Melanin Bliss Media is not a platform that happens to have a founder with a story. It is the product of where I come from — the assignment I was given, and the reason I can relate to people beyond culture, beyond healthcare, beyond the pain: because I have lived it, endured it, and I am still standing.
Where I Come From
I was born on December 18, 1990, in Watts — South Central Los Angeles. My mother was sixteen years old when she had me. My father was gone within a few months. From the very beginning, the most important person in my life was my great-grandmother, Leatha Mae — a woman from Jackson, Mississippi, rooted in the Deep South, who raised me to love, to keep God first, to be unapologetic, and to stand on my own.
Leatha Mae gave me my name. She said it would precede me — that it would walk into a room before I did and announce that I belonged there. She meant every word. She was not afraid of anything, and she made sure I wasn't either. When I was with her, my childhood was warm. It was safe in a way that a child in Watts, in that era, in that family, did not always get to be. She was where the whole family brought their secrets, even the ones they were told not to tell. She never judged. She understood.
She taught me how to love in spite of. She taught me that people are flawed, and that I should not expect from others what they do not have to give. When I was a little girl she spoke in riddles that never quite made sense — until now, as an adult, when I can call them up word for word and finally understand them. She was preparing me for life. She gave me wisdom, and she gave me strength. She also taught me something harder: how to see my family clearly and love them anyway.
What Shaped Me
My family was shaped by every crisis Black communities are told to be quiet about — addiction, incarceration, domestic violence, suicide, foster care, and the kind of generational trauma that does not show up in any chart in any hospital. My mother struggled her whole life; she was an alcoholic, and she passed in 2020 from cirrhosis. Our relationship was complicated in ways that do not resolve cleanly with time, and I have done the work to grieve both what was and what never was. I carry both with honesty.
My family is still, in many ways, broken — and I am not ashamed to say it, because it is true, and because so many families look exactly like mine. There is still distance. There is still dysfunction. My siblings are dispersed. I lost my brother Deneco — we called him Poppy — to suicide, and his absence remains a presence in everything I build. I have a sister navigating addiction, and a younger sister who grew up in foster care and has chosen, for now, to keep her distance. I have brothers whose paths have been hard, whose choices I cannot make for them, and relationships that are strained in ways I did not cause and cannot fix alone. I have loved people the world gave up on. I have buried people the systems should have saved.
And I have learned the particular ache of being treated as worth knowing only once you've made something of yourself — the people, sometimes family, who keep their distance until there is something to be near. I have had to set boundaries. I have had to protect my peace. None of that hardened me. It clarified me.
I say all of this plainly, and with grace, because it is the foundation. I did not come to this work from above it. I came to it from inside it. That is why I can relate to people on a level that runs deeper than culture, deeper than healthcare, deeper than any single subject. I understand the hurt, the addiction, the brokenness, the love that survives all of it — because I have lived every layer.