Standing in front of the mirror, admiring my black graduation gown with my first-generation stole draped around my neck, I envision walking across the stage Dec. 17 to receive my journalism degree from OU.
Like all graduates, I feel grateful. I feel worthy. I feel proud.
Also, it feels miraculous. I have beat all odds.
Growing up, I never imagined going to college. I stopped engaging in school in fifth grade. I dropped out at 16. Growing up, I had no idea about the importance of an education.
My parents got divorced when I was 6, and they would get back together between my mom's four other failed marriages. My mom had bipolar disorder and was often in and out of mental hospitals. My dad was an abusive drug addict who cried and yelled most of the time. Between ages 6 and 17, I lived in 27 different homes in Oklahoma City.
Brooklyn Learned in regalia holding diploma.
Through it all, my only way of escaping my dysfunctional home life was writing.
I used to sit alone, writing about anything and everything I could think of. Writing was an escape that took me to a place where I could feel good about myself. Writing was my only comfort until I was 11, when I took my first drink of alcohol and suddenly — finally — felt comfortable in my skin.
Being intoxicated allowed me to feel like I could be someone great, but the only action I took amid those fleeting feelings was another drink.
Soon, I gave away what I thought was any chance of having a good life. And, in doing so, I gave away my passion for writing and forgot about the comfort and courage it brought me.
I became homeless for the first time when I was 19. My addictions and destructive behavior held me captive in a vicious cycle for years. The maddening loneliness and slew of conflicting emotions were almost too much to bear at times. Being homeless was dehumanizing. My reflection was becoming almost unrecognizable.
In a period of recovery, I managed to obtain my GED at 24. There was a graduation ceremony. I invited my family, wore regalia and walked across the stage. But no one showed up to celebrate my accomplishment. I felt more disappointment than pride.
About three years later, I became homeless in Norman. I will never forget the day. I had solid blisters on the bottom of my feet from walking for so long in the rain because I had nowhere to go. I felt so helpless and humiliated.
Ten years later, walking down the streets of Norman with a backpack on my back looks a lot different. I once slept on the sidewalk near Campus Corner, where I awoke to laughter from a group of tailgaters on game day. Today, I get the honor of walking across campus with a pen and paper in my backpack, ideas in my brain and dreams in my heart.
Dreams of telling other people’s stories. At 38, I have awoken to my potential to live a life better than I could have imagined.
A gown of blue
I hit bottom one day in 2018 and was left with two choices: die or go up.
That came when I found myself gazing at my reflection in the hazy, fake glass of a mental hospital mirror during my ninth visit to that ward in four years. In the midst of a horrifying, substance-induced psychosis, I saw something that both terrified and empowered me. I was seven months pregnant with my third child, who would be my first daughter.
I had lost rights to my two previous children, and the thought of losing another was so horrific that I knew I had to try to make a change. If I didn't, I would not be able to survive on the streets anymore.
I feared more loss would be the death of me.
In that place of peril and possibility, I hallucinated. I feared I was about to be launched into space, to either fall forever or disintegrate by astronomic pressure. I thought I would either die and be on fire forever in hell or be kept alive in a giant, septic, electrical chamber while being tortured by my fellow homeless community.
The only clothes I owned had been taken by the hospital staff to be washed, as if any part of myself could be made clean again.
Ashamed, I stared at myself in an oversized, 1940s hot-blue nightgown like my poverty-stricken, paternal grandma wore while tending her green beans and roses. She never seemed happy.
I shuddered at the thought of ending up alone without any joy forever.
‘It is my strength’
I was terrified when I walked away from that mirror that I would forget what I looked like and that my prayers would never be answered.
But they were answered. Now, I feel about myself just as James said in the Bible, “I look into the perfect law of liberty, and I am blessed indeed.”
After walking away from that mirror a little over four years ago, I haven’t taken a drink of alcohol.
I have built a new life.
Unlike the person I was at 11, when I took my first drink and embraced escape, I now allow myself to feel my feelings while still making healthy choices.
I went from that mental hospital to the same rehab I had been to eight times before. It's nothing short of a miracle that I've been able to keep my 4-year-old daughter and retain my recovery.
I am a single parent, and it is not a weakness for which I need pity. It is my strength.
After getting out of rehab, with the help of a faith-based organization, I was given the opportunity to return to school. When deciding what to pursue, I remembered my love for writing and decided journalism is where I might do the most good.
I started at Oklahoma City Community College in 2019. I became a writer and editor for the Pioneer student newspaper, and the stories I covered helped to bring about needed change by exposing truth that motivated community engagement. In 2021, I transferred to OU, which has been such a healing experience. My feet are no longer blistered, and I am not helpless. I will walk with a sunny disposition and earn my degree with a sense of great pride.
I have paid my way through college with grants and scholarships and have not had to take out any student loans. However, I will forever be indebted to my education, which has given me so much.
Education, the very thing I took for granted as a child, is now the tool that gives me the power to overcome my past. Education has given me confidence in who I am today and who I can be in the future.
My journey once left me devastatingly broken, but I was never destroyed. I was almost — but never totally — hopeless.
I have worked hard to be where I am today. I am happily fighting for where I’ll be tomorrow. And I am winning.
Today, as I gaze into the mirror, I see someone looking to the future with a newfound determination to return to one of my earliest comforts. I look to the world again and write about it, not to escape but to foster understanding.
I possess a clarity of vision and determination to tell stories that hold up a mirror to connect people who otherwise might not see one another.
I have a purpose and a voice, one I’m determined to use for the voiceless.
I write to rehumanize, compel, inform and motivate. Both as a productive member of society and in a profession where I’m earning the trust and respect of a community. Neither of which I felt worthy of for so long.
But writing is not just what I do — it is who I am. I am a writer. I am a storyteller. I am a journalist.
As I declare those four words — I am a journalist — I find long-sought comfort in my own skin.
Truth as a gateway
I am humbled by the privilege and responsibility of being a journalist, where I can help shape the future by cutting through false information to illuminate truth. All the more because writing has been the key that unlocked the gateway to my liberation.
Journalism is a part of the foundation on which people relate to the world. Like standing in front of a mirror that hides no flaws, journalism lays bare the facts and exposes truths. Only in facing them clear-eyed — as individuals or as communities — can we unlock the gates that hold us back from becoming our best selves.
As a journalist, I view myself not as a gatekeeper but as a writer of stories that are gateways to the truths of people’s lives. After that, it's up to each individual — like in my own ongoing journey — to decide which door they go through.
Before walking away from the mirror, imagining myself soon walking across that graduation stage, I smiled and reflected on the gateway that day will mark.
“You did it,” I told myself. “You made it through.”
Brooklyn Learned is a journalism senior at Gaylord College, editorial intern and freelance writer, and — soon — first-generation graduate from the University of Oklahoma.
