I had been ashamed in rooms full of seemingly healthily attached people, especially white people, since college. I hadn’t been in too many rooms like that because I grew up and have designed my life around Black and Brown people and Nature, so I didn’t often need to confront this feeling. But in my past 4 years of Universal deep learning through life experience, I have softened to accept being in more spaces where I am the stark minority, which is not something I commonly identify with.
In college, the two teachers who I saw as the most arrogant gave me feedback that I was arrogant and detached. I immediately felt unseen. They didn’t know what a culture shock I was living through being at a predominantly white university, how little language I had for what I was experiencing, and what deep distrust I had in people as a result of my background. I knew best how to perform and because that’s what I did, I think it was assumed I was whole psychically. I had very high walls to protect my tender emotional state. I hadn’t even skimmed the surface. I was surviving and increasingly feeling both socially isolated because I am different than most of my peers, and desperately desiring to feel deeper interpersonal & spiritual connections.
I grew up feeling outside of my family, neglected, and downcast by my primary parent; my step-dad was kind but took a backseat and my biological father was absent. It would’ve been one thing to draw a conclusion that my mother was simply unable to find kind words or tone in her love language, but because I saw her treat and speak to my sister lovingly, I knew she was capable. She just wouldn’t do it for me. That wasn’t our relationship, and in many ways in my lifetime, I’ve justified this experience as a necessary hardship to teach me to think for myself. But it also caused a deep sense of loneliness, psychosocial absence (commonly with my peers), and confusing social attachments, avoiding attachments/commitments.
Childhood was very painful for me especially, I think, because I am emotionally sensitive as a person. I learned that feeling deeply did not help me be seen, understood, or be treated fairly, and then I got angry. I began to use the tactics I received as mistreatment to fight back at my mother. We fought my entire childhood & adolescence, disturbing the family structure and my own sense of self worth, love, balance, and social standing. I think I am still afraid of becoming like my mother. She must have been so agitated within herself to live in such a destructive state, year after year.
At age 18, after deciding I’d had enough, I would neither fight my mother nor live with her anymore. I moved away, then went to college just so I didn’t have to go home, then I tried traveling again. I was not emotionally balanced, and my mother became physically unwell. When I was 21 and she was 58, she passed away of metastatic breast cancer. I think of it as a syndrome of a broken heart built up with frustration. It’s a kind of frustration, a fire, that can destroy the very barer of it. This is what I try to manage within myself now that I have been exposed to the same poison. I've prayed my whole life not to pass this on to any of my descendents.
I took care of my mother on her deathbed for 3 months. We healed some. It was a tremendously spiritual experience. After her transition, my sister was pregnant with the spirit to replace my mother in our bloodline. I was grateful to be present for those early years bringing a new life into being. After 7 years yeilding to my new family structure, still unhealed within myself, trying to perform and be an artist and a healthy community member, I had been praying to Spirit to take me deeper into a natural life based on land, growing food, and working in harmony with the Earth. I wasn’t moving with enough self-determination, so Spirit knocked me down to make me listen and move when the time was right. It had already been right. I moved into the mountains almost 4 hours from my childhood home city and began to heal.
That was almost 5 years ago, and honestly, I don’t know how I’m doing. I often feel relieved by the knowledge that the human spirit is so stubborn to live. That means I must still be on the up side. The work is tedious, constant, but the work also includes an amount of rest that I still feel ashamed to talk about publicly. It is so foreign to the hustling work culture I grew up in and learned to idealize.
I’m in a full time job caring for my bodies- physical, psychic-emotional, and spiritual-energetic. Physically & energetically, I require an equal amount of activity and rest. I practice yogic breathwork almost daily, and I’m intentional about my diet. I am in talk therapy and have regular deep tissue full body massages. I'd like to also have regular sauna and acupuncture sessions. These therapies help me to move the stubborn (stuck feeling) traumas out of my body’s memory as I actively expand beyond my concepts of limitations, working to re-align my skeletal system, cleanse and detox my body, and fill my heart with the bliss of agape universal love. I am effectively reparenting myself, but ya know how parenting is when you don’t know if you’re really prepared for it and you ain’t really got a map. I question myself. A lot.
I’m preparing to be coached through a 4-month full body detox program with Ginger DeClue, a wellness coach who I’ve been following on social media for a few years. She pulled me in with her deep parasite cleanse protocol, and she followed up with lymphatic, digestive, blood, and nervous system cleansing program that feels right to me: fruit, sun, herbs, breathing, sauna, enemas, journaling, rest and stretching. I have no doubt that this cleanse will uncover difficult addictions- traumas wrapped in false ideologies, but I’m more ready than ever to meet the rest of my life with purpose and internal balance.
At once, my creative life, love life, and health career are growing in positive ways, and I want to be exceedingly well to I meet all of the fruits they will bare. I desire to live into my full potential. I’m excited to shed a pattern of underwhelming myself feeling unprepared or unsupported to be great in all ways. In truth, I am well supported. I am ready.
I am as expressive as I am free; to cultivate freedom, whether inborn or environmental, I must act with brave will and authentic choice in perpetuity.