The Weight of Being Whole
On what it means to move through the world as a Black, masculine lesbian — and why I stopped trying to make that smaller for anyone else.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from being too many things at once for people who can only hold one of them at a time. I know that exhaustion well. I’ve lived inside it. I’ve built a whole life — and eventually, a whole business — on the other side of it.
I am Black. I am masculine. I am a lesbian. And I am, without apology or asterisk, all three of those things in the same body, on the same day, in every room I walk into. That’s not a disclaimer. That’s not a list of challenges to overcome. That is the full sentence of who I am — and for a long time, I didn’t understand just how powerful a complete sentence could be.
I Was Never the Problem to Be Solved
The world tends to receive people like me in fragments. Blackness first — that’s the one most rooms notice before the door closes behind me. Then, if they’re paying attention, masculinity: the way I carry myself, the clothes I choose, the particular confidence that some people mistake for aggression and others recognize as self-possession. The lesbian part gets processed differently depending on who’s doing the processing.
In Black spaces, my queerness has sometimes been treated as a betrayal. In queer spaces, my Blackness has sometimes been treated as an afterthought. In professional spaces, my masculinity has been called “intimidating” when it was simply assured. In every space, someone has had an opinion about which part of me to keep and which part to quietly set aside.
I spent years trying to modulate myself — soften the edges here, amplify the warmth there — until I understood that the editing was the wound, not the answer to it. I became a puppet to other people’s comfort, performing whichever version of myself they could tolerate. And always, somewhere in the conversation, came the lines meant to sound like compliments: You’re not what I expected. You’re not like the others. Flattery with a fist inside it — a way to receive me while keeping their biases intact.
What I’ve learned — slowly, then all at once — is that the discomfort was never mine to manage. The people who needed me to be less were working through their own limitations. My job was never to make myself digestible. My job was to be undeniable.
Masculine and Soft Are Not Opposites
Black masculinity is one of the most misread texts in American culture. When it shows up in a body like mine — a Black woman’s body, a queer woman’s body — the misreadings stack. People don’t have a clean cultural script for who I am, and that absence of script used to feel like an absence of belonging.
But here’s what I know now: my masculinity is not performance. It is not costume. It is not a rejection of womanhood or an imitation of manhood. It is mine — grown from the specific soil of my life, shaped by the women in my family who were strong in ways that looked like severity but were really love with nowhere soft to land.
Masculine does not mean cold. It does not mean unreachable. For me, it means grounded. It means that when I am in your corner, you will feel it. It means I take up my space and I hold it — not at anyone’s expense, but without apology.
Why I Built The Curated Misfits
When you’ve spent a significant portion of your life being told — explicitly or through omission — that who you are is too niche, too complicated, too specific to translate into something the mainstream will receive, you have two options. You can shrink. Or you can build something that proves the premise wrong.
I shrunk for years. There were moments of being fully myself — in safe spaces, with people who could hold all of me. But what I’ve learned is that life is too short to shrink for others. You have to live as you actually are. Now, nearly 50, I chose to build. And as long as you are alive, it is never too late.
The Curated Misfits exists because I understand, from the inside out, what it means to be an audience that no one is talking to. I know what it feels like when a brand’s marketing gestures in your general direction without ever actually landing. I know the difference between being included and being seen. That difference — that gap — is where I do my work.
We use identity and lived experience as the actual architecture of marketing strategy — not as a checkbox at the end of a campaign, not as a month-long initiative, but as the foundation. Because when you truly understand who someone is, you don’t have to convince them of anything. You just have to show up in a way that lets them recognize themselves.
Identity is not a niche. It’s a lens. And when you learn to look through it instead of past it, you stop chasing an audience and start calling your tribe home.
The Gift I Didn’t Know I Was Carrying
There is a particular kind of clarity that comes from having to know yourself deeply because the world offered you no shortcut. I could not rely on mainstream narratives to tell me who I was. I had to figure it out — in the silence after a conversation that almost erased me, in the joy of a community that held all of me at once, in the work I built that finally let me show up undivided.
Being Black, masculine, and lesbian is not a set of obstacles I’ve navigated around. It is the reason I can see what others miss. It is the reason I know that the most powerful marketing does not flatten people — it honors them. It’s the reason I can walk into a room, take up my full space, and help someone else find the courage to take up theirs.
I am Anisa Kenyatta Parks. I am whole. I have always been a misfit, and I am more than fine with that.
Welcome to my wholeness.
Anisa Kenyatta Parks is the Principal of The Curated Misfits, a digital marketing agency that uses identity and experience to connect brands with their people. Ready to find your tribe? Let’s talk.
