Finding Myself… Again. Beautiful Powerful Love 2.0
Image: Book, From Fat, Black, and Unlovable to Beautiful Powerful Love Photo Credit: Kariba Photography
I wrote and published a book in 2019. Before I completed writing the book and it’s many edits, I had a series of healing community events in 2018 to announce the upcoming publication and to share experiences and concepts described in the book.
With help from my peeps, I conceptualized, planned, executed, hosted, and catered these events. I secured sponsors, managed marketing, set up a website, recruited performers, designed the sets, secured instructors, and created swag that was on brand with the point and purpose of my endeavor. I taught myself how to self-publish, secured an editor who understood my vision and how to bring it out of me. I conceptualized my logo and book cover, and formatted the interior of the book on my desktop PC.
All of this, as well actually writing and publishing the book, was accomplished in the recovery aftermath of losing my life 3 times, 3 open heart surgeries, and nearly 2 months in intensive care in the fall 2017.
And yet I was not joyful and I felt like a fraud.
A few days after I published the book in March 2019, I found myself back at the same hospital, back in the same emergency room with a needle in my arm and an IV pumping contrast dye in to my veins. I was terrified to be on a stretcher and glided head first into a CT Scan machine to see if death was once again eminent. Although it turned out that my previous surgeries were stable, I was admitted and stayed for two days until the additional blood pressure meds took effect. I was fully triggered. Given the condition of my vascular system, elevated blood pressure for me is a red alert terrorist threat indicating an increased likelihood of another catastrophic health event.
After that, I did a bit more to promote the book but was soon unable to continue. I felt like a fraud. I was angry, scared, exhausted, depleted, and lost. I had spent 15 months striving to survive and heal, while at the same time digging up my pain as a Black woman and laying it out in a book for all to see. I had spent that time worried about how my family was traumatized by my health crisis and trying to support them in getting back to “normal” while downplaying the fact that normal was no longer a concept that applied to me with my new hidden disabilities.
I had spent the first 15 months of my rebirth, bit by bit, falling back into the same mental and emotional patterns that nearly ended my life. I didn’t feel authentic. How can I help others heal when I am so lost? So, I canceled the then upcoming Beautiful Powerful Love events for 2019/2020 and I went virtually silent on the Black Women’s Movement for Healing I had started. I thought I needed timeout to heal myself - and I did. But I also had to step up and do what my mother taught me to do - take care of myself and my children. By the fall of 2019 at my 2-year Aortaversary, I was back in a corporate job and trying to manage the ebb and flow of PTSD, anxiety, and depression on top of coming face-to-face with the realities of misogynoir. Add to that, deadlines, deliverables, and the mental chess required to navigate white corporate spaces, not to mention the very real health challenges that impacted my ability to function as I had before.
Once again, I was a Black woman struggling to love herself in a society that did not value her – a concept that in 2020 has come on the world’s stage in such blatant ways that it is triggering AF.
I had constant daily reminders that my work was not complete and I had to finish what I started – healing. My body, my open heart surgery scar, my fatigue, my malignant blood pressure, obstructed lungs, my chronic kidney disease, my straight up team of doctors, my children’s concerned faces – all this stared at me daily, urging me to finish what I started – yet again. My ancestors? Well they became impatient with me. They were done watching me fall into the same mental patterns and resulting behaviors that attracted the energy of death to me before. They would not allow me to veer off course from my destiny, my purpose.
They sat me down and directed me to make more life changes and to spend time on me, for me, to heal me.
And I did.
During this time of massive change in 2020, I often worried about my life’s purpose and my ability to survive, both physically and financially, as a newly single woman (more about the separation and divorce in a later post). I concluded that I needed to make my way in corporate America and tried to back out of doing more with Beautiful Powerful Love and put it on a shelf. I conceptualized Diversity and Inclusion projects at the company I worked for that I thought could be meaningful. I tried to bring my authentic self into my corporate world. I reasoned that there was something else I was meant to do, something that did not require quite so much from me. Perhaps there was a path that didn’t require me to dig even deeper and heal even more. Maybe I didn’t need to embrace myself so completely that I would simply radiate my own authenticity. I can just be low key for the rest of this incarnation, right? Though I am blessed to have the ancestral support and divinely inspired ideas to do many things, I have come to accept that Beautiful Powerful Love is me. I am done being hardheaded. I can no longer run from it than I can hide from myself.
Then, ever the overthinker:
Do I write and publish a continuation of Beautiful Powerful Love?
Do I republish a new edition of From Fat, Black, and Unlovable to Beautiful Powerful Love?
Do I create online classes and workshops?
I still need to record those meditations!
Do I apply effort and skill to try to help transform the culture in the small enclave of corporate America in which I am employed?
The ideas were (and still are) endless.
“Get out of your own damn way and trust!” My ancestors spoke.
Although my ancestors had to enlist others to get my attention, I am once again being obedient.
“How do I trust?” I asked. “You take steps and allow your path to unfold underneath each step,” they said.
”How do I figure out what step to take out of endless possibilities?” I insisted. “You take the step that leads to healing. You take the step that leads to truth because it is Truth. You don’t take the easiest step, but you take the simplest step. You take the step that places you in the peaceful current of joy. Then you keep steppin’!”
Image: Barbara Pamplin Photo Credit: Kariba Photography
So I take three deep breaths... and I embrace who the f*ck I am.
I have new websites BeautifulPowerfulLove.com and BarbaraPamplin.com. Please check them out.
I have a Beautiful Powerful Love Tribe. Please join us.
I have a Facebook page. Please like and share.
I have a YouTube channel. Please subscribe.
I’m on IG. Please follow.
Welcome to Beautiful Powerful Love 2.0
Is it a virtual event? Another book? An online course? A blog? A membership community? A movement? A podcast? An opinion piece?
It is what it is.
Together, let’s see what unfolds.
Ohuninifa
