love notes from keesh

Winter arrives quietly. 

It doesn’t ask for urgency or performance. It shortens the days, nips the air, and gently nudges us inward. In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), winter is not a season to conquer—it’s a season to conserve. To slow your breath, soften your pace, and listen more closely to what your body has been holding. 

This season is ruled by the Water element, and with it comes the emotion of fear. Not fear as in panic, but fear as in instinct—the subtle undercurrent that shows up as restlessness, exhaustion, or uncertainty about what's to come. When left unattended, this fear can quietly drain us. When honored, it can guide us back to safety, trust, and deep resilience.

Winter governs the Kidneys (yin) and Urinary Bladder (yang)—the organs responsible for our vitality, endurance, and ability to move through life without depletion. They remind us that strength isn’t always loud, and survival doesn’t require constant motion.

So this is your invitation to fear not—not by ignoring what you feel, but by tending to it gently. By resting where you’ve been bracing. By allowing winter to hold you, instead of resisting its stillness.

We all have a character we love to hate — the one who lies without blinking, charms without conscience, manipulates without guilt, or makes everything orbit their needs. We watch them unravel relationships, overstep boundaries, and center themselves at every turn. And even though these characters frustrate us, we keep watching because they reveal something deeper:

• Fiction gives us a safe mirror.
• It shows us the extremes so we can identify the undesirable patterns
• And it helps us reclaim the parts of ourselves we abandoned trying to please, fix, or save someone who wasn't capable of meeting us where we stood.

A few years ago, I intended to write a blog highlighting these “narcissistic characters,” and their "toxic" behaviors. But today, I want to revisit this list with more nuance — and more heart. Instead of diagnosing or labeling people (which most of us tend to do), I want to explore the energies behind their behaviors. And to do this, I'll be highlighting Robert Greene’s 9 Seductive Archetypes — a framework that explains how certain personalities reel us in, disarm our intuition, and seduce us out of our own self-alignment. These archetypes aren’t only just about romance. They’re about power. Attention. Ego. Fantasy. And validation.

The time has finally arrived—After 3+ years, Stranger Things returned to Netflix with its 5th and final season. Volume 1 released November 26th and its four, 1+ hour chapters left its fandom speechless. If you frequent here, you know I love to relate authenticity and self-healing to pop culture. As soon as I picked my jaw off the floor from that chillingly, exciting ending—my brain gears got to spinning.

I talk a lot about becoming our authentic selves, but the truth is: authenticity isn’t a destination... it’s a cycle. A continual process of growing, shedding, healing, and evolving. Every season of your life calls for you to step into a new version of yourself, to quantum leap — and that transformation often mirrors Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a foundational psychological theory in personal development.

From physiological needs to self-actualization, we revisit each level every time we expand. And the ongoing journey of Will Byers from Stranger Things is an amazing example!

There's a lot of buzz on the internet surrounding 'decentering men' and 'decentering the patriarchy' and while YES ABSOLUTELY to all of the above, I try my best to reframe things in a more aligned way for myself. There comes a pivotal  point in many Black women’s lives when we get tired of surviving on autopilot. Tired of performing strength, tired of always being “the dependable one,” tired of shrinking our needs in relationships, friendships, careers, and even in private moments with ourselves.

And when we finally choose to center ourselves — not in a selfish way, but in a sovereign, spiritually aligned way — we often discover something deeper: the way we attach, love, respond, protect ourselves, and show up was shaped long before we ever had the language to name it.

If you were a 90's kid like myself, you were a pre-teen/teen when Mara Brock Akil's critically acclaimed hit series, Girlfriends, debuted on UPN September 2000. It was an instant hit amongst Black women who at the time were not accustomed to easy-going relatable shows of its caliber.

GREAT NEWS—I have officially secured an editor for my second book!!!

For this week’s love note I want to chat with you about the in-between stages of faith. The past few weeks have been especially hard for me personally in many areas of my life. Back in December 2020, I made the decision to leave Corporate America. I worked in Higher Education as an Executive Director for almost a decade and I decided to walk away, walk out on faith and bet completely on myself.

This week I want to discuss intentionally raising your frequency both internally and externally. One of the best lessons I’ve learned and continue to explore is the knowledge of setting the frequency for yourself and your surroundings. When we make intentional actions to vibrate higher, we simultaneously, set up an environment conducive to our most authentic self.