Butterfly Rising in My Soul: A Transformational Journey from Fear to Freedom

By D. Renée Hamilton

Do you want to reach your highest potential? Fulfill your wildest dreams? Build a lasting legacy? Impact the world with your brand of genius? Butterfly Rising In My Soul: A Transformational Journey from Fear to Freedom will inspire and empower you to break free of the mindset that has prevented you from fully living your life's purpose. This book is for you if:  You have experienced abuse of any kind: sexual, physical, emotional, spiritual.  You have struggled with intimacy issues in relationships.  You have suppressed your sexuality: eroticism, sexiness, or sexual orientation.  You have battled with depression and anxiety.  You have lived with fear and self-doubt.  You want to break free of all these mental and emotional shackles that impede your personal and spiritual growth. Join this author in her journey from fear to freedom and break free of the mental shackles that whisper, "You're not good enough," "You don't have what it takes to make your life better," "What you do does not matter in this world." Shatter the emotional shackles of guilt and shame that hold you back from being the amazing person you are meant to be. Your brand of genius is needed in this world!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781641146135

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Butterfly Rising in My Soul

A Transformational Journey from Fear to Freedom

D. Renée Hamilton

Copyright © 2018 D. Renée Hamilton

All rights reserved

First Edition

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc

Meadville, PA

First originally published by Christian Faith Publishing, Inc 2018

ISBN 978-1-64114-612-8 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64114-613-5 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

For their abiding and unconditional love, I dedicate this labor of love to my two brave and resilient children, Amun-Ra, and Iman.

Introduction

†

I was watching an episode of the television series Underground one night when actress Aisha Hinds portraying Harriet Tubman executed a stellar rendition describing the sacrifices and struggles of an enslaved Harriet who one day broke free from the shackles of slavery. During her gripping performance, Hinds said something that reached out and grabbed me and my attention was riveted in the wake of her words:

See, there be things that happen in your life, and if you lucky, there be only one thing, something that split your life in two; a before and an after.

Prison was that thing for me. It was that one thing that split my life in two where there is now a before me and an after me: the before me lived in a fog of fear, but the after me sees more clearly my path to freedom. Now mind you, freedom is not just a one-time act of emancipation. It’s a continual journey of growing and becoming the magnificent being you were predestined to be in this world. While prison was my life-changing thing, for you that thing could be a myriad of other things—a broken relationship, divorce, death of a loved one, cancer, loss of possessions, etc. The list can go on. We all face adversities in life. It’s just meant to be, but what matters most is how we come out on the other side of these adversities.

Once incarcerated, I soon realized that I had already erected mental and emotional bars around me long before the physical bars manifested in my reality, and it became my personal mission to free myself from my own self-imposed prison. I believe the struggle to free oneself of self-imposed shackles is the journey of every human being, though the times, characters, and experiences may somewhat differ. For it is this struggle that molds us into men and women of resilience and that binds us together as one consciousness.

In this book, it is my intention to share with you the most valuable lessons and insights that I have gained throughout my journey and particularly those I gleaned during my period of incarceration, but what is even more incumbent upon me to share with you is the transformative healing process that ensued along the way.

I invite you to take this journey with me and break free of the mental shackles around your mind and the emotional shackles around your heart. The mental shackles that whisper, You’re not good enough, You don’t have what it takes to make your life better, What you do does not matter in this world. The emotional shackles of guilt and shame that hold you back from being the amazing person you are meant to be. If you want to reach your highest potential, fulfill your wildest dreams, build a lasting legacy, and impact the world with your brand of genius, you must break free of the shackles, whatever they may be.

It is also my intention to bring attention to our criminal justice system, a broken system indeed. Women are becoming the new and swelling demographic in prisons across America, and it is happening at an alarming rate. According to a recent report by the Prison Policy Initiative, about 5 percent of the world’s women live in the United States, but America accounts for 30 percent of the world’s population of incarcerated women (www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015). I’m of the sole persuasion that prison should be reserved for dangerous and violent predators. It is not a place for non-violent, first-time offenders who pose no threat to society. There are more cost effective alternatives, which I share in the epilogue of this book. The call for reformation in our criminal justice system is way overdue. Thankfully, a strong cry is echoing throughout this land of the free for prison reform. Social justice and human rights organizations, among others, have taken up the cause to rectify the cruel and unusual punishment in our broken criminal justice system.

While we can attribute the spiking increase in the rate of incarceration in America to such political tactics as the war on drugs, I will venture to surmise that this increase could also be symbolic of an even bigger problem in our society: the continual perpetuation of fear in the hearts and minds of the American people, which is another kind of incarceration in and of itself. Fear shackles the mind! I’m reminded of a scripture in the Bible that reads, Do not conform to the pattern of this world (system of fear), but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will (Roman 12:2, NIV). The only way to break the spell of fear that has slithered its way like a serpent into our lives is to consciously allow love to sprinkle its pixie dust in our hearts and minds so that we can spread goodness and mercy all over this land. Then, we can each walk in God’s good and perfect will for us.

This book is divided in three parts: Taking Shape, Showing Up, and Waking Up. Each section consists of seven chapters that serve as flashbacks into my past. Also, within each part are two to three snippets (a total of seven) that detail my compelling journey through the duplicitous criminal justice system and the impact it had on my life. The final snippet is written by my sixteen-year-old daughter who shares her thoughts and feelings about how her life was affected ten years ago at the time of my incarceration. I need readers to understand the detrimental effect mass incarceration has on the lives of millions of children. Having my daughter share her point of view offers an added perspective to my story.

Part 1 of this book focuses on my life taking shape during the backdrop of the civil rights and women rights movements, which played a significant role in shaping my perception of the world around me. I share my story of growing up in a sometimes abusive home environment, and how this shaped my perception of men and what it meant to be a woman. My mother also played a dominant role in shaping me into the woman who showed up in the world.

In part 2, I share how I broke free of emotional and mental shackles that were holding me hostage and robbing me of a meaningful and fulfilling life. We all show up at some point between late adolescence and early adulthood, and we bring with us past experiences, faulty perceptions, and what we have concocted during childhood. Many times these perceptions and past experiences do not serve us well as adults and may lead us into situations that prove our faulty belief-system is not working to benefit us, at which point we may choose to continue a cycle of dysfunctional relationships and habits, or we become aware of our destructive behaviors and take responsibility for changing them.

Part 3 of my story is about waking up, reclaiming my freedom, and learning how to walk in my truth. Sometimes it takes a crisis to really wake us up, that is if we have had enough of the pain. As the novelist and poet C. S. Lewis so eloquently wrote, Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasure, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pain. It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Prison was God shouting to me, Wake up! And live the abundant life that I intended for you to live. Toward the end of my stay in prison, God commissioned me to follow three mandates that would propel me into my purpose, and it is imperative for me to point out that at least two out of three of these mandates are relevant to everyone who reads this book.

Lastly, my story is to inspire you to think about your own story. Don’t just read these pages as a voyeur, passively peeping into someone else’s life, but allow your imagination to roam the avenues of your own memories and experiences, past and present. It is our most important duty in this life to figure out why we’re here because many of us have forgotten this pertinent piece of information. You may have to clean up some debris along the way, as I did, to see more clearly. It may take some time to excavate the ruins that lie deep within you buried beneath the sand of your well-constructed walls of defense, but I strongly encourage you to dig deep as though you were looking for lost treasure.

Prologue

†

November 15, 2005

The lights came on. I woke up. It was six thirty on a Tuesday morning. This was the last place in the world I wanted to wake up and find myself. It seemed almost surreal to me. I laid there on my back staring up at the piping that ran along the pale white ceiling. Oddly, I did not feel depressed nor was I in distress. Instead, I felt numb and I was in a daze about my predicament. The place looked like an army barrack. Bunks uniformly lined the windowed wall that stretched about fifty feet long. Dull grayish lockers stood at attention at the foot of each bunk. A narrow pathway separated the bunks along the wall from sparsely furnished cubicles that included a bunk, a stainless steel basin, and a stainless steel toilet. Although there weren’t any visible bars, there was no mistaking where I was. The prominent question that loomed in the back of my mind was, How did a good girl like you end up here?

I climbed down the ladder from the top bunk where I slept that first night. I opened my locker and took out a small travel-size toothbrush, a short tube of toothpaste, and a white face towel. I turned and walked up the narrow pathway that led me into a lobby where I then stepped inside a mop room. The room contained a deep dingy sink and a piped faucet that protruded from the wall and over the sink. Here is where I stood in a drowsy stupor and brushed my teeth and washed my face, along with two other women. It was in this moment that the unfathomable realization struck me that this would be my place of residence for the next fourteen months. My heart sunk to the very pit of my stomach.

I walked back to my locker where I begin to disrobe from the oversized nightgown that cloaked my body like a tunic. My bunk was against the wall, thus lending me no privacy. The sleeves of the gown hung loosely down my arms and the hem dropped midway my calves. I was not a flattering sight. I slipped on the white bra and orange jumper that I’d been given the day before, along with white tube socks and a pair of blue canvas tennis shoes with no shoestrings.

It was breakfast time, and I was hungry. I followed the narrow pathway back up to the lobby and walked freely out of my assigned dorm, Building G, into the brightness of an unseasonably warm November morning. The grounds were manicured to perfection, without even a single stray leaf being left to lollygag on the sidewalks. Zinnias of various fall colors meticulously embellished the walkways that crisscrossed the compound. The distance to the cafeteria was about three hundred feet from where I stood at the entrance of Building G. I self-consciously started the journey up the walkway, completely stripped of any pretense, pride or dignity, and as unadorned as the day I was born, no jewelry, no makeup, no weave—just me.

The next fourteen months would yield all the time I needed to come up with the answer to this foraging question, How did a good girl like you end up in prison? I knew what I had done to land myself in prison, but I needed to understand why.

Part I

PART ONE—Taking Shape

1

Fresh for the Journey

Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to those who are like these.

—Matthews 19:14

I have heard Oprah Winfrey say, Babies come into this world trailing the breath of angels. One of the greatest miracles in nature, I believe, is when a newborn takes in its first gulp of air. There is no other moment on earth when we are closest to God. For it is in that moment that Spirit permeates every cell of a newborn’s body, bringing in a soul fresh from the heavenly realm. It reminds me of the closing line in James Weldon Johnson’s famous poem The Creation: And man became a living soul. Amen.

We enter into this earthly realm with a clean slate that is waiting for the stories of our lives to be written upon it. We are the author of our own story. We come into this world born into an imperfect family already predestined for us. It was not a coincidental mishap or some random act. We were a forethought in the mind of God. Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you; before you were born I set you apart (Jeremiah 1:5, NIV). There is a purpose and a plan for everything that happens in our lives. In this, I am a true believer.

I made my own such debut on July 1, 1960. It’s been said those who are born on the first day of the month do not like to be last. And, I am no exception. I am a passionate and ambitious soul, but my modesty tends to humble and at times restrain me. I’m conflicted because a part of me yearns recognition for what I do in this world, yet another part, the reserved part of me, is hesitant about receiving too much attention.

I have only flickers of memories, here and there, of my very early childhood years. It still amazes me how seemingly insignificant events attached themselves like little sticky notes to my early memories. Events such as, watching my two brothers, James and Lee, pop potato chip bags after eating their contents, and sitting on the back porch of our wooden-frame shotgun house one day anxiously watching a bearded cat cautiously approach me. As the cat inched its way just a tad too close, I jumped up, screamed, and ran into the house crying to my mother. I couldn’t adequately articulate to her what had caused such a fuss in me, but nevertheless, she came running out to the back porch to catch sight of the creature that had frightened me out of my wits. The evidence was nowhere to be found. As I got older, I begin to wonder if that mysterious bearded feline anomaly was just my imagination, until one day I sighted another cat with a beard. The odd gray bearded cat and I stared at each other suspiciously, but this time I didn’t run. Aha! I thought, I knew it wasn’t just my imagination running away with me.

While I retained these seemingly insignificant blotches of memories of my early years, I hold no recollection of events of greater significance in my life. Events such as my mother taking me on several trips out of town for rounds of vaccine shots and having me fitted for a Forrest Gump leg brace that would expeditiously correct a developing deformity in my right leg.

Needless to say, I was much too young to recall that fateful November afternoon when the nation went into an uproar as the news rippled across the television waves from house to house, street to street, city to city: John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, had been shot and killed. America went into shock and then mourning. The news shattered the dreams of hope and promise for some, and hailed victory for others. There was to follow a string of assassinations of great men and women who were called to protest against the archaic 400-year-old, institutionalized system of perpetual inequalities against not only African Americans, but every class, gender, and nationality of people also affected by its discriminatory codes.

However, what I do remember in great detail is the day we moved from Tyler Street, where I spent the first three years of my childhood, to Louisiana Avenue, where I would spend the next four years. From that day forward, the events of my everyday existence took on a more meaningful and chronological progression. As my vocabulary increased and my language became more fluent, memories were no longer just quick snap shots of the past, but they became detailed stories that solidified themselves in my mind.

One such story took place on a clear, sunny day in 1964, the morning after we moved to Louisiana Avenue. My two brothers and I decided to venture out to explore our new territory like curious baby cubs. We heard dogs barking from inside a house across the street and noticed they were locked behind a screened door that created a barrier between them and us, or so we thought. At the encouragement of one of my brothers, we started taunting the dogs, taking full advantage of their apparent state of confinement. As we reveled in our false sense of security, two German shepherds broke free of their presumed prison and charged across the street toward us. We scattered like frightened mice and scrambled for safety. James and Lee took flight and ran to the back of our L-shaped shingled house, and I ran up the steps onto the front porch, separating myself from the fold like a vulnerable doe. I swung open the screen and desperately banged on the hardwood door. I cried, screamed, and banged as hard as my little fist could bear, but to no avail. No one