Dear Tequila, You Are Right.

You are right. There is more to life than your immediate surroundings.

You are right and you have a right, to desire more. You have what it takes to have more.

When you sit with Grandma, Sister Griggs, and share with her, “I believe God has more for me. I don’t know what it is. I see families on TV, and they have a different life – a better life so I think I can have a life like that too”. Listen to her and believe her when she responds with, “You can do anything. You can be anything.”

Holt, Alabama – with its red clay dirt and the towering pines, that spoke calmness in countless times of chaos, is a beautifully serene place. Even in its beauty, it is a tough place for a little black girl to aspire to be anything other than, maybe, a graduate high school graduate, without becoming a unwed mother first, and then maybe “getting a good job, so you can retire.”

Grandma sees hope and fear in the optimistic big brown eyes of yours. She sees the hurdles that you face and how the odds are stacked against you. You want more than becoming a high school graduate. You want more success than “not getting pregnant”. Sister Griggs loves you, believes in you and wants you to know the journey will not be easy.

When she shares, “Once you are born, life owes you nothing else. If you want something, you gotta go and get it. Ain’t nobody gonna just give it to you”, it is her way of motivating you to stay the course and to never give up.

You are right to believe in a future for yourself that you may not readily see. When momma tells you that you are smart and beautiful and you do not feel that way, please believe her anyway. Your clothes may be hand-me-down, and you do not have any new shoes, one day, you will have more clothes and shoes than you can ever imagine. Funny enough, you will also learn to love giving those things away. That heart of giving that you now as a child, will grow even bigger.

When Cousin Lisa speaks life into your soul and tells you that is greater is coming, you are right to cling to the glimmer of hope that she brings. Your belief in yourself and her words, will help manifest into an amazing life of love and light.

You are right to stay focused and to make education a priority. You are right to think that obtaining an engineering degree will be a tough journey. Take the difficult math and science courses anyway. When you fail physics in college, try not to feel like you are failure. It is one class – move on and start again.

You are right when you look around the classrooms in undergrad and feel a since of belonging although you do not see many that look like you. There will be more black female engineers to come, because you stayed.

You are right to embrace your authentic self. You are right to acknowledge your love of science, math and reading. When you feel your talents and gifts will make room for you, in any room, in any setting – you are right.

More importantly, keep going, because you will learn that being right is not critical at all. You will learn to embrace being wrong and learn that there are no failures. There are only lessons. Some lessons will be more painful than others. The lessons will sting but they are needed to take you to a higher ground – to a higher purpose.

You will learn to move through these lessons while knowing that you have time to take your time. Give yourself grace. Providing grace to yourself will allow you to be still and not rush through life. Dwell in the lessons just as you dwell in the triumphs.

You will win.

I love you,

Tequila