A Flag For My Freedom: A Juneteenth Reflection From My Soul

Since the full moon last week, I’ve been in ceremony—
Not one with incense and altars, but the kind where Spirit strips you bare.
Where your soul becomes the sacred site.
Where truth comes not gently, but with fire.

I’ve been in the deep.
Releasing. Shedding.
Confronting the patterns I thought I’d healed.
But healing, I’m learning, isn’t a straight line.
It loops. It spirals. It returns to roots.

And this root?

It was her.

The Mother Wound.

It showed up again.
Disguised in a new face.
Same energy, different skin suit.
And I had to finally ask:
What is still sitting in my vibration that keeps calling this in?

I looked long. I looked hard. I looked honestly.

And there she was.
Not just my mother—
But my grandmother.

See, I was raised by a beautiful, unavailable mother.
She was kind, charismatic—but not to us.
She didn’t want daughters.
And my grandmother, who stepped in to raise us,
She didn’t just dislike that we were girls—
She disliked our Blackness.

And so I was raised in a house where we were stripped of our culture before we even had a chance to know it.
No Black shows.
No Black music.
No natural hair.
No Black friends.

We went to the good schools—the white ones.
Our hair was pressed and pulled until we didn’t recognize ourselves.
We were taught to be proper, quiet, obedient.
Children were to be seen, not heard.
No emotion. No joy. No dance. No sexuality. No self.

And the Bible was used like a belt—
Wrapped around our spirits too tight to breathe.
Religion became a cage.
Righteousness became repression.

And though my grandmother was Black—born and raised in the South—
She embraced the Creole and Native American parts of her lineage,
But rejected the Blackness.
So, we were taught to reject it too.
To shrink.
To be ashamed.
To grow up small, chubby, embarrassed.
Not just of how we looked—but of our very existence.

She used to say, “Don’t bring home no nappy-headed Black boys.”
So we learned: our love was wrong.
Our desires were dangerous.
Our bodies were too much.
Our presence was a problem.

And still, somehow, I thought I was free.

I grew up in L.A.—a melting pot.
A place where we said “I don’t see color” and believed it.
But that mindset, I now see, was its own kind of blindness.

Because it wasn’t until I moved to the South in my forties—
To Louisiana were my roots began,
That I realized the world saw me as something I never fully saw in myself:

A Black woman.

And the irony?

It was the year Juneteenth became a national holiday.
My mother, a government worker, came home with the letter.
A holiday I had only vaguely heard of,
Now carried the weight of something I didn’t know I needed.

That was three years ago.

Now I live in Texas—
The last state to find out the enslaved had been freed.

And here I am,
Just finding out that I have been free all along.
That the shackles weren’t on my wrists—
They were on my worth.
They were on my voice.
They were on my hair, my joy, my truth, my desire.

The full moon shined a light on it all.

I saw the mother wound.
I saw the grandmother wound.
I saw how I had internalized their pain,
And called it personality.

So I cut my hair.
I cut the weight.
I cut the lies.

As a Black woman, we’re taught: “Your hair is your crowning glory.”
But that crown can become a mask, a cage.
So I laid it down.
And I rose.

And I looked at the calendar…

June 19th.
Juneteenth.

The day our ancestors found out they were free.
And the day I found out I was too.

This is my emancipation.
A spiritual Juneteenth.
A soul revolution.

My ancestors were enslaved in flesh.
I’ve been enslaved in thought.

But now—
I walk in my Blackness with reverence.
I learn the parts of my culture that were denied to me.
I speak, I sing, I dance, I cry, I love… loudly.
I am learning to desire again.
To want.
To exist without shame.

This is my freedom.

So I wave my flag.
Not just for equality, but for wholeness.
For Blackness.
For softness.
For joy.
For me.

Who knew that freedom would feel like this?

Who knew I was waiting to meet the version of me
that had been here all along—
just buried beneath generations of silence?

Love is the answer.
Pain and separation were the chains.
But baby—
I’m free now

Let’s keep waving that flag. Higher. Louder. Brighter.

Because we are not just surviving—we are sovereign.