I’m Learning to Study My Own Life
On testimony, archives, and the holy work of paying attention
I turned 40 in January, and I’m learning that my life is something I can study with care.
Paying close attention to other people has always come easily to me. I underline their sentences, trace the questions they carry across books and interviews, and notice the themes that keep returning throughout their work. I can make a syllabus out of a woman’s life and call it research. Now I’m learning to bring that same attention home.
Lately, I’ve been sitting with the choices I’ve made, the rooms I’ve entered and left, the language I keep circling, and the women whose work helps me name what I’m seeing. What do these patterns know about me? What has God been showing me through the life I’ve already lived?
We’re quick to study other people. We know their influences, their rituals, their turning points, their heartbreaks, and what they created from the pieces. We build reading lists, timelines, and mood boards around their becoming. Then we look at our own lives and say, “Girl, I was just trying to get through.”
Entire years get packed into “That was a lot.”
But what if “a lot” is also a text?
What if the years I thought I was enduring were teaching me how to see? What if the closed bookstore is a chapter instead of a conclusion? The shelves, the conversations, the children sitting on the floor with picture books, the hard decisions, the debt, the joy, the goodbye, and everything that has grown since. I want to understand what that season placed in me.
What if I stop treating my life like a pile of loose papers and start treating it like an archive?
Scripture has given me some practice. I’ve spent years reading the lives of women whose experiences held revelation: Hagar naming the God who saw her in the wilderness, Hannah praying with such honesty that her anguish was mistaken for disorder, Mary Magdalene carrying resurrection news before anyone understood what had happened. Their choices, bodies, grief, courage, and encounters with God have shaped how I understand faith.
The women I return to in books have done the same. Lucille Clifton. Toni Morrison. Audre Lorde. bell hooks. Alice Walker. My grandmother is one of my north stars too—her whole life, her faith, her knowing, the way she gathered people and made belonging feel possible.
These women have taught me how to read a life closely. The challenge now is learning from them without disappearing into them.
Admiration can become a hiding place. It’s possible to spend years studying another woman’s courage while overlooking where courage has appeared in your own life. I’ve recognized somebody else’s vision and dismissed the things I saw before I had language for them, calling her work worthy of an archive while rushing past my own evidence.
I want to gather it.
The old flyers. The bookstore photographs. The essays I almost didn’t publish. The notes app fragments. The sentences that found me before I understood what they were trying to say. The ideas I kept returning to because they knew the shape of the work before I did.
I want to look at these things and say: this counted.
I’ve always believed we don’t go through things for ourselves alone. That belief has made it easier for me to share parts of my life that other people might hide. The unwed pregnancy. The depression. The anxiety. The divorce. The seasons I couldn’t name while I was living through them. Somewhere along the way, what I survived might help somebody else keep going.
When I share, I’m often thinking about the woman standing where I once stood, wondering whether her life has gone too far off-script to become beautiful. I’m thinking about the woman ashamed of the very thing God may use to steady someone else.
Studying my life asks me to go deeper than recounting what happened. I want to understand what an experience taught me, what it changed, what it revealed, and what I’m meant to carry forward. Testimony still needs wisdom. Every story doesn’t belong to everybody, and every memory doesn’t have to become a lesson before it’s ready. Some stories can be shared from the altar. Some belong at the table. Some stay with the people who’ve earned the right to sit close.
Looking back used to feel like an inventory of everything I should’ve known. Younger versions of me seemed ready with questions: Why did you stay? Why did you start? Why did you trust? Why did it take so long?
Those questions rarely lead anywhere good.
I’m trying to ask better ones.
What were you trying to protect? What did you know in your body before you could explain it? What kept calling you back? What did you build without a model? What did that version of you make possible for the woman you are now?
These questions let me revisit my life without putting myself on trial. They help me notice the table, the shelf, the garden, the archive, the poem, and the woman who keeps finding ways to begin again.
The questions I’ve carried through my work have been shaping me too. What does it mean for Black women to imagine ourselves in spaces that weren’t built with us in mind? What happens when we stop waiting for those spaces to recognize us and begin building from what we know?
For a long time, I thought I was answering those questions through the bookstore, the gatherings, the book drops, and the essays. Now I can see how the questions have been answering me. They’ve shaped my theology, my feminism, my writing, and my understanding of what celebration can hold.
So this is where I am now: gathering the evidence of my own becoming and paying attention to what it reveals.
My life has a syllabus. Some lessons came through beauty, some through loss, and some through closing a door and realizing the story was still alive. Others came through Scripture, the women who wrote before me, my grandmother, and the Spirit whispering, pay attention, even here.
And at 40, I’m listening.
This was actually a very needed read for me. Thank you for sharing and reminding us to be present in learning about our own lives.
I’m so glad this post came across my timeline. 😮💨🙌🏾🥹 a beautiful reflection.