My Story
I was born to two intellectually disabled adults who lived in Harlem, NY in early 1990. My biological mother was a ward of the state. My biological father? I’m not sure. All I know is that it was deemed that they were unable to take care of me due to their disabilities, income status, and lack of education, so foster care it was. I won’t bore you with too many details, but I was brought to Minnesota by my adoptive mother when I was 2 1/2 years old and was officially adopted at the age of 6. Little did I know, the very way I entered this world and spent my primitive years would be the cause of some of the deepest trauma I could ever imagine.
While I am grateful for my adoption, I have spent my entire life living under the weight of the trauma that the separation from my birth parents and adoption caused. From the fear of abandonment to feeling like my existence was a mistake, instead of walking around in freedom and joy, I walked around lost, confused, hurt, and wondering, “why am I here?”
These emotions alone are heavy, but I also had to navigate these feelings along with other traumas that occurred during my childhood and young adult years, as well as the overarching trauma of being a Black woman in America. I thought I was “really good” at hiding my difficulties behind the mask of a shy smile, but when I became a mother, it became alarmingly clear just how much the trauma I had faced, and continued to face, affected every aspect of my life. Moments of insecurity in my marriage, feeling trapped and lost in motherhood, navigating how to parent my Black children in a world that was built to oppress them, debilitating anxiety, and even questioning my faith, all caused a life that was supposed to be full of joy and freedom to be robbed of that freedom by personal, cultural, and global trauma. (Throw a pandemic in there and you really have a recipe for disaster.)
I’ve said the word trauma a lot, but the truth is, trauma is not talked about enough. Trauma, mental health, racism, and even the mental load of motherhood are each global crises that continue to rise, yet are still considered taboo to talk about. We live in a society where loving your neighbor is controversial. We live in a world where those that love Jesus and are supposed to be the light of the world are using religion to justify the discrimination and hatred of His image-bearers. We have been conditioned to hustle our way through life, shoving our suffering down into the depths of our souls while we wear a wide, fake smile across our faces as we suffer in silence. We live in a world that is dominated by white supremacy, which not only has been oppressive to every single Black, Indigenous, and Person of Color but has created a debilitating society for everyone. Yes, even white men, who are the rulers of white supremacy, suffer at the hands of their own systems that were built to keep them at the top. They just don’t realize it.
The more I have dug deeper into the root causes of my personal trauma while simultaneously watching the world stumble through its global trauma, the more I have noticed one common theme: the loss of freedom.
We are a society that has lost its freedom.
And I believe we must do everything in our power to fight to get our freedom back.
Now, an important disclaimer — I’m not talking about superficial freedoms. And I’m not talking about “freedoms” that become political power agendas.
I’m talking about the freedom to be human in all its human glory. The freedom to prioritize our humanity without shame. The freedom to exist in the skin, body, mind, and soul that God gave each of us without having to prove we are worthy of that existence.
That freedom.
