False Words, True Survival: My Journey Continues

As I walked the streets of Paris, I exhaled fear, trauma, and anxiety. I inhaled the courage and wisdom of Josephine Baker, Nina Simone, James Baldwin, and all those who sought refuge under a Paris sky. In that breath, I realized: survival is not a disorder, it’s strategy. Greatness never asks permission. 

I exhaled all that no longer served me. I inhaled joy, laughter, ease, and freedom. 

I twirled, and I thought.

I have been lost and disoriented in this age of chaos. I carry ancestral voices with me, hearing them whisper across oceans. I recognize the United States of America for what it is: a nation built on duplicity. And now, in Paris, I realize this journey has been about survival, belonging, and release.

Since January, I’ve been living an experiment: answering the world’s call to do things differently. I deleted my social media profiles, keeping only WhatsApp and LinkedIn. I reduced my shopping to only essentials, no more retail therapy. And hardest of all, I removed words from my lexicon that no longer serve me. 

In 2025, as we move through the first quarter of the 21st century,  I asked myself:  What would happen if I intentionally curated new ways of being, thinking, and knowing? 

In Paris, I exhaled what no longer served me and inhaled freedom. This is what liberation feels like

Among Paris’s monuments, I thought about the monuments of language we carry.  The first word that came to mind was imposter syndrome. I wonder if those who designed these masterpieces ever felt like imposters? Maybe. Did Baldwin, Baker, and Simone ever pretend in order to garner the respect they deserved? Likely.

As I reflected on those who came before, I realized, I do not have a syndrome. We do not have a syndrome. Our feelings of not belonging are not a disorder. They are real. We see it daily in the efforts to scrub entire communities and histories from existence. To survive systems that revile your existence, there are times you must put on the cloak of another. 

We have the intelligence, stamina, and commitment to do the job. We always have. Think about it, how many times have you or your ancestors been called lazy by someone profiting from your labor?

And, somehow like Drapetomania of old, imposter syndrome is used to pathologize our very survival.

Those intimidated by your greatness are invested in keeping you insecure. They realize you are more skilled, more prepared, more visionary than even you can imagine. So you are fed subtle messages that you aren’t good enough, that you don’t belong. These whispers are not truth, they are strategy.

If you feel like an imposter, I’d wager it isn’t the first time. Maybe it came through the “work twice as hard to get half as much” mantra, or some other message that convinced you, at a young age,  you weren’t enough. But hear me clearly: You are not the problem.

In today’s climate, the quiet part is being said out loud:

“DEI hire” 

“They’re taking our jobs” 

“Not a REAL American”

You are good enough. You are intelligent enough. You can, and always have been doing the work. You can’t make those who doubt you accept you. Some will always try to shrink you just to feel bigger. 

So, yes, you may feel like an imposter. However, in spite of every message society, every boss, every institution may have told you, you are, I am, we are, The One!

And if language can pathologize our survival, it can also re-center power in ways that keep us bound. From imposter syndrome, the next words I examined were: white supremacy, white supremacy culture,  white supremacist.  Every time those words are uttered, they risk reinforcing the lie that somehow whiteness is inherently superior. Even though “white supremacy" is now used to name systems of oppression, its very phrasing recenters whiteness as supreme.

“White supremacy” and the concept of race were manufactured to uphold colonization, enslavement, and oppression. Establishing a racial hierarchy was the perfect  distraction. After all, as The Wizard of Oz taught us in Wicked,  “The best way to bring folks together is to give them a really good enemy.”

Language shapes perception. When we reduce complex identities and concepts to initials, we obscure the humanity they represent. DEI distances us from the discrimination and harm committed against people those letters are supposed to support. LGBTQIA bypasses the lived realities of those whose lives are more than alphabet soup. CRT erases its grounding in critical thought and historical analysis.

This reductionism fuels dog-whistle politics, channeling anger and fear toward old unresolved questions. The loudest one remains: What do we do about the Negro? 

As I stood on Boulevard Saint-Germain in front of Café de Flore, where so many stood before me, this fable came to mind:

A scorpion asks a frog to carry it across a river. Midway, it stings, dooming them both to death. The frog asks why. The scorpion replies:

“I couldn’t help myself. It’s my character.”

We are in #TheAgeofChaos. This is not an anomaly. It is the expected trajectory of a nation born in chaos. The United States is built on state-sanctioned murder and deception, no matter how much some try to deny history. The founders didn’t stumble into duplicity -  they crafted it, enshrining deception in the nation’s DNA. They promised “We The People” while raping, torturing, and murdering. 

Like the frog in the fable, we keep letting the scorpion on our backs expecting it to change. But the scorpion, like our nation, does what it has always done. It is up to us to do something different.

And yet, as my journey bends forward, I feel the expanse of breath, of release, of liberation.

What I didn’t know, until Paris, is that liberation sometimes looks like letting go. It looks like laying down the cape and choosing to rest.

And so, as I close this chapter of wandering and witnessing, I step toward the next with clarity. Looking out the window, the first tear falls, then the second.

Next stop: Home.