30-year-old Amal White is a social worker by trade, but considers herself to be an activist who centers the struggles of Black women in her work. In this episode she talks about why she tells younger millennials that “adulthood is the ghetto.” According to Amal, the womanhood she’s experienced over the last decade has looked nothing like the womanhood she envisioned when she was a teenager. She thought she’d be married by twenty-one and mothering her first child by twenty-three. Amal talks about how messaging from the single women in her family and society in general caused her to think of marriage and motherhood as expectations of adulthood instead of choices one makes when becoming an adult. Amal also shares how easy it is to succumb to the pressure many women feel to shrink themselves for acceptance. “We’re not encouraged to be who we really are,” she says. “And when we are who we are, we’re seen as problematic.” Amal cites examples of ending relationships with good men and needing the freedom of mobility as ways in which she has been made to feel like she wants too much. When asked what she wished she could gift other women in her peer group, she doesn’t hesitate and says, “The courage to be their authentic selves. No one is going to let you be you. You really do have to take it.”

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