Dear Beloved, from me to me

Dear Beloved,

We come here today to talk about this thing called life. A life I sometimes feel forced to live simply because I keep waking up every day.

I see the commentary asking, “Why believe in God when God has never saved our people?”

It hits. Frederick Douglass made a distinction between the Christianity of Christ and the Christianity practiced by slaveholders.

I question the God I was taught to believe in because our ancestors were handed a Bible by the same people who held them in bondage.

Why would slaveholders teach enslaved people about a God who could free them?

They emphasized verses such as “slaves, obey your masters,” while withholding or minimizing the parts of the Bible about liberation, justice, equality, and God hearing the cries of the oppressed.

They did not teach the fullness of God.

They taught the slaveholder’s religion, a distorted Christianity that emphasized obedience, submission, and suffering while silencing liberation, justice, and the God who hears the cries of the oppressed… maybe that is part of why faith can feel so complicated for “African American” people. We are trying to separate God from the version of God that was weaponized against us.

I believe they tried to place their own voice inside God’s mouth so our ancestors would obey them. It hurts.

Yet, I believe.

I believe in the Creator. The Most High God.

I believe God is here.

I believe my decisions ruined my life.

I believe history repeats itself.

I am a slave… not in the same way my ancestors were enslaved. I would never minimize the chains, beatings, separation, violence, and stolen humanity they endured.

I recognize the echo.

The plantation has changed its clothes.

It has performance reviews, time clocks, headsets, policies, productivity goals, and direct deposits.

I cannot use the paid time I earned without permission.

I cannot go to the restroom when my body tells me to. I must wait for a formal break.

I cannot decide that my mind has reached its limit and simply step away. I must explain myself, submit paperwork, provide proof, or risk losing the income I need to survive.

My time does not belong to me.

My body does not fully belong to me.

Even my emotions must be managed so they do not make anyone else uncomfortable.

I must smile when I am overwhelmed.

I must remain professional when I feel myself unraveling.

I must keep producing, even when my spirit is tired.

The psychiatrist told me I live with autism, ADHD, and major depression disorder.. diagnoses, titles, and medical language to explain why my mind does not move through life the way society expects it to.

Sometimes those words bring understanding. Other times, they feel like another set of chains. Another way of being told who I am, what is wrong with me, and what I need in order to function inside a world that was never created with a mind like mine in mind.

I am prescribed medication for both ADHD and depression. I take it because I am trying to survive, trying to focus, trying to regulate, and trying to keep moving through the life in front of me.

Still, part of me questions why medication is often presented as the first or only answer.

I believe God placed healing throughout the earth. In the plants. The herbs. The food. The water. The sunlight. The movement of the body. The sound of music. The power of rest. The wisdom of community. The energy we exchange with one another.

I believe there are natural ways to support the mind, body, emotions, and spirit... even enrolled back in school studying alternative medicine, now I’m second guessing that. 

In this world, I am given a diagnosis and a prescription before I am given the time, space, resources, or freedom to explore what healing could look like for me as a whole person.

Even healing becomes controlled.

Someone else names the condition.

Someone else decides what is considered normal.

Someone else writes the prescription.

Someone else determines which forms of healing are legitimate and which ones are dismissed.

I am not saying medication has no purpose. I am saying I want the freedom to know myself beyond a diagnosis. I want to understand what my mind is communicating instead of only being taught how to make it perform more efficiently. I want healing that considers my spirit, my history, my environment, my body, and the generations of pain that existed before anyone placed a medical title beside my name.

Maybe I am not a broken person who needs to be corrected.

Maybe my mind works differently.

Maybe depression is not only something happening inside of me.

Maybe some of it is a response to grief, generational trauma, exhaustion, isolation, and waking up every day inside a life that does not feel like my own.

Maybe I need support without being reduced to to a 30 minute session for a prescription refill.

Maybe I can take the medication and still question the system.

Maybe I can value medical care while also believing that God gave us natural tools for healing.

Maybe true healing is not choosing one and rejecting the other. Maybe it is reclaiming the right to participate in how my mind, body, and spirit are cared for.

My brain is constantly receiving, processing, remembering, forgetting, organizing, misplacing, feeling, and trying to regulate.

Some days, simply getting through the workday requires more energy than anyone around me will ever see.

Still, the expectations remain the same.

Be on time.

Stay focused.

Meet the goal.

Answer the message.

Control your emotions.

Watch your tone.

Keep producing.

I do not let anyone see how difficult it is.

The job isn’t bad and it pays me well plus I need money to survive so I return with gratitude… only to use the income to soothe the pain caused by earning it.

I scroll through Temu because I tell myself it is affordable shopping.

A few dollars here.

A small purchase there… something new arriving at the door to create a moment of anticipation in a life that often feels repetitive. Only for the package to arrive and remain unopened.

I watch movies because, for a few hours, I can enter someone else’s story.

I read books because words allow me to leave this world without physically going anywhere.

I shop.

I watch.

I read.

I escape.

None of these things are wrong, but sometimes I know I am using them to create the rest, pleasure, stimulation, and freedom that my everyday life does not provide.

My mind is jumbled. It cannot always sort through everything it has carried. It does not always know how to regulate, so it reaches for whatever it believes may bring relief.

Spend.

Eat.

Scroll.

Watch.

Read.

Sleep.

Escape.

Then the money is gone, the movie ends, the book closes, and I must return to the place that exhausted me so I can earn more money to recover from being exhausted.

This is the cycle.

Work to survive.

Spend to soothe.

Escape to breathe.

Rest just enough to return.

Repeat.

Maybe that is why freedom feels so foreign to me. My ancestors were legally denied freedom. I inherited a world that tells me I am free while making survival dependent on how much of my life I am willing to surrender.

I am free, they say.

Free to choose which company owns my hours.

Free to choose which bills frighten me most.

Free to choose between protecting my health and protecting my paycheck.

Free to dream after the workday has already taken everything out of me.

I believe history repeats itself because systems rarely disappear.

They evolve.

They change language.

They change uniforms.

They become policies, procedures, productivity goals, attendance points, and acceptable workplace culture.

The chains are no longer always visible.

Sometimes they look like debt.

Sometimes they look like health insurance tied to employment.

Sometimes they look like being afraid to call off sick.

Sometimes they look like needing permission to exist inside your own body.

Sometimes they look like taking medication so you can function inside a world that continues to demand more than your mind and body can comfortably give.

Then there is grief… the kind of grief that rearranges your entire life.

My mother died at sixty-one years old.

Sixty-one.

Too young.

Too soon.

My son was twenty-two when he gave his grandmother CPR. Twenty-two years old, trying to breathe life back into the woman who helped give life to him.

That moment did not belong to one person. It reached through all of us.

It became part of his story.

Part of my story.

Part of our family’s story… well, not the “other parent family’s story” story.

He lives, unscathed.

There are things a mother wants to protect her child from, and watching him carry the memory of trying to save my mother is a pain I do not know how to place anywhere.

I was grieving my mother while watching my son carry his own version of that grief.

I lost her.

He lost her.

He also had to become part of the final fight to keep her here.

The hardest pain of all is watching the generational trauma continue and reach my adult son. It is watching him suffer and recognizing pieces of myself, my family, and everything we were never taught how to heal.

There is a particular kind of grief in watching your child carry pain you prayed would end with you.

You question every decision.

Every absence.

Every absence… single mother deep.

Every moment you were surviving so hard that you could not see what was forming around you.

You wonder what you passed down unintentionally.

You wonder what could have been different if you had been given different tools.

You wonder how to help your child heal while you are still trying to understand your own wounds.

That is the part that breaks me. Not simply that I have suffered, but that my suffering did not remain contained within me.

It echoed.

It became an inheritance I never wanted to leave behind.

I believe my decisions ruined my life. Some days, I believe they may have affected his life too. This thought is heavier than any job, bill, diagnosis, or regret I carry.

Still, something in me kept reaching for God.

After losing my mother, I found myself drawn more deeply into spirituality.

Different religions.

Different understandings of God.

Different ways people have tried to explain the sacred, the unseen, death, life, purpose, and the human soul.

I became drawn to tarot cards… not because I stopped believing in God but I believe because I was searching for language. I still don’t know the first day I picked up my first set of cards or how it all started so I know it was God that led me on this path.

Symbols.

Confirmation.

A way to understand what I felt, what I heard, and what Spirit continued to reveal.

A way to understand my own mind… a mind that I’ve spent so many years struggling to understand, struggling to fit in.

The cards became part of how I listened.

Part of how I prayed.

Part of how I made sense of what could not always be explained through ordinary words.

I see God in the symbolism.

I see God in the timing.

I see God in the way a message comes through me for someone else and touches the exact place in them that needed to be seen.

I know God is here because I have watched Him use my voice.

I have watched words come through me that brought clarity to another person.

I have watched someone recognize themselves in something I said.

I have watched people feel seen, guided, and reminded that they were not alone.

I know there is purpose in me.

I know there is a calling in me.

I know I am meant to help others through spiritual counseling.

I know I want to do this work full time.

I want to sit with people in the places where their mind, emotions, spirit, history, and choices all meet.

I want to help people recognize their patterns.

I want to help them face what they inherited.

I want to help them hear the wisdom already trying to rise within them.

I want to help them live.

I know there is a business inside me, a ministry inside me, a purpose inside me. I see a brick and mortar sanctuary called The Magickal House.

A place where the spiritual and physical worlds can meet.

A place for spiritual counseling, healing, reflection, books, herbs, candles, creativity, movement, rest, and connection.

I can see the rooms.

I can see the pool.

I can see the skylight.

I can see the firepits.

I can see people entering overwhelmed and leaving more connected to themselves.

I can see myself doing the work I believe God placed inside me to do.

The vision is so clear that sometimes it feels like a memory from a life I have not reached yet.

That is part of the struggle. I have worked from home since long before the pandemic, yet working from home does not automatically make the work feel freeing.

When you are not doing what you truly want to do, it can still be difficult to get out of bed, even when the workplace is only a few steps away. There are mornings when I do not have to drive through traffic, enter an office building, or sit beneath fluorescent lights, yet I still feel the weight of having to wake up and give my energy to work that does not fulfill me. The distance between my bed and my workspace may be short, but the distance between the life I am living and the life I want can feel endless.

I can see the sanctuary, yet I still wake up and log into a life that does not feel like my own.

I can see the freedom, yet I still have to ask permission to use the time I earned.

I can see myself helping others full time, yet much of my strength is still spent surviving the workday from inside my own home.

While I wouldn’t trade it for the world, because I can only imagine having to commute somewhere making the struggle even hard harder… because truth is most days I struggle with basic hygiene.

Nevertheless, working from home makes the separation even harder. The place where I am supposed to rest is also the place where I work, struggle, perform, and push myself to keep going. I log off, but the weight of it remains in the same room with me.

I have a dream waiting for me in the future, while my present often feels like the nightmare standing between us.

Yet, I am still trying to survive.

That is the struggle… knowing what I want to do, but not knowing how to begin doing it in a way that can support my life.

Knowing I have a gift, but still needing permission to use my own paid time.

Knowing I can help others find clarity, while my own path sometimes feels covered in fog.

Knowing I have a business inside me, a ministry inside me, a purpose inside me, and still having to log into a job that drains the energy I need to build it.

I do what I have to do to survive.

I work the job.

I take the medication.

I pay the bills.

I soothe myself however I can.

I dream when there is enough energy left to dream.

Then I wake up… that may be the cruelest part

Having a dream and waking up to a nightmare.

In the dream, I am helping people.

I control my time.

My work has meaning.

My voice is not reduced to a metric.

My spirit is not something I have to silence until after work.

I am building something that belongs to me.

I am living the life I believe God showed me.

Then morning comes.

The alarm rings.

The computer waits.

The bills remain.

The dream becomes something I must carry quietly while I return to the life that pays for my survival.

The shackles have not fully fallen away. They may no longer look like iron, but I still feel the weight of them.

They are tied to fear.

Money.

Exhaustion.

Uncertainty.

The question of where to start.

The question of whether people will come.

The question of whether what I carry is enough to sustain me.

The question of whether I can really leave the life that is draining me and step into the life that is calling me.

Still, I believe in God.

Not because life has been easy.

Not because every prayer has been answered the way I wanted.

Not because medication erased the depression.

Not because faith made the AuDHD disappear.

Not because spirituality removed grief.

Not because the tarot cards gave me every answer.

Not because I understand why my mother died at sixty-one.

Not because I understand why my son had to give her CPR at twenty-two.

Not because I understand why our people have suffered or why trauma continues to travel through generations.

I believe because something inside me still knows we were created for more than survival.

More than labor.

More than trauma.

More than grief.

More than producing for someone else while slowly disappearing from ourselves.

I believe the Creator did not place breath in my body so my entire existence could be measured by attendance, productivity, and profit.

I believe my voice has purpose because I have already seen it help people.

Maybe my decisions did not ruin my life.

Maybe I made decisions while trying to survive inside systems that were never designed for my wholeness.

Maybe I parented while carrying wounds that no one taught me how to name.

Maybe I gave my son the best parts of me alongside pain I had not yet learned how to heal.

Maybe I am not broken.

Maybe I am exhausted.

Maybe I am not irresponsible.

Maybe my brain has spent years searching for relief in any form it could find.

Maybe I have been trying to buy, watch, and read my way into moments of freedom because I do not yet know what it feels like to live freely.

Maybe the dream is not tormenting me.

Maybe it is reminding me.

Reminding me that another life is possible.

Reminding me that God did not give me this voice for nothing.

Reminding me that the work I am doing to survive is not the full measure of who I am.

Reminding me that my calling still exists, even when I am too tired to answer it.

Dear Beloved,

I do not have the answer today. I only know I keep waking up.

Perhaps that is not punishment. Perhaps it is an invitation.

An invitation to reclaim my mind.

My time.

My body.

My spirit.

My voice.

My relationship with my son.

My calling.

My life.

An invitation to honor my mother by living beyond survival.

An invitation to build what I can, even before I know how it will all come together.

An invitation to face what was passed down, so pain does not get the final word.

One choice at a time.

One honest conversation at a time.

One client at a time.

One boundary at a time.

One dream carried into daylight at a time.

One broken cycle at a time.

Tikisha, weary soul.

She is exhausted, but she has not disappeared.

Dear Beloved,

I do not have every answer today. What I do know is that over the last two weeks, I have sat with myself more honestly than I have in a long time.

I have been learning how my brain works.

I have been paying attention to how my body responds to pressure, grief, exhaustion, overstimulation, and fear. I have begun recognizing that some of the feelings I once judged myself for were signs that my nervous system was overwhelmed and struggling to regulate.

That realization does not make me broken.

It gives me language.

It helps me understand why certain environments affect me the way they do, why I become exhausted, why my thoughts become jumbled, why I reach for escape, and why simply existing inside a world built around conformity can sometimes require so much of me.

Society often expects everyone to think, work, communicate, heal, and move through life in similar ways, even though no two people are exactly alike.

The more I learn myself, the more I realize that understanding who I am is part of my healing.

I am learning myself medically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. I am even taking another step by exploring my birth chart more deeply, not because I expect it to control my life or give me every answer, but because symbolism has always helped me understand myself. It gives me another spiritual language for examining my patterns, gifts, emotions, relationships, struggles, and the way I move through the world.

Every part of this journey is helping me see myself more clearly.

The diagnoses.

The grief.

The medication.

The nervous system.

The spirituality.

The symbolism.

The choices.

The mistakes.

The calling.

The dream.

None of it exists separately.

I am learning how it all meets inside me.

This dark place has not made me lose myself. In many ways, it is forcing me to finally meet myself.

It is making me more honest.

More aware.

More compassionate.

More discerning.

More spiritually grounded.

More willing to question what I was taught.

More willing to recognize what my mind and body have been trying to communicate.

I am not writing this because I have given up on life.

I am writing it because I am beginning to understand my life. I recognize now that healing may not always look like immediately feeling better. Sometimes healing begins with recognizing what hurts, understanding why it hurts, and refusing to keep abandoning yourself just because the world does not understand the way you function.

Everything I have gone through has given me personal experience that cannot be learned only through books, classrooms, certifications, or spiritual teachings.

I know what it feels like to grieve.

I know what it feels like to question God.

I know what it feels like to feel trapped inside your own life.

I know what it feels like to love your child and fear that your pain has reached them.

I know what it feels like to have a calling while struggling to survive.

I know what it feels like to search for healing while questioning the systems offering it.

I know what it feels like to keep waking up without fully understanding why.

Those experiences have given me strength.

They have given me courage.

They have given me wisdom.

They have given me the ability to sit with people without immediately judging, correcting, diagnosing, or trying to silence what they feel.

Perhaps that is part of my preparation.

Perhaps I had to travel through certain places so I could recognize them when someone else arrives there.

Perhaps my purpose is not separate from what I have survived.

Perhaps the woman who will help others is being shaped through the woman who is learning how to help herself.

I am still reclaiming my mind.

My time.

My body.

My spirit.

My voice.

My relationship with my son.

My calling.

My life.

I am learning to honor my mother by living beyond survival.

I am learning to face what was passed down so pain does not get the final word.

I am learning that recognizing my patterns does not mean I am condemned to repeat them.

One choice at a time.

One honest conversation at a time.

One regulated breath at a time.

One client at a time.

One boundary at a time.

One dream carried into daylight at a time.

One broken cycle at a time.

Maybe I am not losing my mind.

Maybe I am finally learning it.

Tikisha, a weary soul becoming wiser.