Re-Mapping the World, Reclaiming Myself

For most of my life, I saw the world through the maps I was given. North was up. South was down. The “Global North” meant power, wealth, and progress. The “Global South” meant struggle, need, and development.

Africa was drawn smaller than it truly is, placed below as if it somehow mattered less. These weren’t just geographic tools — they were instruments of conditioning. Stories in disguise. Scripts we didn’t know we were reading from.

But recently, something in me shifted.

In these past few months, I’m moving through a powerful expansion — not the kind that comes from chasing more or doing better, but the kind that comes from deep encounters with life. From being seen and seeing anew. From soul-level connections, ancestral remembrance, and courageous questions that won’t let me go back to sleep.

Returning to the Land of Origin

In Senegal, I found myself walking ground that whispered to me.

The trip wasn’t just about witnessing history — it was about feeling the memory in my blood. In the weight of the air, in the rhythm of the markets, in the gaze of women who walk like water remembers — I felt pieces of myself rise to the surface.

Not as something new, but as something very old.

Africa didn’t feel foreign. It felt like a return. Like hearing a song you didn’t know you remembered the lyrics to.

A Deeper Line in My Blood

As I’ve stepped into this wider view of myself, I’ve also turned toward something I had long kept on the outskirts of my identity — my Indigenous ancestry.

For years, I danced on the edge of this truth. I felt it in my body but struggled to name it out loud. The world didn’t always offer space for complex lineages — especially those shaped by migration, disconnection, and colonial amnesia.

But lately, the whispers have become stronger. The dreams more vivid. The call to remember has grown louder than the fear of doing it wrong.

I have begun to reclaim the stories of the First Peoples in my lineage — to listen to the Earth as teacher, to the stars as kin, to the body as a sacred archive. I am learning that indigeneity is not just a bloodline — it is a relationship to land, to life, and to legacy.

To be Indigenous is not only to remember where you come from, but to walk in a way that remembers everything is connected.

And so, I am listening.

The Quiet Expansion

At the same time, I was being held in a connection that is both intimate and expansive. One that invites me to question every inherited idea — about love, power, ancestry, and what it means to live truthfully.

The influence of that connection — quiet, steady, and deeply spiritual — helps me begin to see the world and myself with new eyes. Not through loud declarations or grand gestures, but through the presence of someone who sees with clarity and lives with integrity. Through that presence, I am reminded that expansion is not performance — it’s alignment.

The Maps We Were Never Shown

Somewhere in all of this — the love, the return, the remembering — I began to question the maps again.

Why is north always “up”? Why does Europe sit at the center of the world? Why are some lands distorted to appear larger, more important?

What stories have I been living inside just because no one ever showed me a different map?

When I first saw a south-up map — one that placed Africa at the top, whole and grand — something clicked deep in my bones. This was the map that matched my knowing. This was the world I came from. One where Africa doesn’t need to rise — she already has. One where we don’t have to climb upward to matter. We only need to remember.

But even this isn’t just about maps. This is about worldviews.

This is about cosmologies. About who gets to define truth. About what is remembered and what is erased.

And in that remembering, I began asking deeper questions:

• What don’t we know?

• Who decides what we’re allowed to know?

• What if the world is far more wondrous than we’ve been taught?

  
  

These aren’t just philosophical questions — they are liberation portals.

They’ve led me to confront the stories that were passed down with good intentions but narrow frameworks — stories that told me what success looked like, where truth lived, and what parts of me I should keep hidden.

They’ve led me to honor the sacred convergence of my ancestry — the African, the Indigenous, the Celtic, and more — not as contradictions but as constellations.

They’ve led me to stop waiting for permission to belong.

Reclaiming Sovereignty, Re-Rooting Identity

I no longer navigate by inherited coordinates. I no longer fit myself into systems that flatten spirit and fragment truth.

I am following a deeper compass — one shaped by love that doesn’t need a spotlight, by land that remembers my name, and by ancestors who are finally being heard.

Because maybe the revolution isn’t in redrawing the borders. Maybe it’s in how we choose to see. Maybe it’s in refusing to make ourselves small to fit inside maps that were never drawn for our freedom.

I don’t have all the answers. But I do have direction.

A direction that isn’t based on someone else’s "true north," but on a felt sense of rightness in my body, my spirit, and my lineage.

Because the Earth has no top or bottom.

Only sacred ground.

Waiting to be remembered.

And walked with reverence.