HeyJaredStephanie Boardman
A little corner for everyday thoughts, small poems, and spoken-word reflections. Just life as it is, in all its ordinary, relatable moments.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 8
- Latest publication
- Sep 10, 2026
- Audience
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 5, 2026
Latest issues
You’re Not What You’ve Been Through (opens the original)
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I want to hold your hand when I say this.Everything’s going to be okay.I know those words can sound almost too simple when the past is still sitting heavy in your chest. I know some mornings you wake up and the weight of what you’ve carried feels louder than any hope you’re trying to hold onto. Some nights the old stories replay so clearly that it feels like you’re still living inside them. The past has a truly terrible sense of timing. But I need you to hear me anyway, not as a pep talk, not as
You Are Very Good at Being Someone Else (opens the original)
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You have perfected the careful smile, the well timed laugh, the opinion gently sanded until it sits safely in the middle of any room. You move through conversations like a professional, adjusting the volume of your real self so no one has to deal with the full version. The strange part is how few of the people you do this for will still be thinking about you by Thursday.It is a quiet and habitual form of deceit. The steady shaping of behaviour so that approval arrives, or at least disapproval st
What was I complaining about again? (opens the original)
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I saw her online. A young woman standing in her room, medical tubing visible against her chest, speaking with a smile that never once faltered. She described how her pelvic floor had collapsed and released her organs. They had come out, one after another. For a time it had been a relentless cycle of organs falling and surgeries stacking back to back simply to put them back in. Eventually some of those organs had to be removed altogether. She is essentially living on life support, machines and me
The Fire She Called Mother (opens the original)
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Some people hate pepper simply because it is hot and they cannot stand the burn. For the child at the centre of this story, the reason ran much deeper than any fleeting discomfort at the dinner table. It was a hate born in fire and betrayal, seared into memory on a quiet evening in Mafoluku, Lagos State, when the very person meant to shield her instead became the source of her deepest wound.The evening began like so many others. The compound lay wrapped in a deceptive calm as the sun slipped bel
The River Still Flows (opens the original)
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In the village of Ndibe the river curved through the land the way a python rests after feeding, slow and heavy with memory. The people there measured time by the farming seasons and the festivals that marked them. When the first rains softened the earth, men cleared their yam mounds. When the new yams were ready, the whole village gathered to thank the earth and the ancestors who still walked among them in the dust of evening. Kola nuts were broken before every important conversation. The white
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