When I joined 'Essence,' I was a young, single mother. I was 24. I hadn't gone to college. I wasn't making any money at 'Essence' - what was it, $500 a month - and I was struggling. So I was always looking down the road, always hoping for a better, you know, tomorrow.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the resilience and hope of a young single mother who faced challenges but remained optimistic about the future.
Susan L. Taylor reflects on her early experiences when she joined 'Essence' as a young, single mother. Despite lacking higher education and financial stability, she maintained a forward-looking perspective, symbolizing the importance of hope and perseverance in overcoming life's difficulties. Her journey portrays the struggle many face, yet also highlights the potential for a brighter tomorrow through determination and optimism.
In practice
This quote can inspire young parents facing financial struggles to keep believing in their potential.
We are here to love, not to judge. I'd been blaming and raging. I certainly wasn't loving my daughter that afternoon as God loves me. God's love doesn't insist on perfection or even good common sense. Why then should I demand more of those I love? With this tiny change in perspective I began to see the need for correction wasn't in my daughter, but in me.
Everything hinges on education. Without it, you can't advocate for proper health care, for housing, for a civil rights bill that ensures your rights.
We don't have time to waste. Our communities are crumbling; our children are under siege. Failing schools and a for-profit prison-industrial complex are sucking the life out of black homes and communities. We are not going down like this!
It's hunger. It's homelessness, often. It's underfunded, under-resourced schools. It's abuse beyond the chilling. It's having overwhelmed parents and caregivers. Those are the things that young people are struggling with beyond our view.
We women feel we are here to serve. That's the mistake we make. We may have children, husbands, lovers, bills, responsibility. Those things don't own us, but too often we let them.
We cannot succeed when half of us are held back. We call upon our sisters around the world to be brave, to embrace the strength within themselves and realize their full potential.
She wanted to return to her dream. Perhaps it was still somewhere there behind her closed eyelids. Perhaps a little of its happiness still clung like gold dust to her lashes. Don't dreams in fairy tales sometimes leave a token behind?
There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
I feel like we are at a time of great creativity if we choose to embrace it as such, if we choose to engage the will of our imaginations and imagine another way of being in the world.
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.
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