37 Years Later, I am Freed.

The term freedom is a mindset just like the emotion, happy.  I think the World at large is in crisis.  How I find my little soul’s livability is by infusing freedom of mind into my daily life.  Consciousness is meant to be expanded.  When I try to see the future from a grounded stand point it looks a bit foggy.  I stand on an empty road filled with fog.  You can feel the tension of fear and anxiety.  You can feel your lungs start to struggle for breaths of air.  Eventually, you start to stifle.  How can we be okay when there is arguably so much out of our control as humans? Happy Birthday to Oprah Winfrey.  She is my lighthouse in both spirit and light.  I think what she has done was unconventional and she opened up space for a Black woman like me, to follow down the path of owning your own life by any means necessary.  Oprah raised me.  She raised a lot of us.  The show aired at 4pm religiously throughout childhood, teenage years, young adult college days, and I still remember her ending the show around 2011.  I had my gallbladder removed in 2009 and had to stay in the hospital due to complications.  I had received 2 blood transfusion due to having iron deficient anemia.  The day I got out the hospital was June 25th 2009.  The day, my hero, Michael Jackson, took his last breath.  When I came home, I put on Oprah's show.  It was around 4:30pm - ish.  I put on the news in the my grandmother's room to follow the MJ news story.  They said he had a cardiac arrest.  I could not believe MJ was dead and Oprah was the only person that could guide me through this day.  I remember my grandmother saying to me just go in the shower, take a break from the tv for a second.  She knew it was a little too much.  What is happening? I go back to that moment in time a lot. 

I watched the Color Purple about two weeks ago.  I love how our stories as Black Americans produce the same response for the culture.  We are resilient.  If we are fighting villains in Wakanda, if we are slaying Sea Witches under the sea, or if we are producing some kind of Renaissance concert for the Gods, Black American art is sealed in the resilience of life in melanin skin.  I defend Oprah and Whoopi like they are my family members.  I think as a community, not honoring the survival of what some of us have gone through is disheartening.  I feel freer when I am working on something.  When I am creating something.  In 2023, I spent the most time on stage in a year then I had since my college days performing around campus.  It felt really good to be back in the light.  I felt like I went back home to the place that brings me the most freedom.  In 2023, I went through a pretty significant reset.  I divorced the two people who made me.  Forever.  I hate to use the word, forever, because you never know what will happen.  I say forever because the version of that relationship is dead.  I went back to therapy.  I realized that we have to drown relationships with people in our subconscious.  You have to literally kill off the disease in your mind that causes you pain.  It is people.  I noticed a lot of people around me have altered their lives to not deal with people.  That is not me.  Instead of changing who God made me to be, I change the program that is causing me to live, well... less freely.  I do not like constraints.  I really do not care what others think about me.  I have that much confidence.  

I think the new year of life will require more bravery and courage to get to my next peak.  I am in the valley currently.  I feel open to all of the possibilities of what I have done in my past years to help me fulfill my goals of wealth in these new years.  I say wealth in many terms.  The term abundance is playing towards the front of my mind.  Sometimes, like I learned from Michelle Obama, the financial wealth holders cannot pass on the informational wealth, poorer people can.  It's like those friends you have that only post on their feed during vacations, but are still active on Instagram daily.  They must think living between the space of vacations is worthless to share.  I think everyday life is more valuable than the big moments.  The big moments are louder.  Perhaps brighter.  But they are not your everydays.  I love to win.  But I am changing my relationship with insta-wins and working towards a more long term, legacy kind of win.  What have you done to help someone else Tahyira? 

The intersection of Education and the Arts came into my life in Hollywood.  I lived in an apartment that faced the Hollywood Sign.  It was a daily reminder to stay focus on why I moved cross country.  My first job was at the enrichment program teaching dance.  I looked at that job as a way to maintain rent and bills in Los Angeles.  Even though my passion for helping to guide young minds rose, I still did not see myself as a teacher per-say.  I knew I had the elements.  I knew I was the favorite teacher when I would be on campus but I still did not think my criminal justice and sociological background plus the business creative stuff would be an asset.  It wasn't.  My life experiences and educational background makes me the ASSET.  I realized it is going to be less about what we bring to the table and more about how much life we've lived before we sat down at the table.  We need strong hearts and minds to navigate our chaotic future.  It starts in school.  I learned how to manage adults.  So managing a classroom is easier.  I learned how to work with the at risk population.  In after school, the goal is to keep the lights on.  It helps students stay off of the streets, helping them to focus longer on their educational goals.  The higher rates of time in school leads to more opportunities for higher education and less college dropouts.  The job is to be a guide.  As an ELA teacher, I can see the school to prison pipeline a lot more clearer as my responsibility goes towards their reading and writing skills.  It is low.  The pandemic has caused countless interconnected issues I do not think our system is able to handle.  More at risk students, will fall through the crack.  At times, the job is keeping them out of Rikers Island.  I speak to my scholars the way I speak to my friends, in truth.  There are good days and days that make you feel so defeated its depressing.  A lot of teachers have left education due to the political changes at the top.  The future of our World is dependent on the way we work together.  I find that my artistic life circulates around my public service career.  As Tee Slaves, the rapper or Tahyira Savanna, the actor, I find ways to educate and bridge gaps.  There is always going to be more that makes us the same as humans then what separates us.  Hatred is on the rise.  Those like me, working for love, will face a lot of tribulations.  God Speed.