And, yet, we have decided that oppression and killing people is more important than liberation. We have decided that power over people is better than power with others, better than building systems that love and honor humanity. And I can't stay silent and not say something publicly about the fact that the powers that be need to crumble.

The President's claims, this morning, of killing a whole civilization (Iran), the potential of a nuclear attack, the continued genocides happening all over the world to Black Americans, to Muslims all over the Middle east, Native Americans and the Indigenous of the world, to the Palestinians, to the Iranians, to the Lebanese - just to name a few!

It is beyond me, beyond my spectrum of understanding, because I am not evil. I do not understand evil. It is meant to be beyond comprehension to people that honor humanity. And maybe other people are more well-versed in this because I've been surrounded by evil doers my entire life, you know. Maybe they can explain?

But I think we're at a place now where something gotta shake. We've been here a long time - which is why I'm grateful I'm of the lineage of Black Radicalism. I am so ready for the current administrations, the current systems, the current powers that be to crumble! The way we have more resources than we have ever had on this planet and we allow the wealthy elite to suck us dry, to pull humanity from us as if we are not living, is audacious, is disgusting, is deplorable.

And if there was ever a time to see that liberation and power is in your hands, now is the time to see it. Stop acting so helpless!

Do your work in the world and do it without apology. And do it in a way that makes the loudest noise. As a scholar, as a writer, as a developer of human beings, a lover of life, a person born into grief, that has learned from that grief, to witness humanity with all of me. It is time to use my voice to speak up about the atrocities of the world. The atrocities of anti-Blackness, the atrocities of xenophobia, the atrocities of homophobia, the atrocities of patriarchy. People are losing their lives because the elite want power. There should be no elite. People are losing their lives because small people want to inflict terror to feel big.

We have all of the resources needed so everyone on this planet can be fed and sheltered and have health care - all kinds of care, honestly. And yet we're looking at credit scores and taxes that extract from the majority of our populace and make us feel absolutely powerless in the face of inhumane destruction.

This last year, as Founder and Managing Director, I did very few “business” things because I had to heal emotionally from life and physically from recurring fibroids; I had to become a new version of myself — Ocean Novae Anuru — so I could firmly hold Dream Keep’s vision through my own growth and transformation. Living with Complex PTSD has required deliberate intention, deep self-love, and fierce love for my people, as well as reverence for our ability to heal, to make mistakes, to get back up again. The fact that Dream Keep Consulting has existed for 6 whole years outside of my brain and body is a testament to my faith.

Dream Keep was born out of my disenchantment with and harm from the nonprofit industrial complex, after giving so much of my life and labor to organizations that injured me. Even as a side hustle, Dream Keep became a safe place where I did not have to dim my propensity for radical change in a world that desperately needs it. A world where white supremacy culture still insists we do not belong in the very places we have been planted - willingly and unwillingly - and where there is no negotiating my freedom and no reason for me to shrink. As I write my dissertation and its literature review, bringing together Black Feminist Thought, the Matrix of Domination, anti-Blackness, my original definitions of the structural understandings of trauma, and the Five Faces of Oppression to analyze the experiences of Black youth in human service organizations (focused on mental health), I feel planted and rooted.

I remember defining “hood” for the first time because so many conversations kept missing the point; Dream Keep’s first year of existence was just me arguing with people about why I love my own culture. Other aspects of Black culture are not challenged this way - if Black elites celebrate what they enjoy, no one questions it - but the moment a Black Hood/Ghetto person says, “I love being this,” people become uncomfortable with the absence of self-hate. I love being part of a culture that is world-renowned, revolutionary, always dreaming, planning, and doing. That dynamic culture anchors my sense that I belong on this earth exactly as I am.

I was born in 1992, a year of reckoning that included Rodney King and the LA uprisings, and by age five, my father went to prison; I had already been marked by state and interpersonal violence. 1997 was a terrible year, for the record. Additionally, the same year I was first sexually assaulted - which led to years of continued assaults - Amadou Diallo was murdered. I grew up in an actual hood context with a dangerous, abusive father whose actions were serious enough to be documented in places like the New York Times, including a shootout at my house the day he was arrested. I have lived the suffering that hood culture eloquently describes: my mother died when I was 2 days old, and I have endured realities I do not need to over-explain. I turned to structural analysis as I approached adulthood, studying psychology, public health, social work, and education to understand how people can predict a Black child’s life outcomes by age five using their race and zip code.

I am from 10453 in The Boogie Down Bronx (aka Mount Hope - I didn’t know this name until I was grown), and there is nothing anyone can do to make me ashamed of that. My mother left me a literal wall of books in my living room - and I have been reading since I was 3; I have always been a Hood Scholar, the child with big dreams who loved thinking, pondering, growing, failing so I could learn, and winning. Losing my mother so early made me acutely aware that life is finite, which brings me a peace others may not understand. Knowing I will die one day forces me to be deliberate about who I want to be, the world I want to create, and the spaces I want to inhabit. Over the years, so many people have told me they felt safe for the first time in my trainings or meetings - safe enough to speak truths they had held for years - because I shared my own angst, the child abuse and torture I survived, and the power I reclaimed from a family that did not appreciate my existence. They ain’t have the capacity to hold me. And it’s okay because I had the capacity to hold myself and many more.

My mother lived and died in a domestically violent relationship with my father, and I was the last piece of a puzzle she was trying to solve as she navigated his threats, her own sickle cell anemia, and the loss of her brother just months before my birth. I have always known there was something unusual about how I arrived here, but she made choices that ensured I would be born, even though we both nearly died in the process. I have literally lived in the shadow of Black maternal mortality since the beginning of my life. I have lived through losing my first nephew to SIDS when he was two months old when I was only 5; Black infant mortality also knows me. I grew up in the depths of grief — watching structural racism, drugs, and preventable deaths ravage my community. I have seen the trend of Black people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s dying suddenly from heart disease, strokes, cancers, and undiagnosed conditions — patterns that sit at the intersection of public health and social work.

My life has been hard, but I would do it all again to be Ocean Novae Anuru — to have this wisdom and this way of seeing the world — to feel the deep connection I feel when I read Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and so many others. Being Black American is the most magical thing on the planet, and no one can make me hate myself, no matter how hard my abusive family or the world has tried. My mother poured so much into me and I could never even speak to her — my ancestral connection to her is so powerful. All my mothers were dead by the time I was 2 days old — I have lived the statistics others invoke for clout. But I do not want clout — I want liberation for my people. I am still surviving an ongoing genocide in which people close to me have been casualties, and Dream Keep Consulting is a direct thread to Black American liberation.

Black Americans, despite being slaughtered for decades in a nation that claims to be “post-racial,” built this country through stolen labor: that truth cannot be sanitized. All my grandparents are from the South and travelled up to New York City during the Great Migration, which means my people built the agricultural wealth that enriched white elites while being treated as currency themselves.

Dream Keep reaching its 6th birthday is a miracle, especially after I spent the past year fighting for my life — battling fibroids, facing complex PTSD terrors, including confronting the resurfaced trauma of my dead mother’s twin brother, my first rapist, who harassed me 25 years after repeatedly sexually assaulting me when I was 7 years old. I will not sugarcoat my life, my passion, or my ability to dream. Audre Lorde said, “I am deliberate and afraid of nothing,” and even when I do feel fear, I tend to do the thing anyway if it needs to get done. Through all the documents, websites, courses, and growth, there is still so much more to come; I had to crawl through the healing process over the last six years — through a broken leg healing, my first fibroids surgery in ‘23 leading to a hysterectomy last year, and eventually accepting a reimagined path to motherhood in the future. I birthed Dream Keep Consulting just weeks after I finished the physical therapy where I taught myself how to walk again as an adult! I may have a different journey if I choose to be a biological mother, but I am already a community mother who has been doing this work for a long time. I want other adults to see themselves so they can show up better for their kids.

Ten years ago, when Trump was first elected, I said he would bring America to her knees, that he would be this country’s reckoning, and I wasn’t wrong. I have had to heal my self-concept after years of torture, abuse, neglect, and exploitation - from childhood into young adulthood - moving through treacherous waters and still choosing life. We know white supremacy culture, what it is capable of, and how to survive it, even as we acknowledge that there will be more casualties.

My purpose is forged so deeply inside me that no one can get in the way of it; if someone steps in my path, I will go around, grateful for the chance to finesse. I am proud of myself for still being alive and for Dream Keep still being alive. Even though we pressed pause so I could learn how to live well, Dream Keep is not dead; it will carry me and my niggas — and there is so much more work ahead.

I am grateful that I took a chance on myself and on Dream Keep, and I cannot wait to reveal all the things I have been dreaming and planning while in the deep trenches of healing. I am finally stepping out of that space — “I’m coming out!”, as Diana Ross sings — and “I want the world to know!”

Happy birthday, Dream Keep. 6 is an amazing number — of power, reflection, and stability — and now it is time to figure out how to elevate this work so we can move undeterred through the world, far beyond my individual life. This is for the ancestors and the descendants, forever!

So, there’s a saying going around right now that the world is on fire. My biggest question is, since when has it not been on fire? In my almost 34 years of living life, I haven’t run across any times where it - especially America - wasn’t on fire. What version of the world are y’ all are living in? What privilege blocked yor vision? First off, let’s start there. Second off, key questions: what do you do to navigate chaos? What do you do to navigate evil? What do you do to navigate high disappointment? What do you do to navigate trauma in real time?

I think it is essential that in times of crises, such as this moment - which we have been in for an extremely long amount of time - that we ground ourselves. The crisis is so critical now that people are starting to ask beautiful questions like, “What happens after this?” There’s an extreme overwhelm present in the claim that there’s nothing we can do for the most part. And I want to push back against that notion. We are not powerless. There’s plenty that we can do, but it depends on what level of action and change you’re looking at. That being said, I think it is time that we start listening to our dreamers, our radicals, our people who are outside of these systems and subversive, and know that these systems were never made for them (aka listen to woke Black folks - start there).

This is a time where your dreaming fully activates - if you doing it well. The way I’m looking at it, the Hood has always taught me to dream outside of systems that don’t give a fuck about me or my life. That’s just factual. So: what are we going to ponder on? What are we studying? What do we want to exist beyond the horrors that we know? Living with complex PTSD makes me ask this question of myself daily. I don’t get no breaks from this line of questioning. I do not get breaks from the heavy realization that “oh, my goodness, I know the world and it’s terrible because people make terrible decisions.” People choose. They decide actively to terrorize other people. Terror/evil is a thing that people do willingly, willfully. Freewill got these folks messed up! They are doing these atrocities with all of their chests. And if the people who claim oppressive power are willing to do anything with their chest, does that not mean that the people who are deemed “powerless” should not be doing everything with their chest? What is there to lose if we are already dying?

No, really, what do we have to lose at this point? And I’m not saying that our lives aren’t things to lose, because they are. I’m not saying that the comforts we have known are not things to lose, because they are. But in the big scheme of things, what we are noticing right now is that we are living within a world that is in a state of collapse. We know that the structure we have grown up in is not the one we will pass on in every American generation. But I think for the millennial generation and those after us, it’s a little special type of different because we’ve been dealing with, these moments of, “oh, wait, we see this caricature of what the world should have been.”

People have been telling us, “do this thing and you’ll be able to get a job, you’ll be able to be comfortable, you’ll be able to have that American dream” forever! But growing up as a millennial is realizing, one, that it all was a lie. And two, it’s important for us to really think about: how do we give ourselves the space to dream within the current context?

And at the very same time: How do we hold space for the big feelings, the terror, the straight-up fear, the confusion, the dismay, the despair at times? How are we holding ourselves through that? And then how do we hold community through that? There’s truly levels to this shit. Let’s continue to explore these levels together here on my Substack! This is part one of a longer journey!

So who am I?

I am Ocean Novae Anuru, LMSW, MPH, Founder and Managing Director of Dream Keep Consulting. I hail from The Boogie Down Bronx, NYC, and I design brave, practical learning spaces where human service organizations finally tell the truth about harm. We make systemic trauma digestible so real change becomes possible, not just another workshop. Most orgs - nonprofits, schools, youth systems, mental health clinics - claim they fight oppression but mirror it internally through white supremacy culture in leadership, burnout trickling to staff, and harm reaching the communities they label “underserved” while actively treating them poorly. My work challenges organizational dynamics and cultures directly, stopping oppression with authenticity. I work towards liberation in our lifetime, even when the systems that people build (with their lives) ain’t ready for discomfort. We heal out loud in traumatic systems, protect dreaming while fighting for a better world, and build with real action so Black youth, families, and communities don’t just survive - they thrive, embody safety, and live autonomous lives. Welcome to a piece of my world!