A Letter of Gratitude to a Woman Who Always Arrives on Time
There are women who teach loudly, and there are women who teach quietly. There are women who want to be followed, and women who simply leave breadcrumbs and trust you to find your own way. Kendall St. Charles has always been the latter for me. I found her online in late 2016, during a time when I was searching not frantically, but deeply. Searching for language. Searching for confirmation. Searching for someone who could articulate what it meant to be a Black woman who was spiritual, intuitive, mentally ill, intelligent, wounded, and still very much alive. I recognized her immediately not because our lives were identical, but because our themes were. Single motherhood. Afrocentricity as both armor and identity in our youth. Depression that didn’t just make life heavy, but at times made it unlivable. A deep intuition that lived in a dreamlike realm rich, symbolic, meaningful but also dangerous if left untethered to reality. A longing to be grounded without being flattened. Awake without being lost. Kendall found her grounding through a woman mentor another Black woman who held space for her spiritual development alongside therapy and clinical care. She chose integration. She chose discernment. She chose safety. I did not. I took a more Afro-Cuban route spiritually, and every guide I encountered was male. Every experience eventually became destabilizing. Every “initiation” touched wounds I did not yet have the language or power to protect. What was framed as spiritual expansion often became retraumatization. Old childhood abuses were echoed instead of healed. I walked away. And in many ways, I have felt stunted ever since. I know I am intuitive. I see patterns. I feel truth before it arrives in words. But I do not have a spiritual practice the way Kendall does. I don’t have ritual held in safety. I don’t have a container that honors both my psyche and my soul. Still every time I reach a moment where I need a woman’s hand, Kendall appears. Not to save me. Never to save me. But to mirror me back to myself. She arrives like a fairy godmother who refuses the fantasy. And it is not lost on me that her current work is called The Cinderella Detox. Because that is exactly what she has always offered: a detox from fantasy.
A dismantling of the fairy tales women live inside not just romantic ones, but spiritual ones, political ones, racial ones, personal ones. The stories we inherit. The stories we cling to. The stories that promise rescue instead of responsibility. I know my fairy tale well. I would not have been involved with Prince Charming without it. I wanted to be chosen. I wanted to be saved. I wanted the house, the partnership, the “finally.” I wanted to step into a life that felt earned through suffering alone, as if endurance itself was a down payment. Goldilocks fantasies. Cinderella fantasies. Spiritual fantasies. Romantic fantasies. No one was coming to save me. Not Prince Charming. Not Kendall. No one. And that is the most loving truth. Kendall never offered rescue she offered clarity. She never positioned herself as the answer she asked better questions. She never exploited vulnerability she protected it. And she paid for that. Her platforms were violated. Her privacy was breached. Women-only spaces were disrespected. Trust was broken by people who benefited from her labor and then turned on her. Sometimes even men infiltrated spaces that were never meant for them. She endured doxxing, harassment, and abuse not because she was wrong, but because she was right and principled enough to hold boundaries in a world that punishes women for doing so. I honor that. I honor her restraint. I honor her discernment. I honor her willingness to go underground when intuition said it was time and her courage to return when intuition said it mattered. Most of all, I honor what she gave me without ever knowing me personally: Permission. Permission to be a little “crazy” and still be correct. Permission to trust my perception even when it didn’t make me likable. Permission to understand that intuition without grounding is dangerous but grounding without intuition is deadening.
Permission to grow up without hardening. I genuinely don’t know where I would be without her voice echoing somewhere in the background of my becoming. I think I would still be thinking these thoughts but I would doubt them. I would second-guess myself into silence. I would assume my insecurity meant my insight was invalid. She showed me that insecurity and insight can coexist and that wisdom often comes wrapped in tenderness, not certainty.
So this is not a tribute to a savior. It is a thank-you to a woman who walked her own path so honestly that it lit the way for others without ever demanding allegiance, obedience, or belief. Thank you, Kendall. Thank you, Blue. For arriving when you do. For leaving when you must. For never lying to us. For never lying to yourself. And for reminding me again and again that waking up is not a fairy tale. It’s real life. And it’s ours to claim.
