People Healing People by Maya Angelah

People Healing People   Hiding Behind Visibility                Recently, one of my favorite cousins and I were recapping our most recent therapy session and the conversation led to the topic of visibility. She mentioned how feeling invisible played a major role in most of the things that therapy is helping unlearn. It made me realize how much visibility actually allowed me to hide. I know, it sounds crazy, but it's so true. Being almost six feet tall, plus sized, deeply pigmented, and then becoming a model allowed me to hide behind the varying perceptions of my appearance. A confidence that was silently alluded and essentially made up. A facade that was created in the minds of others, and eventually exploited by me.            "Fake it until you make it", but to where and to what end? I faked it and made it to the start of what appeared to be a fruitful modeling career. It appeared fruitful because my ...

People Healing People: Covert Coveting Dear Anonymous, “I painted pictures over reality to create beauty in our emptiness. Romanticizing us was a gift from my heart to make space for you despite its heaviness. It took time to develop our masterpiece, I took time to feel the strokes of your brush. Even in moments you only brushed by, I felt music in your touch. I shaped you in the clouds of my love, You were the man in the moon at night. I fell in love with the idea of you; Our truth was so easy to rewrite. By letting you go, I had to abandon my art. My walls were left with no muse to impart. I still don’t regret setting you free Because all of your roads are painted leading back to me.” Sincerely, Mania At the very beginning of this journey, I wrote this poem about a man that I thought I fell in love with simply because he was kind to me. To be specific, I thought I loved him because he reassured me of my human entitlement to freely express my emotions by saying, “you know you’re a...

People Healing People By Maya Angelah                   When I first thought of this concept, 'People Healing People', I wanted it to be this huge network of people coming together to converse about the vulnerable things of this lifetime, to solve problems in community, and to help heal one another. I then came to the realization that changed how I view myself, others, and how I will live my life going forward. I realized that I've always wanted to save the world, in order to save myself. I figured if the whole world felt okay, I would too in turn feel okay considering I am in this world. But Therapy.     After I made this realization, I wasn't really sure what to do with it. It made me question everything I was, everything I thought I would be, and the way in which I valued other people. For a majority of my life, I was the person who put my own needs last, the person to people plea...