Coming back from The Crossroads didn’t mean I had a map. Esu said: “change what you are doing”, not here’s step-by-step instructions, sis.
So I did what a lot of us do when we survive death but don’t know how to live yet: I ran back to what was familiar.
I enrolled in evangelist school. Smh. Wrong move.
I thought maybe the voice at The Crossroads was just God with a new accent. Maybe if I got more Jesus, more Bible, more structure, I’d figure out what He needed me to change. So I sat in those classes, Hebrew Bible open, notebook out, trying to force myself into doctrine that had already exiled me once.
But the more they taught, the more I questioned everything. Not just The Box. Not just the pills. I started questioning my whole existence. If the God they were describing was real, why did He let an 8-year-old scream until she went numb? Why did He let a 15-year-old feel abandoned by the Divine? Why did He tell me at The Crossroads He didn’t need me to change who I was, but now these teachers were handing me scriptures that said the opposite?
My Ori was stirring. Loud.
Then the pretty Indian half-white girl — that’s what the world called me & my family stated— got her DNA results.
26% Nigerian
18% Benin & Togo
12% Mali & so forth
To be exact.
Let that sit for a second.
I’d been raised on stories that didn’t claim me. Praying to a white Jesus with blue eyes while my blood was singing Yoruba under my skin. I had Obatala and Yemoja in my marrow and didn’t know it. Esu wasn’t a stranger at The Crossroads — He was kin.
Learning my true DNA did something to me.
I got mad.
Mad at Catholic school. Mad at evangelist school. Mad at mother who loved me but passed down the same colonized prayers she was forced to swallow. Mad at myself for believing the lies long enough to almost die by them.
See, we are traumatized from colonization. So traumatized that many of us deny our true roots even when they’re screaming in our bones. We’d rather be anything but African. We’d rather claim anything but the Orisha who never left us.
That rage? It was holy. It was ancestral. It was my Ori refusing to be lied to for one more day.
Evangelist school wanted me to memorize verses. My DNA was handing me a different book — one written in cowries, in water, in white cloth, in dreams I’d been told were hallucinations.
I dropped out.
Not because I was done with God. Because I was done with “their” god. The one who needed me to hate myself to be saved.
I DONT NEED YOU TO CHANGE WHO YOU ARE.
Esu said it. My blood confirmed it.
So I started asking different questions. Not “How do I become a good evangelist?” but “Who was I before they gave me a Bible and told me to forget my name?”
That’s when I stopped calling the purple lady a hallucination.
That’s when I started calling her Iyanla.
That’s when I realized I wasn’t converting to IFA.
I was coming home.
To Be Continued
Did you ever get angry when you found out the truth?
Did decolonizing your spirit feel like betrayal or like breathing?
Drop a 🤍 if your DNA ever woke you up too.