I finished Harlem this weekend, and I liked the series more than I realized I did.
There were definitely things that annoyed me. The hairstyles, for one. 🤷🏽♀️
Our hair requires entirely too much time, money, manipulation and maintenance for these women to walk into one scene with waist-length braids and the next with a silk press, and then somehow have another completely different hairstyle before dinner. Ma’am. Who is paying for all of this?
And some of their dating decisions had me talking to the television. Out loud.
I mean, giving up tenure at Columbia to write your first novel? Why not do both? I understand choosing yourself, but must choosing yourself always require burning down the entire house?
Still, somewhere across those three seasons, I realized what I loved most about Harlem.
The women kept choosing themselves.
Not perfectly. Not always wisely. Not without consequences. But they kept returning to themselves.
And perhaps that is why the series stayed with me.
This week, much of my clinical work sat in the complicated territory of relationships—people trying desperately to stay together, people trying to figure out how to leave, people grieving what they thought their relationship would be, and people trying to love each other when love had become painful.
Heartbreak has many faces.
So does love.
There are moments when both seem to bring out the very best in us, and moments when they expose every tender, wounded, human part of us.
I sat with all of that this Sunday and realized how grateful I am that my current personal struggle is rather simple:
I want to love and be loved well.
I want a healthy, loving relationship.
I want partnership.
And right now, there isn’t anyone on the horizon.
Honestly, that is a pretty privileged problem to have.
Because I have known hard.
I think about graduate school—the long hours, working full-time, single parenting, trying to become something while still being responsible for everything and everyone who needed me. That season stretched me in ways I didn’t always know I could be stretched.
And now, almost ten years into this profession, there are still long hours.
There is still work to do.
There is still building, growing, becoming more marketable, figuring out the next thing, questioning whether I’m doing enough and wondering what all of this is supposed to look like when I finally get there.
Maybe adulthood is simply realizing there is no final “there.”
We keep becoming.
We build careers. We raise children. We survive marriages and divorces. We go back to school. We start businesses. We reinvent ourselves. We heal. We learn boundaries. We learn ourselves.
And then, sometimes, we sit quietly on a Sunday and realize there is one area of our lives where our usual strategy doesn’t quite work.
Love cannot be completed like a degree.
It can’t be built by checking every box.
It can’t be forced by working harder.
And it certainly can’t be scheduled into existence.
Maybe that is why choosing myself matters so much.
Not as a consolation prize because love hasn’t arrived.
Not as some declaration that I don’t need anyone.
I do.
I want companionship. I want tenderness. I want someone to check in because they thought about me. I want laughter in the kitchen and conversation at the end of a long day. I want the kind of relationship where two people can be fully themselves and still choose each other.
But while I wait for that, I don’t want to abandon the woman who is already here.
The woman who worked through graduate school.
The woman who raised children.
The woman who built a career.
The woman who is still building.
The woman who has walked through heartbreak and kept her heart.
Maybe that is the real lesson I took from Harlem.
Choosing yourself isn’t always about making a dramatic exit or starting over.
Sometimes it is much quieter.
Sometimes choosing yourself is simply refusing to leave yourself behind while you wait for the next chapter.
And maybe, for now, that’s enough.
I’m still choosing me.
And I’m still leaving room for love.
Intimately being brave,
Michelle 💕
©️Intimately Worded, Michelle.
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