About The Bee in My Bonnet
As an adolescent, I struggled with behavioral and emotional imbalances rooted in the traumas I faced at home. Expressing my emotions felt impossible, so I bottled them up until they erupted into violent outbursts. One fateful day at school, this struggle reached its breaking point. After a weekend of chaos at home—my mother’s heavy drinking and sharp words left me feeling raw and fragile—I arrived at school teetering on the edge. When a bully sneered at me, calling my mother a “crackhead,” I lost control. The world around me disappeared as I swung at him uncontrollably. It took three teachers to restrain me. That fight earned me a three-day suspension, but more than that, it forced me to confront what I’d been denying: I was drowning in pain I didn’t know how to process. During that turbulent time, a teacher stepped into my life and changed its course. An elder white woman with a surprising depth of understanding of ethnic/Black culture, she saw me—not just a struggling young Black gir...