A Glimpse of the Gods: Healing, Illusion, and the Wound We Can’t Stop Feeding

The last few weeks have been hard. I don’t know if it’s because I am a HSP (highly sensitive person), or because I was born in March. Or because something about this particular season has cracked something open in me that I have not been able to close. But there is something about watching my community argue amongst ourselves in public that breaks my heart in a specific kind of way.

We have this way of ripping each other apart that no one else can replicate. When we feel lied to, when we feel gaslit. When we feel like someone has taken something from us…we go for the jugular in ways we never seem to go for anyone else’s.

We become the sharpest version of ourselves. And we aim it directly at each other.

And I suppose, if I am being honest, I understand it. We learned from the best.

But I still wish we didn’t do it to each other.

So every day these last few days I have been sending up a quiet prayer for the woman who has become the main focus on every podcast. The butt of every joke. The main topic of almost every think-piece.

I hope she is okay. I hope her mental health is holding her. I hope someone in her life who loves her is making sure she eats and sleeps and remembers who she is underneath all of this noise.

And then, because I am who I am, I started thinking about what this moment is really about.

Not about her. About us.

Let me tell you the story.

There is a woman. You probably know who I mean. I am not going to say her name because this is not about her. Not really. She is the door. And what I want to talk about is what is on the other side of it.

She has millions of followers. She talks about trauma and relationships and wounds and emotional health in a language that feels like home. She looks like somebody you grew up with. She flexes like somebody you once admired. She sounds like the block. But she is naming the things the block never had words for.

And Black people pressed follow in the millions because something in them exhaled and said: finally. Someone sees me. Someone is speaking my pain out loud. Someone finally looks like healing.

And then the questions came. About her credentials. About her degree. About whether she is who she says she is.

And the internet did what the internet does.

But here is what I want to ask. Not about her. About us.

Why did millions of people need her to be real so badly?

Sit with that question for a second. Because the answer is not simple and it is not clean and it is not about one woman’s degree or lack thereof.

It is about a hunger so deep and so old that most of us have stopped being able to name it. It is about what happens when millions of people who have never been offered a real conversation about their mental and emotional wellness finally find someone who will have it with them.

Someone who looks like them. Who talks like them. Who wears what they wear and moves how they move and still somehow has words for the thing that has been living in their chest without a name for their entire life.

Was it her beauty? Probably some of it. Was it because she is light skinned? We are going to get to that. Was it because she ran in the circles of famous athletes and entertainers, because she carried that proximity like a credential of its own? Yes to that too. Was it because she made it look like healing could be beautiful, could be luxurious, could be poolside and still be real? Absolutely.

But underneath all of that, before any of that, it was the hunger. And the hunger did not start with her. The hunger has been with us for a very long time.

That is the door I want to walk through today.

WHAT 500 YEARS OF SILENCE DOES TO A PEOPLE

Let us start at the beginning. Because there is no honest conversation about Black wellness in America without starting at the beginning.

For more than 500 years, the emotional and spiritual lives of Black people have been systematically ignored, suppressed, pathologized, and exploited. We were not allowed to grieve. We were not allowed to heal. We were not allowed to name what was happening to us because naming it would have required the people doing it to acknowledge it. And they were never going to do that.

So we survived. We built community in the cracks. We found God in the fields. We kept memory alive in our music and our food and the way our grandmothers held us without saying a word. We developed a whole interior world that the outside world never saw and never counted.

And then we were told that our world did not count.

But let me not move past that too quickly. Because what was happening around us while we were being told our wisdom didn’t matter deserves to be named. People were getting GI bills. People were getting homes in suburbs that had covenants written specifically to keep us out. The medical community that was supposed to heal us was running experiments on us.

Tuskegee. Henrietta Lacks, whose cells built a billion dollar industry while her family didn’t know her name was on them. The distrust was not paranoia. It was earned. It was rational. It was the only sane response to what was actually happening.

And simultaneously the world was being built around us in ways that were dazzling and disorienting at the same time. Television arrived. Music got recorded and commodified. The simple things that had kept us tethered to each other, the front porch, the church mothers, the elder who lived three doors down and knew everyone’s business and nobody’s secrets, those things started fraying.

The Great Migration scattered us. Chicago. Los Angeles. New York. Harlem. We left the South looking for something better and found something different. Not always better. Just different. And in the newness and the noise and the survival of it all, something got lost.

The grandmother’s kitchen got smaller. The village got quieter. The rituals that held grief and celebrated passage and named children into their purpose started to feel old fashioned in a world that was moving so fast.

And so we arrived, generation by generation, further from our own knowing. Further from the healing that had always lived inside our own traditions. Carrying wounds we couldn’t name because the people who could have named them for us were gone or scattered or too tired from surviving to sit down and teach.

And we were told that healing looked like a white room and a white couch and a white clinician asking how that made you feel. That wellness was a diagnosis and a prescription. That your grandmother’s kitchen table wisdom was folklore, not medicine. That the elder who could look at you and see straight through to your pain without you saying a word was not a healer in any way that counted.

So we stopped going. Or we never started. We called therapy white people stuff. We called vulnerability weakness. We carried everything alone or we carried it together loudly in ways that looked like strength but were really just survival dressed up and hoping nobody looked too close.

And the wound festered. Quietly. Generationally. In our bodies and our relationships and the way we love and the way we leave and the way we raise our children in the shadow of everything we never processed.

Until someone came along who sounded like us. And named it.

WHY SHE FELT LIKE MEDICINE

Before I say anything critical I have to say something true. Because if I skip this part I am being dishonest and I did not come here to be dishonest.

She cracked something open. And that matters.

Think about what it meant for a young Black man, raised to believe that emotions were weakness and vulnerability was an invitation to be destroyed, to sit with his phone at midnight watching someone who looked like his people, sounded like his neighborhood, wore the clothes he recognized, and say out loud: your father’s absence wounded you. Your inability to commit is not character. It is protection.

You learned that love leaves so you leave first. Think about what it meant for him to hear that and feel, maybe for the first time, that someone had reached inside the place he never showed anyone and confirmed that something real was living there.

Think about what it meant for the Black woman who had been holding her mother and her children and her job and her grief and her rage and her tenderness all at the same time for so long she had forgotten she was also a person who could be held.

To watch someone glamorous and unapologetic say: you are not strong because you are okay. You are strong because you are still standing while quietly breaking. And you deserve more than standing.

That is not nothing. That is the kind of thing that changes a life. Or at least opens a door that had been sealed shut.

And she did it in the language of the people. Not the language of the institution. Not the careful clinical distance of someone trained to maintain professional boundaries, measuring every word for liability. She came in warm and direct and dressed like a video and talking like the block and somehow also naming the deepest thing.

And something in millions of people said finally. Someone who looks like where I come from is telling me that what I feel is real.

I see that. And I honor that completely.

But here is the other thing I have to hold at the same time. Because this is where it gets complicated and I need you to stay with me.

The same qualities that made her feel like medicine are also what made her dangerous. Not because she is a bad person. But because trauma expressed is not the same as trauma treated. Naming the wound is not the same as knowing how to close it.

And when you have millions of people sitting with their most vulnerable places cracked open, trusting that the person in front of them knows what to do next, the framework behind the words matters enormously. The training matters. The ethics matter. The years of supervised practice that teach you what to do when someone’s pain goes somewhere you did not expect it to go, that matters.

You can love your community and still not be equipped to heal it. And sometimes the most dangerous thing is someone who loves loudly but leads people somewhere they cannot safely go.

THE MIRROR AND THE MIRAGE

Here is the thing about a mirage. It looks exactly like water. That is the whole point. If it looked like sand nobody would walk toward it.

When we are starving for something, really starving, we lose the ability to distinguish between the thing and the image of the thing. Between medicine and something that tastes like medicine but was assembled without the framework that protects the most fragile people in the room.

And here is where I have to turn the mirror all the way around. On all of us. Including the people who have been the loudest in their condemnation.

Because I have been watching the licensed clinicians drag this woman across the internet with their credentials like weapons. The degrees cited like ammunition. The licenses waved like flags.

And I understand the concern. I share some of it. When someone without the proper training speaks into the deepest wounds of millions of people, the potential for harm is real and it has to be named.

But I also want to ask: who gave massa’s institutions the exclusive right to decide who is a healer?

Audre Lorde said you cannot dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools. And I keep sitting with that. Because what I am watching in some of this pile-on is not just a community protecting itself from misinformation. Some of it is credentialed Black people using the master’s framework to exclude someone who didn’t play the master’s game the right way. And I am not sure that is a clean or simple thing to celebrate.

I say this as someone who went through the system. Who sat in those classrooms and those supervision hours and earned those letters that come after my name.

And I can tell you from the inside that the system is not neutral. It is not objective. It is built on a model of human brokenness that was designed by people who never had us in mind. It pathologizes our responses to oppression. It medicalizes our grief. It has gatekept healing from our communities for generations and then had the audacity to call itself the standard.

So when a woman from the hood who watched her mother struggle through addiction and grew up with very little and clawed her way toward understanding the human heart, when she calls herself a doctor and gets it wrong, I want to hold two things at once.

The harm that can come from misrepresentation is real. And so is the harm that comes from a system that made it nearly impossible for her to get in the door the right way and then acts shocked when she found another door entirely.

The question I keep asking is this. The Black clinician who did everything right, who has the degree and the license and the years of supervised practice, why does she have 37 followers while someone else has millions? And the answer breaks my heart a little every time I sit with it.

Because the clinician who went through the system came out speaking differently. Not white. Let me be clear about that. Mastering the colonizer’s language is not the same as becoming the colonizer. It is not a betrayal of your people. It is a survival strategy that also happened to bring real knowledge back to the community.

But it sounds different. It is more careful. More precise. Less poolside, less ring light, less dressed for the video.

And we call her bougie. We say she thinks she’s better than us. We say she forgot where she came from.

When what we are really saying, without knowing we are saying it, is: I have been taught that this kind of knowledge doesn’t look like me. And I am more comfortable with someone who reflects back the wound than someone who might actually have tools to move me through it.

That is not a character flaw. That is colonization still working in us long after the chains came off.

PROXIMITY TO THE COLONIZER AS CURRENCY

Now I have to say the thing that nobody wants to say. But this is Raindom Thoughts and we do not come here to be comfortable.

Colorism is in this conversation. It has always been in this conversation. And we need to sit in it long enough to actually feel it instead of just naming it and moving on.

Think about what we were taught. Not in school. In the house. In the family. In the things that were said out loud and the things that were only communicated in glances and in prayers and in the way certain babies got held a little longer.

Black folks have always been looking at the color of their babies. Checking the ears to see how dark the child might become. Exhaling or not exhaling based on what they see. The light skinned cousin with the “good hair” and the green eyes has always been fine in a specific way that had nothing to do with who she was as a person. We have been pressing and perming and straightening since we were little girls, trying to get our hair to comply with a standard that was never ours to begin with.

And yes, thank God that is changing. Locs and naturals and Afros reclaiming what was always sacred. But make no mistake, throughout the diaspora skin lightening creams are still a product. The preference is still encoded. The bias is still running in the background like software we forgot we installed.

So when a light skinned woman with loose curls and light eyes and what the culture calls a perfect body shows up on our screens talking about healing, something in us responds that has nothing to do with the quality of her framework.

Something ancient and wounded and colonial says: she looks like value. She looks like arrival. She looks like the version of us that got closer to the thing we were taught to want.

And that is not her fault. She did not create colorism. None of us did. But we are all living inside it. And some of us are benefiting from it in ways we have not fully reckoned with.

And then layer onto that the watch. The pool. The luxury car. The celebrity friends.

The things that signal arrival in a capitalist system that was built on our labor and has spent centuries making sure we stayed at the bottom of it. When we see someone who looks like us amassing those things, something in us exhales. Like proof. Like permission. Like a glimpse of what the system told us to want.

Lower case g.

The athletes. The entertainers. The influencers. The wellness personalities with the ring lights and the millions of followers. We have made them gods because they have what we were taught to reach for. And we have handed them our trust and our hunger and our most vulnerable places without always asking what they are doing with all of it.

Fame is a specific kind of drug. And it does something to people. Especially people who came from nothing. Especially people who carry deep unresolved wounds into a spotlight that only ever shows one version of them.

The platform grows and the original wound, the one that drove them toward this work in the first place, never gets tended. There is no time. There is no privacy. There is always another live to do, another clip to drop, another glimpse to offer the hungry millions who are waiting.

And here is the thing I want us to sit with about this particular woman. She grew up watching her mother disappear into addiction. She was shaped by a father who taught her that a woman’s worth was tied to her ability to keep a man satisfied. She clawed her way toward understanding the human heart because she needed to understand her own.

That is a powerful and sacred origin. And it is also an unfinished one.

Because none of us can heal in others what we have not yet healed in ourselves. And when the unhealed get a microphone and millions of followers and no one around them willing to say slow down, the wound does not disappear. It just gets a platform.

Hurt people with ring lights are still hurt people.

WHAT WE LOST AND WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

Here is what I keep coming back to.

We had healers before they told us we did not. We had wisdom keepers. We had elders who could look at you and see straight through to the thing you had not named yet. We had rituals for grief and ceremonies for transition and communities that held you when you could not hold yourself. We had grandmothers in kitchens who understood the human heart in ways that most modern clinical training still has not caught up to.

And that was taken. Systematically. Violently. Over centuries.

And in its place we were given institutions that pathologized our pain, medicated our responses to oppression, and told us that healing was a product you purchased from a credentialed professional in a system that was never designed with us in mind.

So of course we are hungry. Of course we are reaching. Of course millions of us pressed follow on someone who finally made our pain feel seen in a language we recognized.

The hunger is not the problem. The hunger is sacred. The hunger is our ancestors in us saying we have not forgotten. We still know something is missing. We are still looking for the way home.

The question is who we trust to lead us there. And what we are willing to look past in our desperation to arrive.

THE WOUND WE KEEP FEEDING

I want to close with something uncomfortable.

We built the gods. All of them. The rapper who promotes the thing that is killing his community because we made him rich doing it. The entertainer who stays silent about genocide to protect his endorsements because we gave him so much to lose. The wellness personality who called herself a doctor because she knew, she knew, that we would not follow a coach the way we would follow a doctor, because we had been taught that the title was the thing, not the wisdom behind it.

We created the market for all of it. With our hunger. With our longing. With our desperate need for a glimpse of something that feels like healing, like arrival, like home.

And the system, the same one that broke us, is very good at providing products for the wounds it created. It knows what we are hungry for. It has always known. And it will always find someone to put in front of us who looks like the answer just enough to keep us reaching and never quite arriving.

This is not about one woman. This is about what 500 years of spiritual and cultural starvation looks like when it meets a ring light and a wifi connection.

This is about the grandmother’s kitchen being replaced by a comment section. The elder’s wisdom being replaced by a highlight reel. The ancestral ceremony being replaced by a live stream.

This is about us. All of us. Still on the journey back to ourselves. Still sometimes reaching for the mirage because the real water feels too far away.

The only way any of these gods exist is because of our pain.

And our pain is valid. Our hunger is real. Our longing for healing is one of the most sacred things about us.

But we deserve the real thing. We have always deserved the real thing.

Not a glimpse.

The whole view.

Àṣẹ

~ Doc Rain