Either unable or unwilling to sleep, I reached a liminal stage, in which the distant mountain views became a focal point of my attention and imagination. I would see an old farmhouse, a general store on a main street, or a farmer steering a John Deere through a cornfield and find these images deeply inspiring. Stories about lives I would never encounter easily flowed through me. I heard voices in the valley. Perhaps, they were inspired by books I’d read or television series I’d watched about rural life. Maybe, they were inspired by a deep ancestral connection. How can I be sure? What I know is I was curious about the differences (and similarities) between my urban life and the lives of those in rural areas.

Somewhere along the climb, as I could feel my ears and belly adjusting to new air and rolling terrain, I’d hit the final stage of wonder, anticipation, and excitement. An internal sense of knowing we must be getting close to the desired destination of fun inspired me to center myself in my internal visualizations and vocalizations. I imagined myself splashing in the creek, braving the natural rock slide down into the swimmin’ hole, and singing camp songs by the fire a little too loudly and a with a little more artistry than is required, just because I can. I imagined returning home, to the city, happy, healed, whole ready to take on a new school year with a rejuvenated energy.

✦✦✦

In January 2026, after a long-suffering illness, I resolved that I was going back to summer camp in the Appalachian Mountains—at 42 years old. My healing journey has taught me the power of a voice. I lost my voice 18 years ago. At least that’s how I used to phrase it. My lungs and kidneys failed me in 2008 and I lay comatose on a ventilator for several weeks while physicians figured out how to treat my multiple organ failure and keep me alive. Within minutes after being extubated, I could tell that the lung damage I sustained, due to acute respiratory distress syndrome, had transformed breathing—an intricately simple, fundamental, and autonomic phenomenon—into a painful challenge. There were many nebulizer treatments and swallow studies to help retrain my mouth and throat muscles administered by respiratory therapists and speech and language pathologists and I eventually graduated from those daily therapies.

When I heard my voice again, it had changed, drastically, and I had a hard time accepting it—in fact, I didn’t. I wanted to sing. I probably needed to sing, but I did not like my new voice, so I did not want to hear it. I did not want to learn about it. I did not want to interact with it. I’d spent my high school and college years training in classical vocal technique and that training was hard and expensive and time consuming. I so deeply resented the apparent notion it had been all for naught. So, I gave up and I rationalized dismissing this fundamental part of my expression my creativity. I just shut my voice down and went to work. I rarely sang or even intentionally listened to music at all for nearly ten years.

In 2017, weak and housebound while I was undergoing chemotherapy treatments to stabilize my autoimmune disorder, I began to crave music. I purchased an acoustic guitar and began teaching myself to play—without vocalizing because I was still angry, but I needed music.

Over time, I became impressed with my ability to pick up chords and my voice couldn’t help but accompany my fingers on a familiar tune. I threw my first front porch recital. My friends came to support, a few drivers stopped to tune in for a few measures. Even though I felt like I sucked, I was lauded for the achievement of just being brave enough to perform a new skillset in public. I appreciated the compliments, but I have never been able to forgive myself for not excelling at whatever it is that I choose to explore. I decided to get to work at figuring out how to reclaim my voice. To do so required me to break singing all the way down to the basics.

✦✦✦

What is a voice? By what bio-mechanisms does it function? What is its purpose? How does it change? Why—what factors might influence a change in one’s voice? These are the questions that I needed to research answers to. Even as a life-long singer and classically trained vocalist, I never thought about my voice on a mechanical level. So many voice teachers speak in metaphors that I just couldn’t connect to, especially as a person with connective tissue disorder, so I tried my best to follow along and the results were good enough—they were often praised—there is indeed something very simple and natural about singing. But the simple nature of singing requires an intricate whole body coordination involving the respiratory system which regulates air pressure, the vocal folds, which must produce vibrations in the larynx, and a resonant voice must make good use of the space in the chest, throat, and head. This is an oversimplified approach, but all of these concepts (and their more specific parts) must coordinate to produce the airflow, vibration, resonance, and articulation that allows us to project what we wish to be heard.

In my estimation, the voice is a health indicator. As a I have battled long-term chronic illness, the first thing to go offline when a flare starts up is my most authentic voice—my mother will call it out in a heartbeat.

A strained breath, a damaged air pressure system can not sustain good vocal technique, so I practiced breath work and I worked on regulating my intraabdominal pressure.

I practiced singing in my chest voice and head voice. I worked on smoothing the transition between the two, the passagio. Sometimes, I booked sessions with a vocal instructor to troubleshoot and workshop sticky areas where I needed advisement. I did cardio and yoga and dance to improve my physical fitness. I did all that I could as an autodidact and just when I hit the proverbial wall in my self-directed learning, my husband suggested I take a music class at the Augusta Heritage Center during our week long stay in his hometown in the Appalachian Mountains—Elkins, West Virginia. We’d been going to Elkins regularly since we met in 2008. Elkins is located in a lush valley at the base of the Monongahela National Forest. I knew it as a place where outdoor enthusiasts went to do outdoorsy things. I did my research on Augusta. The Augusta Heritage Center (based in Elkins) maintains a fifty year tradition of promoting and maintaining a devotion to the preservation, presentation, and transmission of traditional Appalachian music, dance, craft, and folklore. I had already grown to love this town, maybe even more than my native-born, first-generation American husband did, but the new understanding that it was not only a center for outdoor enthusiasts, train lovers, and history buffs to enjoy, but a place where the ambassadors of the arts and culture of the region join this effortless commingling piqued my curiosity. I registered for a course on healthy vocal technique for performing artists.

There are some brilliant educators out there if you are open-minded and paying attention. My first summer at Augusta, I took a 4-day, 75-minute course and was brilliantly instructed by a blues vocalist/guitarist named Maria. She gently pointed out the flaws in my body mechanics that set me on the road to recovery. Such gems as, “you could be a paid vocalist, but you have got to open your mouth!” and “its your pelvic floor—you’ve got to zip it up!” These metaphors, begging me to translate them to embodied physical reactions and sensations, became the foundational lessons to the manual I call Be Your Own Body Mechanic. I simultaneously researched, composed, and studied these concepts for a full calendar year, knowing that I would return to that valley the following summer in search of more of the type of technical expertise in the vocal arts that I had never encountered as a young person eager to sing.

・・・

It was the first day and we campers had been ordered out of the theater to the dance tent for the start of orientation. I was taken aback at the brashness of the command, but I had come here to do a thing and it was time, so I ignored my instincts to rebuff unnecessary displays of authority and obeyed. Soon we were all gathered under the large canopy and the director was warmly welcoming us, me especially, I thought, after the offense I’d just decided to take at registration.

The director proposed we kick-off the week with a song. As he began the first verse of a song I had never heard, nearly every camper joined in. It sounded like a hymn of sorts. I have religious trauma, so when and wherever an assembly transforms into a congregation, my nervous system is dysregulated. Whatever attention I should have been able to direct towards active listening was busy fighting the urge to flee. The unintelligible singing went on for several stanzas. I began to feel unwell.

To steady myself, I gazed upon the breathtaking mountain views. A gradient of rich blue and green hues was illuminated in the twilight. I practiced slow, deep diaphragmatic breaths and tried to count how many shades I could distinguish, less-than-half aware of the voices in the valley surrounding me as they continued their shared ritualistic song.

I considered whether the ridge I was seeing was Rich or Laurel Mountain and thought about what the pivotal battles there had meant for the Union during the Civil War. I recalled that McClellan’s victories over the Confederates had been the impetus for this beautiful land’s statehood. These thoughts weren’t tangential—I found this historical context extremely important as a black woman from Montgomery, AL, embarking on a cultural connection and exchange experience. Knowing the relationship between the history of where I came from and the history of where I was currently grounded me.

My mind wandered back to the happenings under the tent—still singing—but my ears could make out something about “the hills.” Maybe this was one of the four official state songs? I could also discern the spontaneous layering of several mellifluous harmonies. It was starting to work. I exhaled for at least six counts. I had kept and intended to follow through on a promise to myself to return to West Virgina—to the Tygart Valley—to finish what I had started the previous July. If I was anxious about opening my mind to a different cultural experience, I knew I could rely on nature to center myself to continue to do the healing work I came here to do.

I was there to sing. Not only that, I was there to improve my vocal technique—to prove to myself that I could sing well and with a healthy technique…as I had before.

As I calmed and remembered my objectives and my agency to choose to belong, my mind flashed on a memory of a dream I had weeks ago. My present, if I could stay there, was reminiscent of the sights and sounds from that vision, except more specific, so I knew I was in the right place…for the healing.

・・・

all up and down the posterior chain,

I got high.

As I lay down on the living room carpet,

it came alive and I got to thinking, then writing…

poems?

We’ll see.

In Joy,

JP

Oompa Loompa

Are there Oompa Loompas in my carpet?

If so, I feel sad and confused.

This rug has been an inspiration to me,

until this topic of racial abuse.

If there are Oompa Loompas in my carpet,

then what should I do?

Is it time to shop—

time to boycott

the brand that had this loomed?

・・・

Hold up!

Now, that I look closer

seems I’ve inverted the colors—

the orange and green

appear differently

than the controversial subjects.

I apologize for alarming you

that my carpet might be racist.

For, I was tripping on THC

when I confused these faces.

(oops, my bad.)

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When I reflect on the cycles of my life, my inner monologue announces Madeleine L’Engle’s words I am still every age that I have been through the loud speaker of my mind. I thought it might be a profound sentiment about aging and the major transition points of life, generally. And it might be. But it may also be my mind’s way of admonishing me to learn the lessons of the patterns of the past and move on to something new. A new way of being. A new identity. Someone new?

・・・・・

In the process of trying to make sense of my past, I have tried to know myself—to study myself—to understand myself. Even as a child, I was curious about myself, my motivations, my delights, and especially my anger (which I was not yet emotionally intelligent enough to define as fear). But anger is indeed a scary and overwhelming feeling, especially in an environment where it is not allowed, so I never investigated those feelings too closely. There was too much potential for emotionally uncomfortable consequences to dredging up that pain. Namely, more pain and social disconnection. But, spoiler alert: not dredging up that pain absolutely led directly there to pain and social/emotional detachment.

For sure, I have spent well more than 10,000 hours intellectualizing the concept of me, becoming expertly self-aware of what I allow myself to feel and what I suppress. It occurs to me that all of that observing and thinking about myself was very much in the way of me becoming—being myself. Living in my head, observing and intellectualizing me was probably a barrier to my relationship to my identity because identity is something to be embodied and, for a long, long time, I was unable to visualize and make the connection.

Still, because I have thought about myself so much, there is a lot that I can tell you about me—a laundry list of observable characteristics and contradictory traits that can eventually be perceived. Since becoming a full-time creative, I’ve been constantly revising my personal elevator pitch in my head.

I’d love to tell you that I am detail-oriented and experiential. I’d say that those traits are the basis of any sense of self-assuredness or assertiveness I may give off. They also ground my ability to solve any problem, perceived or real. I’d share with you that I demonstrate my fun-loving, playful, and creative nature in the presentation of my home and my style of dress.

I’d really love nothing more than to share my own impressions and observations about me. But I was raised in polite Southern society where it is impolite, at best, but mostly considered sinful to talk about oneself too much. And the impression I got growing up, from adults gossiping or passing on the code of how to conduct oneself socially, talking about oneself at all is basically the threshold for too much. I’ve already been rude enough and I thank you for you grace, dear reader.

And so, under the weight of societal conditioning and the pressure to conform, it almost seemed pointless to know myself too well. The expectations beckoned me to stop short of myself actually being myself. Now that I am in the present tense and reflecting on my journey, I see I was stuck in a loop observing effects without the agency to do anything about their cause. I believe this led to the pivotal consequence of the most important thing that I can tell you about me: for most of my life, because I did not feel safe to be me, I had a tenuous relationship with reality.

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・・・・・

As a girl watching older Southern ladies, I learned that conversations are often superficial and one-sided. One ought to smile, greet, make polite small talk, rinse and repeat. But, that would not do for me, a highly sensitive creature. I was a deep-thinking child—about almost everything I observed, not just myself. I thought critically, extrapolated connections, and I wanted talk about them—in depth. I wanted (and still want) to be validated. I want to know that I am not a lone observer, perceiver, or witness of my own life and its connection to the collective consciousness (and/or lack thereof).

Because conduct seemed paramount to the discussions I overhead and was involved in, I wondered about people’s behavior most of all. Had the ill-behaved not gotten the same memo that I received about how we ought to be behaving? Who was and was not expected to follow the social code of conduct? Why was others’ behavior so out of control? Whose control? My control?

Because I intentionally ingratiated myself into a social network that discouraged such critique and exploration out loud (I was constantly being reminded to mind my business), I often felt isolated. Or maybe I retreated…to my mind, to think freely and passionately and exhaustively about all the goings-on: the good, the bad, and the wickedly absurd and non-serving nature of the social contract I signed as a girl in Montgomery, Alabama.

As a polite, sensitive girl in Montgomery, I was doomed. For this reason, I don’t think highly sensitive people are meant to be conventionally polite (yes, I’m implying the expectation to “mask” in exchange for “fit” is bad). As a young child, I sensed the hostility just beneath the surface of “southern hospitality.”

I knew my parents and grandparents and the parents and grandparents of my white friends had historical, structural beef. I understood the seething resentment towards the long tradition of The System upholding white supremacy in the South. I could perceive unspoken, unnecessary social and racial tension between strangers in the supermarket checkout line. The tension intensified and even erupted sometimes as Black people were profiled and followed around department stores and shops right in front of me in the Mall on the rich side of town.

I first learned to navigate this disorienting tension passively, through my dad’s discreet teaching that the underlying racial tension and acts of aggression on both micro and macro levels represented a system and its tools of oppression, which ultimately were merely barriers to overcome. But, how to overcome was even more mystifying that the situation (racism) itself.

It seemed that the prevailing attitude was that the overcoming could be accomplished with education. Nothing needed to be acknowledged, said, or questioned out loud to the perpetrators of racist actions. There were unspoken consequences to doing so, but we all knew what they were. Speaking up could cost you your livelihood, it could cost you your sense of peace and sanity as perpetrators attempt to gaslight you that whatever conflict you were experiencing as a result of living wasn’t about your race.

Anyway, the only words I truly remember spoken about the racism I would encounter was a general admonition: don’t worry about them white folks, focus on your studies.

In my head, I was in deep denial. I couldn’t believe it was happening. I couldn’t understand why it would be happening. I couldn’t process the ludicrous notion that any rational human could use race as a justification for villainizing a stranger shopping, living, existing. I also couldn’t really speak on it—I didn’t have the space, the safety, or the tools. But I rejected this insipid dynamic as a part of my reality. It was too painful to realize and accept that people will behave this way and I will have no control over it.

・・・・・

It was early in grade school when I would have my own inevitable first-hand confrontations with racism. Starting towards the end of first grade, classmates began volunteering their thoughts on my blackness to me. “You’re not really Black!” “You’re an Oreo.” “You’re not like other Black people.” How they would know, I could never ascertain, as for almost every young white person I knew (and I knew a lot—I attended majority white public schools K-9), I was their first intimate acquaintance with a Black person (unless their parents were rich and could afford to hire a domestic worker). I couldn’t believe the idea of getting seven year olds involved in perpetuating race based nonsense. I had no words. But I did respond, with effort. I went to the top of my class.

Racist remarks even, or maybe especially, happened to me at church. Fellow vacation Bible schoolers at the white Southern Baptist church I was invited to attend by classmates couldn’t wait to tell me how their fathers viewed the Black people who resided on the side of town where I lived. This was shocking to me: Christians behave this way and teach it to young Christians?! I couldn’t believe it. What was there to say? From a seven year old point of view, I still do not know. But, I became scholarly about Bible drill. I can still still recite dozens of verses by heart.

By the time I was in third grade, I observed a pattern that my skin color was going to be a barrier to social acceptance and inclusion in environments mostly attended by white children. I was haunted by the recognition that children were going to use the immutable trait of my skin color as ammunition to humiliate me. It was terrifying. I became hypervigilant. I braced myself for impact daily. And because racism was not a topic that could be discussed, because people will lie and gaslight, I guess I felt I needed to get to work towards overcoming—hypervigilance and overperforming trauma-bonding together to at least give me the appearance of thriving.

・・・・・

I was successful academically, but success in the social context meant cosplaying rising debutante and embracing the white upper middle-class urge to pick a favorite Black kid to “blindside.” I’m referencing the film based on the book based on Michael Orr’s adolescence and nascent football career, starring Sandra Bullock, set in Mississippi.

Here’s what happened: a chic white woman in a full length fur coat called me articulate and pretty and she and all her good Christian friends excessively complimented me, bought me clothes, encouraged my intellectual curiosity and academic success, and gave me rides to church and school functions when my parents were unavailable due to work schedules or busy with my siblings’ conflicts with my schedule.

These obviously high-class, good Christian white ladies mentored me and spoke to my parents about my educational opportunities, spiritually and scholastically, like I was a worthy investment. So, I decided to be a worthy investment. I wanted to be a high-class lady wearing a full-length fur coat in Alabama in January.

I recognized the flex, the show of wealth and privilege and decided to get in the game. All that it required was conformity, obedience to the hierarchy, impeccable elocution, straight As, profusely expressed gratitude and social grace, and repression of each and every retort I ever thought when I was described as “a pretty Black girl,” “so articulate,” “very respectful,” and “special.” Well, those qualities were already in the handbook and I was already excelling at conforming to the rules of polite society.

I should have known something was amiss. I was somehow exotic, in a place with a large population of Black people. I was constantly being perceived and spoken about in a way that, I’m sure was meant to be complimentary, but was a bit humiliating, othering, commodifying, and isolating. All of the compliments carried the weight of an unspoken clause: for a poor Black girl. Very you’re one of the good ones energy. I figure I wasn’t the only one holding my tongue.

Still, I felt a strong bond to these southern white moms and grandmothers who visually represented a stereotype that aligns with political conservatism and systemic oppression. Confusingly, they were somehow privately administering their own brand of diversity, equity, and inclusion programming, so that I might have access to opportunities their children were more easily afforded.

I loved these women genuinely and felt gratitude for their mentorship to navigate a community with a very complicated history with race and equity. I wanted the type of financial security that my family didn’t have, and perhaps, I wanted to fit in, to belong, within the upper ranks of the hierarchy one day. I wanted to be socially and economically mobile, okay.

Therefore, transactions were made. Social accounts were balanced. I performed adorable, precocious primary schooler so well that I earned myself an IQ test (for real), which I scored highly on and landed a spot in Quest, the talented and gifted special education program at my elementary school. This raised my value and my visibility, making me an even easier target for children testing racist epithets.

・・・・・

My middle school years were dizzying with such aggression. White boys continued to say versions of “but, you’re not Black Black” to me. And somehow I was wrong for being unwilling to take this ignorance as a compliment. Still, I would not be tricked into thinking a poor Black girl and a white boy could have some schoolyard courtship. I knew how to play coy (it’s in the good girl raised in the south handbook). Only in my head, I would snidely reply, “your daddy and granddaddy will tell you exactly how Black I am and it’s Black enough.”

The girls liked to notify me of how safe they felt around my blackness, as well. One standout time was when a classmate casually dropped that her dad referred to Applebee’s as “N-word-bee’s.” I never would’ve asked for this information; she just dropped it in my lap. I couldn’t believe what a ridiculous take that was! Even in the South, where there are a lot of Black people, there are not enough Black people up in Applebee’s with enough regularity to sustain the economic chokehold those burger and margarita specials have on Americans at-large. Everyone likes Applebee’s—what are you guys even talking about at home?!

Still, because I was at an impressionable age, without the willingness or the tools to face reality (because it was so stupid), the psychological violence of this information, confirming what I’d heard my elders speak on, changed my whole perspective on the brand forever. I never enjoyed another “2 for $10” or “all you can eat__” promotion again. I have avoided Applebee’s for decades. I also never responded to the completely unprovoked racial aggression. What I did do is work harder. Grinding my way towards transcending racial trauma seemed like the way.

The series of micro and macro aggressive expressions of socially acceptable racism I experienced made me feel utterly unsafe in my hometown, around my classmates and fellow churchgoers, and, fundamentally, in my skin—being the condition that it was: Black. I remained in a constant state of disbelief and denial coupled with a hypervigilant physical and emotional bracing. I continued to hold my tongue, and my breath, quietly surviving all the vitriol, but I was deeply wounded. By age 13, I officially had an autoimmune disease. I know there’s a direct link. Still, I continued to impress and achieve.

・・・・・

Towards the end of junior high school, I was recognized by the upstanding Christian white ladies for nailing respectful, conversant adolescent to such a high degree that several of my educators and social mentors recommended me to apply to a majority white private college preparatory school, which was founded in opposition to federal policy requiring racial integration in public schools.

I repressed all the thoughts I was not allowed to say, took the test, matriculated, then I was taught English and US and European history and chemistry and physics (Advanced Placement, of course) by men and women from all over the States who had doctoral degrees and/or significant professional experience in their fields. Academically, it was exhilarating. Socially, it was goddamn exhausting.

I absorbed all the remarks about my lack of social, economic, and racial status, demurely, politely, with gratitude for the interest taken in me and the time and resources good Christian women poured into me, frequently folding me into their family routines so that I could beat the odds. The investment paid off. But, I also had to pay for it. I paid for it dearly—it cost me my health over and over again. I was stuck in a loop—surviving.

I couldn’t express the complexity of integrating into a society that saw me as only Black and less-than so early in my human development. And it didn’t make sense to me to tell my parents things they already knew and were fighting on a level that seemed much more advanced and high-stakes. Food must be put on the table for five children, utility bills must be paid, tuition, fees for field trips, I wanted pretty things… I knew they were holding their tongues and surviving, too. They had jobs to do and I had been given my charge: don’t worry about them white folks, focus on your studies.

・・・・・

My academic ascent took me from the wrong side of the first capital of the Confederacy, all the way to Duke University, and I was sensitive and critically thoughtful and hypervigilant the entire time. Still, I was horrified when I left Alabama on a one-way flight to Durham that North Carolina wasn’t far enough to run. Really, nobody told me you couldn’t outrun racism.

To be fair, nobody told me that you could either. Anyway, as time went on, it got harder, more painful, physically painful every time I felt the need to bite my tongue and swallow my words in the face of a casually racist remark. I kept running anyway.

I made it all the way to Washington, DC, nicknamed “Chocolate City.” It sounded like safety to me. But, in a consultancy in Dupont Circle, run and staffed by white people from affluent backgrounds and the Ivy League, everything looked and sounded exactly like it did before. And, by that point in my journey to escape humiliation based on race, eventually, I had built up so much resentment and fear and tension that it was pretty easy to lose whatever control of myself I thought I had.

Here’s a couple standouts to illustrate my emotional state: a white man I mistook for my friend thought he really nailed the historical punchline when he called me three-fifths of a person. A different survival mechanism kicked in. I slapped him across the face in a public setting. When I came to, I realized that action could have ruined my entire life.

Then, someone I’d become intimately associated with came up with what I’m sure she thought was an uproarious punchline (at my expense) when she interjected at the start of my contribution to our typical night-out conversation, “quiet, the White ladies are talking.” My body chose FIGHT again and I launched a French 75 at her face.

I was no longer freezing or fawning or fleeing, but the FIGHT instinct—if I didn’t do something about that—it was to do me additional harm. I now OVERstand this because five Black women who I shared these upsetting and potentially cancellable offenses and defenses with told me so. I was told I was wrong to take it a physical level and the whole “two wrongs” spiel. I am too tired of surviving casual, socially acceptable racism to even write that shit out here. But, I knew very well that I could get myself in trouble with the law being this reactive to such ludicrously performative racism.

My point is: we (Black people) have to remain civil, even as others attempt to strip us of our humanity, and sometimes they don’t stop there.

The point is to strip it and then rip it to shreds—it is meant to fuck with your sense of identity—and we are just supposed to rely on “it’s just words” and carry on. We all know it’s not just words, people. Also, words are damaging. Emotional toll is real and quantifiable and traumatic and trauma is deleterious to one’s health and is passed down through the generations. But, if other peoples’ behavior won’t change, then there’s probably another solution. Boy am I glad I finally got there!

・・・・・

There were too many years of my childhood spent balancing social and spiritual transactions via overperfomlng academic excellence as an apology for the inconvenience of my skin color. Far too many years of my adolescence was spent fearing I had no other option but to quietly endure kids threatening to lynch me, calling me “ghetto,” and being told about parents’ refusal to allow their sons to escort me to school dances or for their teens with cars to give me a ride home. My survival instinct was evidence of a chronic traumatic wound.

Very often, far too often, I felt unsafe, unrooted, insecure, self-conscious, and burdensome. And I didn’t want to acknowledge and deal with those feelings. It felt too big, too scary, too overwhelming to go through them. So, I stuffed them down and heaved more and more of that unmetabolized energy on top, for years, for decades. It seemed to work.

By all the metrics that make any child or adolescent good, I was. Even as the internal pressure twisted me, tied me into knots, contracted and collapsed me…even as it ripped me apart emotionally and burst forth in desperate, impulsive rebukes of a social construct meant to dehumanize me, I was considered “good.” Even as my health failed and I became a medical conundrum, a riddle, an enigma at age 13, I could be a polite and agentic young patient. I found that ingratiating myself to septuagenarian white physicians made them care for me with a bit more intentionality. I simply observed the pattern and connected the dots.

Wherever I was, I was acting the part that society needed me to play to get the ledger to balance so I could one day be at church in January in a full-length fur. But, even though there were many things about my life that I wanted to be different one day, I did not want to be differentiated. And, medically speaking, I really never was.

My confounding, ever-changing diagnosis really didn’t seem like much of a diagnosis at all. It felt like a series of warnings. All of my treatment options were based on empiricism. Meaning, we had to try a lot of different things, and I felt like an experiment for more than 25 years. My relationships with rheumatologists felt like practicing witchcraft with witch-doctors. My team of medical specialists felt like oracles who left little “breadcrumbs” of information for me to decipher and follow, always on their way out the door to another patient.

I am now in a place of safety that I can see the warnings to me for what they were. I’ve translated it into my parlance: Girl, you perceive yourself in permanent perilous danger and a human body just can’t keep up with all that. And I did!

My first rheumatologist actually told me and my mother: one day, just as mysteriously as this all onset, it will leave you. I believe him now; I believed him then and that’s probably why I’ve continued thinking on it for going on 30 years. I don’t find it a mystery at all because I know exactly what motivated me to face reality and my identity and discover my agency to escape the loop and do something new, be someone new, and it was motherhood.

・・・・・

When I got knocked up, after years of being told it was impossible and would kill me even if it were possible, I felt obliged to do an honest self-evaluation. I realized that everything that had happened to me was still happening to me. I decided it was time to make it stop—break the chains. I had a vision of myself as a mother—I knew her identity. She would be whole. She would be real, authentic. She wouldn’t hold her tongue, nor her breath, bracing for every possible bad outcome. She would not be parenting from an infinite well of fear. She would be present. She would flow and flex to meet the needs of being the mother that her child needed her to be. She would embody joy and play and creativity. She would be a soft and gentle place for her child to launch from and land.

Over time, I became these things. I am not perfectly consistent at being those things, but I am consistently these things.

Once I learned how to choose choices that made me who I wanted to be, I felt a stronger connection to my identity. Then, I realized I also had the choice to find the emotional fortitude to be able to withstand the ridiculous things a certain demographic seems entitled to say to my face regarding how little they think of my race.

On the surface, it’s because I refuse to end up in the legal system defending why I literally and figuratively dragged a racist. Ain’t nobody got time for that!

But, really, my reason to stop thinking about being and to simply be was spurred by my identity shift into Mother, which can seem overly saccharine, at best, and hackneyed, at worst. But the empowerment I experienced through this identity shift, ultimately led me to myself. When my thoughts and my feelings got on the same page and I allowed myself to say them out loud and I followed through on the actions that were consistent with those thoughts and feelings, I became someone new, but not completely new—someone new, yet familiar.

Through this massive transformation, I have reformed a strong connection to who I was as a very young child, before the wounds dimmed my light and spirit and before I felt pressure to give in to the expectations to conform. I am back to being the music lover, the dancer, the entertainer, the creative, the artist. I am still detail-oriented, but I know when I’m ruminating on business that is not mine versus reflecting on business that belongs to all of us. I am experiencing the world with my child and my family with a playful whimsy that brings me great joy. I am no longer in denial of reality. There is duality here, there is paradox, there are contradictions. I can hold all the various positive and negative feelings that I experience. I can handle the inherent tension of everyday life (especially in this fucking timeline) even when it is painful and overwhelming, and I can carry on…being.

There is still more that I can tell you about me. I can tell you that I excel at doing unbelievably hard things. I want you to know that I when I’m clear, I don’t hold my tongue. But first and foremost, here and now: I am.

As I lay down on the living room carpet, it came alive and I got to thinking, then writing…poems? We’ll see.

In Joy,

JP

Luchador

There’s a luchador in my carpet

and he makes me feel so safe

from the military marching ‘round my village

in the middle of the day.

I know I’m to be thankful

to live in the land of the free, but

again, here comes soldiers up The Hill!

It feels like a threat to me.

And, I’m frightened of these soldiers

and whatever oaths they’ve sworn to uphold.

But, I stay calm and steady

as they do as they’re told.

I always wear my headphones,

turn my pop music loud enough,

for there’s a protector in my carpet

and he inspires me to be tough.

Yet, again, I encounter the soldiers

and concede my sidewalk space.

I know one day, they’ll march away

and I’ll reclaim my place.

Til then, I find protection

in the luchador in my rug.

He’ll fight for me, as performatively

as any hired gun.

(I mean, you see him, right? 😉 💨)

Because my chronic pain begat chronic absenteeism, I half-imagine/half-remember myself as an apparition ambling beneath the intricate, gorgeous web of ribbed vaulting anchoring the wondrous labyrinth of pointed Duke stone archways on my way to class, or more likely, the medical center for diagnostic testing or treatment.

But, like my grades in those unnecessarily cruel intro science courses, I’m certain my ego has over-inflated my impact and reputation.

It’s far more accurate to confess that it is I who has been peripherally haunted by a burdensome emotional wave of grief and despair at being a burdensomely ill student, friend, and classmate that I have unsuccessfully attempted to suppress.

For twenty years, I’ve been too terrified to let myself remember the relationships and responsibilities I abandoned. I’ve felt extremely guilted by my inconsistency and sometimes downright lackluster academic performance relative to my peers and friends who include professors and surgeons at prestigious places like Wharton and Harvard.

But mostly, I’ve harbored a deep shame and embarrassment of the slivers of extreme vulnerability I left in the wake of my mysterious chronic illness that made me an unreliable and inconsistent presence. I stuffed everyday memories of my years at Duke down so far I couldn’t recollect them…until the group chat went a-bling with who all gon’ be there-chatter about the 20th reunion of our dear class of 2006.

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“I don’t want to go…at all. I can’t believe they are gonna make me give up our spring break in LA for a weekend in Durham,” I protested as my husband nodded emphatically while proactively booking a Hyatt with our Chase points.

For weeks leading up to the event, I defied preparation. Every email the university sent detailing events for the weekend received a grimace and remained unopened. I hoped someone from the friend group would back out, breaking the pact that went without explicitly saying, ruining it for everyone so it would no longer be worth going. I just didn’t want it to be me…another unspoken pact, I assume.

I caved at T-seven days. I opened the emails, paid the fees, and checked the weather forecast. I was committed to the dear friends who I already see with a regularity that is impressive for busy parents and professionals scattered across the States. But, I was resigned to the idea of following up with dozens of other classmates who I expected interactions to be like in-person social media updates—boring and unnecessary. I definitely didn’t have the right attitude. I am so glad I didn’t because I don’t think I would have been able to receive the grace and healing I did over those 48 hours had I not been so anti.

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College is about all types of connections. The educational and intellectual connections leading to preparation for a life and career well-examined and considered, as well as the social connections established through the mandatory rituals of on-campus student life, i.e., dormitory dwelling, common space sharing, and Greek-life partying.

Academically, I put in the required effort (mostly) to establish the connections to exceed, meet, or satisfy expectations. It didn’t always come with facility, but it turned out just fine, of course. Socially, it was simple for me to make connections.

As a student of myself, I have learned that I build connections and relationships by carefully curating and doling out little slivers of the total potential of my personality to those whom I see myself reflected in. I see myself in almost any/every one, but when I feel an energetic spark, I am motivated to skip typical small-talk for something more personal, deeper, and thereby, universal. My relational/conversational approach has been: if I “see” something even remotely intriguing or frustrating, I say something…people laugh, and I’ve a new connection and potential friend.

Now, “if you see something, say something” may be a great policy for attempting to ensure the safety of mass transit. But it is a frightful one for safety in relationships.

I am perpetually in fear of the embarrassment of oversharing and/or overstepping. I have made a practice of making myself vulnerable to those that are able to receive and reciprocate my energy. But, I am frequently made nervous and anxious by this habit. In my head, in real-time, I’m admonishing myself to stop oversharing, over-connecting. I have yet to find the fortitude or self-control to cease and desist.

As a semi-social student looking for true energetic matches, I made deep, vulnerable connections all over campus. I was emotionally slutty. I was also very ill and had many bad days full of pain and debilitation.

To get by, I required a lot of help from my friends. Some lucky chosen ones who made it through several layers of emotional background checks and credentialing (c/o my history of hypervigilance and CPTSD) got to watch me suffer up close, but there were some I could not be so vulnerable with because they did not pass the requisite security checkpoints.

Still, I told the stories of the torture I endured at the medical center broadly, the highlights and lowlights of life as a medical experiment. I hoped my tales of woe and misfortune weren’t too off-putting for my classmates. To be honest, I noticed…I was painfully aware that I, my health issues, bummed a lot of people out and, perhaps I was somewhat projecting, but both perceptions can be true at the same time.

I noticed my story had the power to change the temperature of the room and I didn’t want to be an energy shifter (too bad, because that might actually be my life’s purpose).

So when the seeing and the saying and the bumming and the embarrassing overstepping inevitably happened…when the slivers of vulnerability started to accumulate to a slice…regrettably, I gave myself no choice but to sever those connections.

Now, in defense of me and my social-emotional health, I have many great long-term friendships from college. There are about a dozen classmates that I have been able to maintain epic relationships with, even as we have become very different versions of our former selves—more professional, authoritative, responsible, parental, even. This is an exquisite blessing.

But, beyond that, the thought of reuniting with the amorphous shape of social-emotional acquaintances I’d left disconnected on the outskirts of my dodecahedron-shaped inner sanctum riddled me with anxiety. I had regrettably chosen severance and it doesn’t work—I’ve literally seen this film before (cue up Kier, Chosen One Kier or a little “defiant jazz,” let your mood decide).

I’d ask myself why I’ve always chosen severance, but I already know the answer—Trauma and self-limiting beliefs! The haunting I experienced was by the power of my own ghosting.

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If college is about connection, then reunion is obviously about (re)connection…and fundraising.

I arrived on campus on the most lovely and temperate Friday afternoon in April an alumni capital campaign could acquire. I was unprepared, but willing to recollect little severed slivers of my student life, which, through the power of my own mind, I had distorted into almost all pain, angst, resentment, and sadness.

Twenty years of distortion is even more noise than you can absorb from the Crazies in Cameron Indoor Stadium.

I expected my revisitation of the past to be like the most pointless scavenger hunt of all time, frustrating and saddening.

I started slow, I went to meet with a very supportive former staff member from the school of public policy where I received basic credentials authorizing me to help solve our nation’s healthcare access and coverage crisis. It was a comfortable homecoming, after which, I felt mildly secure in my connection to Durham, NC.

As we drove Interstate-85, remaining on the boundary of Durham and Duke until I was ready, or until it was time, I was gaining more confidence in my memories of the relevant exits and main streets that comprised the grid my undergraduate life. Then, the group chat went live again with where are you/we’re here excitement. I made my way to the student union, dressed to kill as armor—because the hypervigilant always need armor.

My five-year old requested McDonald’s, then we took a trip to the University Store for a new notebook and t-shirt for her. These tasks were great distractions from my anxiety…until an unfamiliar voice called my name, surprising me.

For some reason, I wasn’t expecting anyone to know me here, at reunion. I looked up to see a former classmate, of course. Michelle remembered me fondly enough to call to me from across a shop—“wow,” I thought as we hugged and chatted about our current residencies and took turns pointing out our children.

This was it—reunion weekend must’ve begun now. More familiar faces and voices were next in queue—the core members, guardians, even, of my inner sanctum. The smiles and embraces…the love and light were all completely genuine and customary for my friend group. This reunion within a reunion was a morale booster. It was all in the knowing I had a comfort zone to return to if and when I got overwhelmed by the weight of my own expectations. I was relieved and happy. I bumped into a couple more classmates who were excited to see me and I let myself be excited to see them.

Zara and I had a lovely exchange of memories of each other, took a picture, and swapped phone numbers and it felt good to accentuate the positive experiences and impressions that I made, which I just could not access on my own. The tension over the embarrassing slivers strewn about campus in various friend groups was starting to relax…and just like that, the first test of my emotional growth and fortitude appeared right in front of me.

A man with such a powerful aura that, unprovoked and without solicitation, I offered him significant slivers of myself. Fred may have had a whole pie—I may have voluntarily gone back to offer him seconds, to exhaust the metaphor. I felt anxious and dumb each time, because it is painstaking to be both neurotic and vulnerable, but I could not help myself in his company.

Our eyes met, we exclaimed each other’s names, arms outstretched, and I felt momentarily happy to be lit ablaze with fondness at our reconnecting. Almost immediately the in-person status update waded into the deep end, as had been my pattern with Fred. But, to be fair, I had put him so squarely in the middle of my health care business that he fully deserved to know where I was in the the ongoing saga.

Fred had advocated for me sophomore year in a review featuring deans and doctors about my physical fitness and medical stability to go on a ten-day hiking/camping excursion with a group of students on a university-sponsored trip over spring break. Then, he’d seen and assisted me through dire straits when at the conclusion of said trip, I was carried off a mountain to an emergency department for pain management.

Of course, I suppressed all of these memories until he spoke them to the forefront. I never explicitly asked him if my openness about my health issues had been “too much,” but from what I gathered from his recalling of our long history, the answer was both yes and he was happy to be a part of my story, and that’s probably the best and most correct and honest answer to the question I never asked because I already knew the answer. I know good people.

It was emotional reliving trying and fraught moments with him and I didn’t want to, but I felt it was the right thing to do, for me, at least, even if I wasn’t the one who initiated those topics first. I was brave, but I decided not want to be brave anymore that weekend. I decided I was right to not have even wanted to be there in the first place. I simply wanted to hang out in my comfort zone and have the reunion within the reunion that didn’t challenge my sense of self, which, rightfully needed to be challenged, it turned out.

Still, I tried to remain the same. For the rest of Friday and all day Saturday I avoided discomfort; I had a good time and it was great…until mysterious forces intervened to amplify the lesson I couldn’t’ve already learned.

····

At our fancy class party another friend who I’d doled out slivers of vulnerability to, then disconnected from, asked me if I’d reconnected with a specific group classmates that I’d been close with. I replied, “Of course not! I hope these people don’t even remember me.” Jay scoffed, took me by the hand and led me through the crowd right up to the faces of the people I couldn’t face.

My eyes met kind eyes beaming with recognition followed by the exclamation of my full name, my governmnet name, followed by a mutually long embrace. It felt genuine because it was.

I got to listen to Dean go on about my resilience and strength. His perspective, coupled with the other revelations I had been avoiding, finally brought the house lights all the way up and illuminated the full picture. Whereas I could only see the burden in my impact on others, particularly those who I was emotionally vulnerable with, my peers and former friends had been rooting for me. Perhaps, I wasn’t only a liability, I’d been an asset, too. Haven’t we all?!

Next, I reminisced with Darryl and Nadine and, finally, I got to that point of overwhelm I had expected to experience, only it wasn’t negative, it was a wave of acceptance and love, of myself.

I felt the wave of emotion rising and the tears welling. I turned my back to the crowd and found a corner and let the tears flow. I felt something unfamiliar about my crying besides it just being unfamiliar for me to cry—there were tears streaming from my left eye—an eye that hadn’t cried tears since I was 14 years old before the inflammatory disease and legally blind diagnoses.

I eventually made it back to my hotel room and cried bilateral tears into the wee hours of the morning—with gratitude and wonder. This was no coincidence, this was healing. This was—is—a miracle.

When I made literal eye contact and physically embraced the slivers of embarrassment, humiliation, and shame that I had tucked away in various relationships and connections, I found acceptance and grace and healing. I found love.

It never occurred to me this sort of outcome was within the realm of possibilities.

I will forever be delighted to have been taken by surprise. That which I absolutely did not want to do—revisit the past—led to precisely what I needed to do to move forward. And to move forward and clarify the distortion, I had to expand myself emotionally rather than continue restricting myself. I needed to remain, even begrudgingly, open to considering alternative perspectives. I had to thoughtfully consider a new framework to begin metabolizing the pain I was fearful of acknowledging.

I’ll never regret my 20^th undergraduate class reunion. I couldn’t be happier to have attended and if the group chat should fire up for the next fundraising campaign, it’s Forever Duke for me.

An escapologist is a part artist-part technician who, seemingly, has a superhuman ability to get out of dangerous situations. The practice of escapology involves the acquisition and mastery of various qualitative and quantitative skills. To be a competent escapologist, one must hold the technical knowledge to escape confinement and restraints, as well as the emotional strength to withstand being voluntarily (or involuntarily) withheld. Great patience and precision are requisite traits of an artful and technically skilled escapologist. Essentially, an adept escapologist must possess an ability to detect distractions and diversions, as well a facility to obfuscate and misdirect, when necessary.

To be regarded as great and accomplished, an escapologist must prove their proficiency in defying physics before an audience. The mental, emotional, and physical work of an escapologist may seem like magic to an expectant and suspecting circle of strangers waiting to be impressed on a plaza, or to an at-home audience of primetime viewers dining in front of the television. A trite catchphrase along the lines of “abracadabra” further supports the illusion of real magic, but the discipline and perseverance required to excel at the multidisciplinary and holistic practice of escapology is a long, tough path.

I consider myself a master escape artist à la Harry Houdini or David Blaine, as soon will you.

Admittedly, I have no experience slipping neither cuffs nor cages. I have never attempted escaping a burning building at the last minute. My brand of escapology has not been that type of physical. My particular barriers and constraints are represented by myriad debilitating, life-threatening, and near-death encounters that stem from my own overactive and hyperreactive immune system. I have been routinely challenged by an undifferentiated autoimmune disorder that has sought to dismantle and destroy me by, periodically and regularly, wreaking havoc on my major organ systems.

Thankfully, the particular skillset of a world-class escapologist of physical constraints also applies to metaphysical restraints.

Allow me to explain—the mental fortitude required to “break the chains” that enable one to change a mindset is hard work.

I know because I have initiated this work and, through this project you are currently reading, I continue this exhaustive emotional labor, daily (it also takes a physical toll—the “healing crisis” is very real, y’all). This labor goes unseen, therefore, it may seem intangible and unquantifiable. But, my audience, a supportive phalanx of the big family I was born into and the members added by intentional selection, combined with the bevy of board-certified physicians I have accumulated as advisors on disease management, can confirm that my brand of escapology is, in fact, auditory gasp-inducing hard work. It’s a shame it often appears to bystanders as if a change within occurred by simply casting a magical incantation: alakazam.

Indeed, the mind is a powerful and not well understood tool—so much so that it seems simultaneously strange and exactly right to me that, as I write this, I don’t remember exactly how many life-threatening and/or near-death experiences I have had. My theory is that my significant encounters with physical and social-emotional trauma since birth led to such emotional and hormonal dysfunction that I have repressed memories of said experiences. My protective mind-body connection simply hasn’t let me fixate on the cycle of pain and trauma long enough to formulate a comprehensive list. In fact, whenever I have tried to aggregate these horrifying events, my body and my brain suddenly coordinate to perform what feels like an auto-shutdown. I can feel the energy and emotions rise and spiral intensely throughout my body, creating a lot of heat and discomfort and I force quit the operation for fear of…all the things we have to fear.

Unfortunately, this means I rarely get to reflect on and celebrate the momentum of the miracles either, which are just as many and as powerful as the trauma, as evidenced by my being here to tell about them. I’ve survived insurmountable odds and escaped death time and time again. I was a survivor—a fine title for some. I’m aware that resilience is a necessary characteristic for growth and development. But, when survival seemed to become my whole plot and my most universally defining personality traits became “strong” and “resilient,” as I waded into motherhood, I wondered if there was more I could offer myself, my daughter, my network, my audience. So, I began plotting my escape from survival—and we’ll get to all that entails, but first things first. Any good special, packaged for a sophisticated audience, needs the up-close and personal social-emotional backstory for context and framing…

✦✦✦

My parents and other members of the expansive village of caregivers I was guided by throughout my childhood are bona fide survivors of ever-present structural constraints in the Deep South. When life’s circumstances challenge one’s emotional capacity, from a tender age, I saw the following coping mechanisms: either boss up and throw hands; retreat and isolate; repress the pain and maintain the status quo; or smile, nod, and politely agree (while fuming inside) to keep the perception of peace. I was presented powerful demonstrations of the pillars of the trauma response theory: fight; flight, freeze; and fawn—survival mechanisms.

The social-emotional context of growing up Black and in poverty in Alabama wreaked havoc on me physically and emotionally. I knew no other option but to carry on under the constraints of the inherent generational trauma of structural oppression. And, this is not to say that every day was terrible. My parents and family knew not to reserve joy for some later date when we shall overcome. We celebrated achievements and holidays and birthdays with great fanfare, even when times were economically lean. Even with the merrymaking, fellowship, and joy, I remained conscious of the difficulty of being a poor child in a woefully underserved and underdeveloped community with a dream of one day achieving success and financial security, and that is an intentional understatement.

There were a lot of detractors of my dream, within, as well as from outside of my community. Some, from both sides, were willing to be psychologically abusive and physically violent over it. When it felt like it was not safe to be outside, I retreated inward, physically and emotionally. I was good at school and socializing, but I dreaded it, daily. For too many years, I internalized this abuse—my peer’s attempts to demoralize me and some of the threats of bodily harm. The chronic emotional stress took a physical toll and my life became something like a solfège of physical and emotional tension.

To illustrate: physically, there was prominent distention (of my abdomen) and a painful hyperextension of my joints. Inwardly, I ruminated on probable threats in a hypervigilant retention of as many details of as many scenarios as possible, convincing myself I could prepare for anything and everything. I hyperfixated on intention, which allowed me the displeasure of being in constant contention with perceived allies and opposition. The result of this survivalist mindset was a long-term cycle of chronic stress, inflammation, pain, and several debilitating and deleterious healthcare crises.

It seems like it all came to a head at age 13. I experienced a befuddling set of symptoms that would set my immune system off on a more than twenty-years-long nightmare healthcare riddle that would send me through the greatest academic medical centers across the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions. My medical chart reached even further—to the Northeast and abroad. Doctors called upon other doctors, up the medical hierarchy and around the chain, to try to help a young patient.

I’ll tell the short story, because that is how it happened—quickly, suddenly my semi-stable condition shifted…

✦✦✦

I was a dedicated and enthusiastic head-cheerleader who spent her after-school hours learning how to, literally, tighten up and hold the necessary tension in my musculature to remain steady and fly high in stunts.

One day I collapsed and had to be carried home. A couple of days later, I was carried to an emergency department when I had still not managed to recover the posture and strength to get back up on my own two feet. Things escalated from there. The subsequent two decades are a spiral of life-threatening and near-death medical and healthcare crises, to which no physician could ever put a definitive name or treatment. Anyway, I was sick with no definitive diagnosis—no explanation for my dysfunction. Was it all in my head? Some physicians asked overtly, some covertly. Either way, I understood it was never meant to be a conversation, not with these types of practitioners of allopathic medicine—the specialists in disease management and pharmaceuticals. Because of that, I took it as an accusation and responded internally, as I always had to psychological affronts.

To cope, over many years, I consciously devised a strategy to dissociate to protect myself from the trauma of chronic near-contact with death. I separated my mind from my body and retreated to the agonizing solace of my cognition. I prioritized the immediate to-do list of life’s milestones over sustainable long-term functioning. I went into survival mode—carrying on without too much introspection about cause and effect. My brand of survival was impressive, especially considering my physical and emotional state living in severe chronic pain, on and off psychoactive medications, chemotherapeutic agents, confounding biologics, and opioids to tamp down immune function and manage pain.

I routinely missed weeks of class due to extended hospitalizations fighting for my life in intensive care units, yet I excelled in the challenging academic programs provided by magnet school, private college preparatory high school, a top 10 private university, and graduate school. I passed all the requisite scholastic and life-event checkpoints with high marks. I alchemized immense pain into honors and accolades. None of my experimental treatments were particularly effective at their purported indications, but I was alive, just sometimes dangerously close to the edge of no longer being alive. It was a sick cycle that I had mastery of—until the burnout happened. Somehow, the fuel (mostly fury) that I was burning to keep up with my impossible standard wasn’t working for me anymore.

In 2020, after finding myself unemployed and pregnant during the global Covid-19 pandemic, I realized it was time to make a change. I had shielded myself from my chronic pain for so long, I felt completely disconnected from my body. Intuitively, I knew I could not embark of the journey of parenting in my present mindset and way of forcing every piece into place, as graceful as I may have been able to make it appear. Instinctively, I knew the pathway forward was through my body, through the pain I had numbed with narcotics just enough to be able to ignore it. I had to step out of denial and into being authentically unwell. I needed to reconnect, to be embodied, maybe for the first time in my life. There are many metaphorical possibilities here, but I prefer to express it as a profound desire to escape survival…

✦✦✦

Now is the time to set the record straight regarding these life-threatening and near-death encounters. I can’t wait to feel more confident when I switch away from rattling off estimates ranging from four to nine. Admittedly, four was meant not to alarm anyone too much, as I couldn’t tolerate being perceived as “unwell” or “fragile.” The estimate of nine was meant to be tongue in cheek, as the magnitude went the misinformation alleging cats have nine lives. I thought a quip about possibly being on my “last life” would be an uproarious approach to small talk about my personal relationship with death and dying. When I think of all the much smaller things (than potential loss of one’s own life) the human mind-body hides away as a pain in the ass, a pain in the neck, etc… I am truly grateful for both my inability to remember on a whim and that I am in a place where I can remain mentally and emotionally regulated while consciously remembering.

This is a hard story to tell. It is difficult to have a conversation about a lifetime of debilitation and disability…and death and dying. I have never experienced the memories in order, but as a non-linear series of inciting incidents, complications, climaxes, and denouements that cover my lifespan and present as something like a theatrical trailer of my life. Scenes of past and present collide and rearrange. Seemingly nonsensical snippets of dialogue ring out like breadcrumbs that will connect the plot only when the story is consumed in its entirety. This montage runs its sequence until my brain, or my heart, or my gut initiates the protective shutdown.

It seems a lot of storytellers have an exquisitely planned story arc wherein the audience can be certain that our protagonist, just after the climax, magically understands their purpose. Main characters often show great gratitude to previous events, especially times of turmoil and conflict. They face adversity gracefully, volume by volume. They are heroes. I am hoping to, but have not yet had the “aha-moment” in my life that enables me to see the forest for the trees. I still have work to do. First, I must acknowledge the scars before the connecting threads reveal themselves. Then, there’s the challenge of how perspective changes over time, if you’re lucky… and healing. But, I am here to do my spiritual work and be authentically me, and all that blah blah. So, without further ado, The Escape GOAT presents an honest accounting of escaping survival.

The first time I almost died was at my literal birth. It was on my birthdate that my mother was told that I would likely not survive. I was three weeks post due and had aspirated meconium (inhaled the first bowel movement in utero), which severely impacted the functions of my lungs and other organs and took me to life’s edge. The best case scenario presented to my mother was that I would have likely have severe developmental delays and intellectual disabilities. I’ll spare you the magic catchphrase, but just know, I’m thinking something like ta-da, bitch! Onward.

There was a career-crushing bout of multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS) in 2007, requiring me to be placed into a medically-induced coma for several weeks. In 2011, a sneak attack of deep vein thrombosis (a blood clot in my leg), dislodged and made its way to my lungs, transforming into a massive saddle pulmonary embolism (blood clot in the lungs—a deadly one). Hold on, I can feel the energy spiraling. But, because I am now able, I’ll continue about this plethora of major medical crises.

I had a mysterious infection turned sepsis requiring an infectious disease team to spend many days on a differential diagnosis trying to find the correct treatment for the microbe that tried to take me out, three weeks before my wedding in 2014. There was great escape in 2017 when a physician I had just met, not from my medical team of more than a decade, advocated for me to try an experimental treatment because, once again, I was approaching organ failure.

Most recently, I had to advocate for the saving of my own life after giving birth to my daughter in 2020 by admonishing a room full of doctors and surgeons to check their biases and turn the abysmal Black maternal health statistics around and believe a patient when they tell you they are hemorrhaging into their distended bellies and not leave them bleeding out for hours until they reach the end of their rope have have to read an operating room full of physicians and nurses for filth. I’m overwhelmed—but that’s six.

For years, I was a chronically stressed out lifelong patient with little evidence-base to act on to help myself. I was a walking experiment. Every potential diagnosis and/or treatment plan was a moving target. My mental health took a hit. The solfège of devastation took hold—I was depressed, repressed, suppressed, oppressed…I often wondered, with great self-pity, why I had been a target to seek and destroy, to break down system by system. My musculoskeletal system has been put through the ringer as my autoimmune disorder ravaged my fascia and connective tissues. The mystery illness worked through cycles of attacking every fundamental bodily system, its major organs and functions, and up to a critical life-threatening and/or near-death episode every 3-5 years.

There were signals of bad things to come—not quite life-threatening—but harbingers of danger ahead. At 8, I had a benign growth on my left eye flare up overnight. By 15, I was diagnosed with bilateral panuveitis (painful and persistent inflammation throughout both eyes) and was on the verge of losing sight in my left eye. Though my musculoskeletal system had been ablaze with a low-grade inflammation for years, biannual bouts of autoimmune meningitis from 2006 to 2012 allowed me to experience what it must feel like to engulf a nervous system in flames and not have a hose long enough to extinguish the flare. In 2009, I was diagnosed with a uveal-meningeal syndrome—this made it was official—my brain and eyes were conspiring to maim and kill me.

In 2017, a hormonal thrill-ride began with pseudotumor cerebri (my brain was mimicking the symptoms of a brain tumor that wasn’t actually there) and plummeted me into a menopause diagnosis at 32. But, I kept going because I see no other option to performing resilience (and paying bills). I became used to the routine of emergency department registrations at the end of the workweek, near immediate transfers to an inpatient ward, days to weeks of scans and labs, and high-dose prednisone. I even became accustomed to just how unsustainable of it all was—losing jobs and having to rebuild a life and livelihood from scratch every few years. It all seemed very normal—for me. And, I have to say, while I have gratitude for my struggles because of where they have led me, I can’t help but be human about the matter and consider if there wasn’t a different path I could have taken, rather than circling the mulberry thicket through all nine circles of hell to get to where I am physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Anyway, that toxic momentum spiraled out of control and I hit a proverbial wall and realized I had no choice—I had to escape survival. Somehow, it became crystal clear that medicine alone would not be saving me. I had break patterns and make a way to make a new way. But I had to be mindful, as the way in which one makes a way matters. Cue my particular set of skills I had both acquired and been gifted through experience, from my distressing birthdate to my harrowing birth story, to do what must be done—to escape survival. The Escape GOAT may be a hero after all.

I have spent most years of my life learning to marginally tame the cortisol and mute the pain signals, usually via pharmaceutical intervention. But, since the necessity of my turning point in 2020, I’ve been reconsidering all that I had learned and adding an insufficiently addressed emotional component to my healing process. I realized that leaving my body wasn’t just a physical decision with extreme physical consequences. I was physically weak, to be sure, but the chronic dissociation had emotional consequences. Most importantly, I’ve learned the physical and emotional are deeply integrated. I have made a point to learn how to get out of my head, break the recurring cycle of rumination, and reintegrate my mind and body to heal as a whole.

This whole collection of personal essays are reflections on my journey through these life-threatening and near-death experiences and the strong signal I received that it was time to reassess what felt true and inevitable, develop new skills that I had never even thought could be taught, and escape survival mode to a physical and emotional state of integration and alignment that can allow me to withstand the vicissitudes of life without chronically teetering on the edge of physical and emotional collapse, or death.

These reflections germinate from my belief that (to borrow a term from the health-conscious zeitgeist) to “regulate my nervous system” out of a chronic state of survival mode, I had to (re)learn many physical and physiological processes, including one as basic and autonomic as breathing, at the urging of several physical therapists and alternative medicine practitioners who insisted my respiratory capacity, or lack thereof, was insufficient for optimal health outcomes and a significant cause of my pain. These practitioners then motivated me to evaluate my chronic pain through the point of view of musculoskeletal alignment and work towards engaging my feet, ankles, calves, and hips to learn to support me standing on my own two feet, without intolerable pain.

As I became more aware of myself kinesiologically(emcompassing anatomy, biomechanics, and physiology), I found comfort as I began to recognize, coordinate, and integrate my musculature and connective tissue through movement. I learned to understand my core, not as just an abdominal wall that, for vanity’s sake, I wanted to be flat, but as a system that includes my internal organs which malfunctions under chronic stress and inflammation. I worked with my practitioners to combine my breath, strength, and alignment work to be able to catch and hold myself up as my body attempts to split, fold, or collapse onto itself under undue stress or pressure, emotional or physical, patterns that have been longstanding.

I’ve learned how my emotional state impacts my physicality and the power of my mind-body connection, not just to ensure survival, but to get myself into an integrated, aligned, and engaged position to support myself under stress. Not so that I may never collapse and be unable to reclaim my footing like when this was all began at cheerleading practice, who knows what lies ahead, but so that I can realize the power I have to realign and recover, with or without medical intervention, when I do fall under the spell of chronic stress.

I am sharing my story to remain inspired and to inspire readers to imagine a place where life has stress, because that is reality, but it is not deleteriously stressful.

I am not a physician; nothing in this book is prescriptive. I am not trying to woo-woo anyone into wholeness and wellness. I am merely an eternal optimist, a whimsical woman, who imagines a future where anyone can find the the tools they need to find comfort, support, and strength inside themselves to escape survival and, thus, be a comfort, support, and source of strength to others. The expectation I previously held was the inverse, but this work is not external. It is rooted in integration and, perhaps, integrity.

In my particular situation, without a specific enough pathology to treat, even the best medicine alone could not save me. And the hunt almost left my family and me bankrupt. Could there be a world where chronic stress doesn’t leave us emotionally, physically, and financially insolvent? There’s not some simple answer that doesn’t include good public policy, which seems hard to come by (and this was my profession for years). But, of the factors that I could meaningfully intervene, I am better for doing so. And, I make no claims that I am 100 percent cured—but I am certainly better than ever before.

I, like many others, made a habit, maybe even an identity, out of overcoming long, insurmountable odds, until I decided to more closely examine my patterns with trauma response and self-limiting beliefs. I have decades of experience with chronic pain and desire a more gentle approach to the modern grinder lifestyle. I have been able to downshift my internal alarm system and reduce my intense emotional and physical reactions to tension and stress and I am flat out daring the universe to let something in my story inspire others to find their custom escape route, hopefully before autoimmune disease…and, yes, the memes are right—you do need to be a bitch, sometimes, and it can be fun!

To have escaped survival is my greatest personal accomplishment. By necessity, with purpose, intention, conscientiousness, a great deal of care, and caution thrown to the wind, I stepped off the cortisol-powered carousel I had been on since birth.

To be on the other side of surviving—to be truly living a life I can be fully present in—is a profoundly freeing development. In fact, it is my definition of freedom.

To have arrived at the opportunity to decisively dub myself The Escape GOAT—The Greatest Escapologist of All Time— is the type of high-honor I was never sure I’d be bestowed as I forced my way through academic and professional achievements to the end of financial stability. I am my own harshest critic, so being able to admit that the approval I’ve been searching for, the validation I needed, could only have come from myself, and finally has…it’s better than magic. It’s miraculous.

I’ve been thinking a lot about patterns of cause and effect in my life and I’ve developed a personal chaos theory pertaining to what I perceive as my own “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” a defining characteristic of the mathematical concept of the butterfly effect/chaos theory. I’ve lived a chaotic life. I nearly did not survive my own gestation and birth and my mother was told I was likely to have physical and intellectual challenges due to the traumatic conditions of my beginning. Historically, I have been one of those, “I thrive in chaos” types—a direct link to my chaotic start, I am sure. If there was a problem, I needed it to become annoyingly distracting, almost to the point of physical pain and/or emotional torment, in order for me to be motivated to solve it (that’s the neurodivergent remix).

I needed pressure to become calm. I needed urgency to become focused. I needed a high intensity to find the flow. This method worked well throughout student life. The problem to be solved was usually a long form writing project. For weeks, I would “prepare” by staring at a blinking cursor on blank page on a screen and thinking and overthinking right on up to the night before deadline when I’d finally begin typing and revising said thoughts in a self-doubt-fueled marathon session. A few weeks later, I’d have validation that this was the right strategy in the form of a high score. The strategy even worked well for me when I became sick with a mysterious autoimmune disease at 13. There may not be any meaningful or commodifiable accolades, but my healthcare providers sure were impressed by my demonstrated competency, resilience, and strength as a young patient.

Now, it is clear that I paid attention to the wrong pattern. I never learned better and I didn’t have to because I was thriving in chaos. Adult life outside of college, particularly joining the corporate work force, brought on the pressure and I expected to be able to get in my zone. Instead, my previously powerful inclination towards overworking, overfunctioning, and overperforming in overwhelming circumstances began to backfire. I could no longer consume myself as fuel. My body revolted. On an every-few-years cycle, my painful, debilitating chronic illness led me to the brink of death.

I have endured, survived, and restarted from six life-threatening and near-death experiences. Still, I didn’t ask the right question of my method. I asked: why have I suddenly stopped thriving under pressure?

You see, the thriving always seemed like the point…of a Good Life. I genuinely bought in to the beliefs presented to me as a framework for having a good life. I followed it like a blueprint. I was a good student. I networked myself into a good professional career…and then it crushed me. That’s when I first began to question my definition of thriving—was the thriving causing the dysfunction? If so, how does that make sense? Unfortunately, I felt I had no time to examine these sort of existential questions about life. Bills needed to be paid—mostly healthcare related—and I required health insurance. Logically, I decided to stay the course.

I met a good man who, like me, wanted to start a good family in a good neighborhood with a good school community. My health remained trapped in a cycle of instability, but the good life plan seemed to be working for so many of my peers and I had a real and intense FOMO about attending functions where I could join the alphabet soup conversations. You know, the ones in which young professionals describe their work in acronyms all comprised of the same general 26 letters, yet are supposed to mean exactly what the consultant or contractor clarifies upon being asked for that clarification—it is fun and it is identity confirming, but I digress…

It wasn’t until the winter of 2020, when the world shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic, that I felt forced, by various rapidly changing conditions, to examine my life’s big questions. I was, by all published definitions, vulnerable to complications related to Covid infection—immunocompromised and pregnant. Against medical advice, I decided to be a mother and, intuitively, I understood the paradox of parenthood because I had great parents. It is that the tiring mundanity of the everyday suddenly becomes extraordinarily rigorous and impossibly inspiring because it is all to edify your dependent. I knew I would no longer have the time to continue to stumble into my power at zero hour.

I started to examine my pattern that I called thriving and it started to look a lot like survival to me. I followed all my healthcare crises back to my birthdate—to the initial conditions in which I first demonstrated an excessive strength and resilience under grim and deleterious circumstances.

I realized I was a traumatized survivor who had developed a subconscious ability to alchemize the constrictive energies of pain and suffering into the energy of renewal, at will and when it mattered most.

The decision to become a mother inspired me to make my powers of transmutation conscious.

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The summer of 2020 was an era of movement, of progress—it was decidedly time to move the needle due to all the stories and the evidence society had witnessed about the state of social justice. I, a Black lady from Montgomery, am so glad and appreciative for all the people who protested and endured brutality when I could not because this metamorph had to go inward—constructing and shielding myself (and baby) in a chrysalis while on bed rest, conserving my power for the mandatory transformations ahead. It took a while to see and feel it physically.

The first few years of motherhood were a whirlwind of learning how to be my child’s mother, of course. But, I also had to conceptualize the idea of escaping survival mode. It is hard work to change a deep-seated mindset. I stared at the blank pages of my journal a lot and for a while. I had to uncover my belief that I was a prisoner to my ill-behaved, hyperactive immune system. I had to confront my assumption that my life would always be painful and full of suffering. And I had to disabuse myself of the firmly held conviction that my primary occupation was survival. I took my time. Then, in November of 2024, just a couple of days ahead of my daughter’s fourth birthday, the signal that it was time to take my lessons and plans out of my head and execute them into my body hit me like a Mack truck, but instead, it was a compact SUV, and the metaphor is literal.

I did months of physical and psychological therapy and it changed my life. I discovered and examined many of my physical and emotional maladaptations as they were illuminated through therapy. I investigated theories about pressure and stress and their impacts on a mind-body connection. I got curious about the chaos wrought by surviving a traumatic gestational period that nearly killed me and the chronicity of the aftershocks. I analyzed my ideas about my pain and my fear and my self-limiting beliefs. I divested in Big Good Life and, with my husband’s unwavering support, fully invested in retraining my alignment—integrating connections. I let myself feel all of my pain, emotionally and physically. I knew I had to accept it, feel it, go through it, and metabolize it. Suppression was no longer an option.

As I aligned and I integrated, I strengthened. I became embodied. My emotional and physical strength began to reflect one another. I felt myself stabilize, physically and emotionally.

I clocked the changing of the conditions as I transitioned from being in a state of chronicity health-wise to being in a synchronized state within my whole self. I know that going all-in was the only way I could transform, transmute, and transcend. It’s a process and it’s still in progress cause nothing changes so fast as a condition.

So, here I am, in this digital space, still trying to fit my pieces of the puzzle together, storyboarding causes and effects, and living out my purpose to share stories of my profound life experiences to move the needle.

All of that to say: Welcome to Chronicles of a Metamorph. I am looking to build community with others, and especially, women and mothers of a certain age and/or rage who are learning real-time lessons on their own Healing Journey™. I am here to weave my tales of pain and transformation into the beautiful tapestry of support and hope and agency started and contributed to by the generations of powerful women before me, with a little help from my peers.

I’ll be here weekly posting personal essays from my collection on living in survival mode, routinely experiencing life’s edge for three decades, and the many transformations required of me, tentatively titled, Escaping Survival.

There will be also be lighter musings and reflections, as through all of this, a bitch never lost her whimsy and wish to experiment artistically, especially within this new phase of life which has inspired me to awaken, create, share, and include others.

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In Joy,

JP

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