Before I could even speak, my mother was taken from me. She was just 26. I was seven months old. She died of asthma — something so treatable, so preventable. And yet, I can't help but feel that it happened because western medicine doesn't truly care about Black women's bodies.
Her death cracked the world wide open — long before I had words to name the grief. And though I didn't understand it at the time, her absence shaped everything that came after.
When she passed, it was my grandmother who caught me. Afro-Costa Rican. Rooted. Brave. Unapologetic. Fierce. She raised me — alongside my uncle — through the earliest years of my life. She believed in the healing power of plants — in prayers whispered over teas and roots, healing through hands in soil and pots on the stove. She didn't call it holistic wellness. She just knew how to care for what hurt.
From her, I learned that healing lives in kitchens, in gardens, in the quiet hush of ordinary moments. She made me proud to be Afro-Latina — to carry the rhythm of the Caribbean and the resilience of the diaspora.
Music, Memory & Medicine
When I was nine, my father got sober. He sent for us to come live with him in Maine. We were still grieving — each of us carrying a silence the other couldn't translate.
Music became our medicine. Loud speakers echoing through the apartment, filling the spaces where words failed us. That was how we healed — through rhythm, through sound. To this day, I thank him for my eclectic taste: for the soul, the rock, the funk, the roots. For the soundtrack that held our sorrow.
He also introduced me to psychedelics. He didn't pathologize them — he normalized them. Plant medicine wasn't strange or forbidden. It was just part of the conversation. That early exposure planted seeds I didn't even realize were growing.
Return to the Self
When I was finally ready to sit with it all, I turned to psychedelics — not as an escape, but as a way back to myself.
Psychedelics cracked me open. They made room for the grief I'd carried in silence. They helped me forgive — and see — my father, not just as the man who struggled, but as someone doing the best he could while carrying his own pain.
They helped me see my mother — not just as someone I lost, but as someone whose presence still lives within me. They connected me back to my grandmother's hands, her teas, her prayers. They helped me reclaim parts of myself I didn't even know I'd buried — and discover parts I never knew existed.
The Hood Healer
Psychedelics showed me that I am a healer. Not in the way textbooks define it, but in the way my people have always known.
I like to call myself a hood healer — because my roots are on the block and in the botanica, in ancestral knowing and everyday survival. My healing is loud. It's tender. It's real. And it lives at the intersection of grief, grit, and grace.
And we deserve to heal out loud.
Duality and Degrees
I spent the first part of my childhood in Boston, and the rest in Portland, Maine. Boston gave me culture and community. Maine showed me what it meant to be "the only."
I like to say I earned a dual degree — one in survival, and one in white supremacy. I became fluent in code-switching. I learned how to navigate between worlds. And I also learned how to return to myself.
Even in exclusion, there were accomplices — teachers, neighbors, unexpected kin — who made room. Some helped usher me into the psychedelic space, so I could gather tools and bring them back to my people. Because what good is medicine if it doesn't make its way home?
Mothering as Ceremony
Now, I'm a mother too. Raising a Black boy who will one day become a Black man is a sacred responsibility and a daily reckoning.
I mother with the memory of my own mother's absence. With the rituals my grandmother passed down. With the compassion I found in my father's story. And with the clarity psychedelics returned to me.
I mother with one eye on the ancestors and one hand in my son's — because I know this world wasn't built to protect him. But I will do everything in my power to prepare him, pour into him, and protect his light.
Why I Do This Work
The Entheogen Melanin Collective wasn't born from theory — it was born from survival. From memory. From the urgency to heal.
We are creating spaces where Black and melanated people don't have to shrink, don't have to explain, and don't have to ask permission to feel. Where survival is honored, but healing is expected. Where stories like mine aren't hidden — they're centered.
Because reclaiming these medicines… reclaiming ourselves… isn't just about wellness. It's about justice. It's about memory. And it's about making sure our communities are not just remembered — but restored.
