Whether I always understood it or not, my grandmother Nicole is one of the reasons I am so determined to live an expansive life.
It is not always easy to write about her.
She was a beautiful woman who spent much of her adult life living with serious mental-health symptoms that the people around her did not have the language, resources or support to understand well. I cannot tell you, with certainty, what diagnosis would explain what she experienced. I can tell you that her suffering was often interpreted through fear, stigma and spiritual explanations rather than met with the sustained care she deserved.
Her world became painfully small.
I learned that she had died while sitting in my favorite spaghetti spot in Ghana.
I remember feeling grief and relief at the same time. Grief because she was gone. Relief because a life marked by illness, mistreatment and isolation had finally stopped hurting her.
That combination of feelings was complicated then. It still is.
But when I think about my grandmother now, I often think about places.
I have a favorite spaghetti spot in Accra, Ghana.
I have a favorite pizza spot in El Paradon, Guatemala.
I have a favorite jollof spot in The Bronx, New York.
I have a favorite udon spot in Montreal, Canada.
Those places matter to me for reasons that have very little to do with food. They are evidence of movement. Choice. Curiosity. A life that has had room to stretch beyond one neighborhood, one expectation, one version of who I am allowed to be.
“The freedom to live expansively is something I refuse to take for granted.”
I know what it is to struggle with my own mental health. In my late teens and early twenties, depression and anxiety consumed parts of my life that I still grieve. There were years when my world felt much smaller than I wanted it to be, when simply making it through the day took more out of me than I knew how to explain. Sometimes I think about the experiences I missed, the opportunities I let pass, and the version of myself I might have known sooner if I had not spent so much time simply trying to stay afloat.
That is part of why my grandmother’s story stays with me so deeply.
In my own way, I understand what it feels like when your own mind begins placing limits around your life.
The difference is that I have things my grandmother never had: language for what I am experiencing, access to mental health care, the ability to ask for help, the freedom to leave, the freedom to return, and enough autonomy to build a life around more than survival. I have choices available to me that she simply did not.
I want to honor her by using the freedom I have.
To go places.
To come home.
To ask for help when I need it.
To build a life with joy in it on purpose.
And every so often, to sit in some little restaurant far from where I started and remember that being there is not ordinary to me.
It is part of the inheritance I choose to make from her life.