The Stories We Carry Across Oceans: Psychiatry, Migration, and the Invisible Psyche

A Soul Series on Migration, Mental Health & the Medicine of Remembering

🌊 What Doesn’t Fit in a Suitcase Still Finds Its Way Into the Body

Before we knew language, we were already fluent in inheritance.

Not the kind etched in wills, but the quiet ones, folded into lullabies sung by weary mothers, carried in the tension of jawlines, stitched into the hems of Sunday dresses, and sealed with salt on cheeks kissed by trade winds and grief.

Some memories never needed to be spoken. They live in us.
In the way we flinch at sudden noise.
In our hypervigilance at airports.
In the sigh we exhale but never quite name.

This is migration.
Not simply geography, but psychic migration.
A dislocation of self.
A quiet recalibration of how much we’re allowed to feel, to dream, to rest.

We don’t just leave countries.
We carry them.
In our gait.
In our insomnia.
In the shame we’re too proud to name.

When Psychiatry Sits at the Table with the Ancestors

I practice psychiatry in the hyphen, between Caribbean daughter and American clinician.
Between faith and pharmacology.
Between silence and the stories that ache to be told.

Western psychiatry taught me to chart symptoms.
But my ancestors taught me to listen beneath them.

And here’s the truth:
You cannot pathologize a people whose stories you’ve never sat still long enough to hear.

I’ve held the hands of brilliant, broken women, whose exhaustion was never laziness, but legacy.
I’ve seen grief mislabeled as depression.
Stoicism mistaken for flat affect.
And ancestral trauma misdiagnosed as a disorder, simply because it didn’t speak DSM.

This is why I’m telling these stories.
To bear witness. To reckon. To restore.

Welcome to “The Stories We Carry Across Oceans”

This is not just a mental health series.
It is a sanctuary.
A soft, wide place to land for women living in-between worlds.

Here, psychiatry walks barefoot beside spirituality.
Neuroscience rests in the hammock of narrative.
And healing is not just treatment, it’s testimony.

We’ll explore:

🔹 Intergenerational trauma wrapped in Sunday lace and silent rage
🔹The immigrant psyche and the ache of becoming twice-removed
🔹The grief of lost tongues and broken rituals
🔹The armor of the “strong Black Caribbean woman,” and what it costs
🔹Narrative psychiatry as both clinical method and cultural liberation
🔹Belonging as medicine
🔹Healing the diasporic soul that learned to shape-shift to survive

Each essay will hold clinical wisdom, cultural critique, and soul prompts, an invitation to reflect, remember, and reclaim.

If You’ve Lived in Translation… This Is For You.

If you’ve ever tried to explain your anxiety in a language that didn’t have the words
If you’ve ever questioned whether your sadness was yours, or your grandmother’s
If you’re a provider who senses something sacred beneath a patient’s silence
Then come closer.

This is for the woman who holds lineage in her womb and ambition in her calendar.
For the woman whose voice echoes across continents, even when she whispers.
For the therapist, the nurse, the mother, the mystic.
For you.

We Are More Than Survivors. We Are Archives.

We are the salt of old seas and the sweetness of new soil.
We are not broken, we are encoded.
We carry maps, memory, medicine.

And we deserve a care that sees us fully
Not just as symptoms.
But as sacred text.

So, let’s begin again.

Let’s name what’s been buried.
Let’s speak what our foremothers could not.
Let’s remember ourselves whole.

🗣 Call to Heart:

What story have you carried across oceans?
✨Share below or send this to someone living between worlds.
Let’s unburden and become again in community.