The Leap (part 2)
***
Sometimes I try to pinpoint when my wildness had begun to dull itself. Honestly, my wild nature waxed and waned a lot throughout my lifetime, for many reasons, but I can say the waning happened in a way I could actively feel it in 2018 when I moved to Abu Dhabi. There was something strong I felt about not fully believing I deserved to be there, because I didn't have a Master's degree or extra diplomas or training like some of my colleagues, even in the rank underneath mine. Guilt. The same one I would often feel growing up regarding the life quality of my cousins and fellow countrypeople in Nigeria compared to mine, American-born-Nigerian. That guilty feeling was very prevalent for me in Abu Dhabi given the huge status differentiation based on nationality, ethnicity, and organization-affiliation. Looking back, I see how living from a place of guilt has obstructed my inner clarity, not allowing me to experience life for all it has to offer me. My existence. Not someone else's. On some level within, I feel a powerful call to experience life as uniquely to me as possible — and this feeling is so indigenous to my blood. I had to learn through many misaligned relationships and sleepless nights that guilt is not compassion, which can be clarifying, powerfully nurturing, and transformative. Guilt is life-draining when I'd let it go past being merely a signpost to shift gears into self-compassion, empathic understanding, and honoring the Divine in everything. Oh, but that's a forever journey. Grateful to have some words to articulate my growth, though.
People who I meet who are only familiar with stereotypical pictures of the Middle East often ask me if it was hard for me as a woman there. But it's only ever other Black people or Black women who ask me how my experience was as an Afro-person. No surprise there, and I really don’t expect it from non-Black people. Saves me from needing to objectify myself by explaining my existence, which has often not had the effect I’d wanted with non-Black people.
It was hard for me as a woman in Abu Dhabi, but it was also easy. The patriarchal hand was everywhere, even when to say "ladies first" in administrative offices (which can be plenty and often as an immigrant). I learned, though, that "ladies first" was a little something, but not enough when it came to the ease and freedom I needed to feel on a deeper level in my life. Those three years in Abu Dhabi challenged me to develop my academic intellect, performative social skills, professional demeanor, and more materially elevated enjoyment of life. It wasn't rugged. In fact, it could have been more rugged. The wild intuitive inner space I had started tapping into while in Korea felt like it was drifting a little as I settled into my post in Abu Dhabi for however long I would be there. I was prioritizing my work, my connection to academia, socializing, and professional opportunities. So much for no career. And because my connection to my inner space was dissolving, I knew I was at times suppressing emotions, making rash and unfair decisions, expecting too much from people around me, finding ways to inflate my ego while struggling to understand humility in the peaceful way I feel it now. A humility unto Spirit, Source, the Divine, Universal forces. I look back at my time in Abu Dhabi and see that I did my best. I traveled a lot and enjoyed my life as fully as I could. Enjoyment would take on a different flavor in 2021 when I followed the call to leave the Middle East and move to Mexico.
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This is where I start to get choked up in my story. Because this was another leap. One away from the predictable life that I'd gotten used to in Abu Dhabi, and into a state of surrender, or trust. In 2020, I started my stewardship of Wellspringwords, my now company, inspired by the desire to explore the inner world through writing and creative expression. I created Wellspringwords as a place for others to do it. I'd create techniques and programs to guide them and they'd swim through their depths. I, myself, would get to explore these topics from an intellectual, detached place. A comfortable place I’d cultivated my spot in while working in academia. But in 2021, the urge to dive into my own inner waters was… strong. The call is always strong when it comes. I could only follow the call, otherwise I'd go crazy. Those who know, know. And that call, that knowing, took me to Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca and Mexico City, mainly. I decided to begin my journey as a writer myself, starting exactly where I was. Writing about how good it felt to express myself. Writing about flow at the ocean. Documenting the poetry I would find in everything. And as Wellspringwords grew, so did I. When I would reach another shadowed pocket within myself and will illumination to uncover more of me, Wellspringwords' programming would deepen. I began to attract souls on a similar path of self-discovery and remembering the authentic voice within. These humans have become clients, students, mentees, and friends. A true community. At this point, there was no school to back me and host me as I moved through Mexico (and 3 months in Portugal). There was also no curriculum and learning philosophy I was beholden to. The freedom shook me. I'm just now starting to settle.
***
The story about the darkness of the past couple of years (my years through Mexico and Portugal) coincides with the powerful shifts happening all around the Earth, all through the cosmos. A family member developed a mental condition that slowly disallowed them to care for themselves in a basic way — in the way most people care for themselves, their nutrition, and their hygiene. My own perception of reality started to widen and deepen and develop alternate and asymmetric pathways that scared me in a way. It's always about reconciling realities, and I found challenges in bringing myself "down to earth" or feeling understood by the people I spent years knowing and cultivating relationships with. Before my family member’s condition, I was already starting to swim in different perceptions of reality. The art and writing I decided to take seriously were seriously taking me off land and into different experiences of self and relationship with life. It was exhilarating and exhausting. I deepened my relationship with cannabis, even became dependent, especially during my hardest moments. When this family member’s condition worsened, my whole family was emotionally hit, and it showed through any facades we’d previously projected about having things “together”. A distant relative would call home and ask my mother, “and how is everyone? I haven’t heard from [family member experiencing mental illness] in a while! What are they up to?” And she would reply, “oh, you know, everyone is doing their thing. Living life.” I’d look at my mom from the corner of my eye and see only a wall of protection surrounding her, penetrating the phone line; revealing nothing. But what is hidden only ferments into feeling that is felt by the world around you, regardless of whether others can understand the specifics of your aura.
I found myself doing whatever I could to try and escape the despair and pain I felt. The grief. I poured my grief into my desire to create. I was so sad, I was desperate to be alive. And in my desperation, I created. This desperation was like another spiritual hand guiding me into deeper darknesses within myself. I wrote a lot. I wrote a novel and my characters’ struggles with self-concept and insecurities and darkness and confusion and suppressed power just like I was experiencing — the sacred experience inherent to being human. But rather than that I touch base with insecurity, it's about how I experience these attributes of myself. I realize that I had to be scared of myself, my depths, my magnitude, and the truth of my conscious and subconscious thoughts, first, before I could be with myself in a (re)new(ed) way. And just like reconciling my new perceptions of life with my existing life, I am in the practice and process of reconciling new understandings of myself with my existing self-concept. My family member is in a healing process. My whole family is in a healing process. And we’re blessed because of it. I believe that all disharmony, all dis-ease carries us back to pure health if we walk the brave journey.
***
I recently heard in a song something like "how can you be well if you can't rescue yourself?" Which reminds me of Ms. Lauryn Hill's words "how you gon' win if you ain't right within?" These ideas are what pushed me to make my most recent leap: choosing my wellness by once again leaving the USA and following my heart’s call to adventure, to pure living, to experiencing my wholeness — no matter what the journey will bring. The leap of today brings me to the lobby of this condo I've rented for a few nights. Still in the lobby because my apartment still isn't ready. It's okay. Things worth having sometimes take time. And not because they need to take time, but more so because it sometimes takes a lot of time and wearing experiences to cause people to make the decisions they need to from the guttural, primal needs space. The space of truth and desire. This was the case for me.
In April 2023, I left Mexico City and the 5-month marriage-like relationship I'd impulsively entered, and went from the frying pan into the fire it seemed like. Already, I was swimming in my doubts and darkness — making impulsive decisions is making decisions from a place of fear and lack of connection to the abundance of fulfillment always available. Choosing to end that romance was a brave choice in choosing to end a fantasy I’d attached my ego to about what it would mean to feel secure. Though the choice to end the relationship was brave, it was a tricky, sticky transition; the parts of myself that had hidden in feeling like a fraud when I was in Abu Dhabi were rising. In this transition, I was once again seeing and reliving unsustainable patterns of falsehood and overgiving in some of my other relationships. The grey vision memories before the golden vision memories. Thankfully I had a place to welcome me home in California when I left Mexico. In this experience, though, home really had to be the feeling I was cultivating within myself, because I didn’t feel it on many levels at the family house. My family member’s unpredictable mental health condition meant everyone mostly being on edge, learning how to communicate in a new way with them, expending all available resources on them, which is draining on many levels. As a family, we have been called to once again reconcile the conservative and highly vigilant Igbo, Nigerian culture and custom with the lived reality of mental illness and all the subconscious programming it elucidates within the person experiencing illness and all directly involved individuals. Part of the reason I left my last relationship in Mexico City was because the calling to live from a spiritual groundedness was strong, and I didn’t feel able to live that out in a healthy and free way in that relationship. Moving back to California, spending time with and caring for my family member with mental illness, my parents, the household, and myself, showed me what it meant to live from my connection with Spirit. How to develop faith, and what cultivated or trained faith looks and feels like in practice. It's a peace that truly transcends the illusion of success and fulfillment defined by a world committed to individualism through a scarcity mentality.
In the end, it feels like Spirit had called me home to California to develop the faith I would need to venture out again into this world. Not surprisingly, Wellspringwords programming has taken on a more spiritual, healing flavor. It's because I see the capacity for healing within everyone I meet. Why not? Why shouldn't we all be able to heal and experience life as abundant and beautifully expressive? Healing for me has meant gathering the courage to be vulnerable enough to see myself — all the great and all the obscure — and reconcile these perceptions of myself. Far beyond only trying to make the great things about myself true: they are very true. I am an incredible soul. Far beyond covering myself in obscurities: they do exist. I am powerfully and Divinely human. My healing journey is simply about listening to Spirit with intention. Clearly, the metaphysical touch has always been part of my life. Clearly, I have been powerfully guided. Clearly, I am creating a lifetime of a lifetime. And I'm not disregarding the strength it takes me to live with clarity, courage, curiosity, and (com)passion. I'm also not hiding from myself when I want the story to look or sound sweeter than what it is. So much has had to unravel for me to see myself clearly. And in that unraveling, I've seen some stuff fall out of the previously tangled bundle. Stuff I guess I collected without the sweet intention I hope to live from as much as possible. Thoughts about success and wealth inherited from poor or financially uninformed caregivers. Expectations for caregiving and any sacrifice associated. Expectations of my mother and motherhood in general, inherited from an Ada herself. Does the offspring of an Ada not have a similar level of first-born independence and responsibility? Though I am a second-born? Whatever. Here I am, all rolled out, splayed, out, and unraveled as far as I know. Ready, in leaping. And, oh, my apartment is ready.
