story in the film. This one scene directly mirrors exactly how the entire biopic gets told.

Let's think about the cold opening of the film; Michael walking out to perform in his Bad Era attire.

This is the moment that he is officially become Peter Pan. It is the culmination of Michael becoming the hero of his own story.

We start as the audience in Michael story exactly where we see Michael start in Peter Pan story. Then the filmmakers take us through everything that happens before Peter Pan overthrows Hook…

It's subtle. It's genius. And it gives me chills every time I think about it.

I think my favorite thing about this format—about what the filmmakers achieved here, is that it doesn't boast about what it's done, it just lets it lie for those who are paying attention enough to grasp the story structure.

The other thing I love about it is that it doesn't sanitize what it means to imprint yourself upon someone as a child as young as Michael in a book where the hero does not look like you.

I wanna make a call back to when I said that every single time a new page of Peter Pan appears on screen, it's happening at a milestone in Michael's life.

We see it when we meet Ben, Michael’s rat and just before Michael meets Bill. Then again after we meet baby Bubbles and just before Michael decides to undergo surgery. The filmmakers anchors us to the story like a page turning between these major transitions in Michael’s life.

Right before Michael makes that decision he's looking at Peter Pan then he looks at himself on the cover of his solo album the filmmakers trust us to remember how his father made fun of his nose and then the next scene is him going to consult with the surgeon and move forward with the surgery.

Now, I'm also a Marvel fan and a huge Marvel nerd.

One of my favorite characters is Spider-Man and I'm gonna call upon uncle Ben here when he says, with great power must also come great responsibility.

Stories are powerful therefore they should be represented responsibly. I am a Disney adult myself who also loves Peter Pan. It happens to be one of my favorite childhood stories as well, though it is not without it’s representational mistakes. But I can't help, but wonder if Peter Pan were a character who looked like Michael how would that have impacted his life?

And as a fan of Spider-Man, this is why I'm so happy that we have characters like Miles Morales, giving us iterations of heroic stories we love with nuanced and layered characters that allow us to extract the same lessons, beliefs, and hope from them.

We still have so much work to do to make this a reality more widely, but Michael Jackson was living at a time where there was even less representation than we have today.

In the movie he repeats that he needs to be perfect for the cameras—because of the power of stories and what the film implies as well, this is partially because of Joseph’s bullying and Peter Pan’s eurocentric features at that time was the beauty standard and still are today. There aren't enough books and characters that center diverse facial features, hair texture, food, language, you name it.

One thing I'm proud of about this film is that they made it very clear that in no way that Michael Jackson wanted to deny or erase who he was as a Black man. But this movie made me reflect on the responsibility I have as a storyteller to keep centering people who look like me and who share my identities in my stories as the main characters, because hope that does not look like you can can only get you so far.

I don't think it's enough for people who have been marginalized to imagine themselves as the heroes, we deserve to see ourselves as the main character, and I think the beautiful thing about the way this story unfolds for Michael Jackson is that he becomes the hero that he did not see on the page.

We see this in the way that he handles going to New York City and demanding to be put on MTV. And this is such a core message in Michael's music. We hear it in Man in the Mirror—becoming the change you desire in the world. And there's a line in this scene where Michael tells that executive, “I made music for everyone, black or white.” This is Michael, actively rectifying the part of his own story that was missing.

Being Good Will Get You Nowhere

I think another interesting piece of commentary that I was able to pull from this movie. Was this feeling that being good will get you nowhere.

When I was growing up (and still to this very day) one of my vocal stims was, “I'll get you Peter Pan if it's the last thing I do!” Now, if you're a Disney adult like me and you've watched these cartoons countless times like I have you didn't just read that quote, you heard it.

No one can deliver that line like Hook! Probably because no one is as fed up as Hook is with Peter Pan and all his antics.

For me in the film this definitely mirrors Joseph Jackson. He doesn't see Michael's behavior as someone trying to emancipate himself from his control. Joseph treats, Michael as if he's being a bad kid. This evolves to him treating him as a bad son and a bad person.

And largely the way that he manipulates Michael through guilt tripping him works.

There's so many times where Michael says, “I'm gonna look him in the eye and I'm gonna tell him…” and then Michael looks to someone else to save him.

It's not until after the accident that hospitalizes him that he operates from a place of agency and says that he's gonna do the tour for his family, but then he's done and he's gonna do the thing for himself.

Disney paraphernalia also shows up in the scene again as a motif when Branca brings in the oversized Mickey Mouse plushy.

This is the moment Michael realizes that he has a platform that he has a stage that he is Peter Pan and we the fans, and his brothers are his lost boys.

He quits on stage and it's one of the most iconic things that anyone could ever do! But really what deep in the impact of him walking away was how the story loops in on itself back to the beginning—back to the page where Peter Pan is hovering over Hook as he's getting ready to sink into the sea and be chased by Tick-Tock the crocodile.

The movie opens up with Startin’ Something. A song that feels almost antagonistic and one that's definitely a question. But it also ends on a very important question—a recontextualization of one of my favorite songs from Michael Jackson.

Who's bad?

I think one of the core personality traits that we associate with Peter Pan is that he is mischievous. And to someone like Hook, Peter Pan is very bad. He challenges his authority and he lives outside the systems hierarchy and responsibilities that someone like Hook has been made to live under his entire life.

Because Peter Pan can do something that he cannot.

He can fly.

And on that stage, Michael finds his own magic. He feeds Joseph Jackson to the crowd as if it were a crocodile. It's in this moment that Michael realizes. that defiance can lead to freedom—that if he wanted to get to where he wanted to go in life, he couldn't be a good son—that he had to step out of the script that he been given and into the story he used to read under the covers.

I remember growing up my parents used to make jokes about Michael Jackson (which I took very personally by the way) they would say that he was pretending to be tough, especially in videos like Beat It, Smooth Criminal and Bad.

But after seeing the movie, I'm not only disagreeing with them (again) retrospectfully because I'm a big fan, but seeing his story unfold to then be anchored to the lyrics of Bad as a celebration of emancipation from his father, I think he has all right to ask who's bad and then to also answer it and say that he's bad.

Because it takes immense courage to walk away from someone like Joseph Jackson.

I know because I've also done it.

So when Michael took that stage, or Jaafar Jackson I should say (who portrayed him immensely well) he sang that song as if he was bad to the bone and he knew he was.

Michael had earned the right to ask the question rhetorically.

So now I'll end with asking you a question as well;

When you look at your life and all the things that you survived…

When you think about the stories that have helped you overcome, and given you the courage to advocate for what you deserve and to walk away from what you didn't…

When you look in the mirror and you see yourself and ask, who's bad?

What is your answer?

Many of us associate power with dominance and I think what Michael Jackson was able to illustrate not just in the film, but largely with his life is that sometimes the most powerful thing you could ever do is suffer under violence and ridicule, and still meet the world with magic and kindness.

Because that's bad, that's tough, that’s bad bad!

Who’s bad?!

Meet the Author

Divinity Rae (she/they) is a romance and fantasy indie author, multi-passionate human, professional yapper and self-proclaimed wielder of whimsy. When she’s not writing or rushing to the theater so she doesn’t miss the previews, you can find them with their face in a book, playing their switch, or doing a fun cozy craft.

Divinity writes stories with action, spice, and heart that explore themes ranging from grief and love after loss to low stakes meet cutes and kisses.

Here on the newsletter you’ll find her books, author updates, personal reflections, and film and culture commentary.

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It’s 9:54 pm on a Thursday night, and I am still swooning over You, Me, & Tuscany. You know that feeling you get when you're supposed to be asleep hours ago, but you keep saying to yourself one more chapter? Yeah, that feeling. I have that feeling right now, and I want you to have that too.

I just finished writing out all my initial thoughts and reflections on this movie, but I will keep this post spoiler-free.

I know that readers are always looking for ways they can support Black authors, especially Black indie authors and on the surface it may seem like You, Me, & Tuscany has nothing to do with that but I can’t help but wonder how it would impact the romance book space for Black authors if we supported this movie the way we showed up for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners?

Halle Bailey (The Little Mermaid, The Color Purple) stars as Anna, a young woman who has abandoned her dreams of becoming a chef and is now drifting through her twenties with a series of bad choices. When Anna loses her house-sitting job (and housing) in one fell swoop, a chance encounter with Matteo—a handsome Italian who happens to have a villa sitting empty in Tuscany—will inspire her to jet off for Italy, against the advice of her always-honest bestie, Claire (Home Before Dark’s Aziza Scott).

But Anna’s plan to crash at Matteo’s villa, without permission, just for one night, falls apart when Matteo’s mother, Gabriella (Italian film icon Isabella Ferrari) shows up at the house unexpectedly. In a panic, Anna allows Gabriella to believe that she is Matteo’s fiancée.

That little lie becomes a big problem, though, when Matteo’s cousin, Michael (Regé-Jean Page; Bridgerton, Black Bag) shows up, and Anna discovers that the heat between them may ignite a fire that will transform her life. (Via Universal)

While You, Me, & Tuscany may not be a book adaptation, the film definitely reads like one. (pun intended) I think we think of books and movies as pipelines that flow one way: book to screen. But they orbit each other. What becomes popular in book fandoms also does well in theaters, and vice versa. They are just different mediums of storytelling after all.

And here’s what I know about stories: they help to shape our perception of the people they represent. How we interact with those stories directly communicates their value to the people who have the power to distribute them. And when those representations are executed thoughtfully, the more people who get to experience them, the greater the positive impact on those communities.

Take Sinners, for example. Sinners was not only a cinematic experience but also a launching pad for dialogue about African American history, our contributions to culture under oppression, and the enduring legacy of our impact in this country. This led to deep dives and open dialogue about ways we can continue to appreciate and champion the creativity and culture of Black Americans. It created a space for us to be seen as more than we have been stereotyped as.

You, Me, & Tuscany is not aiming for the cinematic and thematic weight of Sinners, but it's doing something radical in its own right.

You, Me, & Tuscany is a fun, lighthearted movie starring a Black woman as the leading lady, with a romantic connection with a Black man. This story—this movie is filled with softness, grace, adventure, romance, forgiveness, and passion.

Ask yourself, when was the last time you’ve seen a movie like this in theaters?

Black women have been relegated to strong, independent women who are always supposed to do the right thing and have it all together, not just in life but also on screen and in stories. We have carried the torch of femme rage and heroine for ages. You, Me, & Tuscany challenges this narrative and takes us on a cinematic journey through courage, healing, and reclamation free of struggle love.

And it’s come to theaters at a time when Black women have been laid off from their jobs in mass and are still being pressured by society to swoop in as the hero and save the world once again. We deserve to be seen in our softness and given the grace to heal and rest more than ever. Not only do we deserve to be seen in those things, but we also deserve to be celebrated for them.

Supporting a movie like this creates space for more stories like this to exist, but it also shows the world that Black women have the right to exist in this way. It affirms that we are soft. That we don’t always have it figured out, that we are not just the supporting character or the comic relief.

This inadvertently supports Black romance authors because let’s be so for real, romance readers and book lovers are the target audience for a film like this. And you know what we are going to do when we go home and find out that You, Me, & Tuscany is not a film adaptation? We are going to search for books to cure our movie hangover and add them to our TBRs. We’re going to get on platforms like Threads and Substack and yap about what books would be perfect to bring to the big screen next. We’re going to start demanding that romance as a genre is no longer stereotyped as ‘women’s enjoyment’, which should go straight to streaming.

Romance readers deserve movie-going experiences where we get together, get dressed up, and have fun giggling and kicking our feet. But in doing so, we have a responsibility to ensure that we all get to see ourselves in those spaces because Black romance screenwriters and authors are worthy of having their stories told.

I dream of a day when I can walk into a theater and recline in my chair to watch a Kennedy Ryan movie directed by Shonda Rhimes. Or a Shirlene Obuobi movie or a Riss M Neilson movie. Or an F1 romance adaptation of Nelle Nikole’s upcoming release. But we have to show the industry that there is a demand for it.

We have to also start engaging with media that is not centered on Black history and Black resilience, and show up for stories that reimagine the future of Black rest.

You, Me, & Tuscany is a warm hug. It’s the perfect movie for a mental weekend getaway that will leave you inspired to romanticize your own life and take more chances towards your dreams after loss.

If you’ve already seen the movie or don’t mind spoilers, check out the reflections and lessons about the movie here.

Resources: 14 Ways In 14 Days, Celebrating Black Authors Year Round

If you’re looking for more ways to love and celebrate Black authors all year round, I made a series on Instagram that you can follow at your own pace.

Each day is designed to give you one assignment, an explanation of why it matters, and a digital punchcard to take you through the whole journey!

Check it out here:

Watch Now

Halle Bailey (The Little Mermaid, The Color Purple) stars as Anna, a young woman who has abandoned her dreams of becoming a chef and is now drifting through her twenties with a series of bad choices. When Anna loses her house-sitting job (and housing) in one fell swoop, a chance encounter with Matteo—a handsome Italian who happens to have a villa sitting empty in Tuscany—will inspire her to jet off for Italy, against the advice of her always-honest bestie, Claire (Home Before Dark’s Aziza Scott).

But Anna’s plan to crash at Matteo’s villa, without permission, just for one night, falls apart when Matteo’s mother, Gabriella (Italian film icon Isabella Ferrari) shows up at the house unexpectedly. In a panic, Anna allows Gabriella to believe that she is Matteo’s fiancée.

That little lie becomes a big problem, though, when Matteo’s cousin, Michael (Regé-Jean Page; Bridgerton, Black Bag) shows up, and Anna discovers that the heat between them may ignite a fire that will transform her life. (Via Universal)

The Way I Scene It:

Only one year into this presidential term, and it’s been estimated that nearly 600K Black women have been disproportionately sidelined and lost their jobs with the rollback of initiatives like DEI at the intersection of the rise of anti-blackness and the challenges of women’s rights.

If 600K people fell ill in this short time with the same virus, we would call it an epidemic. The world organizations would mobilize to find the source and eradicate the cause. People would take to their phones to admonish each other for not speaking up for those who are suffering or for not doing their part to put an end to the crisis and provide resources to help those impacted ease into the transition of rebuilding their lives.

And while I am a single Black woman with my own unique experience that can’t speak for all Black women, I have observed that the same world that extracts our labor rarely shows up for our hardships. We show up for the whole while, everyone shows up with their hands out.

We have been forced to learn to carry the burden of being excellent at everything we touch—where we can not manage the weight of excellence, we innovate. And we do it as many times as it takes to stay above the fray.

For me, the film You, Me, & Tuscany subverts the stereotype of the strong Black woman archetype by giving us a very relatable yet extremely talented Anna, the main protagonist.

Anna is a grieving, jobless Black woman with 500 dollars in her savings when we meet her on screen. We would never know it, though, because she’s also strutting around with a cute dog and nice outfit. This was the first thing that stood out to me once it was revealed that she’s not in the best place in her life.

Because if there’s anything Black women do, it’s that we carry the heavy things in life in such a way that we rarely look like what we are going through. At first glance, this can feel like strength—dignity even. But for me, I have come to realize that this is a trauma response.

For me, it’s been a mix of assimilation, audacity, and manifestation in equal measure. It’s a coping mechanism that has worked for me until it doesn’t.

However, I found that I left the theater feeling like I should give audacity another try.

Lately, I’ve really been struggling with my own sense of self-worth on this journey of trying to figure out what’s next for me. I got laid off from my job three days after my birthday in December of 2025. My second layoff in two years.

I’m more exhausted than I’ve ever been. Not just living with chronic illness, but emotionally and mentally. Like Bailey’s Breanna (Anna), I’ve been in a cycle of complicated grief myself. My father passed of cancer two years ago—and while I had to learn to rough it as an adult without him, the little girl that still lives inside of me deserved a family she could be proud of. Sometimes grief does show up in the shape of what you’ve lost, but also what you never had and now know with finality that you will never have that thing.

At the core of Anna’s story, there seems to be a message about how loss and grief not only impact our sense of self-worth but also our courage. When something so fundamental is lost, it’s hard to just get up and keep going. I don’t feel as if I get to feel like this is hard as a Black woman. I feel like there’s a standard—an expectation to be ceaselessly resilient even when it can feel impossible to get up, let alone keep going. The need to stop, to pause, to find a way to return to the very thing that could bring me happiness again is made to feel like weakness. But my truth is that sometimes it’s necessary to step away from the very thing we love, simply because it is tied to the losses we have suffered. And that’s okay.

The thing that felt so clear to me watching Anna’s story in the movie was that she didn’t fall on hard times because she was a talentless hack, not even because she was irresponsible. Her life had been unkind to her at the most inconvenient time. Like many Black women in this country right now, like myself, Anna was hurting and under-resourced.

Another way I ‘scene’ myself in this film was seeing how Black women always have each other’s backs. Her friend did whatever she could to be there for her—to encourage, not just to have fun and get back up, but to get it together—even if she ended up supporting Anna’s decision to leave on a whim.

And here’s where Anna’s audacity and almost delulu girl nature really shows its power.

Her friend did try to stop her in the beginning—but it was the sheer audacity to do it her way anyways that ultimately landed her where she was always meant to be.

I’m not gonna lie—I had no business crying at some of the parts that weren’t even supposed to be emotionally dramatic, but I sat there in the theater teary-eyed because even when Anna mustered up the courage and took the leap to go to Italy, things were not easy from that point on. She arrived and had nowhere to sleep that night.

And boy, do I feel like I’m in that same liminal space between the leap and the landing, just trying to figure it out. I’m here now, I took the leap—where the hell do I lay my head down to rest?

This is another scene that resonated with me because rest is rarely given to Black women; we have to take it. Like Anna, we have to find our way in and make room for our own softness because the world would see us worked to death before they would ever suffer us the grace and resources to merely exist.

It made me think about the doors I haven’t knocked on. The doors that I’ve been afraid to barge into. And what kind of life could be waiting for me on the other side?

Now I’m not advocating for literal breaking and entering. I would have lied, too, if the Costas were trying to drag my ass to jail. But what I am saying is Anna made me feel like I could move through this season of my life with more audacity than fear.

I think the true romance of this movie for me was not just the love that grew between Anna and Michael, but it was the romance of a Black woman’s worth when she has nothing to offer the world but who she is.

Even when Matteo’s family asks Anna to help them cook for the last day of the festival, she does so as herself. Making one of her recipes that she and her late mother would cook together. It is a reclamation of something she loved before the grief, not an extraction of her passion without recognition of her humanity.

And in stepping into that kitchen as the hero of her own story, she rekindled her confidence.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been made to feel that I have to show up to my passions with degrees and co-signers just to be considered. In the same ways that young Black boys have the conversation of how to behave to stay alive when confronted with police violence, young black girls are taught very early in life that we have to be twice as good and work three times as hard to get half of what other human beings are worth. It’s no accident that Black women make up the most educated, most decorated class in America.

Even Anna’s teacher called her untapped potential when she couldn’t finish her schooling due to her mother’s death.

Yet, one audacious trip to Italy proved that she didn’t need another course or certification to be who she was. What she needed was the grace to pick up where she left off after losing more than most people would have carried as gracefully as she did. She found that with the Costa family.

The ending of the movie is what really broke me open. I was happy that Anna found her passion again—but it came at the cost of the mistakes she made just trying to survive. We often try to sanitize the process of healing and survival, but it’s messy. People get hurt. Sometimes the road to the destination may require us to be a version of ourselves that might disappoint others. And that’s why we all need a Nonna.

Someone who sees the truth of who we are from the beginning. Someone who shows up in the end to say that thinking she should suffer forever for one mistake is stupid. Someone who’s going to tell us to forgive ourselves and still go after what we want.

When I think of Black women receiving the softness they deserve, I often think of grace as one of the starting points. But we are often held to a standard that feels so impossible to reach sometimes. By our families. By our communities and the outside world. By ourselves.

This film felt like an invitation for me to explore rest and recovery from burnout and exhaustion in new ways. I don’t have the power to change the systems of the world on my own, nor can I benefit from ignoring them. But in this movie, I feel as if I discovered small reframes that left me more inspired than disillusioned.

For two hours, I sat in the theater and dared to imagine who I could be—what life could begin to look like if I had the audacity to open new doors for myself. If I got intentional with creating rest for myself, not just waiting for it. I still don’t think rest will be given to someone like me. Call it cynicism, but my life experiences have not lent me the ability of big faiths. But I do believe in the small magics of life—in the simple romancing of a normal day.

And to my surprise, I find that I might even believe in trying again—in finding my stove and standing next to it once more.

Here’s what these scenes taught me:

• Life is an adventure, not a project. You are allowed to explore without having everything together all the time. Maybe adventure is how things come together

• Trust yourself even if no one else sees the vision. Double down when it gets tough; something wonderful may be waiting for you on the other side.

• Belonging will always be more valuable than belongings. Find your Costas and love them like hell.

• Follow your heart and not your fear. Romance your life, silly!

• And last but not least, it’s okay to go back to the place that hurt you. It’s okay to stand near the stove when you’re ready again. You can pick up where you left off…

Welcome back to The Way I Scene it….

Resources: 14 Ways In 14 Days, Celebrating Black Authors Year Round

If you’re looking for more ways to support and champion Black authors all year round, I made a series on Instagram that you can follow at your own pace.

Each day is designed to give you one assignment, an explanation of why it matters, and a digital punchcard to take you through the whole journey!

Check it out here:

Watch Now

Black women suffered large employment losses in 2025—particularly among college graduates and public-sector workers

IWPR New Report: Black Women Disproportionately Sidelined in Year One of Trump’s Second Term

600,000 Black Women Estimated To have Lost Their Jobs in 2025