Meet Joyce Lee

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Joyce Lee. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Joyce below.

Joyce , we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

I come from a long line of contradictions: My mother and her mother were raised in a very close-knit, huge religious Southern family. My father was basically birthed and left to the Fates. My mother was under the strict and impossible control of her mother and never allowed to make her own mistakes, while mistakes were my father’s only teacher. Traits from both of these lineages live in me. My mother was adamant to make me more traditional in the sense of codependent women. She taught me beauty and charm like a lioness teaching her cubs to hunt. My father preached complete independence, grit and hard work. There was a point in my life where I felt like both of my parents were trying to chastise the characteristics of the other parent out of me.

When my parents divorced it was damn-near sinful to hear “you’re like your father” which, of us three girls I was told the most. My sisters, two gorgeous, hyper-feminine women were always the standard I was compared to. They are shorter and thinner than me, so I was in many ways told to shrink. They were more agreeable than me, the youngest, who loved to think critically and challenge, and family dreamed their wedding day aloud with them and told me I would never be loved.

My self-esteem was below the floor for most of my life. I tried my best to shrink, to be agreeable, thin, and other folks version of a woman and only found myself depressed, divorced, all used up and still feeling completely rejected and unloved.

One day my father called me up and told me his sister died. He was driving from the Bay Area to Louisiana to bury her and wanted me to meet his family there, the same family he barely knew until he was a teen. I agreed. I went to Louisiana, to the family farm I didn’t know about until then and saw women with unapologetic eyes and huge bodies that took up space fearlessly. I saw the facial hair and sagging breasts in loose moo-moo’s swaying with them in rocking chairs as they smoked pipes along with their adoring partners. Their smile upon seeing me felt like an answered prayer over a root-altar. They were magic in presence. They were WHOLE Black women. And they “heeeeee-d” and cackled echoes into the clouds at the sight of me and said “O yeeeeaah, you ours.”

We never really spoke much. They showed me how the farm worked, spoon-fed me some family history and let me be. They never complained or asked me to be anything other than what I was and am, WHOLE. Realizing that just like I am partly my parents, I realized I am partly them too and they were lovely, absolutely lovely.

Every time I feel like I can’t do something I think of them – not just the aunties, but all of us: Mom, dad, grandma, sisters – I think of these undying presences and personalities. The negatives and positives that live eternally IN me. I can’t die. I can’t quit. I can’t not be magic. I’m made of too many eternities.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I am an international writer, performer and storyteller and the CEO and Founder of JL Soul Camp. JL Soul Camp is a wellness equity project for Black and Native American women. It is an annual sliding scale, 4 day retreat in Sonoma County, California at Occidental Arts & Ecology Center. At JL Soul Camp womyn are allowed to take in as much rest, community, stillness and nature as their souls need in order to go back to our communities and families in OVERFLOW and serve from there. We are an intentional community and communicate and support each other’s businesses, health, communal needs year-round.

What feels special about JL Soul Camp is that it spotlights rest and affinity spaces among Black women as the need is for us and the unaddressed and unspoken privilege it is for every other racial group. Many other races get funding to be together among their own and are provided spaces carried over by ancestry and/or the government as immigrants. The struggles of Black and First Nation women is being seen as North Americans without any of the privileges therein: Even though we get paid the least and worked the most, we get none of the help as immigrants and no reparations as descendants of political prisoners of war. Our communities are heavily patrolled, and taken and dispersed via gentrification at will. Our men, sons and sisters are demonized and murdered, our daughters are kidnapped and trafficked at the highest rates and there is no thought to our rest, healing or need for one another. One of the most special things about JL Soul Camp is that most of the women do not know one another and have never been given a space among their own reflections where we are served and not serving – where we are untied in joy and not mourning – yet allowed to mourn together. We get to bring the wounds and discover how we are the medicine. We have always been the medicine.

Please visit @JLSoulCamp on IG to keep up with events and fundraisers. This is seriously as grassroots as a project gets. JL SoulCamp crowd-funds year-round to ensure that each woman has what she needs to be there while making the least amount of sacrifice.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

The 3 qualities and skills that have been most impactful in my journey so far are:

1. Community begins with me.
The attitude and patience and love and lightheartedness and healing that I will and desire for JLSC I must first give to myself and others. I created the space and therefore bring the energy. If I want vulnerability from the group I must practice vulnerability with the group. If I want my correction to not be taken in defense I cannot receive correction in defense. If I want women to practice patience in their process I must be patient with women who are processing. Community starts with me. No one is there to serve my ego, so I must serve it or omit it. I must both remove and include myself for the sake of the whole.

2. Consistency is it’s own force.
There have been so many times where I wanted to quit this project because life be lifin’. I began this project while I was in a MFA program (full-time), teaching 8th grade English (full-time), volunteering at a men’s prison, mentoring middle school Black and Brown girls weekly and dealing with some man not worth the spit it takes to cuss him. I had no idea what I was doing, God gave me the vision and I just went with it. I needed help. I have sooooo many famous friends on social media that I reached out to who didn’t say “boo” back and I began to pout and mentally disown people who didn’t owe me a damn thing! lol. I meditated on my negative thoughts and learned that I have what I need, I just had to sift through my own abundance to find it. And what a blessing that is, to be so abundant in resources that I forgot all that I have. This is the vision that was given to ME, not them. This is MY work, not theirs – they’re in their work and have been consistent in their work to the point of success. If I am consistent too, success will be my reward.

3. Trust.
Discouragement is a part of the process. Trust the process and keep going . . . I SAID KEEP GOING.

Any advice for folks feeling overwhelmed?

When I am overwhelmed I stop. Everything goes to the back-burner and I prioritize myself. I cut my phone OFF and sleep for the day – I don’t care who worries. I don’t care about the deadline or promises. made yesterday. I stop. I only have one me. Everything can wait – that job, that problem, that promise, that friendship, that person who I think “needs me” to help – they can wait. If they can’t that’s just too bad, I need me. Tomorrow is for apologies and rescheduling. People will understand or they will refuse to understand, but at least I’ll still be HERE.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jlsoulcamp.com
• Instagram: @jlsoulcamp
• Facebook: JL Soul Camp