PART I | The OG [Original Gift]: Coming Home to Self

Before I ever went home to Africa, I ‘d been well on my journey of coming home to myself.

Not the version of me shaped by credentials, contractual agreements, deliverables, or funding cycles. Not the version trained to contort my truth into language that institutions could tolerate. I mean my truest self that existed before I was conditioned. Before I learned how to survive respectability politics and how to soften my rage or intellectualize my grief.

The self I now call, OG. Who I was before the world got to me… the Original Gift. In 2025, I was stripped me down to her.

Losing contracts, funding, and my footing. Losing professional certainty in the wake of political destruction that made clear, once again, how disposable equity work becomes when power feels threatened. Countless applications were unanswered and proposals rejected. The interviews I endured (the few I got) were the worst, most oppressive processes I’d ever been a part of (clearly DEI wasn’t working at all, or people just threw everything out the window once they were given the federal green light). It was disorienting. Doors closed without explanation, and I didn’t even need any. I knew why. Last year was a year when everything I'd been building with so much love and intention felt like it was being dismantled piece by agonizing piece.

I didn’t recognize it at the time, but what I thought was a professional crisis was actually a spiritual interruption. Per the usual pattern of my life, emergence has a way of teaching me.

When the world stopped “rewarding” my labor, I was forced to ask a question I had been postponing, even in self-employment where I still found myself at the helm of harmful systems and workplace culture that don’t go away just because you work from outside of them.

Who am I when my work is no longer legible to systems that profit from my exhaustion?

Who showed up to answer was not a new version of me. It was an old one. Faded from the forefront but never forgotten. Very familiar.

The curious little girl who noticed power dynamics and injustice before she had language for it. The truth-teller who asked uncomfortable questions because she knew there was more to the story. The one who always knew that something about this world was out of alignment but also knew, deep in her bones, that it didn’t have to be this way. She was still here. Inside of me. Quiet but unwavering.

The ongoing journey of de-socializing and coming home to self has meant remembering that my purpose has never been transactional. It’s never about fitting neatly into institutions that require my brilliance but reject my liberation. My purpose has always been relational. Ancestral. Transformational. Already written. On the white wall with a permanent Black Sharpie. I'm not new to this. I'm true to this. Bringing in the year, 2025, in Africa was timely. The universe knew something I didn't. It knew that I would need that validation.

2025 is the year that broke me down, not because I failed but because I stopped performing survival long enough to hear myself. To listen deeply. I started embracing failure as an integral component to success a LONG time ago but that’s not what this was. I refuse to blame and shame myself for the injustice that was imposed upon me. This wasn’t about personal responsibility at all and I did nothing “wrong.” I choose not to carry that burden. This occurred because white men felt discomfort. Because they have to be the head and not the tail. Because loss of power was too much to bear. That’s what it all comes down to. The devastation of so many people’s career work, livelihood, critical research, and reputations. Nothing fancy… just plain ole fear. And it’s blaringly evident to some of us. It almost makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. The utter absurdity of it all.

As a lifelong learner, I’ve found that with loss there always come lessons if we’re open to receiving them. What I called rejection, I now understand, was regeneration, a redirection back toward me, the OG… the Original Gift.

That return to myself and to the Motherland, the other OG (Original Ground), are both fragments of freedom that accumulate as I evolve and maintain my mental liberation. I will continue to come back home to myself over and over again as many times as it takes to stay free.