Day One
And a few days into a new year
Part of me is asking myself how I ended up in Mexico City navigating a break up.
Why am I learning how to love again in a city like this?
But this is how life comes together.
At the seams.
And there is no place I’d rather be.
Actually, there is. Both feelings are true.
Today is day one.
It’s 7:41pm. I haven’t left the bed. Nor opened the curtains.
Watched a woman on Tik Tok singing alone to the Pussycat Dolls in her bathroom shortly after I opened my eyes this morning. Then played Stickwitu on repeat and let my YouTube serenade me.
Lucky by Britney Spears plays, then Losing You by Solange. By the time Mariah’s We Belong Together comes on, I’m deep into a pop heartbreak tour in my bed.
My aunt’s funeral, the fires in Los Angeles, this change, this ache. They’re all company keepers.
I read something on Threads that listed out everything that’s causing our collective distress at the moment, then ended with “quite the heavy weight we’re living under.”
Think that says enough, and says it all.
I talked on the phone. Ate some cookies. Felt my feelings. I blocked out the city noise and bounced between reflections—one about my aunt, another about the conversations that led me here. To this bed, this moment, this breakup.
The blessing? I’m already close to okay. Two years ago, I couldn’t get out of bed for the whole month of May—lost and full of shame, staring down the truth of how far I’d fallen down the barrel of self-betrayal and abandonment in search of love.
Today, on day one, I’m full of self respect.
Look. At me. Now.
Two years ago, when I moved to Mexico, was day one of me learning how to be alone.
Over time, I discovered that my fear of death and dying alone was tied up in my relationship with work.
Maybe you can relate.
This conversation sounds one way on the Internet and another way when you’re lying awake at night, questioning what you’re doing with your life, wondering if you matter or if the husband, children, or the loves of your life you were promised will be around when you… inevitably… die.
Alain de Botton calls this ‘status anxiety.’
Many others call it purposelessness.
I learned that changing how you relate to status means giving up ambivalence about your own power.
If the ‘p’ word makes you uneasy, stick around. You’re going to love it soon.
I promise.
Let me reintroduce myself.
I’m Candace, a storyteller, a nomadic death doula in training, and the creator of Medicine Cabinet Radio—your companion for life’s biggest questions and turning your grief into power and mischief, the free Black woman way.
I was raised in the Bible Belt boonies as the eldest daughter of a Southern Christian Baptist preacher’s youngest son. I’m currently building a life between the states and abroad.
My life is far from linear. Between 2020 and 2024, I lost more than a classroom-sized group of family members.
In the process, I learned what it means to end the search for love—romantic, familial, and otherwise—and instead, create a life you love that loves you back with less dogma and more dominion.
Dominion is care by another name.
When the fear of death and dying alone is rearranging your furniture like she owns the place, you don’t need more discipline.
You need a partnership with your power you actually like.
Death has a sneaky little way of initiating us into a state of full approval of what is.
I consider mischief to be your soft, hot, and deliberate legacy-making power. Goodbye reason and hello feeling. Welcome to a life led by desire and built by design.
This is what dominion feels like.
Your dreams of the future change as you change. If you’re yearning for permission to dream a new dream of making a life and legacy as expansive as you are, I’m the woman you’ve been looking for—and I’m glad you’re here.