Self-Transformation and Soul Searching Across the Transatlantic

Not much in my life has unfolded for me in a straight line, my journey of liberation especially.

It spirals, loops, and sometimes revisits places I thought I had already passed through. And with each time I feel deeper clarity and sharper truth. When I visited Ghana to end 2024 and begin 2025, it was not a culmination or completion of my liberation story. It cracked it wide open! An entryway into another realm. As I predicted but could have never imagined, it deepened my love, my purpose, and a yearning I didn’t yet have words for. A longing to connect, not just intellectually, but relationally, bodily, ancestrally.

I intended to write in a journal while in Africa visiting three different countries and multiple cities over the course of a few weeks. I bought a brand new one specifically for my adventure, but I was so immersed in my experience and savoring every single second, I never found the time! I didn’t want to sit still. I wanted to see, feel, taste, hear, and smell EVERYTHING! As much as I could soak up! When I returned back to the states (which certainly didn’t feel very united), I wanted so badly to capture my trip on pages but found myself stuck. My processing lingered and I felt homesick. The gloomy feeling fell upon me as soon as I touched back down in Detroit. I was automatically depressed and it settled in for a while.

At first, I thought it was just the shift from energizing sunshine to the cold brittle weather that I never could adjust to after I moved to Michigan from North Carolina. For weeks, I couldn’t organize my thoughts or find the words. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to face reality. Not because I was empty, even though that’s how I felt. I was full and overwhelmed with grief, clarity, loss, remembering, rage, hope, fear, and ancestral memory all trying to speak at once. Of course there were no words yet. Words come after integration.

Honestly, I started to feel heaviness in the fall of 2024 as political shifts were bubbling, and I felt in the pit of my stomach the need to get more stable employment and started applying for positions. With the support of my family, I had somehow managed to put my anxiety and worry into a compartment and lock it up while I was in the Motherland. The light mist of “no” to my applications became a steady rain and eventually storm of rejection and ghosting after I got back from my lifechanging trip to Africa. But this is not a story about my constant losses, it’s a story of continued liberation.

I’m not sure what jumped inside of me and stayed but last year, I didn’t back down when everyone else was questioning how to pivot and/or contemplating changing course all together. I backed up… into purpose, into ancestry, into harder truths that had to be faced. Asking myself, “What if Harriet Tubman backed down?” isn’t comparison. It’s a legit question linking me to lineage and love that lives in me. I’m not saying I am those who made a way for me. I COULD NEVER BE. I am remembering that I belong to the same moral family, people who were disrupting and demanding what they deserved.

"Going home" was a deeply impactful part of my ongoing "coming home" journey...