Sis, Am I Trippin'? — What Carrie Bradshaw Never Told Us

By Keaidy Bennett | Best-Selling Author and founder of LexxiKhan Presents Publishing.

I used to wonder: can you love someone else's chaos so completely that it finally teaches you to love your own?

Most of us had a Carrie era. Whether we admit it or not. We watched her navigate Manhattan in shoes that cost more than rent and somehow made it look like a personality. We took notes. We asked her questions. We let her sit at that window with a cigarette and a laptop and convince us that obsessing over the wrong man was actually just being passionate. She made chaos look like a love language. And for a lot of us, it felt like finally, someone was telling our story. But for me? It was never just a show.

Carrie was the soundtrack to a blog I built on the audacity of believing my mess was worth documenting. I gave life, love, and career advice, from the self-proclaimed expert in what not to do. I went on dates and reported back. I processed in public. I made it look like content. What it really was, was a girl who hadn't yet learned the difference between being chosen and being seen, so I went looking...everywhere I could think to look.

And honey, I looked. Men of every religion, every tax bracket, every zip code. Wealthy ones, broke ones, professionals, athletes. I even dated someone whose story — no lie — eventually made it to your television screen. I dated a man and his wife. And every time something didn't work out with someone I had managed to see perfectly, I convinced myself the problem was me. Certainly, it was what I was wanting, what I was asking for, or how much of myself I was showing up with.

Because we all have a Big...don't act like you don't. There is a man, or there was a man, who if he called you right now, your whole nervous system would betray every boundary you've set since the last time you let him in. Big didn't mask for anyone, and certainly not for Carrie. He didn't have to. He would sit across from her at dinner and openly discuss the women he was considering marrying, the socialites, the ones who moved in circles that Carrie was still auditioning for, while she smiled later called emergency meetings with her best friends just to survive the conversation. He never went out of his way to be romantic. He ever made a grand gesture. When he left her standing at the altar in a dress she'd built a whole damn dream around, his response wasn't remorse — it was borrowed words. Old love poems from men who hadn't even written them for their own wives, repurposed and emailed to a woman he'd just humiliated in front of everyone she loved. He literally just recycled 'romance' from men who also understood the power of making a woman feel chosen just enough to stay confused.

It only took decades of being the Carrie in my friend groups to understand that there is a difference between a man who chooses you and a man who has worked his way so deeply into your emotional wiring, your desires, your sense of worth, your vision of what your life was supposed to look like, that by the time you realize what's happened, you couldn't unchoose him even if you wanted to. And it's not because you're weak. He just happened to arrive before you knew yourself well enough to protect the woman you're becoming. And somewhere in the process, without you even noticing, the dreams you had before him started to look smaller. The things you genuinely wanted started to feel like too much to ask for. And you started building your idea of a happy ending around a man who was never once building his around you.

That's what happens when we build our entire narrative around one person. They don't even have to be present anymore to still be the main character in your story. And Carrie never fully escaped that. Even after the altar. Even after the apartment. Even after she'd broken girl code, lost friendships, and rewritten her own definition of love so many times it no longer resembled anything she'd once wanted for herself. That man died and still had Carrie pressing and stressing. From the great beyond? No.

That is the cost of a story that was never written with you in mind.

And we have all paid it in some form. We take our thinking caps off and some of us haven't seen them since. We convince ourselves that the cost of love is supposed to feel this heavy. What we don't realize is that the invoice was never just about love; it includes our peace, our time, our presence, our nervous system, our mental health, our physical health, our cortisol levels, our blood pressure, our long term cognitive function after spending years operating in fight or flight. And then, when we've already paid all of that, it comes for the relationships that were holding us together while we were falling apart. The people who loved us the loudest, who knew us the deepest, who were anchoring us to ourselves without us even realizing it. One day they leave and we can't be angry about it. There is only so long you can stand witness to someone you love self harming out loud, watching them choose the thing that's breaking them, again and again, before the watching itself starts to leave a mark on you too.

The cycle rarely changes the cast. It just changes the setting and supporting actors. A different name, a different city, a different situation that somehow arrives at the same conclusion, and we keep showing up anyway, expecting a different ending. There is a word for doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results. Most of us know what that word is...not many of us are willing to apply it to ourselves.

I wasn't drawn to the chaos because I was broken. I was drawn to it because it was familiar. And before I could stop choosing it in someone else, I had to get honest about how much I was still choosing it in myself. That's the part the retreats don't put on the brochure. Healing...real healing, isn't arriving at a better version of yourself. It's making peace with every version that had to exist to get you here. The soft ones and the sharp ones. The ones who knew exactly what they were doing and the ones who absolutely did not. At any moment I could change this story. I could change the characters, the plot, and the ending. I am the author. I always have been. I just forgot for a little while.

And so I'm back. Sitting at my own version of that window, with something in hand, redefining a voice I set down somewhere between survival mode and motherhood and everything in between. And in refinding that voice, I'm having to reintroduce myself, not to you...but to me. Because the woman coming back to this space isn't the same one who left it, and she deserves to be introduced properly.

So here she is.

I am probably the warmest person you will ever encounter. I will make you feel so safe, so seen, so held...that you will find yourself telling me things you swore you'd take to your grave. And because of that, I have built some of the most profound bonds with strangers; friendships that became family, love stories that became lessons, and situationships that, God bless them, became great material. The gift of making people feel safe has been the greatest thing I have ever been given. It has also been the thing I have had to learn, slowly and sometimes painfully, how to protect. Because I used to pour, and pour, and pour, convincing myself that love was endless so the giving should be too. I would make myself smaller, more accessible, easier to say yes to; and then wonder why I felt invisible standing in the middle of a room I had filled for everyone else. I was so busy tending to other people's gardens that mine grew wild in my absence.

But I'm back now. And this time I'm not just writing, I'm building a space for the conversations most people are too comfortable to start. I'm calling it what it is; Sis, Am I Trippin'? And if you're already asking yourself that question then you're exactly who this is for. The last time I brought readers from all over the world into one place, I was figuring it out. I didn't have it all mapped out; honestly, I still don't. Either way we're doing it again; only this time I know more about who I am, what I'm building, and why it has to exist. And I'm not just inviting you to read, I'm inviting you to change with me in the process.

Moral of the story...and there is always one.

We all have a desk. We all have a window. And outside of it, if we're willing to look up long enough, there is a life that has been waiting patiently while we were busy trying to fit ourselves into stories that were never written with us in mind. What we want has always wanted us back. The only thing that ever stood between us and it was us, the version of us that was still waiting on someone else to confirm what we should have known all along.

Healing is not the erasure of who you were. It is the full acceptance of everything you survived to get here. The parts of you that make people uncomfortable, the bigness, the boldness, the refusal to shrink quietly, were never the problem. They were your protection. And the moment you stop apologizing for them is the moment the cycle has to find someone else to play with.

So to answer the question I walked in here with — yes. You can love someone else's chaos so completely that it finally teaches you to love your own. I'm living proof. I just had to survive it first.

Sis, you're not trippin'. We're just finally learning how to take accountability.

Have something to add to the convo? Talk about it in the comments below.

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Keaidy Bennett is the founder of LKP Media Group, Inc. and the voice behind LexxiKhan Presents Publishing, a thirteen-year-old independent house with over 150 bestsellers and a roster of voices that refuse to be ignored. A poet, ghostwriter, and unapologetic advocate, she is the creator of The Book Trap and the mind behind Sis, Am I Trippin'? She is currently raising funds to independently produce an original series that will create over twenty jobs for creatives in Central Florida and expand acting opportunities for Afro-Latino representation in film and media. She writes from Longwood, Florida — and she is just getting started.