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But what if the problem isn’t you at all?

I was sitting in my car while my son was at swim lessons. Parked under a tree. And this tree—tall, strong, steady—was riddled with holes. Woodpecker holes. Top to bottom.

I almost looked away.
But Spirit whispered: Look again.

So I did.

And I realized that, despite all those holes—signs of intrusion, of being picked at, of being used, this tree was still standing.
Still growing.
Still stretching up toward the sky.

And just like that, I realized: the tree was me.
The tree is you.

We’ve been poked, prodded, picked at.
By media.
By people.
By culture.
By silence.

By systems that told us we were less, even when they used everything we had.

And still—we grow.

You Were Lied To About Strength

But here’s the lie:
You’ve been taught that strength is clean. That it’s shiny. That it doesn’t carry holes or scars.

So when you look at yourself and see damage, you forget:
That’s what strength actually looks like.

God didn’t promise a polished journey. He promised presence.

The woodpecker holes are proof that you kept standing anyway.
Proof that you held onto purpose, even when no one else saw it.
Proof that something tried to break you—and couldn’t, even when you felt like it did.

You were lied to about what strength looks like.
And it’s time to unlearn that lie.

To begin, grab your journal, open to a fresh page, and take your favorite writing utensil in hand.

Then answer Today’s Reflection Prompt:

Write it down. Say it out loud. And remember…

You didn’t fake your strength. You forged it.

Community Question📝 What’s a scar—emotional, spiritual, or physical—that changed the way you see yourself? Drop your story in the comments or reply back to this email. If this message speaks to you, forward it to someone else who needs the reminder: they’re still here for a reason. And if you’re growing anyway? Leave a 🌳 in the comments to let me know you’re out here standing too.

Leave a comment

These reflections are part of an ongoing series called Lessons from the Trees—real-time downloads from quiet moments, whispered truths, and things God made plain when I finally slowed down long enough to look.

If this landed for you, sit with it.
If it stirred something in you, write it down.
And if you’re still in the middle of the ache, know this:
you’re not the only one rerouting.

There’s wisdom in the bark.
There’s healing in the growth you didn’t ask for.
There’s still purpose—even here.

🌳
—Shaneequa

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This is Part IV of an ongoing truth series. Welcome, if you’re new. Stay, if you’re ready.

The first thing you need to do is stop gaslighting yourself.

There is no such thing as “acting” ADHD. There is no such thing as “acting” autistic. And that belief — the one that says you’re too functional, too together, too high-achieving, too conversational to really be neurodivergent — that belief is itself the first gaslight. The one you’ve been doing to yourself, probably for years, because the world did it to you first.

Here’s the thing they don’t tell you:

It is a spectrum. Full stop.

Saying someone doesn’t look ADHD or autistic is like saying the rainbow is only eight colors and ignoring every shade that lives between them. Red is not just red. There is crimson and coral and rose and rust and burgundy and brick — and every single one of them is still red. Your brain is the same. There is no single look. No single presentation. No checkbox that, if you don’t tick every box, means you don’t belong in the conversation.

You belong in this conversation.

Twenty years of being told the wrong thing

It took me twenty years to finally get an ADHD diagnosis.

Twenty years of going to doctors and being sent home with anxiety. With depression. With instructions to manage my stress better, sleep more, worry less. And those things were real — I was anxious, I was depressed — but they were not the root. They were the result. Anxiety and depression are frequently what ADHD looks like from the outside, especially in women, especially in Black women, who are expected to hold everything together and not make a fuss about what it costs them.

When I finally got the ADHD diagnosis and started medication, something unexpected happened: it revealed the autism underneath. Because that’s what ADHD medication can do — it quiets enough of the noise that you can finally hear the other signal that’s been there all along.

But getting there required finding a doctor who actually listened. Because until I did, the medical community had a different story about me.

They called me anxious. They called me depressed. They called it a day. They were wrong.

What the medical system does to us

I want to name something directly, because it matters and it doesn’t get said enough:

The medical community does not test adults for autism. Not readily. Not willingly. The system was built around a narrow image — a white boy, quiet, non-verbal or near it, rocking, avoiding eye contact. That image became the template. And everyone who didn’t match it got handed a different label and sent on their way.

I noticed that Black women in particular tend to get labeled as bipolar. Or told they have PMDD. And sometimes those diagnoses are accurate. But sometimes — too often — they are lazy. They are a shortcut. They are what happens when a system that was never designed to see you, looks at you and reaches for the nearest available box instead of actually doing the work of understanding what’s going on.

Bipolar and PMDD are real. And they are also frequently misapplied to Black women whose neurodivergence has never been properly assessed.

I am not a doctor. I am a woman who lived inside a wrong diagnosis for two decades. And I am telling you: if something has never fully fit, keep asking. Keep looking. You are not too much. You are not dramatic. You may simply have never been properly seen.

The spectrum is wider than you think

Here is what neurodivergence actually looks like. Not in a textbook. In a life.

It looks like being obsessive about arriving early — or always, perpetually, inexplicably late.

It looks like being unable to tolerate the tag in the back of your shirt, but owning seventeen soft blankets and a collection of weighted stuffed animals you are not ashamed of.

It looks like needing everything in a specific order — or living in what looks like chaos to everyone else but makes complete sense to you.

It looks like reacting to things others brush off — not dramatically, not for attention, but because your nervous system processes stimuli differently. The feeling is real. The body signal is real. The overwhelm is real.

It looks like feeling like you arrived on the wrong planet. Like your family is loving but you never quite fit. Like you’ve been performing belonging your whole life.

It looks like a brain that never stops talking — a running internal commentary, a soundtrack that never powers down, ideas arriving faster than you can catch them. (This leans ADHD.)

Or it looks like no internal dialogue at all — a brain that thinks in images, in feelings, in sensations rather than words. (This leans autism.)

It looks like standing in front of the shower unable to get in — not because you’re lazy, but because your brain has already mapped every single micro-step simultaneously and the weight of all of them at once is genuinely paralyzing. (ADHD.) Or because you already know you’re going to hate the feeling of being wet afterward, and the whole experience feels like a negotiation with your own skin. (Autism.)

It looks like being gifted in seventeen different directions and finishing none of them. Multi-passionate. Multi-started. Brilliant in the beginning and gone before the ending. (ADHD.)

Or it looks like being consumed by one thing — numbers, art, a particular subject, a system — with a depth and dedication that most people will never understand. (Autism.)

It. Is. A. Spectrum.

And you are somewhere on it. Uniquely. In your own configuration. In your own colors.

My story

I had a genius IQ. I breezed through school without ever opening a book to study — and still landed as a solid B student because I simply did not do homework. I was placed in gifted classes I never felt smart enough to be in. I had the highest score on the state exam and felt like a fraud. I had people telling me my entire childhood that I was not living up to my potential, and I had no language for why I couldn’t just do the things that seemed so simple for everyone else.

My mother used to say I needed my own planet.

I got in trouble constantly for not putting my clothes away. I was late to everything. I had stacks of unfinished projects and a graveyard of businesses and MLMs I’d started with genuine passion and abandoned when the executive function required to maintain them ran out. I felt everything deeply and couldn’t always explain why. I absorbed the people around me so completely that I didn’t always know where they ended and I began.

I was not lazy.
I was not undisciplined.
I was not a disappointment.

I was undiagnosed. For twenty years.

What happens when the mask breaks

Here is something I need to say for every woman who has watched her mother — or herself — change in ways that frightened her.

As women, when our hormones shift — particularly when estrogen begins to drop — the coping mechanisms we have spent a lifetime building start to fail. The masks we wear, the systems we constructed, the ways we learned to pass as neurotypical in a world that demanded it — they stop working. The scaffolding falls away.

And what people see is rage. Overwhelm. A woman who seems to have lost herself, who snaps at things that never used to bother her, who can’t filter the way she used to, who is suddenly and terrifyingly sensitive to everything.

I have seen it described as her becoming a raging b*tch during menopause.

What it actually is: her mask broke. And now the stimuli she was keeping out through sheer force of constructed coping is getting in. All of it. All at once. And she doesn’t have a name for what’s happening because no one ever told her she was neurodivergent to begin with.

This is not a character flaw. This is a neurological reality that the medical system failed to prepare her for — because it failed to see her in the first place.

One more thing I’ve noticed

We tend to be more spiritually attuned. More intuitive. More connected to something beyond the purely rational. I don’t think this is a coincidence.

When your brain is wired to feel everything more intensely, to pick up signals others miss, to live slightly outside the frequency everyone else seems to be tuned to — you start to develop other kinds of perception. You notice things. You sense things. You receive things.

The world may have called it being “too sensitive.” But sensitivity, at its fullest expression, is a form of sight.

Hold onto that.

What I want you to walk away with

If you are going for an assessment — do not mask. I know that sounds terrifying. I know the mask feels like protection. But if you perform your most functional self in that room, you will walk out with the wrong answer again. And you deserve the right answer. You have deserved it your whole life.

Be honest. Be messy. Tell them about the shower. Tell them about the tags. Tell them about the seventeen unfinished projects and the one thing you could talk about for six hours straight. Tell them about the planet you feel like you arrived on by accident.

You do not need to be fixed.

You need to be understood. You need language for what you’ve been living. You need to finally, finally give yourself the grace to be exactly who you are — not a broken version of someone else’s normal, but a full, complete, vivid, specific, magnificent version of yourself.

The spectrum is wide. The colors are infinite. And you — exactly as you are — belong on it.

Grace and Space to Grow,
Shaneequa

Did any of this sound like your life? Did you see yourself in the shower, the tags, the late arrivals, the unfinished stacks? Tell me in the comments. Or tell me what it felt like to finally have language for something you’d been living without words for. I read everything.

And if you’re still searching for a diagnosis — don’t stop. Find the doctor who will actually listen. They exist.

We made it.

From drought to abundance.
From fear and scarcity to hidden wisdom and radical truth.
From the shadow of who you’ve been hiding to the full, scandalous, voice-forward, rain-soaked, machete-wielding reality of who you actually are.

And then — right at the end of a reading that was never supposed to happen — one more card appeared.

A card I had never seen come up in any reading before.
Not once.

Oshun Manifesting Birth. Manifestation. Intention. Abundance.

It came up in shadow — which, by now, you know doesn’t mean absence.

It means this is the work.
This is what we’re being called toward.
This is the thing that becomes available to us when we do everything this reading has been asking us to do.

And on the back of this card — bees.

The Bees

I need you to stay with me here because this is the part that got me.

Bees are small.
Individually, unremarkable in size.
Easy to overlook.
Easy to underestimate.

And yet they are among the most critical beings on this planet.

They pollinate.
They populate.
They keep things growing that we depend on to breathe, to eat, to live.
They are so fundamental to the circle of life that, without them, the whole system starts to collapse.

And they don’t do any of that by being extraordinary in the conventional sense. They do it simply by showing up and doing what they were made to do.
Over and over.
Consistently.
Without asking whether they’re significant enough to matter.

So when you catch yourself thinking — who am I? I’m just one person. What difference does it make? — I want you to remember the bees.

You are enough.

And you are not just enough for yourself.

What You’re Pollinating

Here’s the question this card is really asking:

What are you putting out into this world?

Everything you send out — every conversation, every piece of work, every act of courage, every moment you choose to be fully yourself instead of the edited version — that is your pollination. That is your contribution to the circle. That is how you keep things growing beyond yourself.

• Are you pollinating weeds or flowers?

• Are you spreading fear or possibility?

• Are you adding to the drought or seeding the abundance?

Because you are always pollinating something.

The question is never whether you have an impact.

The question is what kind.

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Manifestation Isn’t Magic. It’s Intention.

This card came up in shadow — meaning the work of manifesting intentionally is still in front of us.

We’re not quite there yet.
But we’re close.
And the path there isn’t complicated.

It starts with being intentional about who you are and what you want.

Not in a vision-board, positive-thinking-will-fix-everything kind of way.
In a I know what I’m here to do and I’m going to show up for it fully and consistently kind of way.

The bees don’t sit around wondering if pollination is worth it. They don’t second-guess whether their contribution matters. They just do the work. Small, steady, essential.

That’s the invitation. Not to have it all figured out. Not to arrive somewhere perfect before you begin.

Just to be intentional.
To show up.
To do the thing you were made to do with the full weight of who you are behind it.

That’s how abundance grows.
That’s how birth happens.

Not in a single dramatic moment but in the accumulation of a thousand small, intentional acts of being completely, unapologetically, pollinating-the-earth yourself.

The Full Arc

Look at where we started.

Drought. Fear. Scarcity. Insecurity. The long dry season of a self that’s been underground too long.

And look at where we land.

Manifestation. Intention. Abundance. A self so fully expressed, it becomes a contribution to everything around it.

That is not a coincidence.
That is not a random collection of cards.
That is a reading that knew exactly what it was doing from the moment it insisted on happening — on a day when I had completely different plans, with a deck I wasn’t even supposed to be reaching for.

The cards spoke. And what they said, from the very first pull to this last one, was the same thing in seven different ways:

Questions to Sit With

• What are you pollinating right now — and is it what you actually want to be growing?

• Where in your life are you waiting to feel significant enough to begin? What would it look like to begin anyway?

• What does intentional, abundant living look like for you — not in general, but specifically, in your actual life?

This is Part 7 — the final installment — of the When the Cards Speak series, an unplanned, spirit-led reading from the Faces of Oshun1 oracle deck that unfolded without intention and had everything to say. If you’re just finding this series, start from the beginning with the introduction and let it take you through.

Want Your Own Reading?

This reading came through for a reason. And if something in this series has been speaking directly to your life — your drought, your scandal, your voice, your purpose — imagine what a reading pulled specifically for you could illuminate.

Private readings are available. The link is in the description.

[Book your private reading here → https://my.flowlance.com/leanintothespirit]

With love, intention, and the energy of the bees,
Shaneequa

We’ve come a long way in this Come Back to Your Senses series.

We started in drought — in fear, scarcity, and the particular exhaustion of a long dry season.

We moved through sensuality and presence, through the audacity of your scandal, through the cleansing rain and everything you needed to release inside it.

We talked about your voice. About showing up fully. About being so completely yourself that you become a light that adds rather than competes.

And now the reading hands us two cards that feel like the exhale after all of that.

Oshun’s Secret. Mystery, hidden knowledge, and wisdom.

Oshun’s Machete. Radical truth, clarity, and self-awareness.

Together they are asking one question: what happens when you stop running from yourself?

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The Secret You’ve Been Carrying

There’s a concept some people call the Akashic records — the idea that somewhere, somehow, the full story of who you are and who you’re meant to become already exists. Already written. Already whole.

If this is a new concept to you, I’m not asking you to subscribe to that literally. But sit with the metaphor for a moment.

What if you already know? What if the answers you’ve been searching for — about your purpose, your path, your next right move — aren’t out there somewhere waiting to be discovered but in here, waiting to be remembered?

Because that’s what this card is pointing to. Not a mystery that belongs to someone else. Not wisdom you have to earn through some elaborate spiritual credential. Your own hidden knowledge. The part of you that has always known — that knew when something was wrong before you could articulate it, that knew when a door was closing before you were ready to admit it, that knew, quietly and persistently, who you actually are even when you were busy being everyone else.

That knowing is the secret. And it’s yours. It always was.

When you own all that you are — when you stop apologizing for it, stop editing it, stop running from it — you unlock something. You get access to a version of yourself that is clear, grounded, and surprisingly unafraid. You open your own book and find that the story was already written. Not to trap you. To guide you.

Oh. I already know. It’s written. It’s here. Why have I been running from this?

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The Machete

If the secret is the wisdom, the machete is what you use to get to it.

This card doesn’t arrive gently. It doesn’t ask you to ease into clarity or take your time getting to the truth. The machete cuts. Clean. Direct. Through the overgrowth of everything you’ve told yourself, everything you’ve been told, every story that was never really yours but that you carried anyway because it was familiar.

Radical truth. Clarity. Self-awareness.

Not self-awareness as a passive, journaling-on-a-Sunday kind of practice. Self-awareness as an active, unflinching willingness to see yourself clearly — the gifts and the shadows, the patterns and the possibilities, the places where you’ve been lying to yourself with the best of intentions.

That kind of clarity can feel brutal at first.
Like loss.
Like exposure.
Like standing in the rain — which, if you read Part 4, you already know you can handle.

But on the other side of that cut? There is nothing left to hide behind. Nothing left to manage or perform or maintain.

Just you, clear-eyed and finally free to move in the direction you actually want to go.

What Happens When Purpose Finds You

Here’s the thing about running from yourself — and I say this as someone who did it for longer than I care to admit.

Purpose will always chase you down.

You can change directions.
You can stay busy enough to drown it out.
You can build an entire life around avoiding the thing that keeps showing up at the edges of your quietest moments.

And it will wait.

Patient.
Persistent.
Completely unbothered by your resistance.

Because it was written before you started running.

And when you finally stop — when you let the secret surface and the machete do its work — you don’t just find your purpose. You find peace. Real alignment. A true reflection of who you actually are underneath all the years of managing and hiding and becoming what everyone else needed.

That is what these two cards together are promising. Not as a distant destination. As the natural outcome of everything this reading has been building toward.

The secret was always yours.
The machete was always in your hand.
All you have to do is use it.

Questions to Sit With

• What do you already know — about yourself, your path, your next move — that you’ve been pretending not to know?

• Where in your life are you overdue for a machete moment? What truth have you been tiptoeing around?

• What would change if you stopped running and let your purpose catch you?

This is Part 6 of the When the Cards Speak series — an unplanned, spirit-led reading from the Faces of Oshun1 oracle deck that unfolded without intention and had everything to say. Start from the beginning with the series introduction, or follow along as each part drops.

Want Your Own Reading?

If you’re ready to stop running — if you’re ready to open the book and see what’s already written — a private reading can help you access that clarity. Not to tell you who to be. But to reflect back what you already know and help you trust it enough to act on it.

[Book your private reading here → https://my.flowlance.com/leanintothespirit]

With love and full presence,
Shaneequa

This card picks up right where that one leaves off — because once you’ve released what was holding you back, once you’ve stood in the storm and come out the other side, there’s really only one thing left to do.

Show up. As yourself. Fully. Out loud.

There’s a Reason Vulnerability Feels Scary

It’s not weakness. It’s not oversharing. It’s not falling apart in front of people who haven’t earned it. Real vulnerability — the kind Brené Brown has dedicated her life’s work to unpacking — is the audacity to show up as exactly who you are, even when every part of you is bracing for judgment. That takes power. That is power.

And this card — pulled from the Faces of Oshun oracle deck in a reading that was never planned — carried that energy completely.

It came up in shadow, which means this is something we’ve been sitting on. Something that’s been waiting.

A voice that’s been living in the background, patient and persistent, waiting for permission that was never anyone else’s to give.

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What This Card Is Actually About

This is the voice card.
The throat chakra.
The seat of self-expression, individuality, and the particular courage it takes to declare — out loud, in your actual life —

Not performing a version of yourself curated for someone else’s comfort.
Not showing up as the edited, audience-approved version of who you are.
Not shrinking yourself into whatever the room seems to want from you.
Not packaging yourself for consumption.
Not being loud just for the sake of it.
Not demanding that everyone see you or agree with you or celebrate you.

Just refusing to hide anymore.

Your anger.
Your passion.
Your love.
Your joy.
Your work.

All of it has a right to exist in the open.
All of it deserves to be heard.

Because silence has a price, too. And you've been paying it long enough.

You know what it feels like…

• To shrink.

• To soften your edges.

• To wait for a right moment that keeps not arriving.

• To bend and adjust and make yourself acceptable for so long that you become a stranger to yourself. An imposter in your own life, not recognizing the person looking back at you.

That’s over now. That’s what this card is saying.

That season is done.

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We Are Stars Meant to Shine

Something landed during this reading that I have to share exactly as it came because it stopped me mid-sentence.

We are stars meant to shine. And stars don't compete. They just burn bright in their own corner of the sky.

Read that again.

This isn’t about being in anyone’s face. It’s not about taking up space at someone else’s expense. It’s about the simple, radical, quietly revolutionary act of being yourself so completely that you become a light — not to outshine, but to add to the light that’s already here.

That’s what your voice does when you use it.
That’s what your work does when you show it.
That’s what your full, unedited presence does in every room you walk into.

It adds.

The Message for This Season

As we move through this spring equinox energy and into this next quarter, this card’s message couldn’t be cleaner:

Be your damn self.

Speak up.
Show your work.
Let people feel your passion.
Stop waiting for permission.
Stop editing yourself down to something palatable.

The people who are meant to receive what you carry — they need the real version. Not the careful version. Not the strategic version.

The you version.

This is the season of your voice.

Use it.

Questions to Sit With

• Where have you been using someone else’s voice instead of your own — in your work, your relationships, your choices?

• What would you say, create, or do tomorrow if you knew your voice was not just welcome but needed?

• What does being fully yourself actually look like — not in theory, but in your real, specific, everyday life?

This is Part 5 of the When the Cards Speak series — an unplanned, spirit-led reading from the Faces of Oshun oracle deck1 that unfolded without intention and had everything to say. Start from the beginning with the series introduction, or follow along as each part drops.

Ready for Part 6 — The Secret & The Machete?

Want Your Own Reading?

If your voice has been living in the shadows — if you know there’s more of you waiting to come through, but you’re not sure what’s in the way or where to start — a private reading can help you find the thread and follow it all the way back to yourself.

[Book your private reading here → https://my.flowlance.com/leanintothespirit]

With love and full presence,
Shaneequa

There’s a certain kind of person who, when it starts to rain, immediately looks for cover.

Head down. Shoulders up. Arms crossed over whatever they’re trying to protect. Moving fast, moving tight, trying to get through it with as little exposure as possible.

I understand that person.
I was that person.
For a looong time.

But this card — Oshun of the Cleansing Rain — isn’t asking you to find cover. It’s asking you to do something that feels almost counterintuitive when you’ve been in survival mode as long as some of us have.

It’s asking you to stand in it.
Back straight.
Face calm.

Even while the storm surges around you.

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What the Card Actually Shows

When this card came up in the reading, what struck me first was the image itself. Because you might expect a card about rain and emotional release to show someone hunched, overwhelmed, barely holding it together.

That’s not what’s on this card.

She is standing.
Tall.
Proud.
Not bracing against the rain but collecting it — adding to it, letting it flow through her and out of her and back into something larger than herself.

She is not a victim of the storm. She is part of it.

She is the alchemy.

That image sat with me because it reframes everything about what it means to go through something hard.

The Holiday Moment

This card immediately brought to mind that movie — The Holiday. If you’ve seen it, you know the arc. Cameron Diaz’s character cannot cry. Not won’t — cannot. She has buried her own feelings so completely, protected herself so thoroughly from her own emotional life, that the release mechanism simply stopped working.

And the whole movie is really about her learning to feel again.

That’s not a rom-com quirk. That’s a lot of us. We’ve been so afraid of being stripped of the things we thought defined us —

• the relationship,

• the job,

• the identity,

• the dream we built our whole sense of self around

— that we started shrinking.
Started hiding.
Started becoming less of ourselves in order to avoid the exposure of loss.

But here’s what shrinking actually costs you: it keeps you dry in all the wrong ways. Dry of joy.
Dry of release.
Dry of the very renewal that’s trying to find you.

What You’re Holding On To

I want to say something directly here because this card came with a specific message and I don’t want to soften it past the point of usefulness.

There is something you are holding on to that is keeping you from your healing.

It could be a relationship that has run its full course.
It could be material things you’ve wrapped your security around.
It could be friendships that no longer fit who you’re becoming. It could be a job that has become a identity instead of an income.
It could even be the dream you had as a child — the one you built not from genuine desire but as a response to something that hurt you, something you were trying to fix or prove or escape.

Whatever it is — you know what it is. Some part of you already knows.

And the rain is not going to stop falling just because you keep your hands closed.

The cleansing is already here.

The question is whether you’re going to let it work.

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What I Know About Hard Seasons

I’ll be honest with you the way this reading was honest with me.

I said during this reading that I went through one of the hardest three years of my life recently. And then I corrected myself — because in truth it was six. And if I’m really being honest, it was twelve. Twelve years of holding on to things I should have released far earlier. Twelve years of white-knuckling a version of my life that the universe, my path, my purpose — whatever you want to call it — was actively trying to liberate me from.

And I couldn’t see it.

I was so focused on not losing what I had that I couldn’t see what I was being given access to.

Pain is illuminating like that. It shows you exactly who you are in the moment and exactly who you’re afraid to become.

But if you meet the moment — if you open your hands, stand in the rain, let the thing go — you will be amazed at who you actually are on the other side of it.

I wouldn’t have gotten here had I not gone through that. But I’ll also say this: had I confronted my fears earlier, I would have gotten here a lot faster. I wouldn’t have needed to hit burnout to find my way through.

That’s not regret. That’s information. And I’m passing it to you so maybe your timeline doesn’t have to be as long as mine.

Work Isn’t Supposed to Be Hard

One more thing this reading surfaced that belongs here — because it connects directly to what we hold on to and why.

Work is not meant to be hard.

It’s meant to be challenging. It’s meant to take effort and focus and growth. But if it feels like you’re Sisyphus — pushing a boulder up a mountain only to watch it roll back down every single time — you might be on the wrong mountain. Heck, you might not even be ready for the mountain yet. You might be in a season that’s calling you to walk through the valley and collect tools first.

There’s no shame in that.
There’s nothing wasted in that.

Everything you gather along the way gets used.
Every detour,
every dead end,
every season that felt like it counted for nothing — it all finds its place eventually.

But you have to be willing to let go of the mountain that was never yours in order to find the one that is.

Questions to Sit With

• What are you holding on to that you already know, somewhere deep down, you need to release?

• Where in your life does the effort feel less like growth and more like grinding — and what does that tell you?

• What would open hands feel like right now? What would you have to trust in order to let go?

This is Part 4 of the When the Cards Speak series — an unplanned, spirit-led reading from the Faces of Oshun oracle deck that unfolded without intention and had everything to say. Start from the beginning with the series introduction, or follow along as each part drops.

Ready for Part 5 — Be Your Damn Self?

Want Your Own Reading?

If you’re in a season of letting go — or if you’re standing at the edge of it, knowing what needs to happen but not quite ready to open your hands — a private reading can help you understand what you’re releasing, what’s waiting on the other side, and how to move through it with clarity instead of fear.

[Book your private reading here → https://my.flowlance.com/leanintothespirit]

With love and full presence,
Shaneequa

We just talked about coming back to your senses — inhabiting yourself fully, presently, unapologetically. Slowing down enough to feel the wind, taste your food, occupy your own life like you actually belong in it.

Now the cards are ready to take it somewhere bolder.

What would they say?

What would they say if you…
…wore that,
…said that,
…quit that,
…started that?

What would they say…
…if you left,
…if you stayed,
…if you pivoted,
…if you went back,
…if you chose yourself so loudly that everybody heard it?

Here’s a better question: who cares?

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What the Cards Pulled

In this reading from the Faces of Oshun oracle deck, the card that came up next carried a specific energy — one called Oshun the Scandalous. Not in a reckless, chaotic way. In a multifaceted, impossible to reduce, done shrinking to fit your comfort kind of way.

Think less coin with two sides, more decahedron — a shape with so many faces it simply cannot be flattened into one neat, digestible version. That’s the energy this card brought through. That’s the mirror it’s holding up.

You are not a simple, one-sided thing. You never were. And the life you’ve been living — the carefully edited, socially acceptable, won’t-ruffle-any-feathers version — that’s not the whole picture. Not even close.

The Scandal That’s Waiting for You

Let’s play a game. Fill in the blank:

“What would people say if I ________?”

Quit my job.
Started a business.
Went back to school.
Left my marriage.
Got married.
Dated someone unexpected.
Moved across the country.
Chose a career they don’t understand.
Said out loud what I actually believe.

Whatever came up for you just now?
That flutter of excitement mixed with terror?

That’s the thing.
That’s your scandal.

And this card’s energy is looking at you like — so what are you waiting for?

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What Their Judgment Actually Pays

Here’s the truth nobody wants to say out loud:

Their opinions don’t pay your bills.
Their comfort doesn’t build your legacy.
Their approval doesn’t fill the quiet moments at the end of the day when you’re alone with yourself and your choices.

The people you’re afraid of disappointing? Most of them are too busy managing their own unlived lives to really clock yours.

And the ones who do have something to say? Their judgment is just their own unexplored scandal talking.

Every day you wait, every version of yourself you hold back — it accumulates. Not as patience, not as wisdom. As regret. As low-key frustration. As this background hum of I know I’m supposed to be doing something different that follows you everywhere.

You’re not meant to carry that.

You’re meant to live.

Bold. Brazen. Unapologetic.

This card is asking you to embody something. Not recklessness — audacity. The kind that comes from deep self-knowing. The kind that says: I have looked at all my sides, all my faces, all the versions of me that have been waiting in the wings, and I am choosing to let them out.

And this isn’t just for women.

Feminine power belongs to everyone.

Men — you are craving brotherhood.
Real touch.
Real communication.
Real fellowship.

The same boldness that says go get your scandal is the boldness that says…

• I’m going to create real connection.

• I’m going to build a community.

• I’m not doing this life alone.

That is feminine power, too. That is the full, multifaceted, decahedron version of you showing up.

Fearless doesn’t mean having no fear. It means the desire to be fully alive is finally louder than the fear of being fully seen.

So go get your scandal. Not to shock anyone. Not to prove a point. But because whatever that bold, brazen, unapologetic next move is — it’s true to you. And living in your truth is never something to be ashamed of.

Questions to Sit With

• What’s the scandal you’ve been talking yourself out of?

• Whose voice is loudest in your head when you imagine doing the thing — and do they actually have skin in your game?

• What would you do tomorrow if their opinion simply didn’t exist?

This is Part 3 of the When the Cards Speak series — an unplanned, spirit-led reading from the Faces of Oshun1 oracle deck that unfolded without intention and had everything to say. Start from the beginning with the series introduction, or follow along as each part drops.

Ready for Part 4 — Stand in the Rain?

Want Your Own Reading?

Sometimes the hardest part isn’t the doing — it’s the clarity. Knowing which door to walk through. Understanding what your specific energy is calling you toward this season.

That’s exactly what we dig into in a private reading. Your energy, your blocks, your next bold move — decoded just for you.

[Book your private reading here → https://my.flowlance.com/leanintothespirit]

With love and zero apologies,
Shaneequa

PART 2

If the drought is where we’ve been, this is where we’re headed.

Two cards came up back to back in this reading that stopped me mid-breath. Not because they were dramatic or dark — but because they were so quietly, achingly inviting. Like a door cracking open and warm light spilling through. Like a reminder of something you forgot you were allowed to have.

The first: Oshun’s Honeypot. Sacred pleasure. Sensuality. Self-love.

The second: Oshun the Seductrix. Attraction. Feminine power. Unapologetic presence.

Both in shadow. Both pointing to the same thing: we have been so deep in survival mode that we forgot how to feel.

Sensuality Isn’t What You Think

Let’s clear something up right away because the word sensuality tends to make people either lean in with the wrong idea or lean back with discomfort. This isn’t about sexuality. It’s not about indulgence or excess or anything you need to earn first.

Sensuality is your senses. All five of them.

It’s the sound of water running in the background while you work. It’s the specific shade of green on a mango tree in late afternoon light. It’s the cool of dusk on your skin after a warm day. It’s eating your food slowly enough to actually taste it. It’s feeling the wind and actually registering that you felt it.

It’s presence.
It’s awareness.
It’s the radical act of being in your life instead of just moving through it.

And most of us — especially those of us coming out of a long drought — have been so focused on getting through that we stopped noticing what we were getting through to.

We stopped appreciating the details.
We stopped letting things land.

What Loving Your Present Moment Actually Does

Here’s what I’ve been sitting with: gratitude isn’t just a feel-good practice.
It’s a frequency.
It’s an opening.

When you genuinely appreciate where you are — not where you’re going, not where you wish you were, but right here — you create the conditions for more of it.

Loving your present moment is part of the healing. Not a side effect of it. Not something you get to do after you’ve done the real work.

It is the real work.

I’ll be honest with you. I’m 245 pounds. I have days where that number feels heavy in more ways than one. But there’s somebody at 345 who wishes they were me. There’s somebody who is bedbound who wishes they had what I have right now — the ability to sit outside, feel the dusk, watch a half moon rise, notice the avocado tree and the mango tree and the palm trees all holding their different shades of green.

That’s not toxic positivity. That’s perspective.
And perspective, practiced consistently, becomes a portal.

Appreciate where you are so you can get to where you’re going.
Not instead of it.
So that.

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The Seductrix Isn’t Waiting for Permission

Now the seductrix — she takes it further.

Where the honeypot invites you to slow down and receive, the seductrix reminds you that you are the invitation. She is feminine power in full expression. She is attraction not as manipulation but as alignment — the natural magnetism that happens when you stop apologizing for who you are and start inhabiting yourself completely.

She doesn’t wait until she’s lost the weight. She doesn’t wait until the timing is better or the bank account looks different or everyone has signed off on her choices. She lights the candles now. She puts on the music now. She creates the atmosphere of her future in the present tense.

And that’s not frivolous.
That’s intentional.

That’s how you practice your way into the life you’re building — by embodying it before it fully arrives.

So light the candle. Get the little water fountain if you’re not near water. Put on the music that makes you feel like yourself. Create the sensory environment that says…

I am here.
I am present.
I am worth showing up for.

Start practicing for your future in the present.

Both of These Cards Take Up Space

What moved me most about these two cards is how they showed up together — and how unapologetically they both occupied their space. No shrinking. No hedging. No footnotes saying, but only if you’ve earned it or pending approval from others.

Just: I am here. I am whole. I am fully, sensually, presently myself.

That is the destination these cards are pointing to. And the path there starts with something deceptively simple — coming back to your senses, one moment at a time.

Questions to Sit With

• When was the last time you were fully present in your body — not distracted, not performing, just there?

• What sensory experience have you been denying yourself that costs nothing but attention?

• What would it look like to start practicing your future self in the present — today?

This is Part 2 of the When the Cards Speak series — an unplanned, spirit-led reading from the Faces of Oshun1 oracle deck that unfolded without intention and had everything to say. Start from the beginning with the series introduction, or follow along as each part drops.

Ready for Part 3 — Go Get Your Scandal?

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Want Your Own Reading?

If you’re in that space between the drought and the abundance — that tender, uncertain in-between — a private reading can help you identify exactly what your senses, your path, and this season are asking you to come home to.

[Book your private reading here → https://my.flowlance.com/leanintothespirit]

With love and full presence,
Shaneequa

The first card that came up didn’t ease us in gently.

It landed with weight. With honesty. With that particular kind of clarity that only shows up when you weren’t bracing for it — because remember, I wasn’t even supposed to be doing this reading. I had a whole other plan for that day. But the cards had different instructions, and the first thing they wanted to talk about was a drought.

Not a metaphor you could easily sidestep. A real, felt, lived-in drought.

The card: Oshun of the Drought. The words printed right there on it: fear. insecurity. scarcity.

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What a Drought Actually Feels Like

We tend to think of drought as an absence — no water, no growth, no flow. And that’s true. But what this card brought up was something more personal than that. A drought of self. A drought of belief.

That long stretch of time where you’re going through the motions but nothing feels like it’s really growing.

Where you’re giving out more than you’re taking in.

Where survival has quietly replaced living and you’re not even sure when the switch happened.

You know that feeling.

Maybe you’re in it right now.
Maybe you’re just now naming it for the first time.

Fear does that. It dries things out.
Insecurity does that.
Scarcity — not just financial scarcity but the scarcity mindset, the there’s not enough, I’m not enough, this will never be enough — that does it too. It creates conditions where nothing can really take root, no matter how hard you try to plant something.

And here’s what’s real: a lot of us have been in that drought for a long time. Some of us longer than we want to admit.

It’s Not Just Personal

What struck me as this card came up was how layered the drought actually is. Because yes — this is personal. This is about the dry seasons inside of us. But it’s also bigger than that.

We live on a planet that has literally been in drought. Communities across this nation are experiencing real water scarcity right now. And there’s something to what the ancients understood — that the inner and the outer mirror each other.

As the people, so the planet.
As the planet, so the universe.

When things are out of order inside us collectively, it shows up outside of us too.

Mother Nature has been in a drought of kindness.
A drought of care and compassion.

We’ve watched systems built on profit strip the very things that sustain life — and called it progress.

But luckily, the earth can regenerate.
Luckily, we can regenerate.

That capacity for renewal is built into us, the same way it’s built into the land.

The question is whether we’ll choose it.

The Shadow Tells the Story

Here’s what gave me pause: this card came up in shadow — meaning reversed, in a position that shifts its energy. And in shadow, the drought card doesn’t mean you’re still in the thick of it. It means you’re on the other side of the worst of it. You’re emerging.

That landing actually felt like relief.

Because if you’ve been feeling like something is finally beginning to shift — like the ground is starting to soften, like there’s something green pushing up through what felt like concrete — you’re not imagining it. That’s real. The shadow position of this card is confirmation: the hardest part of this particular dry season is behind you.

But emerging from drought doesn’t mean you immediately arrive at abundance. There’s a space in between.
A transition.
A reorientation.

Your roots need to remember how to receive before they can really grow.

And that’s exactly where the next card picks up.

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Questions to Sit With

• Where in your life have you been operating from fear, insecurity, or scarcity — even quietly, even in the background?

• What would it feel like to believe, even just a little, that the drought is ending?

• What’s the first thing you’d want to grow?

This is Part 1 of the When the Cards Speak series — an unplanned, spirit-led reading from the Faces of Oshun1 oracle deck that unfolded without intention and had everything to say. Start from the beginning with the series introduction, or follow along as each part drops.

Ready for Part 2 — Come Back to Your Senses?

Want Your Own Reading?

If the drought is something you’re sitting in right now — or if you’re in that tender in-between space of emerging and not quite sure what’s next — a private reading can help bring clarity to what your specific season is asking of you.

[Book your private reading here → https://my.flowlance.com/leanintothespirit]

With love and full presence,
Shaneequa

I didn’t plan this.

I want to be upfront about that because I think it actually matters. I sat down that day with a completely different intention — we were going to dig into politics, try to make sense of the chaos, work through it all with the help of a tarot deck I’d been using for exactly that kind of heavy lifting.

And then something shifted.

Before I could even get started, I felt pulled. Not nudged — pulled. Toward a different deck entirely. Toward the Faces of Oshun oracle cards. No agenda. No outline. No plan. Just that unmistakable feeling that says: not yet. This first.

So I listened. And what unfolded over the next hour was one of the most layered, alive, and frankly unexpected readings I’ve experienced. Cards that spoke to drought and abundance. To sensuality and self-expression. To the things we’re holding on to that are quietly holding us back. To scandal — the good kind. To purpose chasing you down whether you’re ready or not.

It was a lot. And it wasn’t mine to keep to myself.

What Is the Faces of Oshun Deck?

For those who are new here — the Faces of Oshun1 oracle deck is a collection of cards that draw on the many expressions of Oshun, a figure from Yoruba tradition associated with love, water, sensuality, creativity, and abundance. But this deck doesn’t just celebrate the sweet, golden, honeyed version of her. It goes deeper. It holds space for shadow, for complexity, for the multifaceted nature of being fully alive.

I’m not a practitioner of Yoruba tradition or a follower of Oshun as a deity. I work with these cards as an oracle — a reflective tool that helps surface what’s already present but unspoken. Think of it less as a spiritual prescription and more as a mirror that doesn’t flinch.

Who This Series Is For

If you’ve ever felt the pull to be more of yourself but couldn’t quite name what was in the way — this is for you.

If you’re in a season of transition, of shedding, of quietly wondering is this really it or is there more — this is for you.

If you’ve been going through the motions, staying safe, keeping the peace at the expense of your own aliveness — this is absolutely for you.

This series isn’t about predicting your future. It’s about helping you see your present more clearly, so you can choose your next move with intention, boldness, and the kind of self-awareness that changes everything.

What to Expect

This series will unfold across several articles, each one built around a specific card — or cluster of cards — from that unplanned reading. We’ll move through drought and abundance, cleansing and release, the seductress and the scandalous, voice and visibility, hidden wisdom, and the audacity of manifesting on purpose.

Each piece will stand alone. You can read them in order or drop in wherever you land. But I’ll tell you this — there’s a through line. There’s a message woven through every single card that came up that day. And by the time we get to the end of this series, I think you’re going to feel it.

The cards spoke. Now let’s listen together.

Ready to dive into Part 1 — The Drought?

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Want Your Own Reading?

If something in this series sparks a question about your own path — your own cards, your own season — private readings are available. The link is below.

[Book your private reading here → https://my.flowlance.com/leanintothespirit]

With love and full presence, Shaneequa

If you haven’t read my last piece — I Wish I Had Found Me First — this one picks up where that left off. Same road. A little further down it.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a friend that cracked something open.

She’s turning 60 this year. And like me, she’s had her own reckoning with mortality — the kind that doesn’t let you look away once it finds you. Mine have come in waves: appendicitis, blood clots discovered by accident in my lungs, COVID, pneumonia. The blood clots in 2018 were the most life-altering of all. There were no signs. No warning. No dramatic moment. They were simply found — quietly sitting in my lungs, waiting — and I realized in an instant how completely it could have been over. Without ceremony. Without notice. Without me ever knowing what almost happened.

When you’ve looked at that kind of stillness and survived it, time stops feeling abstract. It stops being something you manage or budget or trade for a paycheck. It becomes the only currency that ever actually mattered.

They can always make their money back. You will never get that hour back. Not ever.

That truth has lived in my body ever since. And it's the ground everything else I'm about to say is built on.

The door slam

A few years ago, I tried to explain something to this same friend that she wasn't ready to hear yet. I told her I couldn't make myself do anything my spirit didn't want to do. That it wasn't a preference or a mood — it was physical. Visceral. That when something came up that went against my grain — a suggestion, an opportunity, a “logical next step” — I would feel it physically. A door slamming shut somewhere deep inside me. Hard. Final. Unmistakable.

Hey, you should write for other people. Door slam.

You could help people write their own books. Door slam.

You could consult, coach, ghostwrite, assist— Door slam. Door slam. Door slam.

Every well-meaning suggestion that pointed me away from my own work triggered it. And I couldn't override it — God knows I tried. The world kept insisting I be productive in ways it could recognize and reward. And every time I tried to comply, something in me went quiet and cold and said: no.

It wasn’t laziness. It wasn’t ingratitude. It was my soul saying — with absolute clarity — no. Not this. Not for me.

Because my dream — the thing I have always known in my bones, the thing that has survived every setback, every loss, every version of myself I’ve had to shed — is to be a writer. An author. A filmmaker. A screenwriter. A producer. Maybe even a director someday. I want to create stories that bring people joy. That shift what people believe is possible for themselves. Specifically, I want to write Black love. Healthy love. Non-struggle love — the kind that is so rarely given real space on the big or silver screen. The kind that Black women deserve to see themselves living in, reflected back with fullness and joy and complexity.

That is my calling. And every time someone hands me a detour, my spirit slams the door. Because it knows the difference between what feeds me and what just keeps me busy.

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What my friend finally understood

After more than 30 years in accounting — decades of competence, of hard-won expertise, of being genuinely skilled at something — she was advised to get her CPA license and keep going. It made sense on paper. The logical next step. The smart move. And something in her said no.

Not because she couldn’t do it. Because she didn’t want to anymore. And sitting with that, she began to understand what I’d been trying to say.

It took near death for us both to realize that just because we are talented at something doesn’t mean we are meant to keep doing it. Some skills are for a season. They carry us through. They keep the lights on and put food on the table and get us to the next place we need to be. But they were never meant to be our whole life. Being good at something is not the same as being called to it. Talent and purpose are not always the same thing — and confusing them can cost you decades.

Our calling pulls on us too. And we can spend our whole lives chasing the money that we think will eventually free us to follow it — or we can turn toward it now.

What it cost me not to listen sooner

She said it so simply. And I sat with it, because I knew exactly what she meant — the way you only know something when you’ve already paid the price for not knowing it sooner.

Because I didn’t always honor the door slam. For years I pushed past it. Told myself I was being impractical. Dramatic. Ungrateful. I performed anyway. Produced anyway. Showed up for other people’s visions when mine was sitting in a corner waiting. And the bill came due in ways I never could have anticipated.

That’s what I need to tell you. Because you can’t understand why this conversation landed as hard as it did — without understanding what ignoring that door cost me, and what it took to come back from it.

Burnout didn’t just tire me out. It hollowed me. It took years — years spent healing, resting, recovering, grieving — before I could even begin to see clearly again. And the grief wasn’t just emotional. It was material. Tangible. Permanent.

I lost everything I owned to a storage auction because I couldn’t pay the bill. My grandfather’s Bible. My children’s baby pictures. Writing I had kept since high school. All of it — gone. So much of it irreplaceable. And I had to grieve that loss the way you grieve a person. Slowly. In waves. Without any promise of an ending.

The fuel that used to drive me — the hunger to prove people wrong, the fear of being written off, the fire of my twenties that burned through exhaustion and doubt and obstacle like it was nothing — that fuel left the building during those years. And I haven’t been able to call it back. What I have now is clarity. The knowing without the engine to drive it. I know exactly who I am and what I’m here to do. I just arrived at that understanding in a body that’s been through too much to run the way it used to.

Which is exactly why this conversation mattered. Because my friend was standing at a crossroads I recognized — and this time, I could tell her what I wished someone had told me.

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The chasm that doesn’t shrink

Here’s the lie I told myself for years — the one I suspect a lot of us tell ourselves: someday, when I have enough money saved, enough stability built, enough solid ground underneath me — then I’ll turn toward the dream.

But that someday is a moving target. And the chasm between what I have to do and what I want to do does not shrink while you wait. It doesn’t hold still. It moves forward with time — and sometimes, if you’re not careful, it actually grows wider. The distance between where you are and where your soul is trying to take you can expand the longer you let it go untouched.

The dream doesn’t wait patiently in a room somewhere, hands folded, trusting you to arrive. It aches. It leaks into conversations you weren’t expecting. It shows up in articles written on the side of a road, pulling over to voice-memo grief into a phone because something won’t stay quiet anymore. It finds its way out one way or another — the only question is whether you’ll meet it with intention or keep stumbling into it sideways.

You don’t close the chasm by waiting until you’re ready. Readiness, I’ve learned, is mostly a myth we use to protect ourselves from the terror of beginning.

You close it by chipping.

Five minutes. Ten minutes. An hour.

And this is where the conversation with my friend brought me — not to some grand declaration, not to a plan with timelines and deliverables, but to something smaller and more honest than that.

You chip at the mountain. Every day. Meticulously, if you have to. Five minutes of writing before the day pulls you somewhere else. Ten minutes of outlining. An hour of research. A conversation — like the one I had yesterday — that gets something moving inside you again and reminds you what you’re actually building toward. You don’t need the whole engine running. You don’t need the fire of your twenties back. You just have to touch the work, even lightly, even today.

Because I think about that piece I wrote yesterday — the one about wishing I had found myself before my body broke — and I know in my bones that I wouldn’t have needed to write it the way I did if I had been chipping all along. If I had been building toward the dream in small, consistent ways instead of waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect conditions, the perfect rested and whole version of myself to finally show up and do it right.

She’s not coming to save you. You have to go to her — in whatever condition you’re in, with whatever fuel you have left, one small deliberate movement at a time.

The manifested version of your dream doesn’t appear when you’re ready. It appears because you kept going when you weren’t.

What I want for us

I am a romance writer. That means at my core, I believe in love — the kind worth fighting for, worth waiting for, worth building from the ground up if that’s what it takes. I want Black women to see themselves on screen in love that doesn’t require suffering as the price of admission. Love that is whole and joyful and true, written by someone who knows what that longing feels like from the inside.

And I’ve come to believe that the work of becoming who we’re meant to be is its own kind of love story. The long, nonlinear, sometimes brutal, often quietly beautiful process of turning toward yourself — your real self, your called self — and refusing to abandon her even when everything else is telling you to be practical. To be reasonable. To be useful in ways the world can monetize.

The door slams because something in you already knows the way. It always has. It was protecting you even in the years when you thought it was just making things harder.

Even when the engine is quiet.
Even when the body is tired.
Even when the mountain looks impossibly large and your hands feel impossibly small.

Listen to the door slam.
Then chip.
Then rest.
Then chip again.

That’s how the mountain moves.

Is there something your spirit keeps slamming the door on — or something it keeps pulling you toward no matter how many times you try to look away? Tell me in the comments. I'm building something in this space, and I want you in the room with me.

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I was just driving. And what came to me — clear as anything — was this: I wish I had found me before all of this.

Before the burnout. Before the body broke down, before the brain glitched, before the health took its toll. Before I knew what it was to be scared — to try, but afraid not to. Before confidence became something I had to excavate instead of inhabit.

If I had the drive, the hunger, the energy of my twenties — even my thirties — I wouldn’t be here in my mid-forties still learning who that person is. Getting to a place of greater understanding, yes. But with no engine in the car to drive it forward.

THE DECADE THAT WORE ME DOWN

Years ago, I had a mini stroke. The 2020s had been a kind of reckoning. And this decade — my 40s — has been a walk through hellfire.

It kicked off just a few months after I turned 40. And it wore me down like a grindstone. The pandemic. Housing instability. Job losses. An eviction. The over-humbling experience of having to come back to my parents in the middle of a meltdown — a burnout that took no less than three years to surface from.

And then, just as I emerged from that darkness, I stepped into a political landscape that has doused me in anxiety and fear ever since.

WHAT I WISH I HAD KNOWN

If only I had found myself before all of this. If only I had rejected the labels people put on me — the box that society created for my generation. Demanding that we be high achievers, but only in certain, sanctioned directions.

If only I had stopped listening to the diminishing stories of starving artists. If only I hadn’t let them weave themselves so deeply into my own story about what was possible for me as a writer. Maybe it wouldn’t have taken me this long to claim it.

The lie of the starving artist — told as if struggle were inevitable for anyone who dared create. As if there weren’t entire communities, entire creative economies, filled with people who didn’t even know those lanes existed, but who were still making a living — a very decent living — off of their God-given gifts and creativity.

I wish I had known that before.
Before the body.
Before the brain.
Before the exhaustion settled in so deep.

Then I wouldn’t be here at 46, driving aimlessly, with an unquiet belly, wondering what’s next. Knowing my spiritual gifts. Sensing the entrepreneurial path. But feeling overwhelmed by the thought of all the work that lies ahead — work I had done before, tirelessly, with zeal and excitement. Work I now face with just exhaustion.

THE DIAGNOSIS THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

It all crystallized when I finally got the diagnosis I had been seeking for over twenty years.

I learned of my neurodiversity. I was ADHD — but not just that. I was also high-functioning autistic. And this, it turned out, was what had led to my burnout. There was both grief and release in getting that label — finally — after two decades of the medical community dismissing my complaints as just depression, just anxiety.

A medical system that built its diagnostic frameworks around a white man. A white boy. With no understanding of how hormones and environment shape how conditions present in other bodies. With no framework for a Black woman — someone society has always demanded perform. Perform for others. Perform for other people’s profit.

THE BOX-CHECKING YEARS

Check the boxes. That’s what we were told. Education. Job. Elevation through title. Husband. Household. Keep climbing.

You can’t just have a bachelor’s. Get a master’s.
You can’t just have a master’s. Work on a doctorate.
Box check. Box check. Box check.
Just to be seen as valuable.
Just to be in pursuit of being seen as valuable.
Only to be treated as disposable anyway.

Derided for being the community with the most education but the least amount of pay. Run ragged checking every box handed to us — and still, somehow, not enough.

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WHERE I AM NOW

I wish I could give you a lesson. Some kind of uplift. A bow to tie this together. But this is a truth post. I’m just here to tell the truth about where I am, and where I’m building from.

I know that’s not the right formula for social media. You’re supposed to be attracting people. Getting clients. Spinning things so other people see themselves in your pain and want your solution to their urgent problem. I know the rules. Trust me — I spent over forty years following them.

I wish I had found me before my body broke. Before my brain glitched. Before I became too tired to lift my head out of my dreams and turn them into something real.

But I am still here. Still driving. Still finding her.

And maybe that’s enough to write from, for now.

If any of this landed with you — if you’ve lived in this in-between place, the one where you know who you are but can’t find the fuel — I want to hear from you.

Drop a comment. Tell me your version of this story. Or if you’ve found a way to reignite the engine — genuinely, not the hustle-culture version — share that too. I’m not looking for a 10-step framework. I’m looking for real.

We’re not doing this alone.

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