sydney n. sweeney 🕵🏾‍♀️

Scrolling through an iPhone camera roll is the 21st century version of flipping through the pages of a metal ring-bound photo album and romanticizing times that felt much simpler. In 2020, a miserable year that feels more and more like a literal epoch, waxing nostalgic about The Before—a period that I can’t help but refer to as “when things were normal”—has become an international pastime, and at this point, looking back at snapshots of life pre-pandemic can feel borderline masochistic. We had p

Just a few months ago, someone from Black Twitter quipped that the reigning women of Destiny’s Child had “some really black-ass names.” The joke reintroduced an old truth: Beyoncé, Tenitra (Michelle’s first name), and Kelendria sound as black as catfish and fried okra, or a beauty supply store referred to vaguely as “the beauty supply.” As the tweet became a thread, other folks waxed nostalgic upon a yesteryear when such Afrocentric names dominated black entertainment, and one Destiny’s Child

Our almost-relationship combusted on my 23rd birthday. He was too broke to take me to dinner — or even gift me a one-dollar greeting card. That night, I ate shitty pasta in my little San Pedro apartment and cried myself to slumber, wishing his inaction was unexpected — but secretly knowing such oblivion would disappoint.

Black girls gas each other up about their natural hairstyles in the same way that all tipsy girls compliment each other in the restrooms of concert venues and house parties: obsessively and joyously. It’s a simple, unspoken rule that when we rest our eyes on another brown gal with gorgeous curls, our souls feel an urge to spread some hair love, to reassure that other girl that she’s rocking it right – whether “it” be a gravity-defying afro, well-styled waves, or one-of-a-kind protective style (take customized box braids, Marley twists, or bantu knots, for instance). And when those first “I love your hair!” salutations are gifted to the other naturalista, the conversation frequently snowballs

When I meet up IRL with an Internet boy, my mother is the first person to get my iPhone location. She lives a hundred miles away from me, but I know that if my little red pin were to ever land in suspicious territory, she would be the first to call the cops. I’ve realized that most women my age grant their close girlfriends this kind of first-responder role, and this is not to say that I don’t let my own cronies know what I’m getting into before any risky business commences. (Usually my inbox will be topped with an anxious, yet appreciated “R U OK?” text from my best friend if I don’t prove