(DreamKeepers MLK Jr. Day celebrations, yr?)
[In my dreams I can fly. It’s the same every time. I start running. My speed increases and I take flight. It’s wonderful and I am free]
The earliest memory I have of myself is really not a memory. It’s more like a story I’ve heard or maybe it’s just the story I’ve made up but I like it. The story is when I was two years old, my parents took me to Guyana for the first time. When my grandfather saw me he said, “Dat chile have de call.”
What the hell is the CALL? I’ve always taken that story to mean I was special or that I have a special gift of some kind. It’s actually something that I have always felt about myself but many times was too lazy or stupid to really own any part of it. I even ran from my greatness by changing my definition of ‘special’, like ‘I’m special like they need to have telethon a for me’.
This is part is called ‘LOST’
[In my dreams I can fly. I start running. My speed increases and I take flight. Something is wrong. I’m falling. Start again. Run faster, pick up speed. Take flight. FALL. Harder and harder each time. Just stop flying and you won’t fall.]
I was a ‘curious’ child. I think that my mother must have asked what she did to deserve the challenge I was as a child. I was very active and I had a number of interesting anomalies that had to make her crazy. I would not sit still but I had allergies that the doctor said would require me to stay inside while other children were able run freely outside. That was not going to work. She could not keep me indoors even if she wanted to. I had the only room in the house that was air conditioned because I could not endure heat. I would get headaches that would keep me in bed for days when I got too much sun. I grew up with a chalkboard as a ‘toy’ that I then used to help my younger sister to read and write but I struggled with that same thing well into my twenties. I had great patience for the strangest tasks and incredible frustration for other things. Every year my parents would give me a copy of The Guinness Book of Records or some type of 'book of facts'. I would read it and memorize the facts for the strangest things but I would rarely do schoolwork unless supervised. I was very observant and I had a memory like an elephant (to this day). I did most things by watching and exploring. If you left me in a room to figure it out, I probably would especially if it was hands on task. When I got older, I was obsessed with being a master of liming as I observed in my parents and their friends almost every weekend. I used to say, “When I get big I’m going to be able to cuss and speak like them.” High school became my training ground for my growing talent for ‘hanging out’.
“You are not the kind of student that we are looking for at Syracuse.” That’s what the letter said when my last opportunity shut the door tight on what was my dream for being like my idol at the time, Wilma Rudolph.
Oh yeah, I had dreams and I was clueless for how hard I would need to work to achieve them. Forget achieve them, I couldn’t even find them. My punishment therefore was that I wouldn’t be able to have dreams. I was lost without a vision for my life and I was living, surviving out of control. The first time I ever contemplated suicide was the winter of 1986, the year I should have been graduating from high school. There was no way I could hide anymore. Someone would finally demand an explanation for why all of these things were happening. I was lost in the insanity of it all and I felt like I was not just going crazy, I was crazy for even wanting those things for my life.
This part is called ‘DISCOVERY’
[In my dreams I can fly. Wow! I haven’t flown in so long, I’m scared to take flight. Run fast. I take flight. It’s so easy and it feels so good. I have to fly again. It feels good to be up here. What was that? Something is chasing me. Fly faster. Quick before it catches you.]
I remember hearing someone say that the thing we are good at is sometimes the thing we spend the most time running from.
Even with all of the crazy, disappointments, stupidity, poor choices, I had chances.I could no longer confine overspending to just be in my head. I had failed so many times in my own eyes, it was time to prove to myself that I could be smarter than I had been in the past. When a professor, Dr. Doris Corbett , the most powerful and amazing black woman I had ever known personally took me under her wing, I felt POWERFUL! I felt EMPOWERED and I wanted to be just like her. For five semesters I was not just living a dream, I was realizing it. It didn’t start off like it was in my head, and it was being created in the moment.
Then it happened. Just when it looked like I was getting it right, I had to come home. Was this my punishment for years of wasting time? Maybe I didn’t deserve an opportunity to catch up, to make up, to live up! Maybe it’s true, I’m not enough and I should be satisfied with my lot in life. The cards I have been dealt suck and there is nothing I can do about it except to just suck it up and live with the knowledge that I am special like a telethon special. This would be the second time that I contemplate suicide and this time was different from the first. This time I had a conscience with a face like my mother’s insisting that I don’t settle even against all of the perceived evidence to the contrary.
‘I’m lost but there is a little light because my previous success just won’t let me sleep. My mind is cluttered and filled with noise and it won’t shut up. I’m on the cusp of something, either madness or greatness. I can choose but do I have the energy to reinvent myself while at the same time dealing with my doubt and disappointment’.
This part is called ‘ME’
[I can fly not because I have to but because I want to. It’s easy. Run, pick up speed, take flight and soar. It doesn’t always look pretty. Sometimes it’s even ugly but I’m flying and it feels good.]
I remember sitting in the ballroom of the Convention Centre in New Orleans in 1997 watching Sistah Souljah speak. I was moved to tears as she became overcome with emotion while addressing some of the problems of our communities. So many people in the audience had come to the ‘empowerment’ seminar that day and still, they weren’t getting the need to change their prospective. For me, I was looking for answers to questions. I remember her saying, “We got a whole lotta dreadlocks walking around and no consciousness. A whole lotta African garb and no sense of community responsibility.” What happened in that moment though was a realization that would put me on a path toward where I had always seen myself and I found my voice. I can’t really describe it. I just felt at home, comfortable, familiar with the understanding of who I could be.
My next break through came in 2002 when I attended my first International Black Summit. By 2002, I had already established myself in several capacities but I was still a little shaky on the direction and for what purpose. That first Summit forced me to really take a look at my life and discover the vision in it. Of course, I thought at first I was doing it wrong because I could only see it in my head. When I looked elsewhere, in my heart, I found it. I am empowerment through laughter! After that, it all fell into place. No matter what I do, as long as I am true to that vision, I will be fine. I have blossomed and fully stepped into the possibility that is Adrienne.
What have I learned about myself?
I am a true Cancerian. I will never do something before I am ready to do it and my mood is like the moon.
I am afraid to cry for fear that if I start, I will never stop.
I am emotional and 98.5% of everything I do is based on my emotional reaction to it.
I love hard even though I’ve worked hard on not letting people find that out.
I am extremely sensitive, a little known fact.
I am loyal. When you are my friend, you are my friend.
I am a hard person to know. Many people may claim to know me but only a handful of people can say they have been allowed to know me.
I have a basic sense of fairness that makes it difficult to have me take on certain things if I can’t see the fairness of it.
I hate rules. My first reaction when confronted by a rule I don’t understand, is to break it.
I am passion. Anything worth doing must be fun or it’s not worth doing.
I am committed to the transformation of how we relate to people in black communities.
I love being something that people don’t expect.
I am athletic even though age has given me a few more pounds to haul around.
I am an asshole when I want to be and I don’t suffer fools lightly.
I am giving of my time even at the detriment of my own needs.
I am an introvert in an extrovert’s body. I can be just as excited about doing nothing as I can be about doing something.
I am afraid and lonely sometimes even when surrounded by people.
I want to do everything possible not to disappoint myself, my family, friends, and my communities.
I am laughter. Oh how I love to laugh. It’s like a drug and when I discovered how easy I can make myself laugh and others, it was like crack. It’s the one unique thing that has always been mine.
I am me. The good, the bad, and the fucked up of it all!
There are a lot of things I can use or say to not be wonderful and brilliant in my life and no one would really argue if they knew the story. My uncle use to say, “If I tell you my story, you would cry.” That being said, my life has been about really learning to love the whole package. Inside of struggle, pain, joy, laughter, excitement, failure, triumph, disappointment, and a series of other descriptors...
I have found me and now I don’t have to dream.
I can fly even with my eyes open.
Because I have embraced the entire package...
I have discovered how special my life has been.
I have been divinely blessed and I am special.
