Before our names are printed on our birth certificates, the world has already assigned us labels and designated our positions in life.  Limitations and guardrails are placed on our hopes and dreams before we experience our first sleepover.
 
Our gifts and talents are deducted and compartmentalized before we reach elementary school.  Ahead of confidence and character-building opportunities, society and media impose unrealistic beauty standards, the "strong black woman" trope, and the ideaology that true love comes by way of heartbreak, sacrafice, and suffering, prompting self-love crisis and marriage stigmas all before we've experienced our first crush.  We hear more "no's," "you can't" and "you won't" before we've attempted to achieve, acquire, or pursue anything.
 
We are taught perfectionism and later punished for it.  Forced into independence only to be penalized because of it.  We overwork to shatter glass ceilings cemented above our careers and overachieve to knock down the walls that construct the boxes we've been placed in.  Unfairly and inaccurately, we have been defined by those who have never walked a day in our stilettos. and WE are over it!
 
The women of the Diamond Writers collective have abandoned perfectionism, we've denounced the titles forced upon us and are only interested in fighting for liberated, purpose-driven, soft lives.
 
Our stories are our declarations, our experiences, our mistakes, our wants, hopes, dreams and desires. These stories are our confessions, journal entries, prayers, unspoken truths, and revelations.
 
Our stories declare who She Is!