practicing radical self-discovery.

MUVAhood | Issue No. 002

Hey MUVA,

Something shifted when I found out I was having a daughter.

Not a single revelation — more like a slow-motion reckoning that crept in during the quiet moments. I kept thinking about what she would see when she looked at me. Not what I would tell her. What she would actually see. The woman I’d been — always building, always producing, always useful to someone — and whether that woman was the one I wanted my daughter to learn from.

The answer that kept coming back was: I’m not sure.

And I realized I hadn’t been sure for longer than I wanted to admit.

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We’ve been so busy building lives that look like something that we forgot to check whether they actually feel like us.

I don’t think I’m the only one who got here. I think a lot of us have been so devoted to being good at our roles — so committed to being the mom who shows up, the wife who holds it together, the woman with the plan — that we quietly stopped asking whether the person inside all of those roles was okay. Whether she still knew what she liked. Whether she’d been given any room to just be.

I noticed it in myself slowly. A morning here. A journal entry there. A quiet accumulation of moments where I’d reach for who I was outside of my function and come up with something fuzzy. Not Brianca the mom. Not Brianca the wife or the business owner or the woman with the strategy deck. Just… me. And I didn’t have a clean answer for who that was anymore.

That’s not a small thing to notice. It sat with me.

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And then the pregnancy hit — and my body made the decision my mind had been avoiding.

I got sick. I got tired in a way that isn’t metaphorical. My body slowed everything down and refused to negotiate. And somewhere in that enforced stillness, I came face to face with the voice I’d been outrunning: the one that equates rest with laziness, slowness with falling behind, quiet with wasted time.

I’ve been learning to tell that voice it’s wrong.

Because right now, my body is doing the most important work it has ever done. Growing a person. Sustaining a life. And learning to honor that — to sit down, to actually rest, to let myself just be a woman doing something extraordinary without performing it for anyone — might be the most radical act of self-discovery I’ve ever attempted.

There is no output. There is no deliverable. There is just this.

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But it’s my daughter who keeps bringing me back to the real question.

I want her to grow up watching a woman who knows who she is. Not just a good mom. Not just a devoted wife. A woman. A full, whole, has-her-own-purpose-and-mission woman who didn’t disappear into her roles and call it sacrifice.

And in order to teach her that, I have to figure it out for myself first.

So I’ve been letting myself imagine it. Not the responsible version. Not the version with caveats and realistic constraints. Just — what does the life underneath my life actually look like?

When I let myself answer honestly: I don’t dream of building anything. I wake up at nine. I go to water aerobics. I don’t manage the morning shift, but I’m there for pickup, for dinner, for homework and bedtime. I go to Trader Joe’s on Fridays and I buy fresh flowers and put them somewhere they’ll make me happy. I color — just because I love it, because it has never made me a single dollar and never needs to. I have a wall in my house covered in my kids’ art and mine. I spend my days writing to women who are figuring out how to build lives they actually like. I host meetups where we remind each other that we are that girl — with and without our kids, just us, just being.

That’s it. That’s the life underneath the life I’ve been living.

And it took me this long to admit that it counts as a real dream.

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I don’t have it figured out. But I’ve stopped waiting for permission to want what I want — especially because it looks so different from everything I’ve already built. We don’t need permission to rest when our body is asking us to. To pursue something purely because it fills us up. To take up space in our own lives.

The work of finding your way back to yourself doesn’t start with a plan. It starts with a question asked honestly in a quiet moment.

I’m asking mine. I’d love to know what yours is.

— B

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This Week’s Theme: Thank God for the Crushing

We’re wrapping up this theme and I’ve been sitting with it all week because it could not be more on the nose for where I am right now.

God answered my biggest prayer last year. I am pregnant with my daughter — the one I’ve prayed, fasted, and tarried for. And in the same breath, this season has been one of the hardest of my life. Months of sickness. The uncertainty of what my career and business look like on the other side of this. The tension between needing to rest and feeling like I’m supposed to be doing more.

The crushing and the blessing living in the same body, at the same time.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: olive oil doesn’t flow without pressure. The crushing isn’t the opposite of the blessing. Sometimes it’s the process. God isn’t punishing me in this season. He’s preparing me. And I’m choosing — daily, imperfectly — to thank Him for both. It hasn’t always been easy but I have faith that I’m going to look back on this season with a massive gratitude for the lessons I am learning right now.

Are you in a season of crushing right now and if so, how are you navigating it?

📖 Shop my Bible Study Essentials on Amazon →

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📺 Watching: Paradise

If you are not watching Paradise on Hulu, please stop what you are doing and start immediately. Sterling K. Brown is one of my favorite actors and this show is proof. Last week’s episode had me in full blown tears and this week’s episode had my jaw ON THE FLOOR.

But let’s talk about last week. [🚨 SPOILER ALERT 🚨]

One of the characters dies moments after delivering her daughter from preeclampsia.

As I watched it unfold from the high blood pressure to the swollen ankles I reflected on my birth experience with my son, Brayden. I’ve talked about it a number of times, but his birth was one of (if not THE) most traumatic experiences of my life.

For a while it haunted me. When he was first born I remember being resentful whenever he’d cry because I felt like “what are you crying for, I’m the one who almost died”. I remember not being able to talk about his birth or watch a scene from a movie about birth because instantly I’d feel a pain in my heart. I felt robbed of one those beautiful birth experiences that the girls brag about on TikTok and I was resentful. Any mention of it and I was right back in that room disassociating, with crippling fear, a bombardment of nurses and doctors calling codes over my head while my husband prayed.

But this week, for the first time ever, I watched that episode and I felt something different.

Sadness. Real sadness for the character, for the story. But not that consuming, suffocating trigger. I could see the screen. I could stay in the room. I could separate the show from what I lived through.

And when it was over, I just sat there feeling… grateful. So deeply, quietly grateful.

Healing is strange like that. It doesn’t announce itself. You don’t get a certificate or a finish line. You just wake up one day and realize you made it through something that used to undo you — and you’re still standing.

Now as I prepare to deliver my second child, I won’t pretend the anxiety hasn’t tried to creep back in. It has. But I’m not letting it set up camp. My husband is taking a Dads to Doulas course (I could not be more proud of him), I’m looking into pelvic floor therapy, and most importantly I’m praising God in advance for the safe and healthy delivery of our baby girl.

But I say all of this to say this: go and watch Paradise. You quite literally will not be disappointed. It will give you all of the feels while simultaneously have you ready to jump out of your seat with the action and shocking plot twists.

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Danessa Myricks Yummy Skin Blurring Balm Powder

Last week I mentioned I got a new vanity and LED mirror for my bedroom. Well. That innocent little purchase turned into a full makeup drawer clean-out and restock.

And the best thing to come out of that spiral is the Danessa Myricks Yummy Skin Blurring Balm Powder. I am genuinely obsessed. I put it on and it doesn’t even look like I’m wearing makeup — but my blemishes are covered and my skin looks like… itself, just better. If you are a no-makeup makeup girlie, this is your product. Trust me on this one.

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A magazine for the woman navigating motherhood, womanhood, and her career while refusing to lose her identity in the process. 💌