"...But I made Lemonade."

For an album that has kept Beyonce in my top 5 artists every year since its release because of my pathological obsession with it, I’m surprised I didn’t realise sooner how it was structured to honour each of the stages of grief and in their exact order. 

Whether you resonated with her or not, listening felt like stepping into her story, becoming a part of her journey, feeling every emotion as she did. She retold her feelings so powerfully that she conjured them up in every listener even those with hearts still polished and unscarred. 

She made her grief sound so beautiful and turned what was probably one of the darkest times of her life into an avant-garde body of work that has left its footprints on the sand of time. 

Call it what you want, but all I know is that vulnerability like that can only be championed by one thing, and that’s bravery. So, for all our hearts whether healing, healed or broken, let’s go through the post-breakup stages of grief as experienced and expressed by Beyonce in Lemonade. 

“You can taste the dishonesty, it’s all over your breath… 

as you pass it off so cavalier…”

We are introduced to a man living a secret life, celebratory, and proud of his infidelity. A man who thinks he has not been discovered by one of the most powerful forces in the universe: The Female Intuition. 

He passes it off so carelessly -  in a brushing off laugh, in an assumed mood - a toothy smile that’s never been his own -  lol. Whether welcome or not,  a woman’s intuition will report a butterfly flapping its wings in the middle of the Amazon if it needs to. 

If it protects her and her interests, best believe the universe will be letting her know. No woman has never not seen something that has happened coming. 

I like to think of it as a protective energy field. Often a little pissed at it, its cautionary advice speaks for itself. It is never wrong, and not obeying it feels like a thunderous punishment. It never goes well. 

This intuition births secondaries like that one weird thing that we all have experienced - the forever TikTok phenomenon - “…this is your mother. Are you there?”, right before something goes terribly wrong.  A woman always knows. Be it your mother, your sister, your bestie or yourself. A woman always knows. 

Women don’t “think”. WE KNOW. I think this is why sisterhood is so important. In instances where the universe knows that you’ll ignore your intuition, a woman close to you will know whatever it is that you also know but are ignoring. No matter what it’s about. Tell me I’m wrong. I dare you. 

“I pray to catch you whispering…” cause I know you're up to something and you’ll call me delusional for bringing it up out of "nowhere".

“I pray you catch me listening…” so that the proof presents itself!

"What are you doing my love?"

But, “…hold up, they don’t love you like I love you. Step down, they don’t love you like I love you…”

You know that. So how could you? Cause I know you know this. I’m saying all this to remind you what you already know! 

Why do you say one thing then do the other? Why don’t your words ever match your actions? I can’t believe this is happening! This can’t be real. Cause I know you. I know what you know! So why would you let this happen? Why would you do this? I must be missing something.  

She's saying, I know the man I met and fell in love with and married. I know you. I, however, don’t know who this person who has become so careless with my heart is! I don’t know him! So I must be missing something. This is not you. You know how much I love you and you know how hard we fought to get here. You know.. you know.. you kn- 

Often times in the heat of the moment of the painful truth, we just refuse to believe it’s happening. It feels so surreal, cause you placed your trust in that person. You bled your emotions out verbally, you acted them out so many times such that there’s no way that they could have been misunderstood or mistaken for malice. 

This person knew you and your pure intentions for them. Surely that should have been insurance enough against their seemingly personal attack on your entire reality and existence. 

Surely they would never do that. Not on purpose anyways. So you try to understand them, and try pretending that this is not them acting. It can’t be. Call it the devil, call it an instrument of karma, call it what you want, but it fails to register. Because honestly, it shouldn’t. It's not normal, and no one deserves to ever go through that.

So you carry it with you. The shame of what people will say, the pain of the aftermath. Whether you’ve confronted him about it or not, you carry it with you everywhere you go. It drains your energy so much. Yet, you wake up everyday and convince yourself that learning to ignore it all may be the only way to find peace.  

You start to de-personify him. Not the angel you know. The whole ordeal feels like a personal attack from the pits of hell. You are basically regarding him as possessed. Because in the words of Future… “…ain’t no way. Ain’t no fxckng way.” So you carry on like this for a while. 

“…can’t you see there’s no other man above you? 

What a wicked way to treat the girl that loves you…”

You’re in denial. But your denial, unfortunately, refuses to be denied. It rejects your refusal to acknowledge it. 

This realisation that you just can't ignore the situation you're in makes you so angry! 

As a fire sign, anger is something I know like the back of my hand. At first, you think you’re angry at him, at yourself, at the world, at the friends that helped him hide it, or at the situation but the reality is you’re angry at it all at once lol. The anger starts threatening to consume you. You start seeing RED! It's confrontation time!

“WHO TF DO YOU THINK I AM???“

“YOU AIN’T MARRIED TO NO AVERAGE BXTCH BOY!”

“YOU CAN WATCH MY FAT ASS TWIST BOY!”

“AS I BOUNCE TO THE NEXT DXCK BOY!” 

I feel Bey so much here! It’s no surprise to those that know me personally, that this song is my favourite from the album. I think it represents the situation so well. She is so angry! And in anger, we often say things that we will never do. 

The anger brings out a side of us that should never see the light of day. A side we've been working on taming since we met it.

Sometimes, we do the things we promise during the anger stage. We lose ourselves in the rage and vengeance possesses us. We act out our emotions’ commands. We’re justified... I think. 

All I know is that pain demands to be felt, and me? I don’t deny my fire anything. It is justified! I AM THE DRAGON BREATHING FIRE. 

“When you hurt me, you hurt yourself...”

“When you play me, you play yourself...”

“When you lie to me, you only lying to yourself...”

You suddenly become an even bigger fan of meditation and prayer, cause you’re a ticking time bomb at that time. Your temperance however, knows no bounds. You’re such an emotionally intelligent being, and so mostly, you exercise that caution. Or try. 

In “Sorry” we witness apathy and in “6 inch“ we witness emptiness.

“Now you wanna say you sorry?…”

“Now you wanna call me crying?…”

“Now you gotta see me wilding…”

“Now I’m the one that’s lying…”

“And I don’t feel bad about it”

… “I ain’t thinking bout you…”

The anger takes over to the point of erasing most of the emotions. You feel numb and indifferent to the person. You don’t care what you do that may affect them. This part is about you. It honours no one but you. 

I often tell people that one way you can tell you’re absolutely over someone, is that, when you see them, think about them or hear about them, you feel nothing.  Like Taylor Swift said on Lover “… It isn’t love it isn’t hate… it’s just indifference…”.

You see them and you legit can’t find a single part of yourself that relates to that person’s existence. You start to ask yourself what on earth you ever saw in them. That’s because the you that you are now, would never give a person like that the time of day. You’re healing.  

Be it seeing them online, by word of mouth, whatever, - you just can’t invoke an ounce of relation towards them within yourself. Not in a good or bad way. You just don’t care lol. You realise that they are impermanence personified and you naturally choose to let them go. It is what it is.

No matter how hard they try to guilt trip you and make you feel bad for choosing yourself, they just naturally don’t have that impact on you anymore. On one hand, you’re clearly over them, but on another hand, you’re moving towards a dangerous and addictive territory - emptiness. 

Nowadays it is sponsored by Ashwagandha, but it actually naturally comes to most people who know what I’m talking about. 

“…She grinds from Monday to Friday

Works from Friday to Sunday

She gon' slang

She too smart to crave material things

She pushing herself day and night…”  

This is a focused Queen. She is armed and dangerous with purpose that surrounds no one but her. At this point, you’re just numb. Focusing on work, school, your kids etc. 

Emptiness is so addictive cause it feels so peaceful. You’re on autopilot. You don’t feel anything. You switch your humanity off. Apparently that’s possible. 

Thankfully due to your emotional intelligence, you linger there, but it doesn’t last forever.  At the back of your mind is the thought that you kinda dread the most … 

“You always come back to me. 

Come back, came back...” 

You dread planning what you’re gonna do, or better yet, how you’re gonna do it. You start to wonder if you're actually healing or if his inevitable return will just throw everything that you've worked on so far out the window. 

I imagine that she was thinking that may be she was the problem. I know what that feels like. My dad raised me to be a feminist because he himself is a feminist. 

Bey was raised to believe and take part in “The social, political and economic equality of the sexes”. Same girl, same. 

Maybe I’m the problem because I was raised to have a kind of intelligence that "only" occurs in male children and is only acceptable by society if coming from males. 

I have had almost zero luck finding a man with more masculine energy than me when the occasion calls. Unfortunately for a lot of people, I am my father's daughter.

“My daddy warned me about men like you…”

… “with his right hand on his rifle, he swore it on a Bible”

“…My daddy said shoot…”

“Oh! My daddy said shoot!...” 

You start to wonder if your atypical raising was the beginning of your downfall. You start to wonder if you somehow caused this man to treat you this way and if maybe you can just try to not be like that somehow and that should stop him from doing all this to you.

You look back at all your childhood trauma and attachment issues and wonder if there's something you haven't healed or realised that you have to heal. You look under every scatter on every couch and you find nothing.

Lol, your daddy was right. Your momma was right. Shoot, baby girl. Shoot. No one has ever lost anything by self-defence. Even the law knows it. 

Beyonce said, “my daddy was on to something”. So she stops all that bargaining in its tracks. She gains reign of her emotions and refuses to lose focus.

 You WILL get shot! As you mthfxckng should! Goofy ass. 

“We built sandcastles 

That washed away

I made you cry when I walked away 

And although I promised

That I couldn’t stay, baby

Every promise don’t work out that way”

Have you ever felt your heart break so deeply and so unfairly such that you understand that it is breaking but you just can't understand why?

Like, I met this person, they did me dirty and now I’m done and I’m moving on but it still hurts so bad like someone gave cupid a gun and his first move was to point it at me? And he haunts me still?

Have you ever known your predicament, understood it mentally but your heart just couldn’t? Who could blame it? Poor thing has no neurons. Poor thing has no ganglia. Just gets affected by and is forced to respond to hormone after hormone. To environmental factor after environmental factor. 

When you know what’s wrong and even have a game plan on how to move on, it hurts even more. I think most times the heart feels betrayed by the mind. Like, how could you just move on without me lol. You know I get you but I don’t understand these things as well as you do 😐 give me a chance to catch up while you explain this to me again for the umpteenth time. I don’t get it. Why are we going? Where are we going? What do you mean this is the last time? 🤒 Of what? Did I do something wrong? We’re supposed to be a team. 

“Show me your scars 

And I won’t walk away”

You try to teach your heart that it’s not okay to let yourself be stomped over and over again. You try to teach it that, accepting that something happened doesn’t mean to entertain it anymore. You start to try and teach your heart that forgiveness doesn’t mean reconnection. 

You start on the journey of forgiving yourself for letting that happen to you and your precious heart. Forgiving them was easy in comparison to forgiving yourself. No one talks about the self-resentment that comes with realising that if you had followed your intuition from the start, you wouldn't be in a mess.

It’s the longest road. It takes forever but for the first time you have hope that you really will eventually get there. You tell your heart that you do trust it, but are asking for control. You’re asking to be seen in control, not to be lent an audience and then considered. It’s time to unite yourself. It’s time to move… “Forward”. 

“It’s time to listen

It’s time to fight

…Forward.”

Freedom doubles as both a political statement and a representation of hope in the healing stages of grief. 

You eventually get up one day with a renewed sense of self, sense of existence and sense of feeling in general ✨

Your spark comes back and this new excitement doesn’t feel like a distraction from anything. It is real. The elements celebrate with you too. The wind wails, you notice the sunshine for the first time in a while and the sky joins you in tears of happiness. You’re free from it all.

It exists - and you exist too - just independent of it. You’ve met hope in the form of pure detachment. 

“Lord forgive me, I've been running

Running blind in truth

I'ma rain, I'ma rain on this bitter love

...I’m telling these tears, go and fall away…”

“Freedom, cut me loose

…I break chains all by myself

Won't let my freedom rot in hell

…I’ma keep running

'Cause a winner don't quit on themselves

…I’ma riot, I'ma riot through your borders

Call me bulletproof” 

She dances in the rain. She finally sees a true path forward. She even invites a worthy King (Kendrick) to join her. It is here that we realise that she has forgiven Jay, and that her freedom is coming from letting go of the situation ✨ 

We've seen her bare her soul and suffer through this tragedy. She's earned her stripes. Choosing her highest form of self, she has chosen to walk in the freedom of acceptance. She has managed to conjure up and genuinely hopes to practice forgiveness ✨ 

“Found the truth beneath your lies…”

“…True love never has to hide…”

“…Trade your broken wings for mine….”

“I’ve seen you scars and kissed your crime..”

It’s clearly evident that forgiving and living with a partner’s infidelity may be a lot of people’s forte. The amount of work that it must take to get there, is beyond my own understanding. I admire those that genuinely get up from this and work out a genuine way forward. Whatever the reason may be. I don't know if it comes from a place of love or bravery or some supernatural force. 

“So many people I know and they just trine touch ya…”

She clearly realises that her man has no self control and that he may be for everybody. She also accepts that she can live with this. I remember splitting up with a golden retriever man of 3+ years because he really had no understanding of why this was problematic lol. 

“Our love was stronger than your pride…”

I'm happy that they could overcome that too. I have split with a partner of over a year for this reason. Why must anyone's pride be a factor in a relationship? Everyone has ego and pride, but how often do we let it get in the way of anything? We actively choose humility. 

“They say true love is the greatest weapon…

To win the war caused by pain

… boy nothing real can be threatened

True love breathes salvation into me…”

"...Oh I've missed you my love..."

To each his own, and God for us all.

In the final act of your tragedy, you meet a gorgeous version of yourself that just wants to celebrate you. You came out on the other side stronger and better. Maybe the conclusion is you continuously becoming your best self and realising that you may actually be the love of your life.

"I see it, I want it, I stunt yellow-bone it

I dream it, I work hard, I grind 'til I own it

I twirl on them haters, albino alligators

El Camino with the seat low, sippin' Cuervo with no chaser (chaser)

Sometimes I go off (I go off), I go hard (I go hard)

Get what's mine (take what's mine), I'm a star (I'm a star)

'Cause I slay (slay), I slay 

We gon' slay (slay), gon' slay (okay), 

...Okay, ladies, now let's get in formation ('cause I slay)

Prove to me you got some coordination ('cause I slay)

Slay trick, or you get eliminated (I slay)..."

Everything that happened was leading to this happy girl. She dances, she celebrates other women, she speaks big about herself. She manifests gold. Her braids dance as if they are an extension of her. She knows her power. She walks in her purpose. You are whole. You are healed.