Rest in Peace: Your Sanity (2024–2025)

Nobody held a funeral for it.

No flowers. No repast with somebody's dry mac and cheese and a dish of potato salad that should've stayed home. No program with an awkward photo from 2011 where you looked almost happy. Nothing.

Your peace just... died. Quietly. In the middle of a Tuesday. While you were answering an email you weren't even supposed to be on because you were technically on vacation — except you weren't really on vacation because nobody in your house let you actually vacate.

And you just kept going. Like nothing happened. Like something essential in you didn't flatline right there between the group chat notification and somebody asking what's for dinner.

That's what Minding My Black Ass Business is really about, if I'm being honest with you.

Not an affair. Not a scandal. Not two people doing something wrong in a cabin in the woods while John Coltrane played judgment in the corner. It's about two people who looked up one day and realized the most intimate thing they hadn't done in years was just... sit in silence without performing for somebody.

Darius and Amara didn't run off together because they couldn't keep their hands to themselves. They ran because they were exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't fix. The kind of tired that lives behind your eyes. The kind where you're technically present at the dinner table, but your soul has already filed for early retirement and is somewhere on a porch with a bourbon.

Sound familiar?

Here's the dark part nobody talks about: you can be surrounded by people who love you and still feel like a ghost in your own house. You can be the one everybody calls, everybody leans on, everybody needs — and somehow also be the loneliest person in every room you walk into. That's not a relationship problem. That's not a marriage problem. That's a you forgot you were a person problem. And it happens so slowly, you don't even notice until some random Wednesday, you're sitting in your car in the driveway for twenty extra minutes just to hear yourself breathe.

That's not a red flag. That's a distress signal.

Darius was a wallet. Amara was a calendar. And somewhere between the bills and the schedules and the needs and the obligations, the actual humans inside those roles got real quiet.

The cabin didn't save them. The storm didn't fix them. The stillness gave them permission to remember who they were before everybody else got a vote.

And I wrote a whole book about it because I needed to — and because I suspect a whole lot of you needed somebody to say it out loud, just wrapped in fiction so it doesn't hurt as much going down.

So consider this your notification.

Your peace deserves a proper funeral if it's already gone — flowers, ugly crying, the whole thing. Grieve it right. And then — and I mean this with every ounce of dramatic intent I possess — go get it back.

The circus will keep running without you. It always does.

Mind your business accordingly.

Minding My Black Ass Business is available now in EPUB, PDF, and paperback. Get your copy at mieon.net/shop.