Welcome

First step on The Yellow Brick Road.

This is the Thursday post, The Yellow Brick Road. Today is simply an introduction. I cannot even begin to describe how thrilled I am to have you. My only goal is serotonin.

Graphic: Ethel Moore

What is Come Home?

Come Home is a ritualistic return to belonging by Kendra Austin. A return to the only place we’ve ever truly known. A return back to me. Back to you. Back to us. Sounds comfy, warm, and familiar doesn’t it? Like lighting a lemon verbena candle after a long day of Sunday cleaning. Like getting into your bed with freshly laundered sheets after you’ve just showered. The sweet spot. I’m here to remind you that you are the sweet spot - these moments of joy and contentment we find along the way are just extensions of the joy that lives inside of us always. We need only choose ourselves.

Come Home is a light tap on the shoulder, a whisper, a sweet inner voice. Just like when you’re a kid running around the neighborhood and the street lights flicker on. This is a gentle call back to your safe and sacred space. What’s on your mind and spirit today? Feel free to comment or shoot me an email with an honest answer - don’t sugarcoat it. I have the most vicious sweet tooth in the world, but not for bullshit. It may just inform next week’s letter, or simply make me or someone else feel not so far from home.

Who is Kendra Austin? Ladies and gentlemen………her.

No, but seriously - this is who I do it for. Her stubborn ass calls out to me to shout stories from the rooftops, and I’m a vessel and mouthpiece for her joy. I’m eternally grateful to be in service to her for the rest of my days. We’re still finding out what will become of this lil’ cutie, but for now, I’m Kendra - writer, content creator, and model based in Brooklyn. You may know me from Instagram or TikTok, my offensively long captions, weekly collective tarot card readings, or simply as a loud bitch online. What can I say? I’m a Tumblr Original. Not new to this, true to this.

Photo: Cheril Sanchez

All things Come Home are written by me, Kendra Austin. I’ve been a healer before I knew what that was, and storytelling is perhaps the heart’s strongest medicine. Telling our stories, sharing our truths, grounding our overwhelming feelings into something real is a birthright, and takes many forms. I have friends who write as I do, who throw clay, who knit, who paint, who direct, who design, who cook, who content create, who literally choose for a living, and I don’t mean paying bills. I mean living in their stories. Objects, books, art - they speak for everything we’ve seen, believed, and hoped for. I don’t believe that we are sent such magical ideas, creative inspiration, and passion to remain stirring in our hearts and minds for eternity. The Universe, the divine, goddess above is actually relentless in encouraging us to ground our stories into something we can feel, taste, touch, and see.

I’ve had clinical anxiety and depression for as long as I can remember, and thankfully have the resources and tools to care for myself in the ways I understand. Sometimes I experience a bout of depression as an old hurt begging to be transmuted into something that looks like love. Sometimes when I feel anxious (not clinically, just generally) I’m not honoring my stories enough to sit down and write them in service of judgment, premature critique, and fear of how it will be received. Unabashed creativity is sometimes my only way out. When I hold a story, oh so many stories over time, and in service of others and their sensibilities, I start to burst at the seams, and become detached from the present. Like a balloon that blows up and floats away. For me, truth-telling is the only thing I know that feels right every time, that grounds me, and I trust myself on that. I choose myself on that.

I do not believe I attract what I am. I believe I choose who I think I am, and then choose reflections of those beliefs in my flings, my romances, my soulmates, my besties, my career, my art. Throughout my childhood, adolescence, and early 20’s so far, I often found myself in spaces, relationships, and contractual obligations that made me feel like ?????!???? instead of like !!!!!!!!!!! Where I sought an emphatic YES, I got a Maybe, If You Become X. In 2020, I lost the best of my ever-loving mind but found my heart when I discovered Choice.

While processing a whole entire global trauma, and a race war during the Summer of Listening and Learning, I went through a break-up that dragged me through my own personal hell and back. Every day, this partner made me prove myself to be chosen, loved, and honored. They were fueled by conflict and competition. I never received a single compliment that was not a comparison. Sure, they were a dirtbag, but my tolerance of that relationship taught me a lot about what I choose because at the very same time, I looked at my career in modeling, and felt so similarly. I mean - I literally chose a career that requires me being superficially judged on arbitrary standards in order to pay my bills. My livelihood depended on competition, comparison, and some royally archaic authorities on what we call beautiful. Proving myself fed me, literally. A bitch was seeing patterns.

While I was preaching radical self-acceptance, living outside of the old paradigms of competition and scarcity, and the importance of owning deservedness on the highlight reel of social media, my behind the scenes was nothing but pure torment. I was furious with myself for being a hypocrite, for not living up to my own standards, but I also struggled to admit that none of these circumstances were happening to me. It was easy to dismiss the challenges of my life as bad luck. And of course, there’s always literal oppression. As a person with my identities, it is tiresome to constantly reconcile with the fact that my personal choices can almost never overcome the systemic abuse inflicted upon me, and its impact on these very relationships with both a partner, and an industry built to sell me when I’m marketable and dispose of me when inconvenient. Sure, I was basically living with my partner in the midst of a pandemic. Sure, I was already barely gettin work, and couldn’t even fathom my value and ability to create while barely staying afloat financially and hearing “you’re not enough” on all fronts.

But I chose. Oh, I chose. Little Kendra - always second best to thinness and whiteness no matter how much she overcompensated - wanted to be deemed beautiful and thus worthy of care and protection. Little Kendra, who seldom felt security and safety in her home growing up, wanted another’s authority to save her. It is hard to admit, even now as I extend grace for the vulnerable baby that lives within, but I still believed these things about myself, about my reality. That I could find deservedness in prestige and accomplishment. That my worthiness could be proven. That love could ever exist in the same space as harm. So I chose a world that reflected those early beliefs because it took me 27 years to admit they were there, but they are certainly not who I am. I did not attract an abusive partner and work space, because of who I am. What a callous and fatalistic thing to say to yourself and believe about anyone. Telling the truth, to myself if no one else, set me free. I chose, and I will choose again, but this time - it’ll be me. That’s what Come Home is to me. A choice to return to me over and over and over again.

The sixth Major Arcana card in the tarot is called The Lovers - on appearance we could conclude that this card is about romance, harmony, and divine love, and this wouldn’t be entirely wrong but not even half of the truth. This card was once called The Choice, because its medicine in a reading demands a choice and a sacrifice. It calls the querent to consider if X situation, person, relationship, job offer, or feeling is calling them home, to belonging, to wholeness, or to something that looks like it. Are we choosing out of love and safety for ourselves, or because we think this situation will grant us something we must attain in solitude?

When the pandemic hit, I felt terror for the world as we knew it, for the communities who would be disproportionately unemployed, unhoused, and forgotten in the wreckage of global trauma. For myself, I secretly felt little but visceral relief. It was my way out of the Great Freeze - what I’m calling the apparent pause placed on any plans I had to move forward in my career, relationships, or friendships while I continued to ignore the ways in which I handed over my personal power to be accepted and loved. A literal “Check yourself before you wreck yourself” by my good sis, Universe. Shouts out to her!

The last year introduced me to the agonizing contractions of liminality. Space to grieve, space to accept, space to release, space to dream, space to play before being initiated back into presence in my life, body, and path again. 

Cradled by unemployment benefits and an uncanny amount of time in the day (literally all of it) to do whatever seemed fun, I was more financially and emotionally stable during a whole entire global disaster *takes notes on the scam of capitalism* than I had in eight years since entering the workforce and three years since I moved to NYC in pursuit of modeling, which wasn’t working out exactly as planned. It looked like it was working, because social media makes optics so easy, but as I mentioned, modeling had become another suffocating authority to escape for me. Another gatekeeper to which I, a fat, black woman, was forced to resign my sovereignty in exchange for an idea of someone else’s idea of success. Without the hustle and bustle of daily life and pure survival on the brain, I finally had been present stillness to see myself completely undressed, and answer my calling to choose.

If there is nothing else you should know about me prior to subscribing to this newsletter -  I am guided by no other authority than my own. I’ve never done well with elders, principals, bosses, omnipotent gods, or arbitrary rules - that’s why I work for myself. Freelance life returns virtually zero benefits other than prospective sovereignty, and thankfully that is literally the only thing that matters to me. 

Anyway, identifying latent or overactive beliefs about ourselves and our capacity to hold space and grace for all of them is even more important than the choices we make themselves. In this newsletter, I will challenge myself and my lovely subscribers to the accountability of choice, and to see how we may at any juncture be confused about where home is, exactly and how we find our way back. I have strayed so far away from myself in the name of self-discovery, in the name of love, and in order to find acceptance in community. In the face of what I’m not, I have found who I am (mostly.) We’re still leaving room for luck, chance, surprises, and grace because that’s the spice of life.

Who all gon’ be there?

The Thursday post, The Yellow Brick Road, will be a sometimes long-form essay about the nonlinear experience of following one’s unique path - extremely vague, but always relevant.

When I was a toddler, my sole choice of entertainment was The Wizard of Oz. It still is top 5. It had to be playing the second I woke up, and the second I got home from pre-school, or there was hell to pay. I, too, felt like I was swept away in a tornado that ripped through Kansas. So much was out of my control and in upheaval at a time when I was building a foundation for love, identity, and belonging - a loading zone for my lifelong dreams. While stability is certainly a prerequisite for creativity and imagination for me, stability in itself was a figment of my imagination, for reasons, circumstances, and life experiences that will be unraveled along the way here at Come Home.

I spent my teenage and early adult years finding my voice, my heart, and my peace of mind in people, places, and things that were reflections of what I thought I lacked. I was caught in the cycle of trying to prove my worthiness to belong somewhere, anywhere, only to discover all were but smoke&mirrors, and projections, and conmen. I was the wizard - the powerful alchemist of love in my life - and I would soon learn the hard, soft, and always beautiful way to trust in the magic of my intention to connect, discover, and play.

Much of the inspiration for my writing dates all the way back to childhood, to old tales and stories, and my earliest understanding that humans are almost fatalistically inclined to search for emotional fulfillment in aspirations and surrounding environments rather than ourselves. We want to connect. We want to be accepted. We want to be seen.

Since I started doing spiritual work as a diviner and tarot reader, I instantly saw a connection between the healing properties of fairytales and ancient languages like the tarot, numerology, and astrology, and I use them in my writing to unearth the mysteries of searching and of belonging. It is fascinating how far from true north fear, illusions, linear timelines and expectations of what our path should look can steer us. When the time comes to forge ahead on the Yellow Brick Road, a path carved in only our name, we may forget every step is supposed to lead us back to ourselves, the city of jewels within. No one and nothing else. That’s just companionship along the way.

Baby, we’re not in Kansas anymore. The world is yours.

The Sunday post is more of a #collab - for you, by you. Come Home: the advice column!

I don’t really vibe with pompous, snarky gurus. We’re all students of life. I certainly am, and I want that to be true as long as I have a pulse. We are also masters of our own destiny. It’s easy to become overwhelmed with how, where, when, what, why to wield my power. Lost in the sauce, if you will. I thought the revival of an advice column by a peer who is messy, curious, and intent on being the best person she can be might be fun. Sometimes we just need a sounding board to help us ask the right questions, to recall the answer that was within all along. When you feel compelled to ask “is there a fuckin’ planet in retrograde???”, that’s the perfect time to write in via email, Instagram DM, or whatever feels safest. I’ll be looking for a common theme in submissions, and respond in the Sunday post with something that feels like it’ll be resonant for many or most who need a similar medicine for life’s ebbs and flows. Thank you for witnessing me, and allowing me to witness you. If you’re into this kind of thing, subscribe!

What’s the point?

As I sit in my first one bedroom apartment click-clacking away to create this proclamation of my most precious work to date, the realization that I’m living my Sex and the City dream hits me like a ton of bricks. Much blacker, much fatter, more witchy, more queer, and perhaps just as romantically delusional, my Carrie moment has arrived. Because you’re dying to know - I’m a Carrie sun, Miranda moon, Samantha rising. I won’t be taking questions at this time.

Focusing my energy on sharing myself more authentically through Come Home as my creative hub, rather than in bits and pieces for quick consumption on social media, is re-establishing hope for me. A reminder that when I follow my instinct to do what feels good and whole, in complete disregard of prestige, precedent, or expectation - I am supported fully. This delicious contentment is provided by Substack (thank you, Substack <3), and by my loving community, both online and real life, through which I have come to know the meaning of the words “love” and “safety.” One cannot be without the other, and together they form the nebulous shield of protection and power we carry with us anywhere we go. Hence, the inspiration behind the name and ethos, if you hadn’t caught wind.

Admittedly, it is within my practice and spiritual belief that I am a physical expression of transformative love. No dogma, just vibes. This is who I am; I need only remember and return. Home does not require searching. The feeling of belonging, the security of acceptance, the act of unconditional love shared within community seems to be best accessed in stillness, rather.  bell hooks once called her home “love’s meeting place.” I thought, what if we were love’s meeting place? What if you could stop foraging for the goods, and just be the harvest? What if home and love were synonymous, and both were found in the chambers of our heart to be shared with whomever recognizes us for our truth? Love’s meeting place.

Come Home is a reclamation of a term that once haunted me deeply. As a proclamation of all of the ways that I choose to believe in the magic of my own life, and let it guide me. This is not intended to be anything in specific, but whatever you and I need it to be in that moment, and that’s enough. It’s kinda the newsletter version of the loose goo form that caterpillars take while in a chrysalis. Beautiful, soon to be free, soon to be infinite, goo. On any given week the newsletter might read like:

• A notes app apology to a former self, but slightly more accountable 

• A dissertation on how astrology is both ruining my life, and all I can think about

• Candle and scent reviews from a Taurus moon

• Memes and quips from the zeitgeist

• Musings on seemingly insignificant, and eerily poetic synchronicities

• Old tale storytelling on the top of a mountain 

• An extended collective tarot card reading

• An attempt at hot, millennial Town & Country with less racist vibes

• On being a plant mom

• Post-therapy breakthroughs 

• A quick, but sincere check in from a friend

Homekeeping

1. This is a free newsletter for now. Accessibility is a core value for Come Home. I am so grateful to those who are able to support financially on a sliding scale basis. Those who are not able to support financially can support by word of mouth, and I can continue to create!

2. In the upcoming months, I will roll out exclusive audio content and discussion threads for paid subscribers. If paid subscriptions are not within budget for you right now, but you are interested in this - shoot me an email. <3

3. Just like an actual home, those who disrespect the safe space for ALL are not welcome.

Value is my word of the year. Value, of course, lies in subjectivity. For me, and at this particular juncture in my life, it is synonymous with sovereignty. Sovereignty to create, share, morph, evolve, stretch, grow and play on my own terms, and in my own time is the name of the game. That’s why I don’t have a career in corporate. Having spent the last three years building community on Instagram, I’m starting to understand the app’s corporate and capitalist limitations, and more importantly my own limitations in producing authentically and with sovereignty. Social media is such a volatile space for fat, black female creatives. It has allowed me to step into my own power in ways not possible literally anywhere else, and in the same breath I’m expected to show up in that power…for free.

Basically, I’m growing skeptical of depending on partnerships, shares, likes, follows, and staying in the content mill to sustain my work. Everyone hates sponsored content. Folks have a hard time reckoning with the fact that their favorite creators are also small businesses. We basically get paid to sell you things in order to subsidize the countless hours spent creating meaningful, thought-provoking work, but ultimately, I totally get it. This is my way of cutting out the middle man. You will not see a single partnership here. It’s just me and you! I would love to be even more discerning than already am, and take on even fewer partnerships elsewhere as well. My therapist says I need to work on putting more trust my community to show up for me so I’m doing it!

Subscribe, babes!

Of course, I cannot fill from an empty cup. For the cost of one (1) latte a month, you can support me and my newsletter! I have big plans for Come Home, and see many projects and iterations to come from this baby of mine down the pipeline. An investment in this newsletter is an investment in my future. That investment can be financial, that investment can be sharing it with a friend who you think needs it. Regardless, you’re everything to me!