Speaking My Truth at Upcoming Family Reunion

Natalie giving a reading at a University event

I am days away from reading an excerpt of Black Girl, White Skin to my family, and I find myself going still. Not frozen, but still, the way water goes still before it shows you your own reflection. This is how I am readying myself: emotionally, physically, spiritually.

I have my comforts gathered. Grounding stones in my bag. Electrolytes and protein powder for a body that will need tending on travel days. A playlist I built just for this: songs that pull me back into my body when my mind starts to run. A journal will come with me, and snacks will be found once I land. Small things. Necessary things.

But the real preparation isn't logistics. The real question isn't what will I do if I'm triggered. It's what will I do, how will I tend to myself, when I am triggered. Because I already know I will be. I have support people in place at the gathering. I have friends on standby, a phone call away. This is not fear. This is readiness.

I always carry a flutter of nerves before I read in public. But this is different. This is the first time I will stand in front of blood relatives, some of whom I am meeting for the first time in my life and tell them where I actually come from. Not the sanitized version. Not the story kept smooth for family dinners. The real shape of my origins, the fracture line running through it, the silence that raised me as much as any person did.

I always carry a flutter of nerves before I read in public. But this is different. This is the first time I will stand in front of blood relatives, some of whom I am meeting for the first time in my life, and tell them where I actually come from. Not the sanitized version. Not the story kept smooth for family dinners. The real shape of my origins, the fracture line running through it, the silence that raised me as much as any person did.

When I told my writer friends, they all said some version of the same thing: this is huge, this is courageous. And still, some nights, I've asked myself if this is a good idea at all. I don't think that doubt ever fully leaves. I think you learn to pack it alongside the crystals and the electrolytes and bring it with you anyway.

The sky has been telling me something, too. We are moving through transits that keep asking the same question in different languages: what have you outgrown, and are you willing to let it go in front of witnesses? Pluto's slow work is unearthing what was buried by design: family secrets kept the way old houses keep foundations, unseen and load-bearing. Saturn is asking for the structure to hold even as the truth reshapes it. This is not comfortable astrology. It is honest astrology. It says: the old architecture of who-gets-to-know-what in this family is ending, and you are one of the hands taking it apart.

I feel the divine feminine moving through this, too -- not as mere adornment, but as the archetype she has always been: the one who remembers what was hidden, who sheds the assumptions placed on her before she could speak for herself, who names the betrayals that got dressed up as protection. She does not perform forgiveness before she has told the truth. She tells the truth first. Everything else comes after.

I keep coming back to this: it only takes one. One person in a bloodline willing to say this actually happened instead of let's not. One cycle-breaker changes what gets passed down to every child after her, not because she was fearless, but because she was willing to shake while telling the truth anyway. That's the whole of it. Not the absence of fear. The presence of truth despite it.

So, I am walking into this reunion prepared. Not prepared to be unaffected, prepared to be affected, and stay standing. Prepared to meet strangers who share my blood and hand them my origin story instead of the one that was easier to tell. I am walking in ready to speak, and in speaking, to break something so it stops breaking the people who come after me.