We have a tendency of counting people out before they have the chance to see their light.  For Yamarie, aka Yams, her driving force has been her desire to hustle for hers and learn as she goes.  Having had a learning disability and leukemia while growing up, she’s come into her own as a visual artist with her focus on videography.  Yams talks to us about her artistry and the importance of never giving up.

F: What drew you to visual art? Y: I’ve always been into visual arts since kindergarten, you know when you start painting and drawing.  I think it’s because of colors, it just makes me happy. I got more interested in it around junior high school; in my family there’s nobody who’s into technology, or knows anything about technology.  So when I got to junior high school I had the opportunity to get my first laptop, a Toshiba. I started messing around with what it can offer me and found Windows Movie Maker, and I taught myself how to use it.  I thought it was cool and my family used to have me make them a picture slideshows and burn it onto a CD at the time.  First I started doing picture slideshows, then recording my own random videos.  I started learning Photoshop in high school; it was so complicated and still is! I just know the basics. When I got to college I majored in entertainment technology which is based on theatre work but you can use it towards any career in the entertainment industry. There, I learned specifically lighting and video.

F: Do you have any current artists that influence how you work? Y: I’d like to be the female version of Ivan Berrios, so I would say he influences me. I’ve actually met him, he’s a very nice dude, and very humbled. That’s where I’m trying to be.  His work is clean, original, and that’s the thing that I find is hard.  I try not to be on Instagram too much; even though I follow a lot of photographers and videographers I try to not be on there too much cause you end up picking up their editing style.  I don’t know my style yet, I’m just going with the flow.

F: When you begin a new project, do you plan it out thoroughly or do you let the wind take you wherever? Y: I try to plan.  I have this Instagram project, and it came to mind because I know a lot of music artists: a lot of rappers, pop artists, R&B artists, and I figured it’d be good to have a visual that’s under a minute of them singing, rapping, etc. I did it in hopes that they can gain more fans. I began reaching out to artists and told them what my project is about. If they said yes we’d meet up, take pictures and shoot the video. Once I post it up I include a bio of the artist, so that people can know a little bit about the artist before follow the them. Most of my photography is not planned, it’s more, ‘hey are you available? Let’s go to Queens and just shoot.’  I just work with whatever I have, if the artist is only here for a week and they go back to wherever they live you just gotta do it.

F: Do you feel that people put limitations on you because you’re a woman? Y: I feel like people don’t take me as serious.  I feel like there’s a lot of male known photographers, not too many female photographers or videographers that I know.  It’s hard, it’s hard to keep going.  There’s days where I just wanna sell all my equipment and do something else.  When you dream about something constantly it drives you more.  Since I graduated college in June of 2014, this year is my third year taking this serious, and I’ve done a lot.  I’ve met great people, I’ve networked.  So when I feel down I look at those achievements and remind myself, “I gotta keep going. I’ve invested too much money and time; I’ve done too much just to stop here.”

F: What’s been your favorite shoot so far? Y: I got the opportunity to shoot for Bad Boy’s Reunion Tour at the Prudential Center.  It was super cool because I remember taking it all in. Taking pictures for an artist I grew up listening to, it was fun and I’d love to do more.  It’s hard cause you gotta know people and let them give you the opportunity to shoot. I’ve tried being forward and saying, ‘here’s who I am, here’s what I can do for you,’ and I got ignored.  With this opportunity though, this guy has a clothing line called Never Not Working and I like his apparel.  I hit him up on Instagram and offered to shoot for the brand.  I didn’t even ask for anything beyond that and he offered me a ticket to the Bad Boy show.  I was in shock, I don’t have to pay for anything and just get myself there!?  What!?  That doesn’t happen often. There needs to be more people like him!

F: GotShotByHer has a ring to it, is there a back story on how the name came about? Y: I have a friend named Raul, and he wanted me to be his personal videographer.  It didn’t happen, but he was trying to give me names and came up with ShotByAGirl and I didn’t like how it sounded.  I know I’m a female but to me a girl sounds like a 13 year old, you know?  I’m 25 now.  So then I came up with GotShotByHer. it stuck to me because you ask yourself  ‘well, who’s her?’  It creates that mystery and opens that window to wanting to figure out who I am.  On my page you rarely see any pictures of me; maybe one here and another there.  I like it like that, I want to keep it a mystery to what I look like.

F: There aren’t many widely known Latina filmmakers, what do you hope to accomplish with your work? Y: For more Latina women to recognize their value.  It’s hard for us to get recognition, but we’re just like every other female.  We have goals, we have dreams.  I want to inspire more people; I realize some people won’t shout you out or support you.  Like, I’ll mention an artist on my Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook and want people to follow them.  I’m showing love, I’m putting my people on.  I feel like we should show more love to each other, it takes too much energy to hate and be two faced.

F: What are you speaking into existence for the rest of the year? Y: I wanna shoot more music videos this year, my longtime goal is to be a music video director.  I love, love music. which is why i love visuals,  because of the love i have for music. I want to get better at photography, Photoshop, shooting and editing better.  Just progressing.

F: Why do you do art? Y: I like capturing moments, I like how it makes the person feel.  If they feel more content with themselves or see themselves in a different perspective that they never seen before it makes me feel good.  It’s about helping people see themselves in a better light. Plus, I cant see myself doing something else.

F: What makes a FLASH girl to you? Y: Every time you say FLASH I think about the superhero!  A FLASH girl is a superhero; we’re strong, smart, sexy, beautiful, and determined. A female who is going to do whatever she has to do in order to get what she wants without nudity. Someone who's a hustler and proves people wrong. Getting your own without the help of anyone, just yourself.

Admit it, we’ve been fed a grand illusion of what love is supposed to be.  We expected chariots and diamonds, and ended up with Groupon dates (btw don’t sleep on those) and strategically sent text messages as young adults.  Jourdan is one of the women helping bring a new perspective in dating with her new podcast, Dating in NYC.  Bringing in voices from across different backgrounds, the aim is to bridge the gaps we’ve created and help understand each other’s kinks and experiences.  We spoke with Jourdan about her favorite love movies, the podcast, and being a friend to someone in a toxic relationship.

F: You’re born and raised in New York City, right?

J: Born in Detroit, raised in New York City.  I’ve been in New York since I was eight.

F: Would you consider NYC to be a romantic city, like Paris or Milan?

J: Not at all, New Yorkers are always busy.  I noticed it more after I left because I went to school in Baltimore. When I came back and actually began dating it was like, outside of the fact that no one knows what romance is, New York is not a romantic city.  Everything we know about romance is based off what we’ve seen in our lives or on TV.  People make that shit happen, there’s nothing romantic about walking in the cold or the snow. 

Every stereotype I’ve seen about romance in New York I’ve seen in real life and I’m like, ‘Nah, I don’t fuck with this.’  What I found to be more romantic was when I was in Baltimore because things don’t happen as fast as they do out here.  There’s not much to do in Baltimore, you actually have to find things to do vs. being in New York I can walk outside and fall into something.  In Baltimore you plan things, and I found it to be more romantic because you’re going out of your way.

F: On your blog you began doing a series of other people’s dating experiences.  How did that come about?

J: I got out of a good relationship with a bad break up in the beginning of 2016. Because he had a brand new girlfriend two weeks after we broke up, I thought I could do the same thing.  Instead of doing the things I usually do like taking my time and get over it, I was rushing the process.  I was forcing myself to go out, and this was when I really got a grasp of how to do my hair, so every time I went out it was big and curly, and the guys would be into it so whenever I’d go out I’d bag a different guy.  Maybe two or three guys in the same night, and I felt nothing.  I consider myself to be an emotional person, so when I felt nothing I felt like a fucking robot.  I didn’t want to go out, but I still forced it. They’d text me and I’d ask ‘Who the fuck are you?’  At the end of the day, they were all the same person in different bodies to me.

I had never dated like that before. Because I started dating in college, I mainly dated friends or somebody I met in class. That way I’d at least know the person before I make a decision if they’re the one I want to take things forward with.  A few friends told me I was being destructive because they’ve never seen me like that before.  So after two months of destructive shit I asked myself, ‘What are you missing?’  I thought back to my relationship and everything I liked about it and started giving myself the things I was missing.  From there, I went inward and everything I did was a step up in self-reflection.

I went through the men gave my number to and began thinking about what the disconnect was.  Let’s say there were 14 men: of that 14, 7 only texted me and that was when I texted them first.  Of those 7, maybe two I liked?  The disconnect would be simple shit too, like one would lie about where he works.  You know how guys would wear a Roc Nation hat and say they work there? I ran into a lot of those, and I’d tweet these things out and would get responses like, ‘Yeah girl, that’s the norm,’ and I’d be like ‘Are you for real?’  Like it’s not easy for me to Google this?  I used to work in hip hop and media so I could have gone onto Roc Nation’s site and found out. I’m also an investigator so I look through tagged pictures too. Your first and last name is already in my phone so I can Google you.  If it wasn’t that, they were lying about secret girlfriends.  So when I was tweeting it and getting responses like I got I realized it wasn’t just me.  I decided to talk to other women and get their dating experiences. Everyone I interviewed, I connected in some sort of way.  That’s kind of how Dating in NYC was born.

F: How did you transition that from the blog posts to the podcast?

J: One of the women I interviewed said it should be a podcast, and I was like, ‘Shit, why not?’  I took a couple of radio and broadcasting classes when I went to school in Baltimore, learned Garage Band, how to edit audio, and how to use my voice.  Whenever we made an audio or random podcast in school, they always made me the voice cause I could speak clearly and people can understand what I say when I speak.  I asked a friend who directed me to a studio and that was it.

F: One of the most recent episodes you had discussed BDSM and the fetish life.  How important to you is it to spotlight things that are taboo?

J: It’s very important to me, mostly because everything that I use as a topic on Dating in NYC is something I’m curious or learning about too.  I always want to learn with my listeners, which is why I chose BDSM.  When I was growing up a lot of things were deemed “white people shit.”  Now that we’re in 2017 and getting older and growing out of that taboo attitude, why not explore these things that we may have had misconstrued?

F: How necessary is it that people share their experiences with love and relationships?

J: I think it’s very important because you learn something from each one of your relationships, which is why I had to stop entertaining guys back to back because I learned nothing about or from them.  I didn’t know their names, they would send me pictures of themselves and ‘I’d be like I still don’t know who you are.’ But when I look back on my relationships I remember them and the times we had, good and bad.  I’ve also learned to not take the bad into any other relationships.  Relationships aren’t always sexual, they’re friendships, how I treat my dog, and people on the street.  Everything that I’ve learned from my relationships, I’ve taken into my personal life and I grow from that.

F: Think to when you were younger, and the ideas you had about relationships and expectations at that time.  Do you find that your experiences mirror the expectations you had?

J: No, they’re completely different.  I didn’t really date until I got to college and my first real relationship was around my sophomore year.  When I was younger, I had a skewed image on everything.  My mom raised me in the way that we weren’t friends.  So, I’d see things with my friends or I would read books in which the characters were in relationships and I didn’t know if that’s really how its supposed to work or if they were abusing one another.  I couldn’t go to my mom for it because she made the line very clear that we were not friends, so I ended up going to my friends for a lot of things, which skews the view cause, it’s the blind leading the fucking blind.  I saw a lot of things when I was younger that shouldn’t have been normalized. 

We were younger but developed early, so we were in like 6th or 7th grade and guys that were 18 or 19 would stop by the school and try to bag.  We were in 8th grade and there was like an abortion epidemic cause nobody was teaching us about sex, nobody was teaching us about relationships so we were going in blind.  When I was younger my friends would think things like a man is supposed to pay for everything, he’s supposed to take you out, and if he can’t do that he can’t provide.  Whereas now, I pay for my own things because it makes me feel good about me, it’s one of my self-love things.  If a man can pay for that then sure, but I don’t expect these things from you.  When I was younger we had a lot of expectations that some were random, some were things we wanted our fathers to do that they weren’t.  A lot of my friends were searching for their fathers in their men, and now that I’m older I don’t look for that. 

I’ve dated as an insecure young woman and now that I’m the most confident I’ve ever been, I date completely differently.  I don’t expect anything from a man, even something as simple as compliments and words of affirmation because I can do that for myself.

F: Have you had friends who were in toxic relationships?  How did you navigate those?

J: Of course. I had a lot of friends, especially when I was younger, who would get a boyfriend then go ghost until he fucks up.  As I’ve gotten older I have a lot less friends who go ghost, but the thing about dealing with a friend who’s in a toxic relationship, especially as the single friend, is that you can’t say much.  I’ve learned to be less, ‘You should leave him,’ and more, ‘I’ll be here for you, we can pull up on him if you want.’ 

I’ve learned to give less advice and just be more open because sometimes when a friend is venting they don’t want advice.  They just want to be heard.  I think we’ve all been in toxic relationships. So now, I’m judgment free and I’m just here.

F: Do you think that we as women are progressing in being sexually autonomous?  If not, what do you think is blocking us?

J: A lot of women are on their way to sexual autonomy, and a lot of women are there.  With my experiences (because we were younger), there were things we were taught about sex where it’s for your man. 

So for example: You might do something you consider freaky, but you do it because that’s your man not because you enjoy it. That’s how I viewed sex in my relationships.  My first was at 20, maybe 21, and he wasn’t open to trying many things.  He wasn’t open to even listening, because you know guys know it all.  So he would be like, ‘I’m a man, I know it all, and you can’t tell me this isn’t pleasing you.’  Even though it wasn’t. 

But in my last relationship, we allowed each other to explore different things and it was fun. But in the back of my mind, I was still thinking I’d try new things not because I want to or am curious, but because I’m a freak for my man.  Now that I’m out of that, I’ve reached this mindset where I’m doing things because I like it, and the man just gets to be there and enjoy it.  I’m not doing it for you.  A lot of women are getting that way, and it comes from growing up.  You explore more and unlearn a lot of things, and I had to unlearn a lot of shit from 7th grade to maybe 2 or 3 years ago. 

We’re growing into ourselves and learning to be more sexually explorative and not give a fuck of what someone says.  You can call me whatever you want, but I’m going to do what I want.  You might fuck with it or you might not, but it’s for me.

F: What’s your idea of a perfect date?

J: The perfect dates always include some kind of food; I like to eat.  I like exploring too, even though I’ve lived here most of my life, I’ll wake up and just go out to no place in particular.  I recently found a random restaurant in The Bronx and it’s really good so maybe I’ll take a date there.  I like museums and art galleries but you have to choose wisely who you’d take.  Anything that’s fun and involves food, that’s what I’m down for.  The best dates are the ones where you’ve paid attention to the person and openly communicate, so that they’re enjoying themselves too.

F: Your top love films.  Go!

J: I like Blue is the Warmest Color, it’s a French film about two lesbians. It’s three fucking hours but it goes from her first discovering her sexuality to them being in a relationship to the end and them moving on.  It’s a really beautiful film.  Brown Sugar, too.  In college I thought I was Sydney Shaw and I was gonna find the love of my life sitting with Angie Martinez during an interview then he’s gonna pop up!  Poetic Justice and can I say the New Edition movie?  Cause I fell in love with them, that’s a love movie to me! 

F: What’s a FLASH girl to you?

J: From doing Dating in NYC and a couple of other dating events I’ve done, I’ve learned that a lot of men believe that we hear what we wanna hear.  Which is true in some cases, but I think that a woman willing to learn but is also confident in her goals and her intentions is a FLASH girl.  It takes a strong woman to realize some of the things I’ve learned aren’t okay and want to change that.

by Lana C. Marilyn

Loving yourself is never an overnight process. I think it happens in seasons. It’s this non-linear uphill climb to being a better person, to feeling more confidence in yourself, your body, your life. Bits and pieces. Sometimes doing your best means you learn to love yourself in bits and pieces before you’re ready to look at the whole. That’s been my experience, at least. And I think that’s okay.

For me, my struggle with self love isn’t a dislike of my physical appearance. It’s not a doubt of my creative abilities or skills. Instead, it’s a disconnect with my expression as a sexual being. There’s like, a “block” that inhibits me from having healthy, enjoyable experiences that I don’t feel guilt-ridden about after. It’s hard to pinpoint the root of the problem but suspected culprits are a lifetime of internalized shame, and a history of coercion, unsolicited sexual advances, and disassociation as a coping mechanism for discomfort. I feel broken. I know it doesn’t look like that for everyone but the point is: I don’t feel confident in my freedom to share myself with another person, and if not corrected, it will spiral into a pattern of dysfunctional relationships.

So what’s the solution? I think the answer involves me taking the steps to understand myself, to learning how to exercise sexual agency on my own terms, to trying to break down the barriers that lead to shyness. Sex positivity seems to promote consensual promiscuity, and for those of us intimidated by that, the “broken” feeling weighs heavier than ever.

On my personal blog, I vent sometimes about these frustrations. I feel envious at times, of other women. Women who talk bluntly about their sexual conquests, who are unapologetic about their needs. I’m simply not there yet, and I’m embarrassed by it. Voicing those fears has been a huge component of my recovery to reclaiming agency. Recently after sharing a post, a friend reached out to me with a book recommendation she thought I might find helpful.

The good news is, she was right.

This month, I’ve begun reading Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski. She’s an accomplished sex educator and her book dispels a lot of the myths around women’s sexuality through a scientific lens. Using diagrams and nifty metaphors, Nagoski presents a digestible new understanding of female sexual function and how women process and exercise sexual excitement. Along the way, the book offers a theory for what creates “blocks” like mine and how to undo them. I’m only a third of the way through reading but I’ve already begun to feel a little less broken already. I’m just different, is what Nagoski suggests. Everyone has the same parts, in a different order, and there’s no “right” order. So all variations are normal. And once I understand my own, I can regain control.

Already I feel equipped to make better choices in partners or to discern my own comfort levels. (The book includes quick questionnaires and worksheets designed to make understanding yourself fun!) So far I’ve learnt a new formula for understanding the ‘mechanics’ of sexual attraction and I’ve read about the emotional attachment styles people develop that affect the kind of sex we have. Imagine how revolutionary it is to understand attraction as an intertwined set of gears that start and stop. (The accelerator-brake theory.) Or to learn that I’m an anxious lover, and getting over this is key to my confidence.

Reading the book and digesting all this info is one thing. In hopes of actually implementing the advice, I’ve begun working on opening up to my partners, for example. Recently I shared my findings about “anxious attachment” and it spawned an entire confession of my fears and insecurities, which were met with ample reassurance. The best I can do right now is communicate with my partner. Come As You Are is simply supplying me with tools to understand my needs so that I can go back and explain them. I am very lucky to be involved with someone who’s patient with me during this process.

Moving forward, I hope to do things that will just help me to feel more present in my own body. I’ve been thinking of starting yoga again or taking dance lessons or starting a new journal. Perhaps even a diet would be beneficial. I’m not sure yet. But I know what recovery looks like. It means feeling sexy. It means confidence in my body beyond just superficial approval of its appearance. It means feeling able to say “No” and mean it and to say “Yes” with enthusiasm and conviction. It means that I’ll be able to talk about asexuality without hesitance.

It’s a long recovery process. But a necessary one. So I’m going to be optimistic! What things about yourself are you learning to love in 2017? (I wish you the best of luck!!)