I Remember Me, Before You Told Me Who I Was
“The pieces I am, she gathered them and gave them back to me in all the right order.”
— Toni Morrison
The wind was hot and dry, even from the cliffside. I remember the way it lifted the linen of my robe, the way the sun burned through it and touched my skin. Below, the procession moved slowly—men in gold and white, carrying the body of a king. My father.
I was screaming his name, Father. Father. Father. Over and over, like the echo itself was mine to command. I wasn’t meant to watch him die. I wasn’t allowed to be there. But I had climbed the cliffs to see. I needed to. I was a daughter of power.
They moved through the valley in formation, a river of obsidian and solemn pageantry. The chants were low, steady. The scent of resin and desert dust filled the air. They carried his body with the kind of silence only given to a ruler who had rebuilt a people’s faith in themselves. Setnakhte—founder of Kemet’s 20th dynasty—had held a crumbling throne in his hands and restored it. His reign was brief but eternal, etched into stone, alive in legacy.
And even in death, he inspired awe. I felt it in the way the men bowed. In the hush that fell over the valley. In the ache that bloomed in my chest as I watched them carry him into forever.
The memory returned on a recent, life‑altering trip to Kemet. It rose like heat from the earth. The desert light. The gold glinting off the neb ankh. The knowing.
I didn’t need anyone to explain anything. My body remembered it before I ever used the word.
And in that life, I carried both crown and code. I was born into sovereignty and initiated into sacredness.
I walked the thresholds. I still do.
I had a knowing, every time I entered a temple. I knew where to stand. Where to kneel. Where to pray. The placement of my body aligned with something ancient—it moved with the order of memory. My steps matched blueprints older than time. The scent of oil. The weight of the silence. The rise of voices in devotion. I had been there before. I had served before. I had led before.
That memory didn’t dissolve.
It cracked open inside me—like a relic unearthed with all its light intact.
And from it grew my obsession with justice. My distrust of false kings. My love of salt and sun.
My voice—always echoing the note that feels like home.
Scientists now call it epigenetics. The idea that memory can live in the blood—not just through stories, but in genes turned on or off by war, by famine, by exile, by love. That what we survive imprints itself. That the body does not forget.
But I knew that before the studies. Before the books.
I knew because memory was already speaking through me.
I didn’t find these lives. They found me.
And that wasn’t the first.
There was a knowing I carried as a child. A vision that visited me over and over, like breath.
In it, I was strapped to stone. The sky was high above me. The scent of maize, fire, and smoke filled the air.
The sound of ceremonial drums thundered from somewhere behind the mountains.
There were faces painted in ash and ochre. There was stillness in my body, and a kind of heat in the air that felt both sacred and final.
And even then—I wasn’t afraid. Just still.
There was fire. There were eyes. And then the searing silence of being offered.
When I was small, I used to tell people: I was sacrificed.
As memory. As fact. As a wound and a wisdom—repeating itself through the body until I finally listened.
Nobody knew what to do with a five‑year‑old carrying that kind of knowing.
So they dismissed it as imagination. Said I had a gift for fiction.
I learned to be quiet. But the knowing never left.
It was the highlands of the Inca. I was young. I was chosen.
I was thrown from the top of a sacred pyramid in a ritual believed to ensure harvest and harmony.
The air was thin. The drums were deep. The ground below me felt like forever.
And though I was terrified, I didn’t resist. I surrendered to the offering.
I accepted it.
I stepped forward because something in me remembered what it meant to offer myself to the fire.
Today, cliffs unsettle me. But I don’t flinch. I listen.
I read the wind. I know when to leap, and when to release.
I do not run. I stay. I steady. I let the trembling pass through.
Because I know how to surrender.
I know how to rise after impact.
I know how to honor what must be shed for a season to begin.
I recognize when the end is holy.
I’m learning how to offer from a place of power—not punishment.
How to make peace with surrender when it is sacred.
How to be seen in the moment of release, and still say yes to the transformation.
And then came the dream that wasn’t a dream.
The face I saw in the mirror was mine. Not the one I grew up with. Not the one I wear now.
It was a man’s face. A white man’s face. And still—mine.
When I looked into his eyes, I knew them. His breath. His hands. His want. His presence.
It was me. I was him.
And when I touched his skin, it felt like my own.
In the dream, I was making love to a woman.
It was tender. Curious. Attentive.
There was warmth, and wonder, and a kind of deep remembering.
The sensation of her skin on mine—the electricity, the warmth—it was like discovering breath for the first time.
It was desire, unchained. Pleasure, unpunished. Connection, without translation.
And I felt it all.
It was presence.
And it felt good to be touched like that.
To touch like that.
To receive her.
To feel my way back into myself through her.
The softness of her thighs. The urgency of my breath. The sweet relief of being fully allowed to feel.
And for a moment, it was real. The holy truth of being seen and touched.
Another life remembered through touch and time.
I don’t know his name. But I know the rhythm of his breath, the memory of his hunger, the tenderness in his restraint.
Because it was mine.
Its imprint never left.
Because spirit moves across lifetimes like thread through fabric.
It expands. It remembers. It returns.
And in that remembering, we reclaim the truth:
That every lifetime teaches the next.
That every body, every name, every desire we have carried—was holy.
Gender, race, time—these are only garments. The spirit wears all of them. And is bound by none.
We don’t always reincarnate to become someone new.
Sometimes, we return to remember.
We are here to listen.
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There are certain knowings the soul carries like scars under silk—quiet, but felt.
This was contract.
In time. In fire. In flesh.
Long before I could name myself oracle, I remembered what it meant to hold vision in a world that feared its clarity—and revered it. In the temples, we were the ones closest to God—entrusted with interpreting the unseen, guiding the kings, communing with Spirit. Our gifts were sought. But the same sight that once crowned us made us dangerous to those who could control it. To remember was to hold both honor and consequence.
The vow lived inside me long before I could name its weight.
Not all gifts arrive with celebration. Some return as duty.
Because what is a priestess but a keeper of fire no throne can extinguish?
What is an oracle but the one who remembers too much?
I have died in every century for seeing too clearly.
In Kemet, I wasn’t just royal. I was trained. I was initiated. I was bound to the sanctum that kept the sky from falling. When the Sekhemty was threatened, they came for the ones who prayed at the thresholds. The ones who knew how to read the medu netcher in the dark. The ones whose voices could shift the course of ceremony itself.
And so I went underground.
Beneath temples desecrated by conquerors, I carved sound into stone. I buried invocations under broken altars, inscribed spells into the folds of linen before they were wrapped around the dead. Every gesture was a resistance. Every rite, a refusal.
I was never just mourning my father.
I was mourning the world that made him disappear.
After that vision, I couldn’t shake the heat in my chest. It didn’t feel like grief—it felt like rage. Rage at strangers now tracking dirt through the temples we bled to protect. Rage that the stones became tourist stops. That the sacred was flattened into content through the colonists’ lens.
The selfies in tombs.
The dances in the temples.
The runway shows in front of tekhenu.
Like our blood was just backstory.
Like our gods were props.
Don’t these people understand these are sacred sites?
We don’t wander through cemeteries taking pictures with the dead.
We lower our voices.
We bow our heads.
We bring offerings.
We let the spirits speak.
I wanted to scream every time I saw someone smiling in front of what was once a burial chamber. I wanted to tear down every placard that called our gods “myths.” They rewrote our truth and dared to call it history. And I carried that fury in every part of my being—because of what had been taken, because of how much still gets stolen.
When foreign flags rose over the banks of the Nile, they did not just conquer land—they looted memory. They rewrote the names of gods. They defaced the tombs. They painted over the prayers with the faces of their own kings.
And I watched.
From inside time.
From outside flesh.
They say conquest is a matter of geography.
But I remember how it felt in the air—how it clung to skin, how it thickened the breath of every elder, how it choked the voice of the child seer.
And still, I returned.
The vow brought me back. Across lifetimes. Across oceans. Across skin.
Because some oaths outlive the language they were spoken in.
They move with the soul. They mark the spirit. They carry.
From the beginning, I could sense the signals that history had suppressed.. The knowledge woven into stillness. The visitations in dreams. I didn’t learn the frequency—I was summoned. By blood. By memory. By the ancestors on both sides who had once walked with the gift and laid it down. One out of fear. One out of forgetting. I was the one called forward to remember for them all. I wasn’t simply next in line. I was chosen. Chosen to awaken the codes that fear had silenced. Chosen to carry what both my matrilineal and patrilineal lines had buried. To re‑teach what was swallowed by time. To make the invisible undeniable. The gift did not skip me. It summoned me. And I answered.
Our traditions were never primitive. They were encrypted.
Encoded in ritual. Hidden in plain sight.
And I was trained to guard the key.
My life exists in overlapping frequencies. I speak in symbols. Receive names I’ve never heard but somehow always known. Because I swore I would come back and keep the original frequency intact. I swore to remember.
There are nights I wake with someone else’s war in my throat.
Mornings when I carry the ache of a child I’ve never met.
I have loved people I had no business loving, because their spirit rang familiar.
I have lost people I thought would stay, because my purpose pulled me too far from the present.
And still, remembering offers me moments of quiet power.
A knowing that arrives fully formed—like breath that was always mine.
The alignment I feel when time folds, and I step into a room already shaped for me.
The recognition that happens not in the eyes, but in the ether.
The pulse of clarity when everything clicks—and nothing needs explaining.
Being here—awake, aware, attuned—is sacred labor.
But I don’t resent the gift.
Because I chose this. I chose this.
It hasn’t made life easier.
It’s made it truer.
And in that truth, there is both weight—and wonder.
As Prince once said, “A strong spirit transcends rules.”
And I’ve never followed rules well.
I remember the moment I made the vow:
It was dusk. The sky had gone violet. I was kneeling beside a sacred fire, grinding herbs into ash to seal a protection spell—one meant to guard our wisdom, to keep the codes alive beneath the gaze of power. Around me, I had drawn sigils in crushed gold and ochre, each one humming with invocation. The air was thick with frankincense and sacred intent. I stood by the mouth of the temple, salt and prayer in my mouth. I looked up and said: If I must come back to finish this, I will.
And so I did.
The vow that carried is not a burden.
It is a commandment.
And I want our memory returned.
I want the sanctity remembered.
I want the tombs to tremble from the sound of our arrival.
I am not haunted.
I am holy.
And I’m only beginning.
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I was born through her body, but never felt I belonged to her—and every time I looked for myself in her face, something cracked.
We speak different languages, in tone and in truth. Our love is choreographed. Measured in tolerances. Timed in silence. I’ve spent most of my life trying to translate the gap between us into something softer. Trying to believe that maybe this is just what love looks like when it doesn’t know how to land.
But I’ve always felt like I was speaking to a stranger.
That feeling didn’t make sense—until I looked beyond this lifetime.
I once did a past life reading out of desperation. I needed to understand why the ache between us felt older than I could name. Why no matter what I did, I never felt like a daughter. What came forward was more than memory—it was revelation.
She wasn’t my mother. She was my sister.
We shared a father in a life long before this one. And in that life, he favored me.
It didn’t matter what she did—how high she reached, how often she performed, how loudly she called for his gaze. He gave his affection to me without effort. I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t want the distance it created. But she felt it like a betrayal. A wound that never closed. So I tried to love her harder to compensate. To give the love she always yearned for and deserved. To shield her from the sting of being overlooked.
But she didn’t want my protection.
She wanted what I had.
And the more I reached for her, the more she recoiled.
That resentment followed us here.
It took on a new name. A new address. A new body. But the wound remained the same.
There are days I still try to be the balm. To be the one who heals the bruise I didn’t cause. I call when she doesn’t. I reach when she won’t. I let the sting of her dismissal convince me I’m the one who failed to love right.
But I know now—I’ve always known—this is a pattern that circles back until someone sets it down.
And past life memory doesn’t just explain—it liberates.
Because it reminds me that this pain is patterned. That I am not crazy for feeling the freeze in her voice. That I don’t have to carry the burden of her healing to be worthy of my own.
Understanding that she was once my sister doesn’t soften the wound, but it gives it shape. It gives it context. And with that, it gives me choice.
I am not here to fix what she won’t face.
I am not here to earn the love that was never mine to hold.
I am here to remember—and to release.
There are karmas we inherit.
And there are karmas we end.
This is mine to end.
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So I stopped folding myself into versions that made her comfortable.
There is a grief that arrives when you realize your healing won’t make them love you.
When I was younger, I thought if I did enough—if I called more, stayed quiet longer, made myself small and soft and unthreatening—she might reach back. That maybe love had to be earned, and I just hadn’t paid enough yet. I thought if I could just crack the code, I’d get the mother I was missing.
But some patterns aren’t broken by bending.
They’re broken by standing up.
I had to learn that love is not a reward for enduring mistreatment.
That spiritual loyalty is not the same as staying silent.
That compassion does not mean compliance.
Because the moment I started to speak truth, everything changed.
Her tone. Her silence. Her accusations.
It is one thing to be rejected for who you pretend to be.
It is another to be rejected for who you truly are.
And still—I didn’t want to stop trying. That was the hardest part.
Because some part of me still believed I could rewrite the past by playing savior in the present. I confused penance with purpose. I thought I could stitch the rift closed if I just bled enough.
But pain doesn’t sanctify you. It only exhausts you.
There comes a moment in every healer’s journey when you have to stop performing CPR on relationships that keep flatlining. You have to stop placing your hand on the wound and calling it service.
Even if they are your blood.
Even if they are your mother.
Especially if they are your mother.
Because what we inherit is not just trauma.
It’s expectation.
And expectation becomes contract.
And contracts must be broken before you can be free.
I wasn’t born to be her redeemer.
I was born to be my own.
I stopped auditioning for affection.
I stopped apologizing for being who I came here to be.
Because healing didn’t make her softer.
It made me clearer.
And clarity is a kind of closure, even when the door never fully shuts.
It is the refusal to reenact the wound.
It is the decision to stop bleeding where others refuse to heal.
It is the fire that says: this ends with me.
Because love becomes bondage when it demands your erasure.
And I was not born to vanish.
Because I am no longer available for love that requires my disappearance.
And I let the silence come.
Not as punishment.
As peace.
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To be born Black and disconnected is to enter the world mid‑sentence, carrying questions no one else remembers asking.
We spend lifetimes trying to name that question. Stitching selfhood from fragments. Searching for mirrors in places that only ever taught us to forget.
It is easy in this fog to mistake the search for identity as reinvention. Identity was displaced, waiting to be retrieved.
Memory moves through you before you know its name. It lives in scent, texture, synchronicity. The way your body tenses when you pass a place it’s never been. The way you cry when you hear music in a tongue you don’t understand. The visions that visit in dreams and refuse to leave. The smell of ash and citrus. The image of your hands in gold. The familiarity of someone you’ve never met, calling you home with their eyes.
Memory is a compass. A thread that tugs us toward the unburied parts of ourselves. The parts that refused to vanish, even when history demanded they quiet.
It is what makes reclamation possible.
And in that reclamation, something sacred begins to take shape. You start to recognize the way your laughter sounds like your grandmother’s, though you’ve never heard her voice. You start to trust the knowing that arrives without explanation. You start to build—rooted in what never left. From the breath before the first word. From the knowing that needed no witness.
When I began to remember, it came in textures and scents and temperature shifts. The timelines collapsed. Every fragment pointed in the same direction: forward. The more I remembered, the more reality changed shape. Because to reclaim your past is to reroute your future.
This work is calling for anyone who has ever looked in the mirror and seen more than one face. For the ones who carry homes in their chests but have never been asked where it hurts. For the children of the in‑between, whose dreams speak in forgotten dialects. For the ones who refuse to be defined by the forgetting.
I came to remember and to be remembered.
And from that place, I build.
Because memory is the origin of design.
It is how we name what came before so we can shape what comes next.
What I have offered here is just a sliver of the vast archive I carry. I am not new here.
I came to finish what she started.
And she is me.
One love, ESS xo
Curious about the lifetimes you carry? Schedule your past life reading with ESS here.
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