As we prepare to launch our first ever virtual festival today, i’m thinking about Sonya Renee Taylor and how I came to know her voice. How I came to feel SO SEEN.
At a point, it seemed that my therapist, Michelle Nyangereka, would bring up Sonya every time we spoke. As I talked about the healing journey I’d found myself on, and sharing it with others, she’d reference Sonya’s philosophy on healing yourself first, and as an example of someone who was using her voice regardless of what the world thought. As someone who was comfortable taking up space.
When I looked Sonya up and I saw her talk on Radical Alchemy: catalyzing social change through personal transformation, I was transfixed. You mean someone else, someone so visible was talking about the same thing I was designing with my team? In many of the rooms I find myself in, therapy alone is minimized, not to speak of personal transformation for Liberation. When I talk about these things, people look at me like I have two heads.
Why Therapy?
I started therapy over five years ago after a miscarriage and failed engagement. I’d found myself in cycles of relationships that didn’t feed me, but successfully stripped from me. My hair was falling out. I was dealing with chronic pain. I was a single, widowed mother, in New York, on a budget, subconsciously trying to satisfy my Nigerian parents.
After suppressing my inner artist for twenty plus years, my body had come to a place of no return. It was either I would accept this fate of depression, illness and suicidal ideation, or I would deal with it and shift my course forward.
I didn’t have any friends in therapy and I didn’t know much about it. Just what I’d seen in (mostly white) popular culture. Therapy was just an abstract word that white people used for paying to talk to someone. But I knew I needed to speak to someone for my daughter’s sake.
It was in those first sessions with Venee Kimpson at Columbus Circle that I began to uncover why I kept ending up in abusive relationships. Why church wasn’t sufficiently correcting that cycle. Why my relationship with my parents would direct every other relationship in my life into eternity.
A Universal Seige
I know so many Black women living with trauma. From the molestation they survived in childhood, to the failed romances they were scarred by in adulthood. Even those who don’t have such trauma have the trauma of white underdevelopment to deal with. The trauma of constant programming from white supremacist thought in media and in everything around us, making us doubt our value so committedly that when people do value us, we don’t believe them.
So therapy is essential. Every Black person should have some sort of psychological evaluation to assess their degree of trauma, define the areas in which they need work, and to help them chart a path forward. We can’t keep nurturing our demons with our silence and our fear. We must open up to healing for our children’s sake, so that they too can fully thrive.
Take Charge of Your Healing
And this is what Sonya Renee Taylor teaches. That we have to look within and do the healing work within ourselves. That in doing that, we can expand our Light and share it with the next person and the next person and the next person. And thus change the world.
As long as we hold onto our trauma, we will project our pain onto others, and cause them pain. And we will never see how powerful we are to manifest greatness. Greatness from within, greatness from truth, greatness from love for those around us and the world we live in.
This is the revolution. Healing yourself so you can heal others. Manifesting your purpose so that you can transform the world. Giving fully of yourself, transmuting your trauma to power. That’s Radical Alchemy. And that’s what we’ll be doing at NOIR FEST.
If you’d like to learn more about my journey with therapy and Radical Alchemy, and learn Sonya’s steps for transmuting trauma into power, join us at NOIR FEST today. Stick around until next Saturday for films, DJs, Global Black Meditations and much more.
Resources
The Body is Not an Apology (BINAA) Website
Taraji P. Henson’s Mental Health Foundation: Free therapy sources
Ways to Help
Donate to NOIR Labs’ Black Women’s Mental Health Fund.
