Permission Slip

Have you ever wandered around a stationary store aimlessly ? Finally pausing in front of a line of books. Row after row of leather bound, canvas, stretched velour, moleskin, tanned cowhide. Vegan alternatives. Blown away by all those beautiful covers filled with blank pages. Some might be lightly graced with prompts about gratitude. Being. Love. Forgiveness. Grief.

But let’s be real. What really was happening in that silent pause was a moment of desperation. Feeling deeply in search of something. Anything. A new dream. A different tomorrow. Craving. Optimism. Some call it buying a new journal. But for others it feels like spending time and energy on the possibility of hope. Been there ? No. Just me ?

Life begins and ends in words. Especially the words we speak to ourselves. I was raised to believe that. And not just as a concept. As a truth. And not just the words you find in special greeting cards or beautiful affirmations. Or the first time your lover says I love you. Or I don’t love you anymore.

Every. Single. Word. And the emotion that lives under it. Within it. Through it.

The intention. The motivation. All of the values, ideas and perspectives that go into uttering ANY word.

So the action of buying a new journal is monumental. Significant..Life-changing. Right ?

You know that feeling ? That specific, fragile, renewable feeling that maybe this time things will be different. This time you will write. Consistently. Imaginatively. Dreaming the impossible.

Living through each word that writes itself as a new possibility. Imagining that this beautiful leather bound vessel with its clean pages and its quiet waiting might finally be the container strong enough to hold everything we have never quite said out loud. Everything we have been carrying in our body like a letter addressed to ourselves that we never got around to opening.

I have bought that hope more than once.

Lined journals. Blank ones. One’s with Rumi on the cover. One’s with African print that felt like they already knew something about me just sitting there on the shelf. And I would bring them home and open them with a tenderness you reserve for things you are not yet sure you deserve. And I would write. Sometimes for a week. Sometimes a month. Sometimes longer. And then, without much ceremony, I would stop.

For a long time I called that inconsistency.

But I wonder now if inconsistency was ever the right word. I wonder if what I was actually doing was protecting something. Because showing up to yourself every day. Really showing up, requires you to believe something that this world has spent a very long time trying to make certain people doubt.

It requires us to believe that we are worth showing up for.

I was in a training last week.

They handed us a pen and said: don’t write your answer. Don’t use words. Draw it.

Now let me be honest with you. I am not that kind of artist. My hand does not always do what my eye imagines. But something happened when I stopped reaching for words and let my hand find the image instead. Something moved in my body that language, for all its beauty, had not been able to reach. What came through my hand surprised me. It rose from somewhere that does not go through the long careful corridor of the conscious mind. Somewhere that had been quietly holding hurt that my words did not quite know how to say.

And then days passed. And I noticed something different in how I was moving through my world. Not a dramatic shift. Something quieter. Like a door that had always been there…but now had been left slightly open.

It made me think about something I have known intellectually for a long time but had not yet felt in my body.

Before the alphabet found us, before anyone decided whose way of knowing counted. And whose did not. We were already telling the story. In hieroglyphs. In adinkra pressed into cloth. In patterns that carried whole lineages without a single written word.

We marked what mattered and said: we were here. This is what moved through us. This is what visited us in the night and would not let go. That capacity did not leave us when someone else’s alphabet arrived. It went quiet, the way so many true things go quiet when we are taught there is a more correct way to speak.

But the body remembers what the mind was trained to forget. And when you stop asking your hand for words and simply let it move, something old and patient stirs. Something that has been waiting. Without urgency. Without complaint. Waiting for one moment of permission.

I think about our indigenous ancestors who were deeply oral. Not because they lacked the capacity to write, but because they understood something we are only beginning to reclaim. Knowledge that lives inside a person, inside the breath and the body and the voice, cannot be burned. Cannot be colonized out of existence the way a library can. The oral and the visual and the drawn, these were never lesser technologies. They were chosen ones.

And they are still available to us.

Something else happened in that training.

They asked us to write down a goal. To name it specifically. To break it into steps. To say what it would look like when we had arrived.

And I noticed something move in me that I did not immediately recognize.

I have done a lot in this life. Moved toward things that mattered on nothing more than a feeling in my chest that said: this is yours, go. When I decided I wanted to go to law school, I did not have a plan. I had a truth underneath a decision. And I trusted it. I have done that more than once. Followed the knowing before the knowing had a name. And it worked. It brought me here. But I am only now beginning to wonder what it might feel like to not just follow the call, but to write it down before I go. To say to myself, on paper, in my own hand: here is where I am going, and here is why. And here is what it will look like when I arrive.

But I had never once sat down beforehand and written: this is what I want. This is why. This is how I will know I have arrived. These are the steps, named, ordered, designed by my own hand.

And sitting with that this week, I found myself wondering what might have been different. Not better or worse. Just different. More authored. More mine from the inside out.

Because there is a difference between accomplishing something and designing it. One happens to you when you make it happen. The other is yours from the first word on the page.

What I felt when I struggled to write goals was not laziness. It was something older. The part of me that had learned, somewhere quiet and deep, that making a thing visible makes it possible to lose. That if the dream stays soft and unwritten it can never harden into a failure. That specificity is a kind of risk that not everyone has been taught they are allowed to take.

But I also think about what it means to write a dream down clearly. To give it a date. To work backwards from the arrival and name every step between there and here.

That is not pressure. That is what it feels like to believe your life is worth designing.

I also thought about my mother this week.

She was consistent. Let no one say otherwise. She made sure I had something to eat every day when eating every day was not guaranteed. She went to school while raising me alone. Fighting systems that treated her child as a problem to be managed. Her consistency cost her things I will never fully know.

But I also watched other things be consistent. Racism was consistent. The particular exhaustion of being Black and female and without enough resources in a country that manufactures that exhaustion on purpose was consistent. The message that we were behind. That something was missing in us. That empty hands were evidence of personal failure rather than systemic design. That message was remarkably, quietly, devastatingly consistent.

So when someone says: sit with yourself every day. Look at your life every day. Put pen to paper every day. I wonder how many of us hear something underneath that instruction. Something that says: look at the wound every day. Sit inside what has been done to you every day. Name the distance between where you are and where you were told you should already be.

Is it any wonder we stop?

Is it any wonder we buy the journal with such tenderness and then, without much drama or decision, quietly set it aside?

We were not failing at the practice. We were protecting ourselves from a gaze that had, for far too long, shown us things we did not yet have the tools to hold.

So I chose poetry instead. For years I wrote poems when I could not write plainly. And I want to say something about that. Poetry was not a lesser substitute. It was wisdom. It was a way of touching the truth without having to stand directly in it. It was how I kept showing up to myself under difficult conditions. That counts. That has always counted.

But there is something else available now. And I am ready for it.

I looked at one of those old journals recently. Ten pages full. Ninety pages blank.

And I want to tell you what I saw when I stopped looking at it through the lens of productivity. And completion. And the “proper” filling of spaces.

I saw ten pages that held me. Ten pages that witnessed something true about who I was at a particular moment in time. Ten pages that asked nothing of me except my honest presence and received it. But more importantly…

Nothing was missing.

We live inside a culture that cannot sit with empty space. Look at what development looks like in beautiful places. Look at the shores of Mexico. Bali. Belize. Places so sacred they do not require development to prove wholeness. Yet watch how every open plot becomes a problem to be solved by expats. Every undeveloped thing becomes an argument for what still needs to come. Progress looks like no space left untouched.

And somewhere along the way, we brought that inside ourselves. We stood it over our journals and our practices and our inner lives and let it tell us that the empty pages were evidence of something wrong with us.

But what if the empty pages were never the problem? What if the story about the empty pages was?

What if you never lacked discipline? What if you simply never received the permission slip that said: you can do this YOUR way.

It can look like whatever is honest.

The blank space is not failure. It is breath. It is the rest between the notes that makes the music what it is.

But nobody ever gave us that permission slip. So I want to offer it now.

You do not need to fill every page.

You do not need words every day. Or any structure someone else designed for a life that is not theirs. You do not need to be the kind of person who does anything “perfectly” before you begin.

What if you just needed a container? And permission to fill it your way?

Draw what today feels like. Write a single word. Ask a question you cannot answer yet. Write the date and sit quietly beside it. Write what you are dreaming in the part of you that does not yet have language for it.

Write what your life might look like in one year if you treated your own vision with the same seriousness you have given to everything and everyone else.

Because here is what I am learning.

The past, when we return to it with intention rather than dread, is not only wound. It is also root. It holds the thread of the self that survived everything that was supposed to stop us. Going back to find that thread, gently, on our own terms, is not re-wounding. It is reclamation.

The present, seen clearly and honestly, is not only exhaustion. It is ground. It is the only place any next step can actually begin.

And the future. The written, named, designed future, is something I am beginning to understand differently.

It is not arrogance. It is not magical thinking. It is the quiet declaration that you believe you have a future. That it belongs to you. That you are not only responding to life but, in some sacred and imperfect way, authoring it.

We were told we did not have that authority. Systematically. Across generations. In ways so complete that the lie became indistinguishable from the truth of who we believed ourselves to be.

But the empty page is an invitation. Written in your own handwriting. Addressed to you.

So let me ask you something, and I mean it tenderly.

When did you last sit with yourself? Not scrolling. Not performing. Not managing how you appear. Or how much you accomplished.

Just you, with something to write in. Or draw in. Asking yourself what is actually true right now.

What do you feel? What do you believe? What are you dreaming in the place that does not yet have words?

What matters to you ? Truly ? Underneath the busyness and the roles and the things you are expected to want?

What would your life look like in one year if you wrote it down today and began?

Day-to-day life is so good at filling all the space. We rise and we give. We come home emptied. And we sleep so we can do it again. And in all of that faithful, exhausting movement, the most important voice can go unheard for years at a time. Yours.

Not only in crisis. Not only when something breaks open. On ordinary Tuesdays. In the small quiet before the world claims you. In the pages of something that belongs to no one else.

You deserve to hear yourself.

This is not self-help. This is coming home.

And you have always, always been qualified to walk through that door.

~Doc Rain