Curator’s Corner 002

bell hooks

Editor’s Note

For August, L’aurelei D. brings bell hooks into a conversation about liberation, self-definition, and the space we give ourselves to simply be.

In an issue about the stories that stay with us, her reflection reminds us that becoming sometimes means deciding which stories we are ready to rewrite.

— Mia
Founder & Editor, The Living Room

It feels fitting that our August selection is bell hooks.

Also known as Black August, this month is a time to reflect on resistance and the ongoing work of liberation, making her work especially relevant. bell hooks wrote about Black feminism, education, community, love, and the ways power shapes how we understand ourselves and one another.

One of her most influential works, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, examines the ways Black women have been dehumanized by the intersecting forces of racism and sexism while still being expected to show up for everyone else.

What resonates with me is how much of what she described decades ago still feels familiar today.

Black women are often expected to give. To carry. To hold the feelings and emotions of others. To be everything to everyone without always being given the space to simply be.

This summer, I’ve been thinking a lot about self-care and self-love.

About rest.

About ease.

About the “soft life.”

And about what it means to consider those things not as indulgences or extras, but as necessary and foundational parts of liberation. There is something powerful about deciding that our humanity does not have to be proven through exhaustion.

bell hooks’s work makes room for that kind of questioning.

What have we been taught about who we are supposed to be?

Which expectations have we accepted without examining them?

And what might become possible if we gave ourselves permission to define our lives differently?

Maybe some of the stories that stay with us are the ones we eventually learn to rewrite for ourselves.

So I’m reminding myself, and I encourage you, to slow down and give yourself time to simply be.

Take a walk.

Journal.

Pray.

Be in community with friends and family.

Spend time getting—or perhaps regetting—acquainted with your liberated self.

Not the version of you built around what everyone else needs.

You.

This month, we also celebrate Mia, founder and editor of The Living Room, whose own work is rooted in self-definition: creating with intention, walking in purpose, and making room for stories to be told on their own terms.

Happy birthday month, Mia.

And for the rest of us, perhaps bell hooks leaves us with an invitation worth carrying:

Make room for yourself, too.

L’aurelei D.
Founding Bookshelf Curator
IG: @Laurelei.Durr