In Full Bloom
Notes on becoming all of me
I’ve been thinking about how Black women are taught to survive so early that survival starts to feel like identity.
We learn how to carry things before we learn how to rest. We become fluent in endurance. We know how to keep showing up, keep mothering, keep praying, keep holding everybody else together while pieces of ourselves quietly wait their turn. Somewhere along the way, many of us become so skilled at making it through that we forget to ask whether we’re actually living.
Lately, I’ve been paying attention to the quieter parts of my life.
The sound of my daughters laughing (and fighting) in the next room. A clean kitchen at the end of the night. Me humming while I fold clothes without even realizing I’m doing it. The feeling of driving with nowhere urgent to be for once. Catching myself smiling over something small and realizing the smile came naturally. These moments are easy to overlook because they don’t arrive with applause. Nobody hands you a trophy for finally feeling at ease inside your own body.
Still, I think there’s something holy about noticing yourself soften after years of surviving hardness.
This season of my life has been full of endings and rearrangements. I’m newly divorced. I’ve left two churches in the last two years. Friendships have changed shape so completely they now feel more like memories than relationships. There are conversations waiting to happen and goodbyes sitting quietly at the edge of my life. There are versions of me I loved deeply that I still had to release because I could feel myself outgrowing the spaces that once held me.
Transformation sounds beautiful until it starts costing you familiarity.
Some days this becoming still scares me. I miss what I thought my life would be. Grief still sits beside me longer than I want it to sometimes. The future feels wide open in a way that’s both freeing and terrifying at the same time.
And yet, underneath all of it, there’s joy.
Real joy.
The kind that sneaks up on you while making dinner or sitting in the car after dropping the girls off. The kind that settles into your house slowly until one day you realize peace lives there too. The kind that catches you laughing from your stomach instead of performing happiness from your mouth.
People who’ve spent years bracing for impact understand the sacredness of finally unclenching.
For a long time, my body moved through the world expecting something painful to happen next. Rest felt temporary. Ease felt suspicious. Even beautiful moments carried the fear that something could interrupt them at any second. I carried tension like inheritance. So many Black women do.
We come from women who stretched meals, stretched money, stretched energy, stretched themselves. Women who carried grief quietly while still showing up beautifully pressed for church on Sunday morning. Women who kept entire households alive while nobody stopped long enough to ask what survival was doing to their bodies.
I think about them often these days.
I think about my grandmother and the way she could make people feel held without ever announcing how much she herself was carrying. I think about the women who taught us how to survive while secretly praying we might someday learn how to live more gently than they were allowed to.
Maybe that’s part of what healing is.
Learning that your life doesn’t have to feel like an emergency in order to matter.
For years, I believed holiness looked like self-sacrifice at all costs. Exhaustion felt righteous. Being needed felt the same as being loved. Shrinking myself seemed like the easiest way to keep relationships intact.
Now I think a lot of women disappear slowly inside lives that ask them to perform strength constantly.
Sometimes becoming requires leaving. Leaving relationships that require silence to survive them. Leaving spaces where your humanity is secondary to your usefulness. Leaving versions of yourself built entirely around endurance.
And whew… leaving is rarely celebrated while you’re doing it. Especially when you’re the woman everybody expects to keep holding things together.
Still, there comes a point where pretending becomes more exhausting than truth.
And truth changes you.
“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly,
but rarely admit the changes it has gone through
to achieve that beauty.”
-Maya Angelou
Black women know something about that kind of becoming.
People celebrate the version of us they can finally understand. The healed version. The accomplished version. The wise version. Very few people ask about the breaking open that happened before the blooming. Very few people sit long enough with what it cost us to become visible to ourselves again.
Everybody loves the butterfly.
Few people stay for the transformation.
That’s why this season feels sacred to me even while parts of it remain unfinished. I can feel myself returning to my own life. Softness is reentering places in me that survival once hardened. God is restoring parts of me I thought were gone forever.
A version of me I used to pray for is already alive in my ordinary life. She’s standing at the stove making breakfast. She’s answering emails. She’s buying books and flowers and imagining new futures for herself. She’s writing poetry again. She’s whispering “Thank You, Jesus” at the end of difficult days because she remembers when peace felt impossible.
And maybe that’s what blooming actually is.
Maybe blooming is finally allowing yourself to become all of you.
Whole enough to hold grief and joy in the same hand. Whole enough to admit disappointment without losing hope. Whole enough to stop apologizing for complexity. Whole enough to believe your softness deserves protection too.
Y’all know I carry Lucille Clifton like scripture:
“come celebrate with me that every day
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.”
I carry those words with me often because survival is part of the story, but it isn’t the entire story.
The deeper miracle is that after everything, beauty still finds me. Delight still finds me. Somewhere inside me, hope still believes there’s a future larger than endurance. Somewhere inside me, there’s still a woman trusting that God intended joy for her too.
These days, I’m practicing the sacred work of noticing.
Noticing peace when it enters the room.
Noticing when my shoulders relax.
Noticing when laughter comes easily.
Noticing when my home feels gentle.
Noticing the woman I’m becoming while she’s still here.
There are still unanswered questions in my life. Still transitions unfolding in real time. Still grief I’m learning how to carry honestly. But I no longer believe I have to wait until everything makes sense before honoring what’s beautiful.
Joy deserves to be acknowledged while it’s still warm.
And maybe that’s the real testimony.
After everything life has tried to take, I’m still here.
Still tender.
Still becoming.
Still in full bloom.
Some posts throughout this space may include affiliate links to books, products, and resources I genuinely love. Purchases made through those links help support Socialight Society, my love letter to Black women, storytelling, gathering, and the work of creating spaces where we can be seen fully.
And thank you, always, for being here.