Healing Over Hustling: The Pressure to Perform

It's nearing the 10th month of the year, and I am still trapped in this dysfunctional financial destitution loop. I have been busting my arse, grinding myself into the ground, and working my fingers to the bone, yet I cannot catch a break. Every month has arrived with a verdict in hand, and it feels accusatory. The deficit deepens despite every attempt at real resolution.

I feel the weight of this wait unlike anything else because I genuinely cannot bear to remain in this position anymore. Not to say I wanted to be here before, but before, I could still ignorantly pretend the strength to determine what destination was next came from having more time.

Truth is, we always think we have more time.

And we don't.

Equally, we always think we have more time till we don't.

I am stuck somewhere between them both: we don't and till we don't. Suspended between the knowledge that time is disappearing and the terror of discovering exactly what disappears with it.

There's this air of despair and desperation that seeks to hold your thoughts hostage, tightening around your chest until even faith feels like another performance you are failing to deliver. No matter how much you believe, it seems to notice the smallest twinge of uncertainty rising in your spirit and magnify it until doubt is the only thing you can hear.

If you're not careful, you're crying, out of breath, shaking, and heading to the ER for another somatization diagnosis presenting as anything it can be easily identified as and charged for by an allopathic practitioner. Your body becomes the emergency because your life has been one for far too long.

In my lived experiences, a popular la familia quip is:

“Thank God I don't look like what I been through!”

Boop boop.

But the truth is, that is usually after the fact.

Because in tandem truth, sometimes we do look like we're changing or carrying something, even if we don't look dragged from the outside. Sometimes the strain leaks through our eyes, our silence, our shortened patience, our inability to rest without feeling guilty.

Sometimes we look gathered when everything around us feels scattered.

Sometimes we look composed because falling apart would inconvenience everyone else.

So, what does desperation look like?

What do performative displays of a gathered appearance look like?

What does being Exhausted From Surviving™ look like when exhaustion has become your baseline and rest feels like a threat to your income, your identity, and your ability to keep the whole thing from collapsing?

What does being Overworked. UnderSupported!™ look like when everyone praises your strength while quietly depending on your continued depletion?

What does it look like to be carrying more than anyone can see while still showing up like you can handle it? It looks like swallowing panic before answering the phone. It looks like making plans with money you do not have, hope you cannot afford, and energy your body has already spent.

How do you develop the truth of who you really are when you're so used to being solid no matter what you're growing through? How do you admit that the armor is cutting into you when everyone has mistaken it for skin?

And what happens when the pressure is no longer just to survive—

but to perform like surviving isn't costing you anything?

What happens when you are expected to make the struggle inspirational, the deprivation productive, the breakdown aesthetically pleasing, and the pain proof that you are destined for something greater?

Cause today I am WRITE here.

Every letter, every word, every paragraph, every thought is me WRITE NOW.

These words may be scribblings to someone else, but they are where I reside—perhaps rightfully so.

However—and the comma matters—they have exacerbated my temperance and escalated my tolerance to the level of my next question:

How do I activate change that remains active after the momentum shifts?

The pressure to perform can become embedded so deeply within that it begins to resemble your outward appearance, all while concealing the mental contradiction happening within.

How do I break this chain without extinguishing the very desire that ignited my need to disassemble it?

Cause I am painfully, tearfully, still WRITE HERE...

WRITTEN NOW.

Without any fancy editing. Without some fluffy thematic conjecture.

Just raw.

Just real.

Just WRITTEN.

The Timestamp of Grief

The Timestamp of Grief

As a Practitioner of Hope, I am humbled to be able to represent God's presence in this earth. My discourse of training and lived experiences have become my embedded pedagogy and, therefore, now my operational DNA. For me, after nearly 25+ years of being in service to God in this space of endearment, I can honestly say no amount of formal settings and/or training prepares your heart to fully release the loss of loved ones—especially those who weigh heavy in your heart.

Whether you knew their time was marred by any physical ailment, medical condition, or their lifestyle, your heart still longs for their physical presence, and your thoughts linger in a relay of looped memories, desiring deeply to make more.

One day you're on top of your mentals; the next, your knees buckle at the simplest sound, scent, or sight that reminds you, in subtle ways, of your transcendent loved one.

You tell yourself, they wouldn't want me to be suffering like this. But that does nothing to console the aching parts of consciousness that long for just a touch from them. Your heart has not reconciled with the reality your eyes see every day. This new normal is anything but normal.

People spew the most unbelievable, disturbing, and heartbreaking verbiage during times of grief, bereavement, chaos, and calamity. In a mindset resistant to change and hardened by lived experiences, it becomes easy to excuse such vile verbiage as, that's just who I am, or that's just who they are. But for the recipient of those words, in a world already riddled with confusion betwixt reality and a seemingly forced fiction, the last hit your heart needs is a poor word cipher from anyone—let alone someone you thought you could trust to lift you up when you are so torn down emotionally.

I sit in my grief, and I honor its presence in my thoughts … those that resurface with the slightest entity, unto those that pump up the cadence of my heartbeat and cause my tear ducts to fill as I remember from whence a time has gone. I don't lie to myself as though absence feels less heavy, fills less space by its weight, or resolves simply because I keep going.

My heart sees and hears the date as though it were an interloping being, vanishing and reappearing on its annual solstice. This date is time-stamped on my frontal lobe as though it is the PIN number to access a hidden treasure. But instead, it unlocks and relocks thoughts, pains, and memories on a soundtrack featuring your voice and your giggle.

I'd be lying if I said I wished I could be with you where you are right now. But truthfully, while my spirituality knows you are where I have a desire to be with you one day, that day isn't today. Today, I wish there were a cerebral cognitive cortex conjoined to a cosmological celestial realm I could access to visit with you—to ease the angst in my heart from missing you.

I leave this day choosing to traverse the trauma attached to it by holding a light up to the gift you left me in the characteristic traits I see, similar to yours, in those you touched while you were here and those to whom you gave a little of yourself that I came behind you to love.

Rest in Loving Power, Crown Prince Zephaniah, and tell all the ancestors and the elders I am grateful for all the downloads. I pray I am walking in honor of their sacrifices as I stand on their shoulders to continue building a legacy for those who will stand on mine.

#ZNAourDNA

Developing Truth™: LAMENTATION vs. LIMITATION

 

Developing Truth™: LAMENTATION vs. LIMITATION

I am trying to process the last five, maybe six years of my life through the lenses I have developed from the last months of this year.

It's as though I went to sleep, woke up, and God said, “You are no longer who you used to be.”

In the celestial, cosmological ions of my molecular physiology, it makes much sense because these last six months stripped me of any spaces I still held onto to be bigoted, biased, pious, and confounded—to a space where my complete survival is depicted by the way I navigate the darkness, by sounds of my prayers to God echoing as guiding light.

While I fight chemistry affixed between my humanity and my divinity, I realize my humanity is fully human and needs more discipline to strip itself of old habits that could be damaging to the emergence of my newest level of divinity.

This is not a simple battle of wits.

It is a full-on war of might against will, fully empowered and employed by embedded pedagogy and muscle memory.

While in my divinity, I will fight seamlessly against anything in my humanity that dares buck against God's gift of this newest lens in my divinity.

My humanity knows subterfuge—or yields to subterfuge—against poor choices and habits that, in carnal perspective, have nothing to do with my divinity.

However, the mental malady is that the carnal lays second base, at best, when it comes to the reality that this battle of humanity and divinity, in my humanness, is a tandem fight.

A HEALING OVER HUSTLING™ TESTIMONY A Place at the Table

A HEALING OVER HUSTLING™ TESTIMONY

A Place at the Table

What looked like the wrong placement became the place where God poured back into me.

“I don’t know if I’m ready to say Healing Over Hustling is going strong—but it ain’t growing weak.”

It is 12:48 a.m. on September 7, 2026, and I have had more than 24 hours to sit in what I experienced on Saturday, September 5. Truthfully, I am still unpacking everything.

One thing I have grown fond of—even though it may also be one of the hardest things—is embracing how I have learned to sit in my truth and operate in the way God is pushing me and pruning me. To fully understand both the wait, W-A-I-T, and the weight, W-E-I-G-H-T, of Saturday, I have to go back a couple of weeks.

The Weight I Carried Into Saturday

I did not arrive at Saturday carrying beverages and merchandise alone. I arrived carrying the weight of several weeks and, truthfully, so much of this year.

I had been working long days and weekends, preparing products, moving between responsibilities, and trying to make enough money before the next deadline arrived.

Sometimes so much happens in my life, so quickly and so profoundly, that it is hard to keep the shoestrings of my memories laced up. Days run together because each one holds so much.

By the time the Festival arrived, it was not simply another vending opportunity in my mind. I needed it to be a springboard. I had worked and prepared as if the outcome of that one day might help me catch up and finally breathe.

The Morning Win

Saturday morning, I was proud of myself. By 7:30am, I was set up and ready to sell. I had already decided that, no matter what, I needed to leave at 10:00am so I could prepare for the Festival.

At 10:00am, I still had about ten products left, and I was willing to pack them up and go. But as I started packing, more people came. By 10:30am, I had sold out.

I made it home, unpacked, and kept moving. For once, I did not feel as though I was waiting until the very last minute. I felt momentum. I thought, Yes, I did it.

The Disruption

Then plans changed. A last-minute shift delayed my departure and left me hurt, overwhelmed, and now late. After an honest conversation, my brother and I headed to the festival together, but by the time I arrived, I was already emotionally discombobulated.

The organizers were doing what organizers do—trying to keep everything moving—but I was late, overwhelmed, and convinced I was not in a good placement to sell my beverages. In my mind, being late was about to cost me the win, W-I-N, that I needed. I was ready to pack it all up and go home. My brother told me, ‘Nah, sis. We can do this.’

This Is the Wrong Spot

I thought I would be near the food vendors because that is what I am known for: them good beverages. Instead, I was placed among the other vendors. My banner was not ready because the store had run out of the material needed to print it. My table did not look the way I had imagined it. In my mind, people passing by might think somebody was selling merchandise and just happened to have a few “drinks” because it was hot outside.

People came and bought beverages, but they were not moving the way they had moved at the market that morning. I had worked so hard and attached so much need to this event. I kept thinking I needed to be where the food was so I could sell out.

But unbeknownst to me, the space that seemed like whichever table was left was really the space God needed me to be.

What Was Already Waiting There

One tent over was my bonus daughter, in her own element as a vendor. Between us was a family selling beautiful plant-based food and gemstones, and one of them was also performing at the festival. On the other side of me was a woman selling handmade jewelry.

As evening came, the vendors around me had lights. Then the park lights came on, and I realized we were directly underneath one. The place I had judged as wrong kept providing what I needed.

I even considered going home to retrieve my night-market setup, but I decided not to spend the time, energy, and risk driving back and forth so late. I stayed where I had been placed.

The Woman Who Came Back

Earlier in the event, a friend bought a pouch of Caribbean Crush™. I also shared Healing Over Hustling™ with her and told her about the commemorative piece I had created. She said she would return.

Hours later, she came back. She told me she was glad I was still there. Then she started talking about the beverage—how amazing and hydrating it was. She told me a man had almost drunk her pouch, and she had stopped him. She said, ‘They may have on the same dress, but the ingredients underneath that dress are different.’ Then she read my ingredients to him.

I began to cry—boohoo cry—because while I was standing there doubting myself, she was speaking life into what I had created. She saw the care inside that pouch. She recognized that what may look similar from the outside is not necessarily made from the same ingredients.

Then she began speaking life into me. She reminded me of the people I have helped and told me not to turn my back on what God called me to do. Her words reached places in me that had grown tired and doubtful. Her words gave me life. She watered places in my soul that had become dehydrated.

What Actually Sold

No, I did not sell out at the Festival. I am still sitting with how I feel about that. I will not manufacture a false victory and pretend the financial need disappeared simply because something spiritually meaningful happened. Both truths deserve a place at the table.

But every person who intentionally chose one of the Healing Over Hustling™ commemorative pieces said something. They showed me that what I had created held value and meaning beyond a transaction. Nine months after this movement began, people were not merely purchasing merchandise. They were responding to the testimony inside it.

I arrived believing I needed to sell enough products to replenish my finances. Instead, in the very place I believed was wrong, God sent someone to replenish my spirit.

A Place at the Table

Several stories were sitting at Saturday’s table. There was the wonderful organizing family, who gave the city a good show and made sure the vendors were taken care of. There was the joy of seeing my bonus daughter in her element. There were the families and creators placed around me. There were the people who intentionally supported Healing Over Hustling™. And there was a friend whose words continued to fuel me long after the festival ended.

I thought I needed a different table—or at least a different place at the table. I thought the right placement would be the one most likely to help me sell out. But I was exactly where I needed to be to receive what God knew I needed.

Healing does not require me to deny that I still needed a different financial outcome. It does not require me to pretend that the delays, disappointment, exhaustion, and uncertainty did not hurt. Gratitude and disappointment can sit at the same table. Financial need and spiritual affirmation can sit at the same table. Preparation and disruption can sit at the same table. A morning sellout and an evening slowdown can sit at the same table.

Each truth needs its own placemat so that none of them has to overshadow the others.

Healing Over Hustling™ is nine months old. I do not know if I am ready to say it is going strong—but it ain’t growing weak.

Saturday reminded me that every place at the table will not look like the place I imagined. Sometimes the table is not where I sell out. Sometimes it is where God sits me down long enough for somebody to pour back into me.