O.G.

(Original Gangster)

This is one of the only records I have of something I created when I was young.

Back then, I didn’t analyze what I was making.

I felt it.

I would feel intensely and work until the feeling was finished.

At the time, it was instinct.

But in hindsight, especially considering the world I was navigating, the symbolism feels louder.

A Black girl in a Southern white school.

Images of beauty that didn’t look like me.

Power framed a certain way.

Worth crowned selectively.

The forest feels different now. Hiding. Watching. Adapting. Surviving.

And yet - there is something defiant here, too.

“O.G.” wasn’t about violence. It was about origin.

The first self.
The unfiltered instinct.
The version of me who created before she learned how to explain herself.

Some of the imagery reflects the world I was absorbing.

Some of it reflects the power I was quietly claiming.

Even now, the message still rings true in a way I can’t fully name; something about visibility and concealment, about beauty and hierarchy, about who gets crowned and who crowns themselves.

"O.G." is a time capsule.
Of instinct.
Of environment.
Of a young creator processing a world she didn’t yet have language for.

It reminds me that even before I understood my story - I was already telling it.