You can ask my mother. You can ask my father, and probably my brother too, and they'd all tell you: I have always been the kind of person who listens for the story underneath the story. The sentence behind the silence. The ache tucked inside the joke. The dream someone keeps folding smaller because life has taught them not to ask for too much. Even before I had language for it, I was paying attention to the way people carry things. Grief in the shoulders. Hope in the hands. Joy in the laugh that breaks through anyway.
Internally or externally, I'm always gonna see beyond the surface, and I'm going to wonder about the "why".
Before Soul Noire had a name, I was already following the thread. I was learning trauma-informed care, researching how storytelling can help people process what they have lived through (homegirl thought she might get a PhD, ha), working alongside survivors of interpersonal violence, and watching how healing is rarely as neat as people want it to be. It is not always a breakthrough at the altar or a perfect journal entry. Sometimes healing is the first honest sentence. Sometimes it is remembering you have a body. Sometimes it is crying in the car and still choosing to go inside. Sometimes it is beauty finding you again when you thought all you had left was survival.
I chose social work, not just because God led me there, but also because I wanted structure for care. Not the distant kind. Not the clinical kind that forgets people have grandmothers, favorite songs, church hurt, group chats, body memories, unanswered prayers, and dreams they are scared to say out loud. I wanted to understand people in context. In family. In culture. In systems. In spirit. I chose Howard on purpose because I did not want us treated like a paragraph in someone else’s textbook. I wanted to be shaped by a place that knew we were the text, the theory, the testimony, the archive, and the future.
That legacy matters to me. I think often about the road behind us, paved by people who studied by candlelight, prayed through closed doors, built institutions out of scraps and conviction, made beauty in the middle of being denied rest, and still left us something to stand on. I think about the stories we inherited, the ones that kept us alive, and the ones we are still learning how to tell without flinching. I believe part of our healing is learning to hold all of it: the ache and the wonder, the survival and the softness, the history and the joy.
In conjunction with the vision God gave me, Soul Noire was born from that place. A desire to make healing feel less sterile and more alive. Less like a checklist and more like coming home. Through journals, affirmation cards, guided resources, workshops, classes, groups, and eventually media, I want to create tools and spaces that help people process, reflect, create, connect, and remember themselves. I believe art is part of how we heal. Writing gives language to the buried thing. Music loosens what grief made stiff. Film lets us see ourselves from another angle. Beauty reminds us that we are not only what happened to us. Joy reminds us that being whole is not just about being functional. It is about being alive, and it's what we've been doing for ages-- coloring.
At its heart, Soul Noire is my offering. It is the place where my faith, my social work training, my love for Black stories, my eye for beauty, my belief in art, and my desire to build softer places all meet. I am not just making products. I am building toward a world where people can be held with care, equipped with language, invited into reflection, and reminded that healing can be sacred, practical, communal, creative, and full of joy. This is the beginning of that vision. A seed in the ground. A story being written. A room being prepared for everyone who needs a softer place to land.
