The gift hidden inside the wound.

A beginning far from where it would end

I was born in Guyana, into a world shaped by water, heat, and the quiet rhythms of a place that held me before I had words for being held. As a young child, I was separated from my parents—circumstances that, at the time, I could not name but could only feel.

What I lost then was not only their nearness. I lost an early mirror. The faces that were meant to reflect me back to myself were suddenly elsewhere, and in their absence I began, like so many children do, to assemble a sense of myself from fragments—from what was present, what was missing, and what the world seemed to expect.

Becoming who I was supposed to be

The years that followed carried me into the familiar territory of achievement. I learned how to be good. How to be capable. How to become someone whose worth could be measured in what she produced and how well she belonged. For a long time, that blueprint felt like a life. It was, in truth, a performance organized around an identity I had never consciously chosen.

Beneath the accomplishment, a quieter question lived. It did not announce itself. It simply waited—beneath the faith I had inherited, beneath the losses I had survived, beneath the versions of God and self I had been handed. Who am I beneath everything I was taught to be?

The mirror that found me

For more than two decades, I have worked with people in the field of substance use treatment and counseling. I came to that work to help others discover themselves—and discovered, instead, that the therapeutic space was also a mirror. The people I sat with were not the only ones being seen. I was being seen, too. And slowly, I began to see myself.

My spiritual journey unfolded alongside it. The God I had been given as a child became a question, and the question became an encounter—less a set of answers to defend than a presence to inhabit. Healing, I came to understand, was not the erasure of what had happened to me. It was learning to experience myself differently in the present moment, with the past no longer authoring my future.

The gift inside the wound

I do not tell this story as a victim. The separation, the achievement, the questions, the loss, the faith remade—none of it was wasted. Each became part of the lens through which I learned to understand transformation, identity, healing, and the human capacity to change.

The wound of never being given a clear mirror became the gift of learning to hold one—for others, and at last, for myself.

What if the experiences that shaped you do not have to define you?