365 Questions--August 5

In what area do I feel I made my biggest improvements?

I’m extremely proud of how far I’ve come in rediscovering who Briana is. For so long, I felt like I was doing enough. I felt like I was doing the best that I could considering all that I had been through in the last few years. I had a reason for every part of who I am. Like, I don’t trust people because the people that tell me they love are the ones that have hurt me the most, family included. I’m so transparent with people because I’ve seen people around me live a complete lie for the sake of being seen. Every single thing that made me who I am was due to things that happened to me. I was doing the best that I could on my own, but how many of y’all know that with God all things are possible? I wasn’t able to be completely free because I had become a product of my circumstances and the things that I had been through.

In one of the most broken places I’d ever been in, God began to reveal to me that I was capable of living better than I was. I didn’t have to be the person I was. I was able to be completely free. I thought that being free meant not thinking back on those things that had happened in my life. I wasn’t free. I was simply suppressing all of my experiences. It’s crazy. My bachelor’s degree is in psychology and we talked about suppressed me memories all the time, but most of the time it was in the context of rape or molestation. I never considered it outside of that. 

So I started to deal with the very beginning of my brokenness—my childhood. It was through this that God began to speak to me and I was literally feeling the chains falling off. Ones I didn’t even know existed. I never in a million years would’ve thought that I would’ve been able to go through what I just went through and be able to smile the way that I do, to be such a carefree Black girl, to be able to live life to the fullest. The minute I gave all of those chains to God, doors started opening for me everywhere. Within in the first few weeks of me deciding that I couldn’t do it by myself, I went on more interviews within 2-3 weeks than the entire year and a half I had been applying for jobs, and this is just the beginning.