Dr. Nicole Avant carries titles familiar to many women: mother, sister, daughter, caretaker, provider, business owner, employee, teacher, professor. Now, at age 42, she’s learning to define herself outside these roles. In our recent conversation, Nicole shared how she’s taking the time now to find and love herself. She’s breaking free from the confines of productivity, structural inequality, and capitalism to build a life centered on joy – and she wants more women to do the same.

Interview by Michaela Rawsthorn. Photography by Chelsie Walter.

Tell us about yourself.

My first response is to always go to work. So, I’m going to try to answer this away from productivity and instead be about me. I’m awkward. I’m goofy. I think I’m funny. I’m very family-oriented, but I am trying to develop an identity outside of the family, outside of being a mom, sister, all those things. So, I’m 42 but I am really just learning so much about myself in the midst of this pandemic. I feel like I’m an adolescent for the second time.

Tell us more about your background.

I grew up in resource-deficient neighborhoods of Chicago. I remember looking through home catalogs visualizing homes I wanted to live in. I would circle them, and I was like, this is a home I'm going to get when I get older. These homes were modern, large, and looked like they had access to amenities such as vibrant parks, pools, and things that I just did not have access to. Someone said to me in high school, ‘The more you learn, the more you earn.’ That stuck with me.

People told me I was smart. And so I'm like, okay, well education will be how I access these well-funded neighborhoods. I was at the top of my high school class, graduating with more than a 4.0 GPA, but when I got to college, I had to take remedial classes. That was eye-opening. Even as someone who did well in school, my school just didn’t have the same access to high-quality education that other public schools had. We did puzzles in French class. We didn’t have a Geometry teacher for the first half of the year. We did not even take the required constitution test, but somehow we all passed. I thought I was getting over school. But I have come to realize these systems were getting over on me.

In college, I had to study four hours a night because I was just so behind, even though I graduated eighth in my class. I was also in a predominantly white space. I felt like I didn't really belong. Every day, I felt like an administrator was going to tap me on my shoulder to let me know I shouldn’t be there.

I pursued my Doctor of Pharmacy from the University of Illinois at Chicago, another predominantly white institution. And then, after that, I pursued two residencies at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. Again, I was the only Black resident. Looking back, those experiences were challenging. I was experiencing gender and racial microaggressions at institutions not built or designed for me. I did not have that language at that time, so I would internalize negative experiences to mean I was not enough. Wasn’t smart enough. Wasn't likable enough. I felt like an imposter a lot of times and assumed something was wrong with me.

All of these experiences shaped the work I do and how I view the world. I'm at a place where I'm realizing I am enough, and I need to deconstruct these harmful messages I have learned from these systems of power.

Can you talk more about your consulting work?

I am a licensed and board-certified pharmacist. I came to Cincinnati to be a clinical assistant professor and chief diversity officer for the University of Cincinnati (UC) College of Pharmacy. People were really excited about a lot of the courses I taught, including racial and ethnic health disparities and inclusive leadership in health. They liked what I was teaching and how I was teaching it. A lot of colleagues then linked me to organizations to do little snippets of my courses.

I started doing it for free. Then people were like, “You got to start charging.” So, I started charging a little something. That I thought was fair. Someone pulled me aside and was like, “Okay, your prices are way too low.” I thought then that I might be able to build this into a business. That’s what I did [Editor’s note: Nicole is the Founder and Owner of Avant Consulting Group].

I'm focusing on liberation through engaging in pleasure and rejecting any internalized ideologies that I am disposable, expendable and should suffer.

We first started in health care organizations. Structural inequities such as slavery and redlining and how they impact the maldistribution of the social determinants of health. I wanted health systems to understand that what impacts health lies outside of the clinical encounter, beyond personal choices and biology. Health is significantly determined by larger systems such as education, transportation, and housing. I want health systems to use their financial, human, and social capital power to craft interventions that enhance access to stable economies, high-quality education, and robust housing investments to improve the health of Black patients and patients of color.

After George Floyd was murdered, our work opened up to a lot of different organizations outside of healthcare. They reached out to me because they had an awakening of sorts. So, we have been working with tech and software companies to dismantle inequities within the workplace and with broader society.

Did your approach or messaging change when these new organizations started reaching out?

One thing I changed was offering free workshops so people can see the type of work we do.

People get a little anxious and nervous about these conversations. But we don’t use shame or guilt as part of our facilitation style. We’re trying to hold space so people can talk about the things they really want to talk about but are afraid to talk about. So, while we were getting all these emails from all these organizations, there was still hesitation. People were afraid to name racism and privilege at work.

We use shared vulnerability in our workshops. I talk about my unearned privileges as a cis-woman. I talk about how I’ve messed up by misgendering people or about how I am learning so much more about the construction of gender in a way that I wouldn’t if I hadn’t acknowledged my privilege. I know what it feels like to worry that you are going to say something wrong. There is so much nuance involved in trying to get people to be vulnerable and have these hard conversations. It’s a lot of work, and you never know what the energy in the room is going to be. But we cultivate a space where people can come together to have conversations. The other change we’ve made is to introduce new topics that people don’t usually think about as diversity topics.

Most people think diversity and inclusion conversations are just about racism. But it’s all the -isms: classism, queer antagonism, fat antagonism, and much more. We recently created a workshop on fat antagonism to get people to incorporate body diversity. We are also creating conversations related to treating children with dignity for our clients that interact with youth populations. People often forget that kids are humans and deserve to be treated with tenderness, care, compassion, and kindness. There are so many conversations of discipline, domination, and “staying in a child’s place,” and not enough about how to regulate our own emotions, eradicate the need to dominate others, and how even childism is similar and related to racism and other systems of power.

Additionally, we are creating an arm of Avant Group, Black Joy Collective, to provide gathering and organizing spaces for relaxation, joy, pleasure, and ease. So much of my work has involved helping predominately white organizations craft interventions to help Black people and people of color access safety, dignity, and belonging. I want to pivot as I strongly desire to live in communities of care to reduce stress and engage in radical self-acceptance and love despite all of the harmful narratives Black people have internalized from systems of oppression.

What are you passionate about?

My passions continue to evolve. Before the pandemic, I would have probably named something related to work as most of my adult life has been about school and work. Now, I am really trying to get away from productivity as my primary focus and how I see and value myself. Productivity has framed my life because I have been laser-focused on living in robust and safe neighborhoods.

Outside of work, I have been mommying since 18. Mommying is hard now that our villages have been destroyed. I remember having my four-month-old baby, who I transported on the city bus to daycare; it was a two-hour ordeal to get him there and then to get myself back to campus to attend classes and spend another two hours to pick him up and get back home. On grocery days and days with doctor visits, it would be even more difficult. Luckily, I had a father who gifted me his brand new car to remove an obstacle to achieving my vision.

I have been grinding almost my entire life. I'm in my forties now, and I'm like, do I even know myself? Do I know who I am, what I enjoy, and what I like independent of work and family?

I had been in a relationship with my husband for 20 something years. And then, at 40, I felt a strong urge to explore my sexuality. I had never made the time to explore as I was laser-focused on school, career, and my family. Sexuality is the kind of thing I thought people explored in adolescence. Not when they are settled. But it was time for me to craft other identities outside of work and family. So, now I am focusing on me. I'm focusing on liberation through engaging in pleasure and rejecting any internalized ideologies that I am disposable, expendable, and should suffer. I am also focusing on pleasure activism to share and bring as many people as I can on this journey.

I'm cultivating spaces for fat Black women, like me, to come together and radically love our bodies and decolonize shame and trauma. To heal from the toxic narratives we are fed constantly and persistently. I'm very intentional about creating a space just for us because, as I told you earlier, I have spent so much time trying to get people in dominant groups to understand their position and privilege. It can be exhausting at times and unhealthy. I started to realize that while my work is to decenter whiteness, I am implicitly centering whiteness via working with predominantly white institutions. I need and desire to center the folks that have been harmed – and I am usually included in those groups.

I don’t want my life centered on work but on creating economies of care. Since the pandemic, I have spent several months in Jamaica as a digital nomad. I do better in and by the water, in the warm sun. I started realizing I didn't want my life consumed by duty, obligation, and work. I want a slower and more pleasurable life. In the US, I can easily overwork. In Jamaica, I’d work until two in the afternoon, go swim, and sit on a beach to read and listen to music. I felt good in my body when I was doing that. I was out of my anxious head and more into my luscious body, paying attention to my senses.

“I am constantly learning and unlearning.”

Also, while I was there, I hired someone to help me with the kids from nine to five. She would do the cooking, cleaning, and grocery shopping. It significantly reduced the stress of managing a home, remote learning kids, and a small business. I had more time for myself and in cultivating friendships that developed in Jamaica. Being a mother, especially without a village, took so much out of me as I internalized the message that ‘Motherhood is sacrifice’. I'm rejecting that now and learning to take better care of myself. I'm in this space where I'm working to enhance my sensuality. Finding the joy in the little things.

Even in the way that I shower, it's not a chore. It's not a task I need to complete to get to the next task. It’s yet another opportunity to feel good. I take my time and pay attention to what it feels like for the warm water to hit my body. I don’t need to rush and scrub my body down because I got to hurry up and get to the next thing. I get to take my time. I am slowing down. Reclaiming my time. I rushed the first half of my adulthood.

When the world stopped in 2020, and everything was canceled, I couldn't even enjoy the stillness. I was so stressed about money, my business, and staying safe in an economy where money is prioritized over safety. We're in a pandemic where almost a million people have died. I think we're all collectively grieving and don't even know it yet. Racial capitalism makes it hard to feel. To grieve. To rest. To prioritize safety. So I am choosing to prioritize rest, pleasure, joy, and safety. It’s hard, but if I don’t prioritize those things, they won't happen.

To be clear, when I say pleasure and joy, it's not just slowing down and reading books and sitting by the beach – it's sexual, too. And I think we're afraid to even admit that many of us are sexual beings with erotic desires. My embodiment practices include erotic embodiment as well. I’m unpacking shame in all the ways that I have learned it around my sexuality and around sex. I am reclaiming my humanity through all forms of embodiment. It feels good to let go of assimilation and discover all the ways to feel good for liberation and as an act of resistance.

I’m also building community with people. I'm co-planning a trip for other Black women and our families. We're going to spend a summer in a community in Mexico, raising our kids together, growing, having fun, exploring, healing, unpacking shame, and decolonizing all of the things that we have learned that are really harmful to our minds and our bodies.

I’ve learned to adorn my fabulous body in beautiful, colorful clothing. I wear my belly out, which I would have never done five years ago. I used to cover my arms and wear shawls, and now I'm wearing two pieces. Part of that is me learning to love, celebrate and accept my body as is regardless of the messaging I receive to hate my body. Regardless of the misrepresentation. Regardless of not seeing myself represented in media. Regardless of the myths surrounding my body. It's knowing that I am enough.

Pleasure is a path to individual and collective liberation. I'm seeing that more clearly every single day. I'm trying to get other people to see the value and the richness of their beauty and even expand what beauty looks like. The more of us that are free – the more of us that can dismantle these harmful systems. That is what drives me. Pleasurable liberation for us all.

Who is an influential woman in your life and why?

Oh, I would have to say, my grandmother. She was a sharecropper from the South. I remember having to interview her for school about her experience with picking cotton. It was eye-opening for me in the fourth or fifth grade. I remember how hard my grandmother worked for her family.

She would wake up at five o’clock in the morning to get the house clean. Then she would ride the bus for an hour or maybe two to get to work. She was a maid at a Marriott in Chicago (tearing up). I get so emotional when I think about it.

She did not have access to a lot but she made sure I was taken care of. She protected me. She died when I was 18, a new mother, and in desperate need of guidance. I look back now at the vision she set for her descendants by migrating to Chicago from Tutweiler, Mississippi. The obstacles she faced, and I am like, how did she do it? I think back on the few times I rode with my mother to drop her off at work. At the back of the hotel. Not the front entrance but the back. I did not understand what that meant as a child, but I know now. I imagine the indignities she faced navigating the world as a poor Black woman. I want to live my life in pleasure, ease, and relaxation for her and all my ancestors like her who were denied their privilege and birthright.

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The Second Adolescence of Dr. Nicole Avant