Finding My Assignment

Before my first day at that fancy elementary school for girls I knew that I was on a mission. How did I know? Who told me? Was I psychic already or was that one of the powers I had to develop to fulfill my mission? By the time we went to the meet and greet in the gorgeous stucco building with wood details, I knew. My mission, no option NOT to accept it, as the only Black girl in the elementary school, was to prove everyone wrong.

I got it from my Dad. My mom was never the only kid at an all white school but my father was the only one, or one of very few, for his entire elite scholarship-based private education just like me. It wasn’t until I found my grandmother’s yearbooks that I learned that she and her sisters and first cousins were usually the only Black kids in their public school too. So I came by it honest, inherited or inferred. It was up to me to vanquish all the stereotypes about Black people that these super privileged white people held in their minds and hearts. My weapon? Excellence. It was more important than friendship bracelets, leaf piles and sleepovers. I wanted that look of pride (and relief) on my father’s face when I won awards. I wanted the glint in his eyes when he looked at the other parents. I couldn’t have known, but I certainly felt that there was something gratifying for the schoolboy he had been, brilliant, isolated, sharp-witted and always on the defensive in unsafe white educational spaces. Why, one might have asked herself a million times, would he ever put me through this? Short answer? He didn’t know better. Yet.

An image I altered as part of a grief and joy ritual where I imagined my Dad and I being the same age and being besties in our school days, so neither one of us would have to be alone.

My father believed what my grandparents instilled in him. 1. Education is God. 2. You have to fight for everything you get in what my immigrant grandfather called “This man’s country.” My grandparents put their kids in white schools knowing it was unsafe. So my grandmother took over the PTA to have oversight. My parents put me in a white elementary school knowing it was unsafe. My Dad joined the board of trustees, so there was only so much they could do to me.

My father had taken the excellence route himself. So much to prove. Elite boarding school education. Ivy league undergrad AND law degree and MBA. First Black person in a vice president role at The Bank of New York. He was even featured in Black Enterprise Magazine. Winning? While I was in elementary school my father had a revelation. My Nana calls it a nervous breakdown, but I think it’s a miracle. In his corporate lawyer vice president investment bank job, my father realized what all his excellence had gained him, an opportunity to be a Black face in a white space forever, complicit in mergers and acquisitions that destroyed other people’s lives. So he could pay for his children to end up where? in the same hellish institutions? Was this the point? No way.

My father began the long journey of retracing his steps. A difficult journey which involved divorce, moving to a different city and though I felt the economic difference in my life, I didn’t really understand what was going on. Both of my parents remained committed to my and my siblings education, now on scholarships (#evenmoretoprove) and without a clear reassignment, I just continued my mission.

Here is the poison of having something to prove. At some point, it steals your internal navigation. At a certain point I couldn’t tell the difference between the gratification of lusting after the idea of excellence and the sincere sweetness of following my own dreams. Do you ever feel that way? When I see the brilliant talented people around floundering, disconnected from their core sense of purpose and wondering what to react to and how, I think about the way my mission almost stole my relationship to my purpose.

Almost.

In his journey, my Dad finally came back around to relieve me of my (deeply internalized) mission. He realized that part of his purpose on the planet and in community was to create what he would have needed to listen to his inner knowing and live a purposeful life. Through massive unlearning he taught himself to self-define, manifest and become accountable to a purposeful life and then he created a curriculum to share it with other people. Starting with me. I’m proud to say, now that my Dad is an ancestor, that what I have inherited from him most of all is the joy of living a purposeful life full of love and inspiration.

This month, my Dad’s birthday month and mine too, Sangodare and I are implementing the first 3 month cohort of the curriculum my dad invented: The Chrysalis: Life Purpose Road Map. Our online introductory workshop Doing What I Came to Do: Clarifying Your Assignment is this Saturday at 3pm EST, the virtual-only version of the full curriculum kicks off on the solstice (Sun, June 21st at 3pm eastern) and the retreat version kicks off with a weekend in Durham, NC on June 27-28th. You can get all the information here.

I am so excited to invite you into my new mission, to inspire a world where everyone we know is fully living in their purpose and generating more love and freedom for everyone.

Love,

Alexis