Endarkened in Boston

Boston feels brilliant but not always soulful. It’s a city that knows how to think but rarely how to feel. Walking its streets, I could sense how intellect is currency—how tone, posture, and conversation are all designed to affirm a certain kind of whiteness. It’s beautiful, yes, but also cold. Thoughtful but not tender.

I came here expecting inspiration, not initiation. But Boston became both.

I’ve learned that intellect without soul isn’t wisdom. Some people can talk about liberation but move without love. They quote theory like scripture but avoid the vulnerability that liberation actually demands. And yet, somewhere in that tension, I found my clarity.

Boston taught me that I don’t have to perform intelligence. I embody it. My intellect isn’t detached—it breathes. It feels. It remembers.

I’ve been called to speak more intellectually these days, not to sound smart, but to honor how spirit speaks through my mind. For me, intellect lives in the body. It’s in how I sense energy before words form. It’s in my tone, my awareness, my ability to read the room without being told a thing. My mind and body work together—thought is just spirit translated.

When I speak from that place, I don’t sound sterile or distant. I sound alive. My intellect has rhythm, heart, and God in it. It’s the kind of knowing that can’t be taught, only remembered.

One day, two BU students interviewed me at the Museum of African American History. They asked about DEI and erasure, and I found myself talking about oneness, storytelling, and truth-telling. I don’t remember everything I said it really just poured through me.

I do remember saying that it’s dangerous to tell only one story. When we erase parts of history, we erase the lessons too. When we’re forced to assimilate into whiteness, we lose the rhythm and richness that make us who we are.

I spoke about writing as my way of archiving emotion, of holding memory in language. I’m an author, but also a bridge—between past and present, intellect and intuition, mind and spirit.

That day, I found the soul of Boston.

I found it in the African Meeting House, where our ancestors gathered to dream freely. I found it in the Museum of African American History, where Lucy Terry Prince and Phillis Wheatley Peters reminded me that intellect and poetry have always been sacred. And I found it in Frugal Bookstore in Nubian Square in Roxbury, where the voices of our people still fill the air with truth and joy.

That’s where Boston’s heart beats—in the places where Blackness is not theory, but life.

And honestly, my best conversations came from my Uber drivers. The ones who spoke to me in Spanish and helped me learn the language more fluently. The one who told me I’m the future of Black people. The ones who encouraged me to go to Africa and lay down roots.

They reminded me that wisdom doesn’t always come from classrooms or titles—it comes from people who live close to truth.

Then there was the woman at the bookstore. Not elitist in the Jack-and-Jill sense, but in the “for the people” kind of way—the kind that hides superiority behind consciousness. She spoke down on AKAs and light-skinned girls, saying she preferred “down-to-Earth” people, but her tone carried pride, not peace.

She told me she only wanted to get paid to write. Nothing creative beyond that. And I thought—how different that is from me. My writing started as survival. It’s for me first: expression, release, healing. The money will meet me when it’s meant to, but the purpose came first.

She said people can change how they think and feel if they just decide to. She told me she changes her mind all the time. I told her I don’t change my mind; I expand it. I don’t erase my feelings; I release them.

Our thoughts come from what we’ve lived. Our emotions live in the body. They don’t just disappear on command—they must be understood, softened, and integrated.

Her intellect lived in her head. Mine lives in my body. Hers felt performative; mine feels lived. But I also understand that we’re all learning in our own ways. She reminded me that consciousness without humility still becomes hierarchy. Maybe she meant well, but her energy felt performative — more about being seen as aware than actually embodying it.

She spoke of opportunities; full rides, partials, delays — as if proximity to institutions could validate her intellect. But intellect isn’t borrowed; it’s lived. It’s not where you could’ve gone, but what you’ve embodied.

Even in friction, there’s revelation. She reminded me that thinking without feeling is just performance.

And then there was love—or something that once seemed like it.

I loved a man who mirrored Boston itself: brilliant, historical, emotionally distant. African-born, American Ivy League-trained, raised on resilience but not rest. He could analyze anything but feel almost nothing. He was taught to survive systems, I was born to transcend them.

He taught me that intellect without intimacy is exile. To be articulate yet unfeeling is to live as a mind untethered from its heart.

I was born to feel the world and reimagine it. He was born to think his way through it. We are both brilliant in different ways, but brilliance alone can’t sustain love.

Boston helped me see that. It showed me how love without emotional literacy is just performance. How intellect without soul is mimicry. How presence without vulnerability is only proximity.

So I bless him and release him. My soul is too full for half-embodied love.

I call my framework Endarkened Africana Womanist Epistemology.

It’s a way of understanding that centers the spiritual, embodied, and ancestral as valid forms of knowledge. It expands on earlier endarkened theories but grounds them in Africana womanist thought—where intellect, intuition, and emotion all work together as truth.

For me, knowing isn’t just mental; it’s lived. It moves through the body, through lineage, through spirit. It’s love as theory, memory as data, and embodiment as liberation.

Boston reminded me that intellect can’t save me, but embodiment can.

That liberation begins when I stop trying to think my way to freedom and start feeling my way there.

This city, in all its brilliance and contradictions, brought me back to myself.

I found its soul in the people who spoke truth to me, in the places where Blackness still breathes,

and in the quiet moments where I remembered that wisdom doesn’t need to shout—it just needs to live.

Because I didn’t just walk through Boston.

Boston walked through me.