When I got the call from my mother that my younger brother was in jail, I felt that the whole bottom of my being fell out from under me. We had gone through this “jail” stuff before, during my adolescent years, with my father who spent years in and out of prison. My father had been out for years at this point and doing well in his recovery. My brother, awaiting the arrival of his son was in anticipation of new fatherhood. I was working as a Behavior Health Clinician, actively involved in Prison Abolitionist, Reproductive Justice and Anti-Police brutality work.
Life was good for all.
Then my brother was sentenced to 15 years in prison and all of the doors that I had felt was shut and sealed from the years that I spent as a young girl with a father incarcerated, flew back open. All at once.
I fell into a deep, dark depression. I stopped doing the organizing work that I felt most proud of. I ate fast food two to three times a day.
I had a bad pattern of eating food and staying barricaded in my home.I only left my home to go to work and back home.
I drank a lot of Mountain Dew to numb the pain that I experienced with my brother’s incarceration. With the food intake and lack of exercise, I gained a significant amount of weight and became ashamed of my weight gain.
My mother, who was also struggling with her weight, started going to the gym with great results. This encouraged me to sign up at my local YMCA in my neighborhood.
Literally overnight, I went from being a person who rarely ever exercised, to someone who started taking Zumba several times a week, water aerobics, belly dancing, and now spinning and step aerobics.
Inspired by Lakeisha Shurn, I went on two 100 day challenges; one in 2015 and another in 2016, where I exercised for 100 days straight.
I was exercising and moving, but I was doing it all in solitary. That was, until I found GirlTrek. Or as I like to think, Girltrek found me.
October 2016, I had never attended an GirlTrek walk, but on a whim, I co-organized a walk with another Philly Trekker. From that time, I have had the opportunity to participate and organize several GirlTrek events including 5k walks, an “We are Harriet” event, and continued weekly walks in West Philadelphia.
GirlTrek has provided for me the sisterhood that I have needed in my time of healing. With a community of sense, GirlTrek gives to me what I hope that it gives other women, and that is a sense of friendship, solidarity and a body of other women who are seeking to walk to their personal health in a collective arm of other Black women.
GirlTrek is the verb to my healing.
As healing has to be honest. It has to be able to make you uncomfortable with the pain that you are living within the moment.
The beautiful part about GirlTrek is that you do not have to get to those healing places alone. You have sisters.
This notion of togetherness has allowed me to have a deeper love of sisterhood and a deeper love and value of myself. I have come to understand much better that we can create love and sisterhood whenever we are, whether that is walking as a solo trekker, or with your church, or with other Black Women wearing superhero blue on a Saturday. We are all walking for our personal and collective freedom of health in valuing ourselves to sustain us in both times of lack and times of plenty.
Iresha Picot-Wagner, M.Ed, LBS is a Philly GirlTrekker. Iresha is a Licensed Behavior Specialist and Outpatient Mental Health Therapist, and is the co-editor of the book, “The Color of Hope: People of Color Mental Health Narratives. Iresha is also a birth doula and her website is www.52ndstreetdoula.com
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