Freedom Dreaming in (This) Apocalypse

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”

Audre Lorde

Photo by Habeebah Rasheed Grimes

Last fall, I attended an event where I ran into a dear friend I hadn’t seen in some time. We hugged and exchanged words of acknowledgement and celebration as Black women do and she drew a loved one into our interaction so that we could become acquainted. As she introduced me, she shared, “Habeebah recently quit her good job.” My breath caught in my throat.

Let me first say, I have absolutely no shade for my friend—she knows the realities of leading while being Black and a woman. She has generously nurtured and supported me and many other Black women in the community I call home. But the truth is, I felt a bit of internal conflict hearing myself introduced with this descriptor. Her comment touched on fears I was holding about navigating the space between who I was while leading a nonprofit and who I am becoming since stepping away from that role into a freedom dream.

Also, my dear friend wasn’t wrong. I had indeed stepped away from a “good job.” Until June 2025, I was the CEO of a multi-million dollar nonprofit where I had spent almost all of my professional life and experienced life-changing personal milestones. I was generally respected, trusted, and supported by my peers, colleagues, and board. Yet, after nearly 25 years of service across a variety of roles and 10 years of executive leadership—having served as CEO for seven of those years—I resigned. And I did so with several years to go before I would be eligible to access a penny of my state retirement benefits.

Holding myself out to the world on my own terms and giving myself permission to nurture a freedom dream of being a full-time consultant, speaker, and writer with time on my hands for myself and my family, especially in these deeply disturbing times, was (and still is) scary. But I was being called to use my gifts in a new way, one that would advance my own and others’ healing more explicitly. And I could no longer ignore it.

Freedom dreaming in the midst of this apocalypse is at once terrifying and necessary.

And we are indeed living in apocalyptic times. As I voluntarily left my good job last June, more then 300,000 Black women were being systematically forced from theirs, causing the unemployment rate among our demographic to skyrocket. Black women, including several I know and love, have been caught up in what amounts to a mass firing of Black women professionals from the federal workforce, corporate and nonprofit c-suite positions focused on equity as well as roles in service to federally-funded initiatives aimed at addressing racial disparities—all at the behest of the Trump Administration. Over the past year, hundreds of thousands more Black women have lost contracts and employment opportunities in other sectors. Black women are demonstrably the first casualties of a broader economic free fall.

Since Emancipation, every generation of Black Americans has had to survive an apocalypse, even after surviving the apocalypses that were the Middle Passage and chattel slavery. There were Black Codes, Bloody Summers, redlining, decades of Jim Crow and its violent enforcement, the assassinations of civil rights icons, Reagonomics, the Crack Epidemic, police violence, mass incarceration, and the Great Recession to name a few. Now we must endure the current era of colliding crises that include the United States of America’s return to openly racist imperialist politics and policy.

To survive each era of generational end times, Black women have had to make decisions about the most practical thing to do and did so for survival’s sake. If one were to consider for just a moment Black women’s relentless pursuit of higher education and entrepreneurship, and our persistent efforts to preserve this democracy, you might say to yourself, “Black women must be the most practical people in this nation.” However, despite our pragmatism, we seldom find ourselves thriving or truly free. It has been only our capacity to dream beyond our circumstances that has allowed us to create what we need to achieve freedom.

Thankfully, there are many examples, from the Mother Land to the plantation to present-day, of Black women who understood that there are possibilities beyond the practical and that freedom is possible, even in apocalyptic times. In fact, every generation, before and after slavery, dreamed of freedom and pursued it relentlessly.

And I am in awe of these ancestors’ and elders’ determination to be free. I’ve been personally aware of how hard it is to nurture freedom dreams in apocalyptic times for several months now—struggling even to finish this piece—and often wondered how did they remain so steadfast when the world around them was (at times, quite literally) on fire.

Most days, the fullness of my freedom dreams still feel out of reach but my body has welcomed the ease that the majority of my days allow for, my heart has reveled in the time spent with my sons as I drop them off and pick them up from their destinations, and my spirit has been buoyed by the knowledge that I am able to exist in my dream space because Black women before me placed in me a longing for self-determination, authenticity, and a life of purpose.

So, like them, I am holding fast to my dreams. For myself. For my sons. And for every Black woman standing at the edge of her own possibilities in the midst of this apocalypse.