Monday, February 14, 2011

My Life: Part One - Young Kazi


Some would say I had challenges against me before I even began. I am biracial, and I was born to a white mother, and black father. For reasons that I will get into, I was separated from the black side of my family and raised in a white suburban neighborhood. I’m not sure which came next after that; my stuttering problem, or my social anxiety, or were they both ramifications of my original separation? Love is a powerful thing though, and it lifted me and guided me through the confusion, and dark nights ahead.

I learned the power of love the hard way, through multiple abandonments to follow. Yet from the darkest voids in my young life came a guidance that would grow stronger and stronger in my life. Until on my 19th birthday, when it literally grabbed me and shook me awake!

Looking back now, I hardly remember young Kazi. He seems a mere shell of what I have become. But upon a closer look I realize that he is more like the “core” of who I am now. As time has gone on I have learned to believe in dualities, and I have come to understand this to be one of the many in my life.

See when I began this adventure that became a life, I was completely introverted , yet on the same hand, full of myself….and only myself. I can remember that as a child I use to pretend that I was on my own TV show….FOR DAYS!

What it brought me was a feeling of important unimportance ( see what I mean about the dualities ). Deep down I knew I was isolated, but I could not summon up the courage, or love, to change. At least not as rapidly as I would have liked. So if I was made to feel like I was alone in the world; I was going to act like I was the only one who was real in the world. Perhaps my broadcast would be seen by some people in the real world back home!

In retrospective, it was my way of adapting to the difficult situation of being raised biracial. Not that I would have changed it for the world. I believe we each choose our incarnations. Mine has been a wonderful one, with a wonderfully select set of lessons.


I was raised by my maternal, white, Jewish grandparents since the age of one. My mother who was 19 and pregnant with my sister at the time, fled with us from my (African American ) father, who was trapped in his own hell of substance abuse. We went to live with her parents. Growing up is never easy, but growing up being biracial in the 1970’s, in a completely white neighborhood was especially “challenging”. The isolation and helplessness only intensified when my mother moved out of the house.

Yet with each tragic blow awaited a blessing, and my grandparents stepped up, loved us, and continued to raise us by themselves. I did not find out till much later in life how redemptive this would be for everybody on a karmic level.

My spirituality was intrinsic, but I didn’t have very much actual spiritual knowledge at the beginning and my progress was slow, measured in years, and decades. But like the 100th Monkey, eventually the progress began to be seen in my life faster and faster.

Before I began to journal, each day blended into the other. Sprinkled with occasional victories and insights I somehow managed to eek out a life. Somehow I did not spiral down the slope of isolation I drew into my existence. I did not know it at the time, but I was suffering from Social Anxiety Disorder from birth. In my head all it did was make my show more important.


I had no idea I was being influenced by such forces as heredity, both biologically, and emotionally. I did not know of the struggles in my ancestral line, nor the plan they had for me. A plan that would cross the centuries, the oceans, and the even the grave for me.

I could have no idea that one day, on my 19th birthday the hand of God would swoop me up, shattering the existence I had delicately pieced together!


  • You can read about all the life changing experiences that followed, in my upcoming book titled, “Game Over: How to Thrive At A Time of Chaos”. Be sure to join my blog: www.kazikearse.blogspot.com for more information and updates!!!