The Remix: What it is and Why it is So Urgent

Reinvention is not for the meek. There are levels to this thing, and each level requires more of you. More courage. More clarity. More resilience. Just more.

We romanticize reinvention as a glow-up, pivot, or fresh start. But in reality it is a dismantling. It is the stripping down and intentional rebuild up of one’s life. I am learning this every day as I build the woman I am determined to become.

Imagine believing your vision is clear because you see things the way you’ve always seen them, only to put on prescription glasses for the first time and realize everything before that moment had been a blur. That’s what it felt like when the medication first began to work. Problems that once consumed me suddenly shrank in size and urgency. For the first time in my life, I realized how much time I had lost, and how critical it was not to lose another second. That was the moment I chose reinvention as the way forward.

That moment didn’t come until I was fifty-one. 

By then, I had spent thirty-five years in pain, unaware that life could be any different for me. I was first diagnosed with clinical depression at sixteen. No follow-up therapy. No medication. Just a label and silence.

Eventually, I began  acting out. By twenty-two, I had ricocheted across the country several times, joined the Navy, went AWOL, and had a fling and a baby. When I wasn’t detonating my life, I was in bed. I forfeited years of possibilities and opportunities. And this is why reinvention is not indulgent. It is corrective and redemptive.

I call my personal reinvention journey The Remix.

In R&B music, the remix keeps the original track but adds new production that changes the energy of the song. Sometimes the remix is better than the original. Think Let’s Get Married (Remix) by Jagged Edge. The foundation is the same. The arrangement is not.

That’s what this is.

My core beliefs, morals, values, and lessons earned the hard way will remain intact. But the production is changing. A different mindset, stronger beliefs and structured routines. Discipline is the game changer and faith is the compass.

For me and women like me, The Remix is urgent. We have already surrendered too many years to depression, anxiety, and other untreated mental illnesses. We will not surrender another.

We have spent our lives surviving. And now, it’s time we lived.

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