Excerpt from Bright Night of the Soul (WIP)

Mad Mom

I’ve been labeled crazy, looney, too much.

This was more so true when my kids were young. Capitalism and Patriarchy was whooping my ass.

I lost myself, I lost my mind. I became exactly what these system wanted me to be, a husk, a hollow, a hole. A basic functioning human being. And this ain’t even the point where the madness begins, the madness begins during the ascent, during the return to the body and self. When I was regaining consciousness and returning to the driver’s seat of my life, I had to go crazy to get going.

Crazy. Mad. Mentally Ill. Neurodivergent* use whatever term you like, I embrace them all with affection and acceptance.Though those were some humiliating, alienating, low low moments of my life, and I delivered myself through it Getting free ain’t pretty or easy. That’s why not everyone wanna do it.

What’s wild to me is that when I was suffering with symptoms of actual clinical depression, few cared. I remember one morning, had to be February, cold and gray, when I couldn’t even lift my body out of bed. My youngest was knocking on the door asking for cereal, and I just laid there, staring at the ceiling. Not because I didn’t love them. Not because I didn’t want to feed them. But because I couldn’t move. I felt—not like I was drowning—but like I had already drowned. And I was tethered to the depths. Oppression, depression, suppression—all pressing down on me. And no one was coming to save me. And I know this isn’t something unique to me. I, too, have stepped over the sleeping and suffering bodies of people in my community. One of the functions of oppression is that it interrupts our ability to care for ourselves and each other.

I get it. I forgive and I hope that those I harmed through my inertia and despondence will have forgiveness in their hearts for me as well.

but,

Back to my ascent, and the reclamation of my life. When I began to slowly reincarnate, return home to myself, present and embodied I began to take stock of the wreckage of my life and the big, bold audacious moves I would have to make to build a harmonious life. I also realized what I was truly up against as a mother, a single parent in this world, in these United States, Detroit, MI. What it would take to keep my children protected from this system so they never became a husk and hole for this system like I had.

When I came back to myself, I had a new vision for myself and a new understanding of freedom. I was ready to build a life of magic and radical, unchurched faith, to find my gifts and purpose and become the artist of my life.

When you decide to get free, that’s when folks get “worried”

At first it was small but impactful changes, new practices and ways of being. I was reading a great deal of theory, listening to lectures of freedom fighters of the past, engaging in remembrance, foremembrance to imagine a new reality and future for myself and the collective. After building some self trust, I started making bold and liberatory moves.

In 2014, I started homeschooling my children.

I wasn’t be cute or quirky, or radical but because I was working inside a juvenile detention center, and I saw the writing on the wall. I saw how the system was set up to funnel Black children, straight from the classroom into the prison, the cemetery, or some other institution.

I started to clearly see, that public school options available to me as a poor working mother could not protect my child, that nurturing and honoring the brilliance of my children was never the point of school

When I did this

Some of the loudest doubt and critique came from the very people I thought would understand other Black women, Black queer folks, Neurodivergent, mentally ill folks I considered community. They came at me hard and nasty.

Folks questioned my sanity for wanting to protect my kids from a system that was never built for us. They looked at me like I was unstable. Like I was paranoid. Like I was making life harder than it had to be.

And now? Here we sit in the wake of the attempted dismantling of the Department of Education, while I’ve graduated two of my children from my home, one is in college, one is in a certification program and I’m still schooling one more.

And I gotta say, a decade later, my so-called madness looks more like vision. Looks like liberation. Like love.

What I’ve learned is this: people rarely call you crazy when you’re “clinical”.
They call you crazy when you abandon the status quo. When you refuse the scripts.
They call you crazy when your clarity threatens their comfort, norms and illusions.

so,

Yes, I’ve experienced oppression-induced madness, the kind of internal frag

mentation that comes from trying to survive in a world that hates you, erases you, gaslights you at every turn. I’ve known the ache of being overwhelmed, the confusion, the dissociation, the panic. I’ve been there. And I honor that part of my journey.

But what I won’t do anymore is let people confuse my liberation for delusion.
I won’t accept that protecting my children is reckless, but handing them to the state is responsible.
I won’t be shamed for building a life that actually feels like mine.

Because it ain’t no problem for folks when you are breaking, the threat is when you are becoming.

My so called (ex)homies called me crazy and now they are scrambling. It brings me no joy to see it, but I see it. Crazy.

Artist Statement:

My work explores the soul and imagination. The personal, political, and the cosmic.

As a MIMND (Mentally Ill, Mad, and Neurodivergent) Black queer artist who has spent decades matriculating through mental health systems both as a provider and a patient, I’ve come to understand that the state is not troubled by our brokenness,it fears our wholeness, fullness and freedom. The system calls us “crazy” [derogatory] and labels us unfit not when we are disassociated, compliant, or collapsing quietly, but when we become clear. When we begin to dream beyond the confines we were given. When we choose sovereignty. That’s when the labels come.

My current project, Bright Night of the Soul, is a multidisciplinary work that draws from my personal experience with madness, institutionalization, indoctrination, motherhood, and spiritual awakening. It explores how oppression—especially racialized and gendered forms—shapes our inner worlds and fractures our access to imagination and spirit. It asks: what happens to the soul under systemic violence? How do we reclaim the imagination as a sacred technology of freedom?

This work is in conversation with La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind, which articulates a “mad methodology” rooted in Black radical creativity. I situate myself within this lineage: artists, thinkers, and fugitives who understand that madness is not merely pathology,

it is also practice. It is protest. It is portal.

Consider the historical diagnosis of drapetomania—a so-called mental illness used to explain why enslaved Africans would run away. In other words, the desire to escape was framed as madness. And though most of us today would consciously reject that logic, its residue lingers in the collective unconscious. We have been so deeply conditioned by trauma, violence and surveillance that liberatory practice still looks like madness, even to those of us who long to be free.

My art is about unlearning internalized policing. It’s about meeting those monsters in the dark and discovering that the soul, the mind is not broken, but buried under illusion and indoctrination, the rubble from oppressive violence. My work explores shame and sacredness. And the possibility that madness might just be the language of transformation.

Through essays, poetic prose, audio rituals, and visual storytelling, Bright Night of the Soul offers an invitation: to reclaim our inner world as a place of power, to honor our nonlinear healing, and to remember that the dark night is a dark night for the ego, for the empire but a bright, luminous, glorious night for the soul.