Anxiety as Ancestor
Doechii, Anxiety, and the Art of Black Femme Survival
Four years before Doechii won her Grammy, she dropped Anxiety on YouTube as part of her “COVEN MUSIC” series. It was a raw, unpolished manifesto for Black femmes who knew what it meant to hold fire in our throats and call it song.
Back then, it was just us: the girlies in the coven, sitting at the foot of Doechii’s bed, looping her videos around ourselves like hula hoops, and resonating deeply her snarled “Somebody’s watchin’ me.” We didn’t know she’d soon become the third woman in history to win Best Rap Album. We just knew the song felt like a hand reaching through the screen, saying: Here’s the water. Drink.
But in March 2025, when she finally released Anxiety on streaming platforms, the world finally noticed what we’d known all along—that survival is a song you hum long before it becomes an anthem.
Years before Anxiety flooded TikTok, I learned what it meant to spill. At 19, I was building a fledgling career selling event services, my passion and hustle colliding with a world that demanded more than I felt ready to give. When a client asked to put me on retainer, instead of pride, I felt the walls close in. My phone burned cold against my palm as I Googled what is a retainer?—my breath shallow, my mind a storm of shouldn’t you know this already? When Google came back to me with links to dentists in my area, I lost it.
Overwhelmed, I deleted my website. Erased my socials. Let the desert take what I couldn’t carry.
water sign woman
the woman who feels everything
sits in her new house
waiting for someone to come
who knows how to carry water
without spilling
- Lucille CliftonDoechii—born Jaylah Ji’mya Hickmon—was 21 when she uploaded “I got fired thank God” to YouTube in January 2020. In the grainy video, she smirks at the camera, her voice defiant: “So, I got fired today. I don’t give a f–k, to be honest.” The clip, which later went viral after her 2025 Grammy win, is a masterclass in Black femme audacity. While the world tried to tell her she was fired from minimum wage work, Doechii saw a future rap icon plotting her next move: “I’m gonna ask studios if they have any internships open.”
But, to me, Anxiety was the real baptism. Released months after her firing, the song throbbed with the kind of honesty that scalds. Over a sample of Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know (an admitted bop about a white man’s heartbreak, refashioned into a Black femme roar), Doechii mapped the anatomy of being watched: “Anxiety, keep on tryin’ me / Somebody’s watchin’ me.” For four years, it lived on YouTube, a well for the coven. We returned to it like daughters to a mother’s kitchen, ladling its lyrics into our own thirst, and racking up millions of views.
the desert & the oasis
Clifton’s poem asks: who knows why the desert is sprinkled with salt?
The answer is in Doechii’s second verse:
“Court order from Florid-er / What’s in that clear blue water? / Negro run from popo / That blue light and that rojo.”
Salt is what’s left when water dries up. When the state drains your reservoirs, snatches your labor, your joy, your voice, it leaves you crystalline and cracked. But Doechii, a Tampa-born daughter of Florida’s swelter, doesn’t just carry water; she weaponizes it. That “clear blue water” is the same Gulf Coast brine that birthed red tide algae blooms and anti-Black laws, masking toxicity beneath its shimmer. “Rojo,” blood spilled under blue sirens, becomes her offering: survival as ancestral ritual.
I see Anxiety as a flood. She let it pool in the desert of her early career, let it gather moss and meaning, let it become a mirror for every Black femme who’d ever choked on the word “tomorrow.”
When the song finally hit streaming in 2025, it felt like a full circle moment for me. The same fans who’d clung to its YouTube version resurrected it on TikTok, stitching their own anxieties into its DNA. The algorithm, that modern-day overseer, had no choice but to bow.
When Doechii won Best Rap Album in 2025 for Alligator Bites Never Heal, and lifted that trophy, she also lifted Clifton’s water pitcher. In that silent gesture, she said, without uttering a word: we’ve been carrying this all along. She became the third woman in history (and the first Black queer woman, despite the fact that Janelle Monae BEEN OUT HERE)1 to claim that award, a statistic that feels less like progress and more like a dare. Try to ignore us now.
But Anxiety wasn’t about Grammy’s. It was about the four years before that. It was about the girl in Florida, the coven online, the salt and the spillage. It was about the truth that Clifton knew: the woman who carries water is never waiting for someone else. She’s already in the desert, already drinking, already free.
listen to Blackwomen
Doechii was 21 when she released Anxiety in 2019. I was 28, writing essays about bodies and silence. Clifton was 63 when she published “water sign woman” in 2000, her voice steady as a river. Three women, three generations all carrying water in our own ways.
I used to think the person Clifton was waiting for, the one who knew how to carry water without spilling, was someone else. Someone older, wiser, more assured. But Doechii, who happens to be younger than me, taught me otherwise. She taught me that the person we’re waiting for is ourselves. That every woman, every femme, every person who has ever felt the weight of a pitcher in their hands is already carrying it. Already spilling. Already surviving.
they say to the feel things woman
that little she dreams is possible,
that there is only so much
joy to go around, only so much
water. there are no questions
for this, no arguments. she has
to forget to remember the edge
of the sea, they say,
to forget how to swim to the edge, she has
to forget how to feel. the woman
who feels everything sits in her
new house retaining the secret
the desert knew when it walked
up from the ocean, the desert,
so beautiful in her eyes;
water will come again if you can wait for it.
she feels what the desert feels.
she waits.
- Lucille Clifton
I write this essay the way Doechii writes songs: with the understanding that every word is a rebellion against silence, that to spill is to survive, and that anxiety, like water, is shapeless until we give it a vessel.
So let it flood. Let it drench the desert. Let it be the thing that carries us, finally, home.
Love y’all. Mean it. If you love me back, Buy Me A Book!
As I wrote in Tip on the Tightrope, Black femmes like Janelle Monáe have spent decades balancing vulnerability and self-preservation on a high wire strung between industry expectations and ancestral truth. Monáe, a visionary force in music and a trailblazer for Black queer artistry, who redefined modern music with Dirty Computer has been nominated for 8 Grammy Awards but has yet to win. This teaches us that awards are not the measure of our magic.
That essay cracked my ribs open in the best way—like a communion, like a knowing hand pressed to the small of my back saying, I see you, I’ve seen you, I see all of us. The way you give language to anxiety, not as enemy but as elder, not as burden but as witness, feels like gospel we’ve been needing.
The way you write —It hums. It pulses like a heartbeat too fast in the chest, like a whisper too holy to ignore. Every line holds a soft rebellion, a reclamation of the self inside the storm. I love how you hold history in the palm of your hand, tracing the ways survival is inherited, how worry is not just a weight but a warning, a wisdom passed down through bone and blood. There is something so true in what you’re saying: that our anxieties, our fears, our hypervigilance are not signs of failure but proof of love. Proof of all the people who made it, who had to make it, who needed us to make it, too.
And the care!!! The way you care for yourself, for your ancestors, for your readers —It’s tender and urgent. A call and response with the parts of us that have been waiting to be named. You remind us that healing doesn’t mean erasure, that we don’t have to abandon the parts of us that kept us safe. You don’t just write about anxiety—you hold it close, make space for it at the table, ask it what it needs. That kind of tenderness is a revolution.
I read this and felt less alone. I read this and felt my own heart unclench just a little, just enough. Thank you for this offering, for this mirror, for this hymn to all of us who have ever carried too much and called it our own.
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
“That every woman, every femme, every person who has ever felt the weight of a pitcher in their hands is already carrying it. Already spilling. Already surviving.” So much yes!