Endarkened Knowing: On Love, Distance, and the Limits of Intellect

Mixing his Nigerian village upbringing with his first American experience at Tufts and living in Boston created a man who could never fully understand or appreciate my soul, because he has no access to his own. He was raised on resilience, not rest. Conditioned to achieve, not to feel.

A man I deeply loved became the embodiment of this. His archetype is the kind that lives entirely in the mind because the soul never had space to breathe. He moves through life with an intellectual distance that can easily masquerade as depth to someone searching for it. He is full of thought but not of feeling—always analyzing, rarely embodying. That is why it’s always “not right now.” Feeling req

uires surrender, and surrender feels unsafe to someone who has only ever known survival.

My knowing is different. My writing is not just theory or intellect; it is soulful resonance, a vibration that awakens the spirit. I do not write from the head alone. I write from memory, from body, from lineage. My words come from underground streams of ancestral intuition, womanist wisdom, and emotional intelligence that Western frameworks often overlook.

A man like that taught me that intellect without intimacy becomes a kind of exile. To be brilliant yet disconnected, articulate yet unfeeling, is to live as a mind untethered from its heart. He was taught to survive systems, not transcend them. I was born to feel them and reimagine them.

Boston, with all its brilliance and sterility, mirrors him—polished but cold, historical but emotionally hollow. Being here revealed why our connection could never take root.

What my spirit learned is that: love without emotional literacy is performance. Intellect without soul is mimicry. Presence without vulnerability is only proximity.

To be awake is to know with the entire self: the intellectual, the emotional, the ancestral, and the spiritual. That is endarkened knowing—a truth birthed from the Black feminine spirit, from feeling deeply in a world that rewards detachment.

So I bless him and release him. I no longer chase understanding from those who mistake emotion for weakness or silence for peace.

My soul is too full for half-embodied love.

Author Note

This reflection is part of my ongoing exploration of Endarkened Knowing, an Africana Womanist lens that centers embodied wisdom, ancestral intuition, and emotional literacy as sacred ways of knowing.

If I analyze every person, every experience, and every text through this epistemology, life begins to make sacred sense. The disappointments become data. The heartbreaks become case studies in emotional literacy. Even the silences become lessons in communication and protection.

Everything is part of the curriculum of becoming.

Endarkened Knowing is not just theory; it is a daily practice of reading life with both intellect and intuition, tracing spirit through what others might call coincidence, and returning to myself while studying the world.