I don’t know how to refer to myself anymore.
#realtalk: I don’t know my name.
Can you imagine?
If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you’re probably used to me starting a Facebook live or online event with something like this:
“Hi, I’m Dr. Venus Opal Reese—your Millionaire Mentor™.”
But I don’t want to call myself “doctor,” anymore.
I don’t feel the need to say, “multi-million-dollar earner,” anymore.
I don’t need the “Black Woman Millionaire” label, anymore. #imsoblackidyblackblackblack
I don’t need people to know I graduated from Stanford with multiple degrees.
None of this is who I am anymore.
But who AM I now?
The problem is, I really don’t know.
And a lot of that “unknowing” revolves around the fact that I don’t know what God wants me to be, anymore. I don’t know what He wants me to do with my life, anymore.
Now, hear me—I do not doubt God. Not ever. I never have. You can’t come up from the streets and doubt God. I’ve lived too much life to ever do that.
I am CLEAR that everything IS in Divine Order.
I just don’t know what He wants from me, anymore.
I don’t know my destiny, anymore.
I honestly don’t know how to be useful, anymore.
In the midst of all of this “unknowing,” I find myself reveling in the smallest, most seemingly insignificant things. Moving my body. Combing my hair. Thinking about Happy.
I woke up this morning and, for the first time in years, I could feel my hip bones.
That may not seem like much … unless you are used to looking and feeling five months pregnant, due to the size of the fibroids in your uterus.
But for me, this was HUGE.
I am watching my body change.
I am now at the weight I was when I was a dancer … and that brings me a very real spark of joy that I’ve been missing for a long time.
It makes me realize that, even as I sit here in emotional upheaval, so full of questions … I am manifesting. What I want comes to me, even when I’m not expecting it.
I am creating a whole new relationship with my body, even while questioning who I am now.
I’m questioning something else, too. I hesitate to share it, because I get how it might sound. But I have to remind myself that right now, I am writing for me—for my own healing. So if you don’t like the way this lands, it’s okay. You don’t have to. You can stop reading.
Here it is:
What if the tumors—and the process of the hysterectomy—was ALWAYS the closest I would ever come to giving birth?
The fibroids didn’t just make me look and feel pregnant, because of their weight and size. They also caused pain that I understand is similar to contractions.
The removal of them from my body was similar to a c-section, as I understand it.
And following the procedure, my hormones are just all over the place … just like when a woman gives birth.
So maybe, just maybe, this was the closest I was ever going to get to feeling life in my body.
And maybe this was all God’s way of helping me have the experience of “being pregnant,” and “giving birth.”
Maybe, ironically, that was part of healing my own wounds. (This “season” of my life coincided perfectly with my choice to get present with the absence of my father—but I’ll save that for its own post.)
So much of this journey is me trying to wrap my head around everything.
Maybe none of this will make an ounce of sense to anyone but me.
That’s okay. I’m comfortable, now, with just BEING with whatever it is I experience and feel.
What I’ve realized recently is that I think I had a secret hope. A secret dream that was hidden even from myself … because I never TRIED to have a baby. It wasn’t something I thought I wanted, consciously.
But now that the option isn’t there, I realize that hopes and dreams can live inside us, undiscovered.
Until it’s too late.
And now that the option is gone—now that the choice has been made for me—I realize I have to give up that quiet hope that I barely even felt before, but that was somehow ignited inside of me, when they took my uterus out of my body.
I grieve the dream, now.
Maybe, when I am able to fully reconnect with my physical body, I’ll find myself again.
Maybe then, I’ll know my new name, and it will match my new identity.
Venus Opal