Silver Sparrow – I am Regina Lynette

I am a black American Christian woman who believes in having a full-on mental health team. I also know that while I am not the only one, I know that it’s not exactly commonplace yet for my demographic. Since I began my mental health journey in college, I have kept my path pretty quiet, sharing information only with people I deemed either safe spaces or emergency contacts. But I think the time has come to say more and say it publicly. This is another reason I decided to do this blog in this manner. Part of who I am includes details about my mental health journey. But you not gonna get the juicy stuff today. Today, I celebrate my current therapist.

I am a black American Christian woman who has a white American woman in charge of her *talk-therapy. And I love my therapist. This year, while watching horrific news about white people killing black people, I found myself in a mental state about racism I’d never been in before. I simply didn’t want to talk to white people about anything and I didn’t want white people to talk to me about anything, simply because they were white people. I didn’t want apologies. I didn’t want questions. I didn’t want greetings or terms of endearment. I turned my nose up at the idea that a white person had words to say. And about a week before my next therapy appointment – the one that came after I realized my sensitivities to white people just because they were white – I needed to decide how I was going to talk to my white therapist. Other than the awareness of her being a white person, I didn’t feel the same animosity or angst about talking to this particular white person and I tried to unpack that some before my session. I didn’t do a great job.

My therapist has an artistic background, has lived in other countries, and has lived in large American cities known for diversity as well as smaller southern cities known for lack of diversity and that was enough to remind me that she was a safe space. During that session I told her that I do not want to talk to white people. She paused the session to make sure she understood what I was saying – because she’s a white person and I was talking to her. Then I tried to say I still felt she was a safe person despite my current feelings about white people and hoped I wasn’t offensive. A few weeks later she reached out to me to ask if I’d heard about a therapeutic product made specifically for people of color designed by an African-American therapist. I thanked her for seeing my color. This was summer 2020. She is still my therapist and I still love my therapist.

That anecdote says nothing about how I’ve come to love my therapist, nor does it specifically promote therapy. But that anecdote is the demonstration that a therapist to love is a therapist who is right for you and your needs. A therapist to love is one who can handle what life throws you both and can still guide you through those challenging times. A therapist to love is one who sees you clearly and respects you completely. And my therapist is a therapist to love.

When I met this therapist, I was having complications and my chronic mental illness was out of remission leaving me unstable. She was referred to me by my psychiatrist along with a nutritionist. Having had therapy for more than 20 years, I had long developed a process to make sure I got the most out of my sessions. This included self-awareness of issues that surfaced, recognition of things that just weren’t working, and an acknowledgement of the level of disfunction my illness caused versus the level of disfunction my unresolved issues caused (which means I had to accept that sometimes I needed a pill and not only behavior changes).

There were a couple of problems immediately apparent to me in the first few sessions with this therapist. First, I wasn’t going to be in control of this process in the way I had been with previous therapists. Second, I didn’t have the energy, courage, nor foresight to take the reins of this process in the way I had done with previous therapists. Bumping up against that those first few sessions made me reconsider being under her care. I always had an introductory session or consultation before choosing a therapist and could establish my needs at that time. I just made an appointment with this therapist based on my chosen psychiatrist’s referral. But I decided to continue because in this case, my psychiatrist, talk-therapist, and nutritionist – my mental health team – all knew each other and could discuss my progress together and I wanted to see the benefits of that arrangement. So, I decided to “let go” (which ended up being the focus for at least a year) and stopped planning for my sessions. I would just show up and follow her lead. I found that the sessions where I had absolutely nothing planned to discuss were the best sessions. We were still getting to know each other, and I wasn’t really giving her much to work with – I wasn’t showing up and presenting myself to her in the sessions but was open enough to let her sort of rummage around and see what we could work on. And in time, she got to know me. She got to know the characters in my life. She knew when to pause a long time because she could see me thinking. She learned when to either re-direct or end the session because it was just too much to handle. And she learned how to check in with me at the start of each session to see how to best direct our time. Now she has a better handle on me than I have on myself in some ways and I trust her with my everything. That’s a therapist to love. And I love my therapist.

Only you know what you need from a therapist and only you know what’s most important to you in a therapist. However, when I am asked about what I’ve learned I need from a therapist and what’s important to me in a therapist, there is one thing that I consistently note first – the best professionals are artists. Creatives approach medicine with the idea that every human is different and that every human may respond differently to therapy – both techniques and medications. They understand that the patient knows more about their body and mind than anyone else and therefore require that a partnership be forged to determine a treatment plan (you’ll see this in the agreements in your intake paperwork or it will be discussed during your consultation and/or first appointment). Artists use their passionate natures to fuel their progress. And the patients of creative and artistic medical professionals benefit from getting a partner who holds their hand along the very customized treatment plan to reach the pinnacle of the individual’s health. They lay out a plan based on their education and experience and then stand back and look with admiration and pride at the mixed bag of tricks that the plan actually incorporates as it’s executed. My first artistic doctor beamed with pride with every success I had – we had. He fought to the death my insurance companies and got pissed at the pharmaceutical companies when they caused problems with getting my prescriptions filled. He was very invested in me and taught me to be very invested in my health.

I just wanted to tell the world that I love my therapist. And I know that it is critical that African-Americans seek therapy, and that African-American issues can often only be understood well by African-American therapists – so much so that I want to acknowledge it as fact. And I’ve had both black and white therapists and had positive experiences with both. Have the courage to seek the right therapist for you whether it’s gender, race, color, or any other identifiers and experiences.

I love my therapist.

*I use the term talk-therapy to refer to the sessions provided by my medical professional that rely mostly on talking. There are many different kinds of health professionals who take on this role so I use a broader term to focus on the process rather than the person’s credentials. When I use this term, usually I am separating doctors who prescribe medications from other medical health professionals who focus on a myriad of other techniques.

Silver Sparrow is the title of a novel by Tayari Jones about two half-sisters, their shared father, and how life unfolds for them and their families*. I went to see her at the Decatur Book Festival and while discussing her book, Tayari Jones asked if there were any Silver Sparrows in the room. I raised my hand. The feeling of pride that accompanied that acknowledgement surprised me.

The story of me and my half-siblings has always been shrouded in shame. I never took on the shame directly, but some people look at me as the shame – I was a catalyst for change in my parents’ lives. But I never even remotely accepted the blame for my parents’ decisions.

My father was married with children at the time he met my mother, and she was divorced with children. They began their relationship while my father was still legally married. I have 3 half-brothers and 4 half-sisters. I shared one half-brother and one half-sister with our mother. I shared two half-brothers and three half-sisters with our father. I’m the only and last child between my parents and all my siblings are “half”. No one in my immediate family used the term “half” so I’ll be dropping that now.

It was easy to share my mother with my brother and sister because they lived at home with me and neither of their fathers were involved in their lives. It was a little more complicated with sharing my father. His oldest children were close to my mother’s age, so he wasn’t co-parenting young children but adults. They were married and having their own children – I have three nieces and a nephew who are older than I am. So, while I was technically sharing my father with his older children, what was happening day to day was that I had a father (and in some respects my mother’s children had him as a father), and his older children were abandoned. With young children, fathers typically make some legal arrangement to share custody with mothers and all the children manage to grow up together in some manner. With adult children, what happened in our circumstances, is that I became a secret.

I didn’t realize I was supposed to be a secret, mainly because I knew the truth about my family structure and we never treated it like a secret. But when I spent time with my father’s children and I met people from their everyday lives, I had to be explained. “Who is this small child with you – too young to be friends with your own children?” people would ask. “This is my baby sister. Yep, there was one more who came much later.” Or if my nieces were asked then it was often, “This is my baby Auntie.”

And I almost got pleasure that we’d shocked someone because our family was a little unexpected. As a teenager and young adult I started to feel more sensitive to other people’s reactions.

The moment I felt for certain that I had been a kept secret was at my niece’s wedding. I was a bridesmaid and was approached at the rehearsal by two ladies I didn’t know. They asked who I was, and I told them the bride was my niece. They assumed I’d sort of adopted my way into the family – not that she was my biological niece. I explained – no, her father is my older brother – and the look on their faces, the sudden silence to me, and the whispering behind my back but in front of my face felt shameful. That is what I felt.

I feel compelled to provide some disclaimers. First, I do not know those ladies and if they were standing in my face this minute, I wouldn’t know they were the ones with whom I spoke and couldn’t tell you what the significance was of them being at the wedding rehearsal. Second, there could have been any number of reasons they weren’t privy to details about our family that had nothing to do with feelings or opinions on how I came to be – I have no idea what the relationship with these ladies is between my family. And third, though it’s no secret that this brother had a difficult time with our father and his choices, neither he, his wife, or his daughter ever made me feel anything less than precious when I was with them. This is just a recollection of a moment in my life where I felt shame and realized I was a secret – not a factual account of anything done to me by anyone. I was old enough that I could understand that my existence and the circumstances around my conception was not necessarily something to boast about and not necessarily information that just anyone needed to know. Yes, I am very aware that the compulsion to offer that disclaimer speaks rivers and yes, you likely will hear more about that later – I’m trying to keep these entries brief.

The first time I noticed how easy (and benign) it was for me to have become a secret was the first time I realized my siblings had become my secret. Years ago, an associate at work was leading a professional development workshop and as part of his intro and opening comments he would ask if anyone in the room had older brothers. This was much more about a segue into an anecdote about him having older brothers and less to do with getting a census of the participants. Though I had been in the room when he did this presentation several times, this was the first time I was a participant in the workshop, and so this was the first time I raised my hand. He was so startled that I felt a little embarrassed. He was silent for just a beat too long before he said that he had no idea that I had brothers. I said something to try and explain that there was no reason for me to have mentioned my brothers in our previous interactions – we had a professional relationship that was also relatively friendly – and before it became too awkward, he moved on. This would be true for most of the people I interact with on a daily basis. Just because I see or speak to someone everyday doesn’t mean that I’ve had any interactions with them that require them to know anything about my family structure. This has absolutely nothing to do with how I feel about any member of my family and everything to do with the point of whatever I am trying to say at that moment.

So since that revelation, I look back on my memories with a different lens and with much less sensitivity than I used to. If you call me Regina, you do not know the whole story, trust me (even if you already knew everything I just shared). And there are no secrets – just rooms to the house you haven’t been invited to enter, so to speak. If you know me well (likely you call me Gina) you probably get the explanation of my family structure because you probably need it – anecdotes can get complicated if you don’t know the key players. But if you were introduced to me as Regina, and now call me Gina, (or vice-versa) you are missing some details – they aren’t secrets but you find out things on a need-to-know basis. And I determine when you need to know.

The pride in raising my hand at the book festival to identify myself as a Silver Sparrow was because it was a pretty name for something complex that I now find beautiful. My parents made the choices they thought were best at the time. I say that they weren’t always the right choices. Maya Angelou said “Just do right. Right may not be expedient, it may not be profitable, but it will satisfy your soul.” Some of their choices were expedient at the cost of being right. Some of their choices were profitable at the cost of being right. And some of their choices were easy and comfortable at the cost of being right. I know my parents sometimes didn’t consider – and at times didn’t understand – the impact that their decisions would have on the generations to come after them. And there is a lot of pain associated with all of us who suffered consequences of their choices. But, the day I raised my hand proudly declaring myself a Silver Sparrow was the day I saw the beauty of what they gave me. I was exposed to many different philosophies of life – all my siblings were adults and I was often in a position to be taught by them as parents to children. The brother who I mentioned earlier in the wedding story taught me how women should be treated by what I saw in how he treated his wife and daughter. All my sisters wanted me to look and behave ladylike, even though they all had slightly different ideas of what that meant and different deliveries of the message. Everyone expected me to be studious and ambitious and encouraged me to be the best they thought I could be – whether they really knew what that was or not. If I had not been a Silver Sparrow, I wouldn’t have had the siblings I have, and we wouldn’t have had the life experiences that have made us all more intentional about our life choices and aware of what we are contributing to the following generations. And while my life experiences range from horrible enough to repress to so joyous it is heartwarming, it’s that spectrum that gives me pride.

I have 3 brothers. I have 5 sisters (fictive kin included). I am Regina Lynette, and I am a Silver Sparrow.

*Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones is one of the books that I hugged after I finished reading it. I have read all her books and have recommended all of them at one time or another to friends and family – and now to you.

My Tayari Jones books are enjoying a sunset on the lanai.
Pictured from left to right – An American Marriage, Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow.

Tag: Silver Sparrow

I love my therapist.

I am Regina Lynette. I am a Silver Sparrow.