I’ve been navigating a messy, depressive phase of my life, confronting and unlearning imposed definitions of myself, competence, and gifts. It is heavy work, I must say, to reconstruct a selfhood free from the systems that have sought to define me. Historically, these systems are rooted in narratives that erased Black agency, leaving no space for autonomous identity development. From a European existentialist perspective, “the human being is born, therefore immediately exists, and subsequently chooses direction in life, creating meaning of self through experience.” They have a choice in determining who they are. We [Blacks], on the other hand, inherited a stolen sense of self, which, at its core, created a disconnect that is the direct result of three historical realities:

· The Erasure of Roots: The systematic stripping of African/Black language, customs, and traditions.

· The Legacy of Dehumanization: The historical classification of Black bodies as property rather than human beings.

· The Burden of Negotiation: The ongoing necessity for the Black collective and the individual to constantly renegotiate identity and meaning.

Black folks have been engaged in the painstaking work of undoing the inauthentic due to the realities above, and in the same vein, we are forced to reckon with the narrative of the White model of success—a structure we’ve had to inhabit to get by. Navigating this is complex because that model has worked to a certain extent; it has been our armor, yet also our cage, and stepping away from it feels like both a liberation and a risk. Audre Lorde wrote that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, so I have come to find that the risk is the only path toward sovereignty. So, I find myself revisiting Frantz Fanon’s questions on Black existence, which mirror some of the questions I’ve asked myself as a Black, nonbinary, neurodivergent body—Who am I? Am I who I say I am? Am I all I ought to be? My own inquiry asks, how might I cultivate sovereign dimensions in defining my identity that exist outside of Western utility and definition? The beauty of this question is that so many dimensions within the Black collective have emerged, are emerging, and remain in tension across art, music, and education, making it a model for my individual understanding.

I recognize that there is not only shadow but the radiance within Black existentialism. While the historical realities are undeniably bleak, a persistent light emerges from this tradition—a legacy of Black folks who have already reenvisioned, affirmed, and dreamt of new possibilities.

This collective dreaming provides the blueprint for my own home, a space I am building through these five steps:

1. Dismantle: I begin by identifying and deconstructing the inherited beliefs, anxieties, and colonial expectations that have colonized your intuition, my ancestral inner knowing.

2. Storytelling & Witnessing: I hold space for my stories. In this phase, I allow shame and grief to be present. I lean into vulnerability with those I trust so that I can experience witnessing from the stories of subjugation, bias, and misinformation proliferated by others about me. The goal is to experience validation and affirmation rather than denial, apprehension, and fear.

3. Counter-storytelling: I rewrite the script. I move away from identifying as the victim, where the system is the lead character, to authoring my own story. I become the Seer, defining myself agentic being.

4. Integration: I pull together the authentic fragments of me. I work toward building a cohesive, authentic self-concept that honors my experiences, history, and the learnings from experience being in community with other Black people.

5. Emergence: I step into the world as a self that no longer asks for permission. I engage in active meaning-making and sense-making on my own terms.

If you’d like to join the existential void, walk alongside me as I go through this blueprint, or are curious about Identity Reclamation Coaching, I’d love some company.

become a soul spacer

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