i had to walk away from millions to save my life

an essay from my body to yours.

last week, i had to remove my care from someone i deeply care about. when i say remove my care, i mean my virtue, my light, my gifts, my generosity, my time, my wisdom, my presence. they’ll still get my prayers. but they won’t get me anymore, unless there’s a radical shift.

i’m in deep practice of honoring it when my body — she — tells me i’m not safe anymore, because for years she was silenced, neglected, and sacrificed. i didn’t really want to do it. but she wasn’t feeling it. she said, am i leading in this season, or nah?

i said okay, girl. i’ll handle it.

we’re still learning how to get along and be on one accord.

every day, we work with leaders to help them understand that we as humans are made up of three parts — spirit, soul, and body — and all three hold a key to the expression of your best work. each one needs to be healthy, whole, aligned, and free to operate at its highest potential. so we do a deep dive to understand which part of you is out of alignment, and we help restore it. we need strong, embodied leaders at the helm — not ones who haven’t processed their pain and use it to punish everyone around them, but ones who know how to take their pain and put it to work relieving someone else’s.

our best work was never about how much money we make. i’ve made millions, and nearly killed myself doing it. our best work can never come at the expense of our health and well-being. and for me, in the process of doing my own work — my spirit and soul are strong. but my body, she’s taking longer than ever to catch up. she’s been clear with me: bitch, we’re not doing it like that again. so we’ll go as slow as we need to, so i can hold what God has for you without you having to sacrifice me for it again.

i hear it so often in the people we serve and in the messages i get from you all, i’m not going to make it if i keep going like this. this way is not sustainable. and she — my body — wanted the mic today, to speak to the other bodies who are speaking up too.

so, moving forward — this is her essay.

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i was tired

in December 2021, i was tired. like bone tired. and i had to get Maya’s attention because she wasn’t listening. she’s so hardheaded and stubborn. she was doing that thing where she just kept pushing through even though we weren’t okay. Maya was the CMO at Clubhouse at the time. maybe y’all remember that flop, and if not, you can google it. i tried to warn her i might not make it if we took that job, back when the offer came in at the beginning of that year. but she didn’t listen.

Maya did listen to me when i said it was time to leave Netflix, at the top of 2021. she loved it there. she did great work, and it was one of the most formative seasons we had together. but that thing started happening — the thing that happens when people who look like us start getting successful and visible. the suppression kicks in. Maya was told she was on track for the highest levels of leadership, but it kept getting deferred. and one of the things i love most about her is that my girl will always speak truth to power. but in that environment, the more truth she spoke, the more blows i was the one absorbing. we were under attack — cortisol up, guard up, sleep shallow, always scanning the room before she even walked in.

and honestly, i’m tired of being on high alert. being in this body, in this country — happy independence day, my ass — requires a different kind of strength just to feel regulated, just to feel safe enough to come down out of fight-or-flight. but Maya’s been in survival mode since college. we had a baby at 19. we started hustling immediately, no time to recover from anything before the next thing came. we ended up in a marriage with a bum where i had to stay on defense, especially when he came for us in the divorce. she climbed the corporate ladder so fast she stopped paying attention to me — wasn’t honoring my rhythms, wasn’t honoring my cycle. i just got dragged along, no safe place to actually exhale.

and after almost eighteen years of that, i needed a break. so i was relieved when she finally left Netflix. i thought that meant rest, real rest, the kind where the nervous system actually gets to reset. but no. this bitch walked straight into the most stressful environment she could find because she needed to prove to those people she could lead at that level too.

and i get it. i get the particular kind of heartbreak underneath all of it. she followed every instruction, did everything the right way. she kept her head down. we worked hard, and we believed it would pay off. she thought that if she finally got the title, the salary, the recognition, the seat at the table — she’d feel unleashed. powerful. purposeful. fully expressed. and she was good to people the entire time. we did our best to be a safe space for everyone else. she gave generously, often at my expense.

burn it down to the ground

so in December 2021, after about a year of Clubhouse, i had to light her ass on fire to say enough was enough. i started with panic attacks. i hadn’t pulled that one out before, so it caught her completely off guard, heart racing for no reason she could name, chest tight in meetings, her body screaming emergency when nothing around her had changed. then i started breaking out in hives. had to set that histamine thing off like an alarm system. her immune system so overloaded it started reacting to nothing at all. and Maya actually said it out loud one time, i didn’t even know Black people could get hives.

then i turned up the volume on her headaches until they became full-blown migraines — the vision-blurring, light-sensitive, can’t-lift-your-head-off-the-pillow kind. i made them so intense she couldn’t get out of bed. but my girl is stubborn, i told y’all. she kept. pushing. through. so she just started drinking more and numbing more just to turn the volume down on all of it.

so i said, okay bet. let’s start with the lymphatic system. make it sluggish, backed up, no drainage, so everything she’s not processing emotionally, she can’t process physically either. then digestion. i made food an enemy, and bloated her after every meal. i’m gonna turn her gut into a battlefield so she can’t trust her own body to just work. let’s flood her with cortisol until she’s retaining water like she’s storing up for a famine. fifty pounds weight gain in a few months, and none of it makes sense to her because she’s barely eating differently. i needed her exhausted in a way sleep doesn’t fix, the kind of tired that scares you.

to really set things off, i increased the intensity of the migraines where she had to lay on the bathroom floor in the dark. i made her eyes bloodshot, like she’d been crying for days even when she hadn’t. i let her skin break out along her jaw and hairline, the stress pattern, the kind estheticians ask about your hormones over. and her hair, i let it come out in the shower, in the brush, on the pillow, because i needed her to see the evidence in her hands. add in some depression and she was down for for the count.

and Maya was pissed. she was furious. which i loved, honestly, because it meant she was finally starting to feel something again instead of disassociating from me. she’d always thought she was the strong one mentally, emotionally, spiritually. resilience was the story. it was the brand. she thought she could pray through anything, push through anything, solve her way out of anything. but not this time. none of her usual coping mechanisms were working, and that terrified her more than the symptoms did. i remember hearing her in prayer, begging God — and begging me — not to break down. not now. not after all these years of grind and sacrifice and fighting to get to this exact moment.

but she didn’t realize until later that me shutting her down was God answering her prayer. me and God are on the same team. that’s the homie. and He cares deeply about my well-being, because He can’t accomplish His purpose without me.

my plan worked

my efforts worked. by March 2022, Maya finally gave her notice. and i could finally stop bracing and start breathing for the first time in a long time. in those first few weeks, i was sleeping fifteen hours at a stretch, like our nervous system finally got the memo that the threat was over and it was safe to power down. recovery could actually start.

every now and then, i’d catch Maya on LinkedIn, scrolling messages from recruiters. she actually considered interviewing for that TikTok CMO job a couple months after we left, and i said bitch, don’t you even dare.

it’s taken us four years to get to the place where Maya understands me, takes care of me, and is letting me lead. it’s still uncomfortable for her. she’s still learning to trust me. but i know things will never be the same.

still, the conditioning doesn’t go away overnight. the world’s conditioning is embedded deep in my molecular structure, wired into my neural pathways. decades of “push through it” and “rest is for later” laid down like scar tissue. it shows up in every micro-moment: in the way i still have to communicate the truth of what i need, over and over. and in a way she’s having to learn how to care for me like i’m a newborn — patient, unhurried, paying attention to signals that have no words yet.

don’t listen to them. listen to us.

so while i have your attention, there’s a few things i want to get off my chest.

we will spend 70 percent of our lives at work. and the workplace we exist in was not designed for me to thrive. it was designed to homogenize me, conform me, suppress me, shut me down. the average Black woman experiences 8.7 microaggressions a day. if i’m doing the math for Maya, that’s nearly 60,000 attacks on me over the last eighteen years alone. that’s not counting the macroaggressions. not counting everything else surrounding work: society, relationships, politics. not counting what’s already in my bloodline, passed down from generations before i was even born.

the irony is, we betray our bodies to make money and survive, and we call that success — without ever considering what kind of wealth is waiting on the other side of properly stewarding this precious resource instead. we don’t have many examples of that. Maya and i are working together to become one of those examples.

what we do have are examples of people who look like us trying to convince us that beating the system is the way. it’s not. the ones who say that are often the ones who had to dissociate completely just to survive it — they had to become like the system to beat it, which means somewhere along the way they picked up the identity, the voice, the advice of our abusers. and it’s not entirely their fault. they did what they had to do to survive.

but anyone advising you to beat the system without telling you the truth of how dark it gets, without preparing you for the actual battle, is committing reckless endangerment at best, and something closer to a slow murder at worst. asking Black women in particular to succeed inside the modern system of work is asking them to continually betray themselves. handing someone that assignment without also giving them the tools to regulate their own body isn’t mentorship. it’s malpractice.

our bodies cannot heal inside the environment that is designed to destroy us. and i know a lot of us are proactively leaving. others have been asked to leave. regardless of how you got out — we, your bodies, thank you. we know it’s scary. we know there are real worries, real burdens. but for those of us with faith, we have to believe that God is not going to let us fail. it’s hard to believe that, because our bodies have been in survival mode for so long that safety feels foreign. healing takes time.

Maya moved home. yes. at her big age, she moved back home. (i realize how blessed we are to even have that option.) i needed a safe place, a sanctuary to retreat to and come down out of survival mode. i needed to lower the bills. share the load. these days i barely brush my hair, wear no makeup, live in comfortable clothes, and keep interaction minimal — except with the people i actually trust. Maya sold pretty much everything she owned. (a lot of that kicked off after shiny sisterhood fest).

and honestly it’s so nice to just be. it feels good. it feels liberating. we’re surrounded by incredible people — Kevin, her other friends — people we can tell the true story of our survival to, so i can finally, properly process all the trauma i carried.

we’re still learning what this feels like — spirit, soul, and body actually aligned, actually well, all pulling in the same direction for once. we don’t have it all the way figured out yet. we’re building back up. and this time i know we’ll be able to keep it. we’ll keep you posted.

but thank you for listening to me. and I pray you keep listening to your own body too — honoring her, not just managing her. check in on her. ask her what she’s been trying to tell you. and when she answers — and she will — don’t you dare go silent on her again.

sending u so much love,

maya’s body