Empress
“Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good?”
That question has lived in me for most of my life.
I was raised, in part, by an old, very Christian Black woman. Super Christian, in the way many Black elders are when their faith is not just something they attend on Sunday, but something that has structured their endurance, their language, their warnings, their hope, their understanding of the world, and their understanding of what it means to survive it.
I did not know I was autistic then.
So I did not know that I was taking so many of those lessons literally. I did not know that when I was told to do good, to be good, to mean well, to trust that righteousness had its own protection around it, I was building an entire operating system from that instruction. I heard the moral lesson, and I installed it as law.
Be eager to do good.
Do not move with malice.
Let your heart be clean.
Trust that truth has weight.
Trust that good intent should matter.
And for a long time, I think I believed that if I could keep my own motives clear enough, I could stay safe from certain kinds of harm.
Adulthood has taught me that is not exactly true.
Autism has helped me understand why it took me so long to admit that.
There have been people who harmed me and meant to. There have been people whose actions were not misunderstandings, not accidents, not unfortunate miscommunications, not gaps I could repair by explaining myself better. They meant what they did. And because I was so focused on my own desire to do good, I sometimes gave away too much benefit of the doubt.
I judged the situation by my motive.
I assumed other people were moving from somewhere similar.
I kept returning to the question I had inherited: who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good?
Now I understand that the answer is more complicated than the child in me wanted it to be.
Some people will.
Some systems will.
Some institutions will.
Some people will harm you because they misunderstand you. Some will harm you because they understand you well enough to know where you are vulnerable. Some will harm you because your goodness is useful to them. Some will harm you because they cannot imagine goodness without control. Some will harm you because your sincerity disrupts whatever performance they were relying on.
And still, I have not been able to release the question.
I do not think I want to.
Because I still have faith.
Not the kind of faith that requires me to flatten everything into a single story. Not the kind that says every church, every doctrine, every inherited teaching, every translation, every institution, every sermon, every rule, and every elder’s warning must be accepted without examination.
I have too much life behind me now for that.
I also have too much reverence to pretend nothing sacred was given to me.
One of the things I keep processing as I move toward this next birthday is that there is almost never a single truth for things that have existed since the beginning of time. Faith is one of those things. Language is one of those things. Culture is one of those things. Neurodivergence is one of those things.
We have modern language now. We have words like autistic, neurodivergent, masking, sensory processing, pattern recognition, literal thinking. Those words matter. They help us find ourselves. They help us find one another. They help us stop treating our lives like private failures and start recognizing them as shared patterns.
But nothing is new under the sun.
We did not begin existing when the language arrived.
People like us were always here.
We were in families. In churches. In kitchens. In classrooms. In markets. In villages. In prayer circles. In migration stories. In the ones who asked too many questions. In the ones who remembered everything. In the ones who could not stop telling the truth. In the ones who were called difficult, gifted, strange, sensitive, dramatic, prophetic, stubborn, touched, chosen, troubled, too much.
Sometimes the name arrives long after the life.
That is why language matters so much to me.
Language can liberate, but it can also limit. It can connect people, but it can also carry the violence of how it spread. English has allowed so many of us to communicate across borders, build technology, write, publish, organize, and reach one another. It is also a language that moved through the world with brutality. Christianity, too, has carried both communion and conquest.
That is a hard truth to hold if you were raised to revere both.
But I think mature faith requires the ability to hold hard truths without collapsing.
My love of Swahili helped me understand that differently. Living in Tanzania changed my relationship with language, culture, and belonging. It gave me another way to feel how people make meaning, how greetings carry humanity, how language can shape attention, respect, rhythm, and relationship.
When I shared parts of my travel journey publicly, people often assumed I had moved to Africa because my husband was from there, or because I had married into that culture.
That was not true.
He is a Black American, just like me. And still, the assumptions revealed something to me about how quickly people assign culture, belonging, and motive based on the stories they already know how to tell.
We create so many barriers in the name of culture.
And then language and trade slip through those barriers anyway.
Sometimes beautifully.
Sometimes brutally.
Often both.
That is the part I keep coming back to: often both.
Faith can be inheritance and indoctrination.
Language can be connection and conquest.
Culture can be belonging and boundary.
Goodness can be sincere and still leave you exposed.
Autism can make the world clearer and more confusing at the same time.
A childhood lesson can be incomplete and still sacred.
So when I hear, “Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good?” I no longer hear it as a guarantee that no harm will come. I hear it as a question about orientation.
What are you facing toward?
What are you eager for?
What is still true about your heart after disappointment, betrayal, confusion, correction, and growth?
I have been harmed.
I have misunderstood harm.
I have overlooked harm.
I have explained harm away because I could not imagine choosing it intentionally.
But I also know that my desire to do good was real.
It is still real.
And regardless of what anyone calls their faith, regardless of how they name their connection to the ultimate, I believe there is something powerful about remaining eager to do good in a world that gives you many reasons to become cynical, guarded, performative, or cruel.
Maybe the question was never meant to promise that goodness prevents harm.
Maybe it was meant to remind me that harm does not get to become my source code.
That is the part I am carrying with me now.
Not naivete.
Not denial.
Not the belief that everyone means well.
But the decision that I still want to be oriented toward good.
With clearer eyes.
With better boundaries.
With language that can hold more than one truth.
With faith that has survived examination.
With the understanding that the child who took the lesson literally was not foolish. She was building herself from the best language she had at the time.
And now I get to give her more language.
