NaKeesa Frazier-Jennings Wants You to Be More Accountable to Yourself

NaKeesa Frazier-Jennings: I think it’s critical to center because I don’t think we know everything there is to know about the importance of rest in every other part of your life. I also think that Black people have been socialized and programmed in an unhealthy way to always have to be achieving something and that rest is a luxury and not a human right. I do not believe that — I think that the lack of rest can be linked to a lot of harmful health outcomes and your overall wellness not being intact. So, for those of us who are in the Black community — with all the things that we have in our history and things that have been passed down through generations that are not necessarily positive — it’s another very important reason why rest is critical to our well-being.

Gentle accountability is making sure that you’re accountable to yourself for all things — so it could be a huge goal, it could be a small goal, it could be making sure that you are investing in your wellness, it could be something that you’re doing just for you that brings you joy. But it doesn’t have to be this like, “If I don’t accomplish this thing, I’m a terrible, horrible person.” It’s [about] flipping it to, “Yeah, I wanna be accountable to myself, but I don’t have to beat myself up about it if I don’t accomplish everything I’m ‘supposed to.’” Because the goals are something that you’re working toward, it doesn’t mean that you’re gonna always automatically reach them.

It probably has been inside of me for a long time in one way or another. I didn’t have a vision of what it would look like, it kept eating at me, like, “You gotta get this out there. You have to create something that is gonna support people’s wellness.” I certainly had Black women in mind when I was creating it because that’s who I spend the majority of my time with outside of my spouse. I have a lot of conversations with Black women about what our day-to-day lives are, and I kept hearing the same kind of things over and over again. Thinking back to my childhood about how I didn’t see Black women modeling self-care or even thinking about themselves at all and how that was negatively impacting them from my perspective. I didn’t wanna be like that. And then I had an auntie who kept saying to me last year, “You need to journal, you need to document your life. You and your husband [artist George Jennings] are doing a lot of important things and you’re making Black history. When you get older, you won’t be able to remember all the details.” I was resistant to it. I’m like, I have five actual jobs. I don’t have time to journal. But it kept nagging me in the back of my head, like, “How can I make journaling something that is doable for me?” I thought, if I have the same six questions that I had to answer every day I’m able to, that would kind of center me. I thought, I can do that. And I think that this will be a method that will work for other people too.

I am a Virgo in every sense of the word, and so I’m very self-motivated. I wanna get 110% on everything. I really worked very hard in my adult life to do away with that way of being and get rid of perfectionism. But it creeps in every now and then. The old me would have done 365 days of accountability — you’ve got to do it every day, you have to do it for the whole year, and you gotta start over on January 1st next year. But I didn’t want to put that out in the world. So, number one, the book is a decent size as far as thickness. … I also felt like 100 days is more doable in people’s minds than 365. [That many] days can be overwhelming for people to think about. You don’t have to do it every single day, you can take breaks, use it how it works best for you. Do it whenever you want! If it’s once a week, then it will take you a couple of years to do it, and that’s fine. Regardless of whether you do it for a year or you do it for 100 days within a year, you’re still creating a habit that allows you to center yourself each day that you use it.

I wanted whoever was using this book — particularly people from marginalized communities — to take some time and really celebrate whatever. I drank a glass of water today, or I got my MBA today, and everything in between. This society makes people feel like they’re being arrogant if they talk about being proud of their accomplishments. But there are certain demographics where that’s acceptable. I wanted people who may not typically [celebrate their accomplishments to] do it, even if it is just within the pages of the book.

I’m a student of life — even at 50 years old, I am learning something every day. I want other people to approach life in that way, like, hey, I’m learning new things every day. If I pay attention to that or if I’m not, maybe take the opportunity to try to seek out knowledge or information, because it could be something that you learn about yourself. I wanted to put in the prompt about obstacles because, again, as a Black woman, I feel like we don’t get that grace from the world about why we didn’t accomplish something or why we didn’t show up on time. We are judged so harshly and then we sometimes internalize that and judge ourselves so harshly. I want people who have a ton of things on their plate to understand if they didn’t accomplish their goal for today or this week or whatever because these real life things happen, that’s totally fine.

Then the biggest one for me, that I really want everyone who engages with this resource to think about, is how did I take care of myself today? That, to me, can be transformational to people who don’t even consider that. [Those kinds of people] consider how they take care of everybody else a lot of times, but they’re not considering how they are taking care of themselves. Some people can look up 10 years later and they have not really done one thing of any significance for themselves. They say you shouldn’t pour from an empty cup — I would never even consider doing something like that. I don’t even pour from my cup. I pour from my excess because what’s in my cup is for me.

Basically, it’ll be different covers. I did the original version with the purple cover — it’s just 100 Days of Gentle Accountability. I did a second version which has the same pictures on the inside, but it’s 100 Days of Gentle Accountability With Pride and it has a rainbow design on the front. And then I did an image-free version so that I could bring the price down for people. … Then, I’ll have two more versions — one will be 100 Days of Gentle Accountability in black. That will be an homage to the beauty of Black women. Instead of flowers [in the book], there will be black and white photos of Black women that my husband photographed. Most of those photographs he took of the women are the reference photos he used to create his new exhibit, The Women, The Paper, and The Light. And then the final one will be the 100 Days of Gentle Accountability PNW version that will be full of pictures from me and my husband’s travels throughout the Pacific Northwest. We love a good day trip — we’ve been living here since the late ’90s — and we have thousands of pictures throughout the Pacific Northwest that I thought would be something people might like to see.