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Fighters can be made, but they can be born, too.
Trauma is my baseline. Typical. I’m a Black American female. Trauma is in my DNA. Trauma like the verbal and emotional assault on Kentaji Brown Jackson or the convoluted humiliation of Jada Pinkett Smith. Or Trauma like, you know, chattel slavery.
That being said, My life is traumatic. From the beginning to now, my life has been a wavy line. An upward trend of blips. Now, my childhood was grand. Phenomenal. For its entirety, I was fiercely loved and nurtured. The shenanigans began after I left the nest.
For some context, I dropped into this world two months early to a mother struggling with undiagnosed Lupus (It was the 90s. They truly had no idea. I also had a heart condition called supraventricular tachycardia when I was 4. (I described the tachycardic (fast heartbeat) episodes as my heart “breaking”.) I started my medical education at 26 and was diagnosed with hypertension at 28. I had my first stroke at 29. My second stroke was at 30. My life began with stress…