The Power of Perseverance and the Modern Win

By Tawanna-Marie Woolfolk, LCSW

James Baldwin once wrote that it took him years to “vomit up” the lies he had been taught about himself before he could walk the earth as though he had a right to be here. I return to that truth often because my own journey has been a long unlearning, a slow detoxing of stories handed to me, absorbed by me, believed by me, and never meant for me.

Five years ago, I was still living inside those inherited truths. I was masking my autism, my ADHD, and what I now recognize as a lifelong Nonverbal Learning Disorder—not out of deceit but out of survival. I performed excellence the way some people recite hymns: from memory, from conditioning, from the hope that maybe this time it would finally earn me safety.

But success built on self-abandonment is not success. It is erosion—and it is erasure.

Today, success feels different. It is quieter, more rooted, more embodied—and more unmasked, more resonant, and more audacious. It feels like my own breath belonging to me again, like my nervous system finally allowed to soften, like walking the earth—like Baldwin—as though I, too, have a right to be here.

As an autistic–ADHD, non–childbearing-by-choice woman, I have come to understand that my vocation is not motherhood in the traditional sense but mothering as midwifery of truth. I steward the rebirth of women—especially those in their thirties through their seventies—who have spent decades believing stories that were never theirs. They were told they were too sensitive, too intense, too inconsistent, too emotional, too withdrawn, too much or not enough, when in reality they were neurodivergent, brilliant, misnamed, and surviving.

Everything began to shift in June 2022, when I reunited with my birth mother, Mama Liz—a matriarch whose return awakened something ancient in me. During our first virtual reunion, supported gently by my therapist, I looked at the woman who brought me into this world and said words she had never heard: “You deserve to be free. You deserve healing.” She told me the six-year-old inside her—the child who had carried shame and silence for fifty years—finally felt relief.

Witnessing her healing in real time became the catalyst for my own. Yet the three years that followed brought a profound unraveling—a purification that stripped my life to bone truth. Relationships fractured, stability dissolved, and safety eroded at every seam. Even as my own life fell apart, something holy was happening: the woman who birthed me was being reborn, and her liberation called me deeper into my own.

Through Doula for the Soul Enterprises, I guide women through their own Baldwin-like unlearning—the detoxing of mind, body, and spirit from the truths they inherited but never deserved.

I help them hear their nervous systems again, understand their neurodivergence without shame, and reclaim the parts of themselves they exiled to survive. My leadership is consent-based, trauma-informed, and rooted in embodied safety. Winning, to me, is not applause but the moment a woman stops negotiating with her own harm and walks the earth—steady, sovereign, unmasked—as though she has a right to be here. Because she does. We all do.

Perseverance for me is not about pushing harder but about softening into truth. It is the courage to unlearn what was never mine and to stand firmly in what is. Every woman I support teaches me that healing is possible in any season of life, and that returning to oneself is the most powerful victory we can ever claim—and choose again each new day.

Connect With Tawanna-Marie

IG: @doulaforthesoulenterprises

FACEBOOK: @Tawanna Marie W.

www.linkedin.com/in/tawanna-woolfolk

Email: TMW6328@GMAIL.COM