My Story

I’m a Midwestern girl raised in a home adorned with Black art, filled with Black music and literature, grounded in Black culture, and steeped in Black Baptist traditions. Faith Ringgold was on the walls, Toni Morrison was on the shelves, Anita Baker, George Benson, George Clinton, EWF, Loose Ends and Kashif played throughout the house, and church was woven into the rhythm of life. To this day, I hum hymns from that maroon National Baptist Hymnal I used as a lap desk to draw pictures during Sunday services as a child.

​

That upbringing gave me a deep pride in my Blackness and a love for storytelling, creativity, faith, and community. But growing up also taught me some more complicated lessons about what it means to belong.

I was the smart Black girl who sometimes stood out before I ever learned how much easier it could feel to blend in. I knew what it was like to be teased for “talking white,” and to find myself as one of the only high-achieving Black girls in the room. I also learned early what it felt like to have my body noticed, judged, and commented on—and how easily a girl can begin carrying other people’s ideas about who and what she should be.

​

Like many women, I became very good at achieving, performing, caring for others, and doing what needed to be done. It took longer to understand that being accomplished and being emotionally whole are not necessarily the same thing. That realization has shaped both the woman and the therapist I’ve become.

 

My academic journey certainly wasn’t a straight line. I began in Nursing before finding my way to Psychology at Fisk University, where being surrounded by brilliant Black students and faculty offered a very different experience of belonging. I later earned a master’s in Sociology and eventually a second master’s in Counselor Education. What once looked like a series of turns makes much more sense to me now: each one brought me closer to work that allows me to sit at the intersection of people’s inner worlds and the families, communities, cultures, systems, histories, and beliefs that shape them.

​

And my education didn’t end when I became a therapist. Life has continued to teach me through marriage and motherhood, changing friendships and painful friendship breakups, complicated family and stepfamily relationships, caregiving, learning more about my own family’s intergenerational wounds, and becoming part of the sandwich generation. Even my relationship with faith has required me to wrestle, question, unlearn, and reconstruct. I still identify as a Christian and follower of Christ, but my faith today has more room for questions, complexity, curiosity, and the parts of ourselves we were sometimes taught to silence.

 

All of that is part of why I’m drawn to soul-centered, culturally grounded mental health work. I know professionally—and personally—that healing rarely happens by pretending our stories are simple. We are shaped by race, gender, bodies, families, faith, friendships, expectations, losses, joy, culture, and all the versions of ourselves we’ve had to become along the way. I believe there should be room for all of it.

 

When I’m not in session, you can usually find me creating, coloring, crocheting, listening to music, podcasts, or audiobooks, or happily disappearing down a rabbit hole of historical and sociocultural documentaries. And I will always live for a classic Black sitcom, my favorites being A Different World, and Family Matters. I throw a lil Golden Girls in there for a lil razzle dazzle.

​

I’m also a proud member of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc., wife to my best friend, Bobby “BJ,” mama to one radiant daughter, Kia, and dog mom to Bentley Lamont Burton. I’m a caregiver, a friend, a daughter, a wife, a mother, a therapist—and a woman still becoming who she is truly meant to be...FULLY.