Refinement (2023).
On a cold snowy day in February of this year, I was trudging through icy streets with some ladies from my church to pick up trash in the city of Coralville, Iowa. I was wearing my black trusty boots from Walmart, a winter jacket so big it looked almost comedic and black gloves I thrifted. I almost slipped a couple times but there was something incredibly humbling and beautiful about that experience,and in that moment God revealed something to me. I wrote this on my Instagram:
‘It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that coming to Iowa was never just about my career or my writing, that it is a season God is using to disciple me. It’s difficult, a little lonely but overall I’m happy I’m exactly where God wants me to be, becoming exactly who He wants me to be.’
When I kept thinking of a word to some up this year, the word that kept coming to mind was ‘pruning’ which shares an etymological root to the word ‘cleansing’. When shrubs or trees are pruned, their leaves are cut off, leaving the branches looking bare and a little haggard. I have felt like that for a lot of this year. For starters, this year was my first attempt at being celibate, and that experience alone unearthed so much about me as a person, about how sexual pleasure had become a crutch in my identity, and how I almost did not know who I was without that part of myself. I used to indulge in a certain plant-based relaxant and in the fourth month of the year, God demanded I drop that habit. This year was also the first full year of long distance with my boyfriend and I — and we felt the weight of it in a way we never had before. Life just got so REAL for me on many ends and it seemed like I was constantly being stripped bare and asked to rebuild myself anew, again and again. So when I started writing this year’s reflection, the word that I finally settled on was not pruning or cleansing.
It was refinement.
A brief etymological google of refine said:
‘“to bring or reduce to a pure state or a condition of purity as full as possible,” 1580s of metals; c. 1590 of manners (“purify from what is coarse, low, vulgar, inelegant, etc.;’
I found it really interesting to see the word ‘reduce’ included in the definition of refinement. Reduce as to make smaller? To bring (notice how the word bring here has a faint undercurrent of force. Like BRING the horse to water). Those verbs stood out to me because at many points this year I DID feel reduced — to tears especially. At many points I asked God why this year was putting me through the wringer especially in the second and third quarters? (April was a particularly difficult time where I even started beefing God because I was like ah ah this is too much).
But what is the purpose of refinement? To bring to a ‘pure’ state. To remove pollutants from a material. To make something a higher, purer, better version of itself. That is what my 2023 was about, and although it was an incredibly painful (and often) lonely process, I can see now that it was exactly what I needed at this point in my life and something that my future progress and success depends on. If a material is not refined, then it cannot be fit for certain purposes. There are many many things coming in my life — successes, opportunities, people — that I would fumble if I have not been properly refined. This painful recalibration that God subjected me to, is a prerequisite for so many of the things I am hoping and praying for. And if this year taught me nothing else, it taught me that God will never give you what you are not ready for. And an essential element of God’s preparation is through refinement.
I turn 25 in the next three months, and in so many ways 24 was a breaking up of the soil, that furious turning over that crushes soil into it is in soft heaps that are ready for seed. In that breaking, so many things have become clearer to me. It is much clearer to me the kind of writer I want to be; one entirely committed to telling women’s stories, building community and healing through words. And in what has been probably my greatest (artistic) achievement this year, I founded The Abebi Award in Afro-Nonfiction (an instruction I got directly from God btw, almost exactly a year ago on this very date). This year, I have gained clarity in my writing praxis, by learning what stories actually move me and the kind of essays I want to be creating– ones that show the intricacies of becoming, intermingled with memory and building. I am tracing lineages and my obsession with motherhood and mothering has come into full bloom and I look forward to sinking my teeth into the meat of that subject matter in the coming year.
I have weathered rejection a lot better this year, because my confidence in my writing has deepened considerably. I know I am an excellent writer. I know that I tell important stories. I know that my work has the capacity to heal and to strengthen. And that is a victory so immense for me. It is a victory I thank God every day for. To arrive at this point I am now, WHEW. It feels incredible. And it is only the beginning. The beauty (and pain) of refinement is that even as you go through it, you know this is not the end. There is an endlessness to becoming that demands constant recalibration. A revisitation if you will. And I am committed to that. May God give me the strength to rise higher and higher, to become more and more of who He wants me to be.
In this year of refinement, God has helped me to do many amazing things in different aspects of my life. In January of this year, I won the Magdalena Award for the best essay in my department. It is titled The Responsibility of Remembrance, and it is about my grandmother and all the ways we honor our ancestors through memory. That essay is very precious to me because I started it in 2021 and it went through multiple rounds of revision (REFINEMENT!) before it won that award. And that award was the seed that bloomed into the Abebi Awards. Isn’t that so beautiful? That the work I create has universes inside of it? That my words make even more things possible? I bless God.
My main writing goal for this year was to revise my work better and although I kinda lost track of this goal as the year picked up, I did MAJOR work on one of my essays and the revision was impressive. I revised another one of my essays after taking feedback from workshop and at the end of the year, I revised a 5,000 word essay into a 1,600 word essay for a competition. So in a real way, I achieved my one writing goal for the year because my relationship with my work is a lot freer now and I can play with it better. I also got more experimental with my essays, wrote about three to four solid new ones and also wrote the preface for my essay collection which is taking serious shape right now.
This year, I taught a Masterclass to Buckley High School students titled ‘Writing From The Head and The Heart: Emotion and Memory in Creative NonFiction’. It gave me so much pleasure and showed me just how much teaching is an innate skill for me and to see the students interact with the material and come meet me after to say how much they enjoyed it, felt incredibly affirming. It was one of my major career highlights of this year. Another was my summer role with the Johnson County and College of Liberal Arts where I world on the Lulu MErle Johnson exhibit in Iowa CIty to honor the first Black woman to get a PhD in the state of Iowa. That summer role was such a huge blessing to me because it aligned SO closely with the kind of work I do and it opened so many interesting doors for me and I met so many amazing people. (I asked God for a summer role and He blew my mind with it. Please ask God for the things that are important to you and trust in His capacity to deliver. He will).
I also taught literature class to college students this semester for the first time and God made it easier than I thought it would be. I planned a syllabus titled ‘The Power of The Personal and The Elemental’ and the students really enjoyed the material and interacted well with it. Teaching students also made me more understanding towards every teacher I have ever had. Omo teaching is not easy o! Shalla to every teacher out there.
Something that happened throughout this year as well as a result of the refinement was that I shed a lot of naiveté about life and things in general. Be it the development of my frontal lobe, or just the realness of life in this year, the scales of naiveté fell from my eyes and I have a more pragmatic and relaistc expectation of life now. Now I understand seasons a lot better. I know that things cannot always be bubbly and rosy. Disappointment is a brick in this building called life and that mere fact does not destabilise me in the way that it once did. This, I beleive, is what they call growing up. 2023 was a VERY ‘growing up’ kind of year. Maybe growth at its core is refinement. It was also a year where I had to find out what was REALLY important to me. Like what do I REALLY want? What goals and dreams are mine and which ones have been foisted upon me? Why do I want the things I want? Why do I write the things I write? There was a certain kind of significnace tied to my actions and my desires that was not always there. And it made me more careful and more intentional about what I did or did not do. I hope that continues as I grow, so that everything i do is rooted in meaning.
Of all the growth and refinement that happened this season, my spiritual growth and refinement were perhaps the most outstanding. I went from being a shy(ish) Christian worried about writing for God to publishing TWELVE pieces about my faith walk with God and sharing them all over my socials. By God’s enablement I started Bare and Blessed, and had weely prayer calls and check in sessions with some wonderful women of God. We are all at different stages of our walk with God, but God Himself helped me create an atmosphere where we all feel safe enough to be vulnerable and say things as they are. It has been the most fulfilling thing I have ever done, to talk to people about God and to have them respond in truth? What a blessing.
This year I also completed The Revival Discipleship Program led by my Pastor Fums, and it was a life-changing experience for me. It happened in March and God’s sense of timing as always was perfect because I stepped into 24 knowing that it was time to get serious with God and He sent me all the resources I needed to make that a reality. And boyyyy did God drag me deeper into Himself this year? There was a time in July where I would just spend the whole day gisting with God, reading scripture and listening to sermons and my days felt like perpetual sunrise. I was so light and at peace in my spirit and I hope to return to that same plane this year, to be at rest with My Father and to be watered by His love.
All things considered, 2023 was a very important year. It was a year that will make other years possible, that will make other things possible because I am now a purer, more refined, more honest version of myself who is ready to dive into her future backed by her God. In 2024, my only real goal is to get lost in God. For my roots to grow deeper and deeper into Him. For my life to radiate the glory of God through everything I do — how I write my essays, how I love my family, how I teach students, how I move through the world, how I love my W — EVERYTHING I do to be saturated by God. Because I have seen that outside of God, everything is so small; accomplishments, achievements, temporary pleasures they all fade away. The ephemerality of life has started to appear realer and relaer to me and yesterday when I was reading Isaiah 40 with my siblings we were struck by verse 8 where it says that grass withers and flowers fade but the word of Our God stands forever. I know what I can build my life on and it is not book deals or an agent or romantic love. The only thing I can build my life on is the Solid Rock, and there is no Rock like my God. That is what this year taught me and it is a knowledge that I will carry for the rest of my life.
Here is to 2024: a year of deeper surrender and deeper roots. A year of excellent and powerful essays. A year of deepened love, of bonds waxing stronger and stronger. A year of completed manuscripts. A year of laughter and of ease. A year of steady steps. A year of hands made strong by the Hand of The Almighty. Amen. Amen. Amen.
