Monday, August 10, 2026

My first time at Stirling’s Coffee. It is smaller than I expected given how much I have heard about it, but I see why it is so loved. It’s beautiful. Very scenic, it captures the essence of Sewanee. Small but so scenic, so human, so green, so alone in its beauty yet felt deeply by those trying to escape loneliness while still embracing the solitude that life has wrapped around them.

I ate my akara and garri. I couldn’t finish the akara, but the whole eating experience wasn’t bad at all.

Then I started to do the reimbursement thing and then I started with Carlile You without Me. I realized that this was a song I want to use to anchor my birthday message for my 30th. Something about me and my mom, something about how she must feeling the you without me feeling that Brandi is feeling about her child(ren).

I then went on to NPR Brandi and I have heard this song before – Human- but it played again. And Good God, I lost my fucking mind. I lost my fucking mind.

I am crying in an open space, in God’s blest beloved Stirling’s. The song is doing things to me. Good Lord Jesus. This is the part 2 of what I know I will anchor my birthday message on. But it’s more the message, it’s more than trying to find new strength as I walk into my 30th year. It’s more than reckoning with the fear, with the gratitude and the burden that comes with it. It’s more than all that. It’s just that it describes everything I have been wrestling with this whole year, this whole year. Good God, the song.

Brandi breaks down the process of writing it here.

There is a lot I want to say. How the song, Human, somehow melded into the ecstatic, freeing feeling I have been having all morning due to the courage I took to go out and let myself live outside my room. The beauty of Stirling, the calmness, the chaos, the seeing other people live their lives other than the two lovely girlies I have been cooped up with these past days, the excitement on people’s faces, the stillness, the conversations, the hopes I wore on my sleeve when I pulled out my yellow blouse and paired it with a blue jean, all of that and more, made Carlile’s Human resonate in ways that it didn’t when I first listened to it then. I remember loving it then, but no, I didn’t cry in silence, I didn’t rethink my entire life in gratitude and trembling like I did today. The person maketh the environment just as the environment maketh the person.

Oh wait, also went to the library to collect my laptop (I get a brand new Mac laptop – surprised look) and they had this whole thing in the library that I found cute.

Me looking fly today. I hope I stay in this good mood for a long while.