Desireé B Stephens, Counselor-Coach-Community Builder

✨ FEATURED ARTIST ANNOUNCEMENT ✨

Energy Toss Network x The Healing Homestead Collective presents:
Metamorphosis: Open Mic Summer Frequency Series

Join us on June 19th as we welcome our featured artist, Felicitee Love
Felicitee Love is a poet, healer, dancer, and advocate whose work is rooted in resilience, radical self-love, and the unwavering belief that healing is possible.

Through poetry and authentic storytelling, she inspires people to reclaim their voice, rewrite their story, and move beyond survival into a life of freedom, joy, and wholeness.

This isn't just an open mic.
It's a gathering for connection.
A gathering for expression.
A gathering for healing in community.

📅 Friday, June 19th
⏰ 7 PM – 11 PM
📍 The Healing Homestead Collective
🎤 Open Mic
🍽 Food Included
🥤 Sips Included
🧊 BYOB + Coolers Welcome
🪑 Bring a Lawn Chair
🔞 21+ Only
💰 Suggested Donation: $25

Community Is The Main Event.
Come as you are, Leave transformed
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/metamorphosis-open-mic-summer-frequency-series-tickets-1991705419525

Have you ever felt like you can't take on another thing?

This is the part in the arc where she gets ALL of her parts together.

Growth requires capacity... You can't have more when you haven't made space. https://desireebstephens.substack.com/p/season-of-expansion-growing-without?r=2v5h8f

NEW LIBERATION EDUCATION ESSAY ✨

“I Wish Y’all Hated Us Enough to Leave Us Alone:
Black People as Fixation, Avoidance, and Triangulation”

This new essay examines:
▪️ supremacy culture as a relational system
▪️ fixation on Blackness as avoidance of confronting whiteness
▪️ triangulation and emotional displacement
▪️ embodied liberation and somatic interruption
▪️ why Black autonomy is so often reframed as threat
This is not simply political commentary.
It is an invitation into deeper awareness, accountability, and practice.

Through real-life examples, somatic reflection, and relational analysis, this piece challenges readers to move beyond intellectual agreement and into embodied liberation work.
✨ “Awareness without practice becomes performance.”
✨ “Liberation is not an identity. It is a practice.”
Read the full essay here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/desireebstephens/p/i-wish-yall-hated-us-enough-to-leave?r=2v5h8f&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

“Because giving can still maintain control.

Receiving requires trust.”

That line cracked something open in me while writing this article.

*Where We Become Water* became less about romance and more about the decolonization of relationship itself.

The article moves through:
• supremacy culture in intimacy
• hyper-independence as survival
• fear of conflict and defensiveness
• urgency in attachment
• performance vs vulnerability
• devotion as stewardship
• liberation as relational practice

And ultimately asks:

How do we remain human while loving and being loved?

If this season of your life is teaching you through tenderness, grief, softness, repair, longing, community, or embodiment…

This piece may meet you there.

Read: *Where We Become Water — Love as a Liberation Practice* https://open.substack.com/pub/desireebstephens/p/where-we-become-water?r=2v5h8f&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

The United States government can suddenly find billions to compensate people tied to January 6th and “government overreach”…

…but somehow the conversation about reparations for Black Americans is always “too divisive,” “too expensive,” or “too far in the past.”

Meanwhile…
Black people are expected to carry historical amnesia in a country that never stopped extracting from us.

And hear me out… You do not have to go all the way back to enslavement to prove harm.

You can start with:
Redlining.
Mass incarceration.
The War on Drugs.
Predatory lending.
School segregation.
Environmental racism.
Discriminatory GI Bill implementation.
Police violence.
Employment discrimination.
Medical racism.
The destruction of Black communities in the name of “urban renewal.”

You can start with the fact that Black Americans are STILL disproportionately punished, underfunded, displaced, surveilled, and denied access to generational wealth in real time.

And PUHLEASE miss me with this blue fantasy. People need to stop pretending Democrats are automatically absolved from this conversation.

Jim Crow Joe AKA Joe Biden told us Black voters:
“If you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”

MFKR WHAT!!???

After DECADES of HIS policies that harmed Black communities (including support for the 1994 Crime Bill) there was still no meaningful federal legislation specifically protecting Black Americans from anti-Black violence and systemic harm.

Meanwhile, the government was able to move quickly on legislation addressing anti-Asian hate crimes when violence surged during COVID.

Don’t misunderstand what I am saying, their protection mattered.
Asian communities definitely deserved protection.

But we the Blacks… noticed the contrast.

Because anti-Blackness in America is so normalized that even discussing targeted protection or repair for Black communities becomes controversial the moment it is named directly.

And that is the truth many people still do not want to sit with:
America will fund punishment, policing, war, and political loyalty before it funds repair.

So the question remains:

If this government can mobilize billions for people connected to political grievance…
where is the repair for generations of documented anti-Black harm carried out with the full force of the American state?

Where are all the “No Kings” white folks when the roads lead South?
Not metaphorically.
Literally.

Because this is the tension many people still do not want to confront:
There is a difference between allyship and solidarity.
One can exist as performance.
The other requires transformation.

In this new piece, I unpack:
• why so much white “allyship” collapses under pressure
• the historical pattern of symbolic resistance followed by retreat
• how supremacy culture lives in the body
• why the South has always been America’s blueprint
• the somatic difference between appearing liberated and practicing liberation.

This is not a gentle article.
It is a relational one.
A historical, relational, and somatic reflection on why solidarity requires risk.
Read now on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/desireebstephens/p/where-are-the-no-kings-white-folks?r=2v5h8f&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true or www.desireebstephens.com

There’s a moment where you can see the pattern clearly…

and still do the same thing.

Still:

• say yes when you meant no
• over-explain instead of hold
• leave yourself to keep the peace

That’s conditioning, and that’s why you need practice.

Because what comes next requires you to move differently.

Not perfectly.

Differently.

I wrote about what that actually looks like in real life, not theory.

👇🏾

https://open.substack.com/pub/desireebstephens/p/you-stayed-now-you-have-to-live-from?r=2v5h8f&utm_medium=ios

You Are Still Mother

Let this land where it needs to.
You are still mother.
Not because of proximity.
Not because of a title someone else affirms.
Not because of a role that stayed intact.
But because mother is an energy.

It is a way of moving through this world.
A way of tending.
A way of witnessing.
A way of holding life with care, even when your own hands feel empty.

You are still mother
when you co-parent across distance, across tension, across new realities.

You are still mother
when your children are held by community and you are part of that web, even if you are not the center of it.

You are still mother
when your body has held the possibility of life, even if it never formed into a child you could touch.

You are still mother
when loss has lived in your womb, in your body, in your story.

You are still mother
when the language around you has shifted, when woman may not be your title, but care, creation, and holding are still your truth.

You are still mother
when you have become the one who tends to yourself, re-parents yourself, holds your own inner child through what was not given.

You are still mother
when you no longer have a mother of your own, and you must now carry both the longing and the lineage.

You are still mother
in step, in foster, in chosen family, in auntie, in elder, in guide.

You are still mother
in the quiet ways no one celebrates.
Because motherhood was never meant to be confined to biology or proximity.
It is an imprint.
An energy.
A relational way of being.
And nothing about your current reality
removes you from that truth.
If anything, it deepens it.

https://open.substack.com/pub/desireebstephens/p/mothers-day-in-the-in-between?r=2v5h8f&utm_medium=ios

Mother’s Day can be beautiful.
And it can also be… complicated.

Some of us are celebrating.
Some of us are grieving.
Some of us are estranged.
Some of us are holding all of it at once.
And most spaces don’t make room for that truth.
So I wrote something that does.

This piece is for:
— the mothers without proximity
— the daughters without mothers
— the ones navigating separation, estrangement, or loss
— the ones holding joy and grief in the same body.

It’s not about fixing the day.
It’s about staying with yourself through it.
✨ I’m offering this article freely as a gift today.
If this work supports you, I invite you to become a paid subscriber to sustain it and help keep scholarships available for others.
📖 Read here: https://open.substack.com/pub/desireebstephens/p/mothers-day-in-the-in-between?r=2v5h8f&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
💌 Scholarships: [email protected]