Some of my earliest memories are in Flatbush.
Johnny pumps in the summertime. My grandmother’s bedroom floor. Little pieces of a life that probably didn’t seem important enough to remember at the time, but somehow they’re still here.
Memory is funny like that.
There are entire stretches of my life I couldn’t tell you much about, and then there are random moments from childhood that I can still see.
Back then, of course, I wasn’t thinking about any of the things I think about now.
I wasn’t thinking about purpose.
I wasn’t thinking about identity.
I wasn’t thinking about whether I was becoming the woman God created me to be.
I was just Tasha.
Before I knew anything about becoming somebody, or losing myself, or finding my way back to God, I was just Tasha.
Eventually, Brooklyn gave way to Baltimore.
Baltimore is where most of me was formed. It’s where I grew up. Family was there. Music was there. And church was definitely there.
When I say we went to church, I mean we went to church.
Sunday morning service. Sunday evening service. And Kentucky Fried Chicken somewhere in between.
Church wasn’t something I discovered later in life. I grew up knowing Jesus. I knew Scripture. I knew what worship sounded like. I knew what it meant to pray. God wasn’t a stranger to me.
Which makes the rest of my story a little harder to explain.
Because I still walked away.
There wasn’t some point where I suddenly decided God wasn’t real. I didn’t stop knowing what I knew. My life just started moving in a direction that eventually put a lot of distance between what I knew and how I was living.
And I stayed there for years.
There is a whole lot inside that sentence.
Some of it is in The Making of Me, and I don’t need to retell the book here. But I think it’s important to say that because sometimes we tell stories about coming back to God as though the person coming back didn’t know any better.
I knew better.
That’s part of my story too.
And then I came back.
Even that sentence sounds much cleaner than it actually was.
Coming back to God wasn’t one beautiful moment where everything in my life suddenly made sense. Some things changed quickly. Other things didn’t. There were things I had to walk away from, things I had to relearn, and things about myself I had to let God deal with.
I’m still letting Him deal with some of them.
That’s probably one of the biggest differences between the way I thought about life when I was younger and the way I think about it now.
I used to think becoming had a destination.
You became successful.
You became healed.
You became whole.
You became the woman you were supposed to be.
And then, I guess, you arrived.
I’m not so sure anymore.
Paul wrote:
“Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after…”
Philippians 3:12, KJV
I understand that verse differently these days.
There are things God has done in me that I can look back on and clearly see. And there are still places where I know He isn’t finished.
Both can be true.
These days, I’m in North Carolina. I’m writing. I’m podcasting. I’m building STAND Movement. Every now and then I’m on a motorcycle. Sometimes I’m sitting at a piano. And I’m doing all of that as somebody who still doesn’t have everything figured out.
Maybe that’s why I started this site the way I did.
Still becoming, still learning.
That’s not just something that sounded good underneath my name.
It’s where I actually am.
Sometimes I think about that little girl in Flatbush.
She had no idea where life was going to take her.
Some of it I wish I could have protected her from. Some of it I wish she had done differently. Some of it I’m grateful she got to experience.
But I don’t want to go back and rewrite her anymore.
She’s part of how I got here.
And I’m starting to understand that becoming isn’t about finally getting far enough away from all the versions of myself that came before.
God has been merciful to all of them.
The little girl.
The church girl.
The woman who walked away.
The woman who came back.
And me, right here, still becoming.