Waiting at the Wrong Station

How Black feminist literature taught me to stop waiting and start living

Happy Sunday, y’all.

I wake up some mornings just looking for space. A space to slow my heartbeat down. A space to expand my own chapter in my own book. Sundays feel sacred to me. My routine is simple but intentional. Treadmill on. Hands steady. Fingers typing. Mind moving. Before I even get out of bed, I read.

I like to read things I have never read before. I want my mind to be uncomfortable sometimes. I want it stretched. I want it out of its comfort zone. I want to connect with ideas I do not always see myself in at first. Most of the time, that means Black feminist work. Writers I love with my heart and my mind. Writers I have known for years and writers I have never met.

This particular morning, the thought echoed in my mind: Stop waiting. Stop waiting for people. Stop waiting for permission.

I had just read Audre Lorde’s poem Stations, which is about waiting. About how we are taught to wait. She uses the image of stations and movement, and I kept picturing myself at a bus stop. You know that feeling. You are standing there. You are waiting. The bus does not come. Or it comes and goes in the wrong direction. Now you are on a bus headed somewhere you never planned to go.

At that point, you have choices. You can stay on it and see where it takes you, or you can get off and try to find your way back.

This is not Robert Frost. This is not “the road not taken.” This is real life. This is the hood. This is your hood. There are no metaphors to romanticize it. You either move or you stay stuck.

In Stations, Audre Lorde talks about how women are taught to wait to become the arrow that pierces someone’s heart. That line stayed with me. As women, we are often walking around wanting to be “the one.” We want to be chosen. We want to be desired. We want to be the arrow Cupid shoots so we can win the prize.

And that prize is often raggedy.

For me, the prize was complicated. I got a child out of it, and she is not raggedy. She is my blessing. But the man was raggedy. The situation was raggedy. My life during that time was raggedy. I hope my daughter makes her own mistakes, but not the same ones I made.

Audre also talks about how we wait for other women’s words to make us whole.

That part hurt.

Because I did that too.

I waited for another woman to affirm me. To tell me I was doing it right. To tell me I was “that girl.” To validate how I looked, how I moved, how I lived. Not sexually. Emotionally. Spiritually. Socially. I wanted her gaze. I wanted access to her world. I wanted to be her go-to.

So I clung to her words. I followed her way. I adjusted myself to fit into her spaces. I craved female attention as proof that I had what it took to survive and exist.

She knew how to look for things in people that men could not see, because men were too busy looking for themselves in her. She held herself together. I stood there catching drips of what she had to offer.

Meanwhile, I had things too.

I just was not paying attention to them.

I needed to take inventory. To look at myself and ask, what do I bring? What do I have?

I remember cutting class in high school just to hear my name come out of her mouth. Running to the phone when she called. Wanting to be that friend. The “best friend.” The chosen one.

I waited.

Then I got tired of waiting.

And I became my own friend.

I screamed my own name.

I learned how to answer my own calls.

I do not say that casually. It took years of waiting for me to realize I had to move from that station. Not to my final destination, but to the next one. Because I am still figuring things out.

Audre writes about women waiting for themselves around the corner and calling that empty spot peace.

Amen.

How many times have I told myself, “If I just do this, peace is coming.” “Give me a minute, I’ll get there.” “A better version of me is waiting.”

Meanwhile, I was bullshitting.

Still hanging around that corner. Talking. Gossiping. Playing games. Wanting my name on certain women’s tongues. Giving my body to men I wanted to impress. Giving my mind to women who barely had control over their own minds.

I gave her my imagination because he could not hold it.

I wanted his heart. I wanted her affirmation.

So let’s talk about imagination.

I read Christina Sharpe’s essay Beauty Is a Method, and it took me straight back to my childhood. Back to before the waiting started. Back to when I could capture images like a camera. Back to when I dreamed freely.

As a child, I believed everything I touched was gold. My voice mattered. I wanted my own voice in the room. That was it. That was everything. I could not wait to grow up so I could use it fully.

Christina talks about how, as she grew older, she learned about the complexities of Black life. How those lessons made her appreciate her mother even more. How Black mothers make life beautiful in the middle of struggle. How they make it sparkle. How they protect their children from the ugliness of the world while preparing them for it.

That was my home.

There were books in my house. Books were language. Books were discipline. Books meant, “We are going somewhere.”

Christina talks about homemade bookmarks. About nothing going to waste. About turning scraps into love. That resonated with me. Who needed fancy bookmarks? Fold the page. Make something out of nothing.

I remember my bookshelf. I remember becoming a teenager and seeing the world unfold through books. Realizing I could touch other lives. That I could escape and expand through reading.

She also talks about warm spaces to read.

That mattered to me.

Because in the middle of chaos, there were warm spaces. Even when parts of my home were jagged and painful, there were beautiful places inside it.

I lost that space for a while.

Dissociation will do that.

Survival will do that.

I could not find it mentally.

Now I am rebuilding it.

It is on my brown sofa. In silence. In a home I made beautiful. I did that.

I read The Salt Eaters, Sister Outsider, Ain’t I a Woman, and Beloved there. That space holds my healing.

Across from it is a painting of a Black woman. A reminder that I chose beauty. That I curated peace.

Danielle McKinney’s The Sandman reflects that for me. That Black woman resting on the sofa. Twists in her hair. Warmth. Stillness. I saw her. I see myself.

Back to Audre.

I am guilty of waiting.

Waiting for the ring. Waiting for affirmation. Waiting at the wrong bus stop.

When the bus did not come, I laughed. I laughed it off. I laughed at myself. The joke was on me.

Somewhere in that waiting, I forgot what made me feel safe. I forgot the little things. I forgot how peace felt in my body. Even now, I am still trying to remember.

I got the ring. I got the voice. I got the validation.

And it felt good.

But it was not me.

It was me in survival mode.

Waiting makes anything feel acceptable. So I took what came.

Not because it was mine. Because it was available.

It left me waiting again.

At another station.

I kept thinking one day something would arrive and scream, “It’s me. Stop waiting.”

It never did.

Eventually, I gave up waiting.

And that was scary.

I was unfolding.

I was asking myself, who are you now? What do you want?

There was a conversation inside me between who I had been and who I was becoming. And she said, “I want you.”

I did not understand that at first.

Now I do.

It meant: get off the bus. Get to work. Choose yourself.

Stop waiting.

This essay is about movement.

About changing your circumstances by going forward or backward, but always moving. About seeing beauty along the way and learning from where you have been.

Audre Lorde started this conversation for me.

She is a girl’s girl.

She loves us enough to tell us the truth.

Her words feel like a melody and instruction at the same time. A reason to wake up. A reason to get it together.

And I am listening.

Note from the Author

This essay is not an instruction manual. It is not a blueprint. It is not me telling anyone how to live their life.

It is me thinking out loud.

It is me tracing the places where I waited too long, stayed too quiet, loved too hard, and forgot myself in the process. It is me sitting with Audre Lorde and Christina Sharpe and letting their words argue with mine, comfort mine, and rearrange mine.

I write the way I think. In images. In fragments. In memories. In theories. In feelings. In the language of Black women who learned how to survive before we learned how to rest.

Some of what you read here is tender. Some of it is funny. Some of it is uncomfortable. All of it is honest.

I believe storytelling is a form of anthropology. We study ourselves. We document our lives. We leave evidence that we were here and that our interior worlds mattered.

This piece is part of that record.

If you see yourself in it, I’m honored.

If it makes you question where you’ve been waiting, I’m grateful.

If it reminds you to move, even just a little, then it has done its work.