Author: The Dainty Thug

The Broken Record

Uncategorized

Caged birds sing broken records with strained vocal chords,

Hoping someone tunes in

Even though their strings need tuning.

A cacophony of unsynchronized notes, greet the dark matter…

Sound waves.

Their voices get drowned out by time, but

Their lyrics still flow,

Still current.

Etched into the background noise like audible graffiti,

Their art becomes the sound of the needy,

Protesting the desires of the greedy.

Caged birds can not spread their wings, so

They let their words fly and their messages travel for them…

This is the song the caged bird sings,

Though heard by many, it’s understood by few:
“True freedom is within, for universe lives in you.”

Skin Care Routine

Lifestyle

Throughout my teenage years and the first couple years of my twenties, I struggled a lot with my skin. I was always getting breakouts and though they only lasted a few days, the scars they left behind always lasted weeks and sometimes even months.

When I was 19, I began wearing foundation to try and conceal my scars because I couldn’t find any real solution. At 21, I began experimenting with all natural acne treatments and at 22 I finally implemented a skin care routine. It was when I finally stuck to this routine (and increased my water intake) that I discovered what the root of my acne problem was… DRY SKIN.

I had been under the impression that since I had acne my skin was oily and over produced natural oils. I tried to treat it by using Astringents and other products that are specially designed to “dry out” acne, but I never really focused on moisturizing my skin. Not providing my skin the moisture it needed, was contributing to the over production of natural oils that I tried so hard to reduce. It has been a year since I began to focus on moisturizing my skin and my skin has made a dramatic improvement. I no longer suffer from frequent breakouts, and when I happen to get a pimple, it’s only one and gone in a few days.

I have also noticed that sticking to a routine guarantees consistently clear skin. Many times over the past year, I had reached points where I felt that my skin was “cured” and could afford a few days without the routine. It never took more than a few days of abandoning the routine before my skin began showing signs of regression, and slight breakouts began to appear. Consistency is the key to ensuring healthy, beautiful skin.

Below, is a detailed explanation of each step in my routine. This is not a how-to, or an exact recipe for clear skin, these are simply steps that have worked for me and my specific skin care needs. Feel free to draw inspiration from these steps and incorporate them into your own routines! (The products featured are ones that work for me, and it is important to note that these products may not work for you. The key is to find similar products that fit your needs and come up with a routine that fits your lifestyle.)

1. Cleansing

I did not include a picture of the facial cleanser I use because this is a part of my routine I’m constantly changing. Typically I will choose a product designed to clear acne. Sometimes I buy a facial cleanser with exfoliating beads, sometimes I won’t. I have found that either works just fine for me. I do, however, stay away from cream cleansers. For one odd reason or another, those have never done me any justice.

Personally, I wash my face 2x a day. Once in the morning, and once before bed.

Leaving the dirt and oils that can accumulate on your skin (especially if you live in a big city with lots of pollution) over night will cause them to clog up your pores and having clogged pores is what leads to black heads and pimples. Not washing the oils and dirt you may have soaked up from your pillow while sleeping, can also lead to clogged pores. So, make sure your face is being cleaned regularly.

2. Toning

I have used a few different skin toners/astringents and I can’t say that I prefer any specific one over all the others, but this is the one I’m currently using. Currently, I use this 2-3x a week after cleansing but if I have been wearing make up a little more than usual, I make sure to use it more often.

Toning your skin is what gives you a nice even texture (I’m not sure that’s even the right word) and an airbrushed look and feel to your natural skin. It dramatically reduces the size and visibility of your pores, and picks up any impurities that may be left behind after cleansing.

Toning my skin regularly has made a huge difference for me personally and I definitely recommend including a toner in your regimen.

3. Hydration Mist

This is not a staple in my routine but I use this when my face feels a little dryer than usual or I spent too much time between cleansing my skin and applying my moisturizer. When my skin is too dry, my moisturizer doesn’t apply the same way so this definitely helps fix that issue.

4. Spot Correcting

As I mentioned before, scarring is a huge problem for me. A pimple may only last a few days but the scar lingers for quite some time on my skin. I’ve been using this product for about 6 months now I definitely notice how much this speeds up the scar fading process. I use 1-2 pumps of this 2x per day (after every time I cleanse my skin) and it works wonders.

This product is becoming one of my holy grails and I definitely recommend using this for people who suffer from scarring like I do. It is not a magic eraser and works best at preventing new scars from lingering while providing an overall evenness to your skin tone.

4. Eye Cream

This is a step that most women my age tend to skip but as someone who tends to have dark circles under their eyes, this is a must. Also, in my opinion the best way to avoid signs of aging is to be proactive and take steps to prevent them. This eye cream is not a drugstore product but is worth every penny.

I use this 2x a day and I apply it only around my eye area. After 2-3 days of using this you definitely start to see the improvement to the discoloration that can be caused by lack of sleep, and an overall rejuvenation of the eye area. This is without a doubt one of my favorite products and I recommend this to anyone looking to improve the appearance of their under-eye bags or lines.

5. Moisturizing

The final step in my skin care routine is one of the most important ones… MOISTURIZING. As I mentioned before, this has been the key to avoiding breakouts and keeping a healthy looking glow.

My personal preference when it comes to moisturizers is cocoa butter or raw shea butter. These products are both very moisturizing and considered to be a little “heavy” on the skin but I love knowing that the moisture will last me all day. Lighter products don’t provide my skin with hydration that lasts well into the evening, which is something I personally need (especially during the colder months). They also leave my skin with a dewy finish that leaves me with the natural glow I love.

Again, the products you use in your regimen can be unique to fit your personal skin care needs but implementing a routine and sticking to it (and drinking more water) will definitely help you achieve the healthy glowing skin you’re looking for. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this, please be sure to check back for other posts like this one.

Road to Self Discovery

Thoughts

About a year ago I set out on a self love journey and immediately found that I had a hard time learning to love myself because I realized I had no real understanding of exactly who I was. Of course I knew the basics like my favorite colors and foods, but when it came down to really figuring out exactly what my personal beliefs and values were, I drew nothing but blanks.

Like most kids I adapted the beliefs and values instilled in me by my parents and whenever I heard something that conflicted with those values I took it with a grain of salt. Doing this became increasingly more difficult as I grew into a young adult and started forming opinions based on my own observations. Whenever I started openly questioning the truths passed down to me by my parents, I was always met with some sort of resistance and in order to keep the peace I began to keep my thoughts and ideas to myself. Keeping these new budding ideas to myself was probably one of the worst things I have ever done because, in doing so, I was stunting my own development. It is perfectly natural and extremely important for us to question things. The questions you ask dictate the knowledge you acquire and having knowledge is what gives you the ability to form opinions and beliefs. You can’t decide what you think if you aren’t sure of what you know. The more I prevented myself from questioning authority and the generally accepted truth, the less I developed into my own person, and the more I became a mirror of my surroundings. It’s no wonder I had no idea who I really was.

The first step in my road to self discovery was deciding to allow myself to exist freely. Instead of filtering my thoughts and actions to fall in line with my upbringing and what is socially acceptable, I began to think about the things I wanted to think about and act the way I wanted to act without judging myself for doing so. This, in my opinion, was the most important step. We often cast away ideas because we feel that we are weird for thinking the things we think. The same applies to our actions. We act differently at home and around loved ones than we do around the general public out of fear of not being accepted or being labeled “strange”. Sometimes a moderate filter is very much needed, but many times it is limiting. If you are constantly moderating the things you do and say to please others you are allowing yourself to live by their standards and stripping yourself of what makes you unique. If a person is defined by what they believe and how they act but their actions and thoughts are controlled by what others deem acceptable, what does it say about that person?

Once I began to exist without judging myself using society’s standards I started to really get to know who I was and slowly but surely I began to love the person I was becoming. You have to know who you are in order to know how you feel about yourself. Now that I have a better idea of who I am, I can truly say I love myself and enjoy my own company more than I enjoy most things. Much to my surprise, other people have begun to love me too. Granted, I lost a few friends during this process, but it turns out that for the most part people love genuine people and ironically, it was the approval of my peers that served as confirmation that I was doing the right thing. While I loved getting the outside recognition, their approval wasn’t my motivation to continue on my path. It was the empowering feeling of finally being my own person. It’s a feeling I want everyone to experience because it is one of the things I believe makes life worth living.

I’m Back and I’m Better

Thoughts

I started this blog about a year ago with every intention of making it a compilation of thoughts and critiques on the society we live in. It didn’t take me very long to realize I didn’t have much to write about because my understanding of the world we live in was so small. Then, I decided that it might be easier to focus my writing on myself and the things I have learned about my place in the world as a young Latin American woman in the United States of America, and again I found myself stuck. It dawned on me that I didn’t know myself as well as I thought I did and I had no grasp of what my place in this world was. After spending 21 years growing and developing I should have had a good understanding of who I was, no? It turns out I didn’t have the slightest idea. It was then that I decided I needed to do some self discovery and here I am a year later, more me than I have ever been, but not as me as I’ll ever be.

I finally have things to write about and I have never been more excited to do so. I would like to thank everyone who supported me and this blog first time around and everyone who stuck by me during this past year. I hope you all enjoy everything I plan on sharing with you.

 

Early Morning Thoughts

Thoughts

How long will it take for us people of color to recognize and support our own businesses, entrepreneurs, and artists of all kinds? We keep calling out for equal representation in institutions that were never meant to include us while still blindly supporting those very same organizations that ignore our talents time and time again. We have to stop asking to be valued by people who may never understand our struggles and accomplishments. Instead, we need to love, nurture, and enrich ourselves.

I support people who share the view that we need to invest our hard earned money in our communities in order to see them grow. We waste hundreds of thousands of dollars a year buying european designer clothes that were not meant to be worn by us. When those designers host runway shows how many models of color do they choose to showcase their work? One? Two if we’re lucky? But how many of those designers appropriate our culture by having their models sport textured hair and braided hair? Definitely more than just one or two. Please keep that in mind the next time you buy a European designer hand bag.

The truth is too many of us are furthering our education and taking our new found knowledge to the corporations that continue to oppress and exploit us. Do not underestimate the power of knowledge, and be aware that knowledge acquired outside of the classroom can be just as important. In other words, do not discredit the lessons passed down to you from generations and generations of hard-working people who have struggled to make it possible for you to have access to an education. Knowledge is a resource we cannot afford to waste or misuse.

I’m not saying we need to boycott all things outside our communities. I’m just asking that we think about exactly who we are supporting with our money and make efforts to allocate funds to the organizations that have our best interests at heart and represent us in ways we deserve.

 

Being a Latina in the US

Thoughts

The older I get the more I realize how truly difficult it is to be a Latina living in the US. It’s like I’m constantly trying to find the perfect balance between assimilation into US American “culture” and my own Dominican culture. I’m either too Dominican for US Americans or too “white” for my Dominican family. I’m constantly thinking back to the scene in the movie Selena where her father Abraham tries to prepare her for exactly what she was getting herself into by being a Mexican-American artist crossing over into popular culture. It is exhausting.

I find myself cringing everytime I hear my Spanish accent roll off my tongue when I’m around white Anericans. I still don’t know why or how I’m so proud to be Dominican but so ashamed of my accent. I still refuse to accept the fact that I have an accent even though im always being told otherwise. I guess it’s a learned self-hatred and I’m still in the process of decolonizing myself inside and out.

I don’t think I’m alone in this struggle, and I hope that everyone out there who is trying their best to fit in with their family and the general US American population knows that they aren’t alone either. Maybe we’ll find a happy medium… Maybe we won’t. Who knows? I sure don’t.

To be continued…

Poems

I used to be a person, place and thing, a noun
With a presence so profound,
You would know I was present before I even made a sound.
Me and myself had fallen so deep in love with I,
But now I no longer exists
And all that’s left is this….
Huge abyss of emptiness.
We tend to sit, talk, and reminisce.
Me and myself just haven’t been the same since…

I Died.

Back then I had a smile like sunshine,
It drove away the darkness like the sunrise.
Back then you would only see me cry sometimes,
But now leaky faucets have taken the place of my eyes.
Again, me and myself haven’t been the same without I
We forgot how to live so we eat, sleep, and survive.

You didn’t even give me a chance to say bye,
only rest peacefully,
I,
Never thought I’d ever have to bury myself or write my own eulogy.
“Here lies…
The person that I used to be.”

I was a queen, with power and dignity
I never even needed a king,
Cause I was the one who did the conquering,
So tell me how the hell you managed to conquer me?

To be continued….

Natural Hair Journey

Lifestyle

I started my natural hair journey by accident in early 2014. When I was 12 years old (2007), I stopped relaxing my hair after getting a really bad relaxer that had my hair all kids of messed up. For the next 3 years I went through a really awkward transitioning phase until my hair was finally 100% natural. I learned how straighten my own hair as a freshman in college (2012) when my mom bought me my first flat iron. Once I had started straightening my hair on my own nothing could stop me. I had mastered the flat iron and I loved it.

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Wash & Go, February 2014.

By the time I was halfway through my sophomore year of college (2014), I decided that I wanted to wear my hair curly more often. By this point my hair was so heat damaged that it literally did not curl. Loose frizzy waves were the most my hair could manage, even after endless crunching.

Eventually what I had started doing was french braiding my hair while wet and letting dry to achieve a more defined curl and I would rotate back and forth between this and straightening my hair.

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My braid out on a good day.

Since I didn’t really know of any curl styling products besides gel at the time, I had been relying on my conditioner as a styling product to hold my “curls” and fight frizz. I had attempted using gel in high school but I could never find one with enough hold or one that gave my “curls” any definition so I abandoned the idea of using gel altogether. By now, it was early 2015 and at some point someone recommended that I look into Shea Moisture products because they were really good for styling curly hair, so I did.

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Wash & Go, November 2014.

I started off simple with their Coconut & Hibiscus Curl Enhancing Smoothie and boy did I love the results. It was the best curl styling product I had ever tried. It held my “curls” like Gel was supposed to and gave them definition I had never seen on my hair before. Now that I had found my new miracle product I wore my hair curly all the time. I should probably note that what I considered curls were actually more like deep waves (which is why I’ve been putting the word in quotations) but as time went on they kept getting closer and closer to the curly side of the spectrum.

Throughout the Spring 2015 semester I only straightened my hair a handful of times and as a result my hair became so much healthier and thicker. As a child, I was always told that I had so much hair that I had enough to supply four people with a whole head’s worth of hair. Once I had begun relaxing my hair I lost a lot of the fullness I once had and I never really regained it. It was only until I had stopped applying so much heat to my hair that I finally began to see a difference in my hair’s fullness.

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Wash & Go, February/March 2015.

Towards the end of the semester into the beginning of the summer I began to experiment with different products ranging from styling jellies to styling lotions and milks. I started combining different products to see which ones worked best to achieve my desired look. Finally, towards the end of the summer, I found a product formula that worked best and it was one of the best days of my life! My hair finally developed its own curl pattern, and I was the happiest girl on the planet.

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Wash & Go, July 2015.

Today, my curls are healthy and bouncy and actually curly but I still feel like I have a ways to go until I can say I am 100% satisfied with my hair. Looking back my journey thus far I can say that this has been one of the most rewarding experiences. Not only do I feel accomplished when I look at how far my hair has come but I also feel more like myself.

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Wash & Go, November 2015.

My natural hair journey has served as so much more than just an aesthetic transformation. It has been a road to self discovery. I’ve learned so much about myself and the woman I aspire to be and I’ve gained a sense of accomplishment. For so many years, hair stylists had me under the impression that my hair was an un-tamable entity and now that I have learned not only how to “tame” it with a flat iron, but also how to properly care for it in its natural form, I feel like there is very little I can’t do if I put my mind to it.  Through my natural hair journey I’ve been able to inspire and assist so many young women my age to start their own and being able to have that kind of effect on people is such a rewarding feeling. Going natural is something that I would recommend to every woman. It is not a quick or easy process, but it has such a beautiful outcome.

 

 

Deafening

Poems

This emptiness is deafening.

The sound of nothing echoes through the canals of my ears, as it beats on the drums, and triggers these tears.

This emptiness is deafening,

Cause all I seem to feel is the presence of nothing and the absence of everything.

This emptiness is deafening.

I am hollow, these bones are hollow, these victories are hollow.

THIS EMPTINESS IS DEAFENING!

Am I the only one aware of the lack of substance in the air OR is it just that I’m, the only one who cares?

Are you even listening? Baby, are you there? Can anyone hear me? Am I not being clear?

My emptiness is deafening.

I’m just waiting to disappear.