In September 2016, I was 24 years old fresh out of college and living in Los Angeles, working as an art consultant for a fine-art photographer. I had my own place, a new job and the confidence of a young woman who thought she was grown. In hindsight, I didn’t know anything. I was ready for the world but in private, I was at war with myself.

A Seat at the Table was a container for my rage.

I’m the daughter of a life-long church musician, so I learned early to listen closely. I was raised on gospel, oldies, hip-hop and, most importantly, R&B. Lyrics mattered. Feeling mattered. But there is music you can hear and feel but still not understand. Some music requires a little more life from you.

I knew Solange’s music, her history, and the expression of her art, but A Seat at the Table was the first time I understood Solange, the artist. And at 24, I gravitated toward the parts of it that sounded most like what I was already carrying.

At this time, I was working at that fine-art photography company as the only Black woman, getting my first dose of workplace microaggressions and learning how much anger you could carry while still being expected to show up with a smile. That summer in 2016, I watched Alton Sterling being killed by police in Baton Rouge on Twitter. The next day, I watched as Philando Castile was fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop in Minnesota.

I was so angry. And still, I had to go to work.

I remember putting on my headphones and packing prints into sleeves, carrying feelings I was just beginning to have language for. Then, on September 30, 2016, Solange gave me somewhere to put them.

I heard “Weary” and felt held. I felt the anger moving underneath “Mad” featuring Lil Wayne. Hearing my inner world reflected back to me with that much tenderness almost felt scary. Solange wasn’t asking me to get over what I was feeling or to feel something else. She was making room for it.

Six weeks after A Seat at The Table dropped, Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election.

I remember going into that office the morning after Election Day. Surrounded by liberal white women and gay white men, in the blue state of California, trying to process “how could this happen?” There was shock in the room but I did not share it in quite the same way my colleagues did. As a Black woman, I had spent my life knowing what America says it is and what America is capable of. Those are two completely different things. But sitting in that office, on that day, I knew that my grief came from a place much deeper than theirs.

I knew that it could.

And I now had a new album for that grief.

When I first heard A Seat, it sounded like an album about being a Black woman in America. Now, after a decade of living through heartbreak, falling in love, grieving the death of loved ones, leaving multiple jobs and doing the work of putting myself back together, the album sounds more like a set of instructions. Like an emotional and philosophical blueprint for how to navigate pain and protect your spirit while moving through the world.

Not instructions for avoiding pain. Instructions for remaining me while moving through it.

It’s not simply that I finally understand Solange’s work. A Seat at the Table and I have been traveling together for 10 years. Some things about this work I understood and processed immediately, like the sonic relief of the instrumentation. But other things required living.

“Cranes in the Sky” may be the clearest example.

In a 2017 conversation, Solange revealed that she had written the song eight years earlier, separate from the rest of the album. She was coming out of her relationship with her son’s father and trying to understand who she was outside of being a wife and mother. She described the self-doubt and emptiness of that period as something familiar to women in their twenties—the feeling that no matter what you do, nothing quite fills the void.

She was roughly 22 when the songwriting process began.

Back then, I heard Solange list all of the ways we try to make pain disappear. In the last 10 years, I tried them. Exhausting every distraction before realizing the thing I was running from would still be waiting when I stopped.

That may be the sweetest and hardest lesson of coming of age. That sometimes you have to go through it to get through it. And thankfully, we can do it with the medium of music coloring the journey along the way.

This medium is generational, too. My grandmother was not always my grandmother. She was my age in 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act became law, as Black Americans were still fighting to freely exercise their right to vote. At the time, Nina Simone was singing to the moment. My mother gave birth to me at 33 in 1992 after America watched the beating of Rodney King, then watched a jury acquit the officers charged in his beating. She had “Optimistic” by Sounds of Blackness. And now there is me, 34 in 2026, realizing that they once stood where I stand now: women still becoming themselves while carrying whatever the world had placed at their feet.

Black women have always had something to be weary about.

But that is also another thing I hear differently in A Seat at the Table now.

Black people don’t only survive through resistance. We survive through pleasure. Beauty. Music. Style. Laughter. Family. Memory. Through the ability to make something beautiful for one another even though the world outside of it is ugly.

And there is so much beauty here.

The funk of “Junie.” The intimacy of “Cranes in the Sky.” The bounce and swag of “F.U.B.U.” The softness of “Borderline (An Ode to Self Care).” There are horns and harmonies, family stories and jokes, hair and bodies and movement. The album is as interested in the inner world of Black people as it is in our universal experience.

Long before “protect your peace” became podcast clips, before boundaries became content and self-care became something that could be packaged, marketed and sold back to us, Solange’s masterpiece was talking about preservation.

She didn’t invent those ideas. Black women have practiced forms of self-preservation for generations. But she gave a generation of us (millennials) a musical vocabulary for them.

And she built that vocabulary with great intention.

On A Seat at the Table, Blackness was in the architecture.

Solange wrote, arranged and co-produced every song on the album and executive-produced it alongside Raphael Saadiq. Tweet’s voice appears on “Weary,” “Mad” and “F.U.B.U.” Her mother speaks. Her father speaks. Master P becomes a recurring narrator.

Every person invited to this table meant something.

Solange shared that Master P represented empowerment and independence to her: someone invested in Black people, Black community and Black storytelling. She connected that ethos to the way she and Beyoncé were raised—to build their own platforms and spaces when those spaces weren’t available to them.

Suddenly the album’s title feels even bigger.

A Seat at the Table wasn’t simply about demanding entry. It was about ownership. Who builds the room? Who gets to speak inside it? Who owns the story told there?

And Solange’s vision expanded beyond the record. Her work moves fluidly between sound, film, movement, fashion, and design.

That’s what makes “visionary” feel like the right word for her.

With this album she was constructing an entire language around the inner world of Blackness and asking us to experience it with our ears, our eyes and our bodies.

And she was doing all of this while learning to claim her own authorship.

Solange admitted she had struggled even to say aloud that she wrote every lyric on the album because of how difficult it can be for women to openly claim their accomplishments. The record had taken three years to make. She was playing keyboards and drums, and producing vocals and co-producing tracks, learning to fill the spaces in the music that she felt no one else could fill for her.

That, too, is preservation.

Knowing what is yours and being willing to say so.

Ten years ago, I needed A Seat at the Table because I was a 24-year-old Black woman beginning to understand what the world would ask me to carry. And I was trying to create while carrying it all.

At 34, I need it differently.

I know now that preservation sometimes means rest. Sometimes it means leaving. Many times it means allowing yourself to be angry without immediately expressing it outwardly. Sometimes it means grieving people you thought would be here longer or setting a boundary. Preservation can also look like making something beautiful. Other times it means sitting still long enough to finally feel the thing you’ve spent years trying to outrun.

At 24, I thought Solange had made an album I understood. Songs communicating what I was feeling at the time.

At 34, I realize she made an album I would grow with.

And maybe that is why A Seat at the Table still feels so alive 10 years later. It never promised Black women that the world would become easier to carry. It reminded us that we were allowed to put some of it down.

To rise. To be weary. To be soft. To be mad. To be joyful. To protect what is ours. To create beauty anyway.

And, above all, to belong to ourselves.

Read the original article on Essence.