Uncovering

I walk in as a Black woman in a society that taught me strength was survival.

That I must always appear put together, never broken

but that illusion no longer fits the truth of who I am.

I had to break.

And that breaking saved me.

Because breaking gave me permission to unravel the lies I taught myself and by people who were too wounded to heal.

People who couldn’t fully break, so they passed down their fragments as wisdom.

I was raised in trauma

the kind that forms like a keloid, growing over everything, disfiguring the softness that tried to form beneath it.

I couldn’t see.

Literally, and emotionally. I needed glasses, but I didn’t know how to ask.

So I stayed blurry

in vision, in identity, in voice.

And in that blurriness, someone I trusted took advantage.

My first male friend.

My first betrayal.

He didn’t ask for consent.

And I didn’t know how to name what happened.

But the white sheet did.

That moment shifted how the world saw me

not as a girl needing care, but as a girl to be called names.

Easy.

Hoe.

Black.

Dumb.

Invisible.

The trauma invited more trauma.

Another man saw my vulnerability like blood in the water.

He gave me attention, gifts, what looked like love

but I learned too young that love and exploitation could come dressed the same.

I opened my body because I didn’t know I could say no.

I didn’t call it rape.

Because no one told me it was.

Not until I was pregnant.

Not until I miscarried in a hospital room with my rapist on one side, and my mother with her paperwork on the other.

That was another sheet.

Another sacrifice.

And still

God was with me.

Though I didn’t know Him yet.

I only knew the structure of church, not the breath of Yahweh.

But that moment sparked something.

A restart.

A new school.

New friends.

Black teachers who wanted me to succeed.

Peers who looked like me.

A boy who became my friend.. then my first love.

I felt what it was like to be a teenager,

to laugh, to dance,

to be held gently.

That season helped me reclaim a piece of girlhood I thought I lost.

But unhealed doors stay open.

And the enemy doesn’t knock.

The cycle returned.

The rapist came back.

More manipulation.

More performance.

My body became my only language with adults.

And that language stole my love away.

Later.

I became a mother.. again to a soul who didn’t ask to be born through my pain.

But he saw me

my little Black boy, watching the keloid try to consume me.

Marriage came while I still carried the bags of my past.

And it failed, not because I didn’t love him,

but because I still didn’t know how to love myself.

He had his own doors open too.

And we bled all over each other until it all collapsed.

More children.

More love I held in my womb.

More grief, because now those children live far from me.

Taken not by death, but by systems and choices and the enemy’s access points.

And their father, who I once loved, became a wall between us.

The pain has been unending at times.

There were moments I wondered how I’m still here.

But I am.

Because I met Yahweh.

Not just the God of the pulpit

but the intimate God who held my hand when I couldn’t move my feet.

The God who whispered that my joy was not dead.

That my story was not done.

Through prayer and fasting, I began to see the access points the enemy used.

I began to close them.

I began to speak.

To write.

To breathe.

To find joy, not in perfection

but in my process.

Books like Sisters of the Yam have given me language.

It’s reminded me that Black women’s trauma is not shameful

it’s sacred when spoken aloud.

And so I write this, not to relive pain

but to liberate it.

I am no longer just surviving.

I am uncovering joy.

Peeling it back, layer by layer, from beneath the keloids.

Because joy belongs to me.

And I will have it

for the rest of my days.

Song: ERA III by Chromonicci