Confessions of a libra

Blame Olivia Pope | Credit: Here

04.06.25

Shonda Rhimes feels like kin for how she builds worlds where women can both be powerful and punished. Her talent has beaconed and spurned my own, because I see in her, my own rhythms of romanticism and multidimensionality. Scandal dared to do what other shows had failed to do with their chest. Have a Black woman lead who was petite, feminine but no less intimidating in her power. Scandal dared to show a woman whose intellect and cunning ran circles around the most powerful men in the many countries. Her poise, her eloquence were unmatched as well. While others watched Scandal as some sort of anomaly to Black womanhood, I saw myself in her.

A woman like Olivia doesn’t just walk into a room, she rearranges gravity. Olivia Pope represents my Libran qualities with ease. She outpaces her counterparts all while wearing exquisite high-end business attire. She doesn’t need to pick between her feminine self expression and power. She gathers intel and uses it to enact justice. Now she’s not always in the right, and we will explore that later on.

Olivia Pope is known as The Fixer, this is something I have identified with my whole life. I have always sensed problems and solutions really quickly and felt a calling to guide people to the results that they were looking for. I felt emotional labour, even as a child. I felt myself regulate environments because I had the capabilities to. I helped guide people into their chosen field when I was a teenager, and it has happened all around me since. As an adult, I have guided many people old and young alike in workplaces.

My calm demeanour has people calling me in times of crisis. People confide in me things they wouldn’t confide in their partners, their best friends or their Priest. Fun fact, people talk to me a lot about sex just very casually. I think I radiate my sex positivity so much so that the most shy people unburden themselves around me. A memory just came back to me from high school. We once had this girl join our school in the last two years. I cannot for the life of me remember if this was year 11 or 12 but, I befriended her.

She was quiet, deathly so. She wore her curls in a side part covering up a bump on her forehead. Once she felt like I was her safe space, she told me that she had this collar. At first she was being coy like she got it to wear for a convention but I asked her to bring it to school. I said if you bring it, I’ll walk you. It was a dare, but I was deadly serious. She brought it and one lunch time I walked her around the cafeteria which was covered in clear glass panels. So if you went to high school with me and you remember that day…that’s how that transpired.

Olivia has a problem and his name is President Fitzgerald Grant III. He is older, he is sexy, he is drawn to her autonomy like a moth to a flame but he is married. Swine. Shonda does something really special. She makes Fitz – this Republican, cheating man with a silver spoon in his mouth – a pining mess and in that we fall in love with him. It might be cheeky of me to like contradictions but that’s exactly what I love about Scandal. She makes you question your morals every season, possibly every episode.

As a writer, if I can be known for something let it be my ability to write yearning. Let me be the one who soothes those tender aches we all like to hide. Shonda’s dialogue particularly between Olivia and Fitz is historical in it’s precision. Each of her characters even outside of the main couple are so beautifully complex, and so is life. I hate when people overuse terms like glorifying in favour of terms like witnessing. I’ve never thought she was glorifying cheating but rather exploring through it. Why does society like to pretend to be perfect where it is not? The way she writes is so interwoven with reality, that it enchants you. That’s why 13 years on Scandal is still alive and well in the heart of fans.

Olivia’s restraint in the face of a roaring love like the one she has with Fitz, mirrors my own. Her ambition and focus on her empire is the backbone of her strength. Fitz misses that side of her every time he tries to contain her. Have her work exclusively for him or around his schedule as though she is not a powerhouse in her own right. I loved watching two “alpha-type” characters bring out the softest part of each other while battling egos to wrestle into love. Shonda’s other talent, which I hope you find mirrored in my own writing, is the power of tension. Tension in the silence, in the pauses and in the eye contact. Kerry Washington is a Goddess on screen, she speaks with her very cells. She channels and we feel it in our pelvis.

I’ve watched Scandal so much one could say I have studied it and I have channelled from it. It has been my muse in my 20’s in understanding chemistry and pacing. You can see in my writing through Reverent Bliss, Good Man and FWB Vol. 3 –  a spectrum of erotic power expressed with elegance instead of crass. Let’s explore my favourite Olivia and Fitz dialogue to illustrate the exquisiteness of her yearning.

Olivia: I smile at her and I take off my clothes for you. I wait for you. I watch for you. My whole life if you. I can’t breathe because I am waiting for you. You own me! You control me! I belong to you–

Fitz: -You own me! You control me I belong to you! You don’t think I wanna be a better man? You think that I don’t wanna dedicate myself to my marriage? You don’t think, I wanna be honourable to be the man that you voted for? I love you. I’m in love with you. You’re the love of my life. My every feeling is controlled by the look on your face. I can’t breathe without you, I can’t sleep without you. I wait for you. I watch for you. I exist for you. If I could escape all of this and run away with you? There’s no Sally or Thomas here. You’re nobody’s victim Liv. I belong to you! We’re in this together!

I mean…yum! I would hazard a guess and say Shonda has herself experienced a powerful love from her ability to express it with such clarity. Know that in my writing, I channel from lived experience. I’ll recall the boiling chemistry I had with a particular man, and conjure it in my body. Then, I translate that feeling into words. I won’t lie though and say I didn’t have this inbuilt. I was reading and plotting erotica before I had my first sexual experience. My ability to express ache has always been there but its evolved now into self-anchored yearning. Sometimes when I pull from experiences I haven’t had, the feelings and images are so elicit and strong, I have to believe they are borrowed from another life or timeline.

In Olivia Pope I also see a woman with wounds. A woman who has been forced through her harsh and exacting upbringing to show up, twice as good. Like many of us Black women we are raised and taught to work extra hard in anticipation of all the systemic issues we have to deal with. We largely gas each other up because rarely will anyone outside of us do it. Our wins and excellence are swept under the rug while our delinquents are propped up and platformed. It was revolutionary to see a Black woman be as powerful as many of us feel we are, have the kind of autonomy a woman can get by climbing the capitalistic ladder – and still be unsatisfied and imperfect. That’s not sensationalising.  Where I hope to differ from Shonda is by weaving spiritual memory and erotic consequence into my prose.

My younger self saw Olivia as familiar and aspirational. Now that I am older, I see her as a powerful cautionary tale. Of what can happen when you are hyperindependent. She leaned into the wounds of her upbringing to form high walls which created romantic chaos. She began to almost crave or thrive in the chaos. While wielding her influence, she lost sight of her softness. She always wanted to be the strong one and in that she paid the price.

Had she allowed herself to believe that she deserved more, it would have come earlier. It may not have even come in the form of Fitz. Olivia is an example of the weight that strong women bear. She had to compartmentalise her passions, something I cannot aspire to. Something I want to smash as conditioning in other women around me. Olivia is an aspect of me and every woman. Hurt, raw and deep down just craving some good loving. Imagine what the literary world, and the cinematic world would do with more Black women writers platformed. How much more raw could the media that we consume be?

As a writer, I hope to build upon Shonda’s work and mystify it. Bring magic into the mundane until it’s the only thing that feels normal. Romance is terribly undervalued by being represented as a purely feminine genre to enjoy. When romance is written well – with grit and vulnerability – whole realities can emerge in your mind. You can better improve your own romantic life by daring to daydream, then cheekily enacting those very daydreams. Why live a boring life, when you can live an extraordinary one? Watch Scandal. Study the tension. Study the dialogue. Ignore the moral quandaries, and elevate your romantic experience.