was to be the beginning of Set’s new life. But, it was not an easy experience. “I was one of a handful of urban black people they had treated, and they didn’t really understand me or my experience. I had to teach them, get help for myself, and be with all these white people and try to understand them, too. But, I was able to step away from the urban environment I had been in and find some peace. My friends and family coined a phrase about my volatile emotions. They would say of me, ‘Set trippin.’ I found out that that wasn’t the real me that was so crazy, it was a chemical imbalance in my brain. I learned I have a condition I can control, but I had to attack it the way I attacked my schoolwork. I have wished that my whole nuclear family could learn what I learned in that month. Sierra Tucson saved my life!”
After her discharge from Sierra Tucson, Set settled in Sausalito with her children. She attended intensive psychotherapy for two years, combining individual and group therapy with 12-Step meetings of Codependents Anonymous and Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. She was determined to continue to heal herself and create a foundation of mental health. She says that her rages all but disappeared and she became more aware of herself. Set makes the point that some aspects of mental health can be hereditary as well as environmental. “If you are continuing to have emotional problems or are continuing to use drugs, or going to jail, look into it,” she says. “There is help available.”
Once Set’s emotional health stabilized, she felt ready to return to school. “I’m dyslexic,” she explains. “I was six before I could spell my own name and I couldn’t read well. I hated to read out loud the way you have to do in grade school. And for the longest time I didn’t believe I could have a career. I thought maybe I could do something simple. I tried going to cosmetology school after Tupac died. But, there was too much gossip and everyone always asking, ‘Who killed Tupac?’ I just couldn’t stay. But, I am ambitious and I decided I needed to get the basic skills I had missed in high school. I enrolled in The College of Marin, a local community college near where I was living in California, and I learned so much! In high school I had learned that I could be somebody, but now I learned academic skills I really needed.”
When Set returned to Atlanta, she gained entrance to Clark University. She remained a student for one year, and though she says that she doesn’t remember much of what she learned there, what she did get was the confidence to pursue a career. There were several fitful starts and stops, with Set gaining experience along the way. She opened a beauty salon, but had trusted the wrong person as a partner, and had to leave that behind. She loved fashion and wanted to design clothes, but didn’t find a lot of support. Even so, she persevered and created her clothing line, Madame Velli, based on her own designs. She was determined to bring her ideas to market. “Before I went to Sierra Tucson I was overweight, had no confidence, and didn’t think of myself as pretty,” she says. “My idea of myself was what I saw reflected from the men and what they said about me. I just thought I couldn’t compete. When I received money from my brother’s endowment, I began to wear high fashion clothes, and I saw how I was judged differently as a result. I could see that the clothes were a distraction from me. They held me in a particular way. I wanted to design clothes that empowered women to be themselves.”
Set says that she decided to continue recreating herself. She had some cosmetic surgery despite disapproval from others. “Its what I wanted, and I just didn’t care what others said about it.” She married Gregory Jackson, in a magnificent and meaningful ceremony in her mother’s backyard. “Greg is totally supportive of me,” she says. “He adds stability to my life and I enjoy being a stepmother to his children.”
Nowadays, Set is one of the proud owners of a boutique clothing store in Decatur, GA, called The Wild Seed, in honor of her favorite author, Octavia Butler, who wrote a book by the same name.
“I’m a girl who most people wouldn’t think I’d read Octavia Butler. But I began reading her stories and books when I was eighteen or nineteen years old. I wept when she died recently and I wanted to acknowledge her in this way.”
In addition to her work at The Wild Seed, Set serves on the Board of Directors of The Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts in Stone Mountain, GA. She is the liaison for “Pac’s Kids,” who are students at the Center, and teaches healthy empowerment classes to them in the summer program, employing some of the ideas and techniques she learned during her own recovery process.
Set is an advocate for mental health whenever the opportunity arises. She is emotional and adamant when she says, “I truly believe that improving people’s mental health and addressing depression and post-traumatic stress disorder would lessen poverty, domestic violence, child abuse, drug addiction, and gang activity.” She alludes to a recent trip she made to South Africa where she visited in Soweto. “There was so much despair and depression and it reminded me of what I felt like when I was depressed. When a person is depressed, there is just a feeling of nowhere to go. This is an issue that needs addressing worldwide. So, my best advice is to attend to your mental health. Doing that changed my life.”
Denise Stokes
“I can’t be who I am, if I don’t know who I am.”
I heard about Denise Stokes through another woman I interviewed for this book. “You should really be talking to Denise Stokes,” Sonya Lockett said to me. “She is amazing in her work educating people about HIV and AID’s.”
I went to Atlanta, Georgia to meet with Denise, who came to my hotel wearing a beautiful dress with a flowing cape over it. She looked absolutely elegant, and though she has been HIV positive for many years now, she is the picture of health.
Denise has also been in recovery from drugs and alcohol for many years. And so, we had a brief discussion about my career treating substance abusers before moving on to talk about her very remarkable life.
Denise Stokes says that she grew up in a family that was secretive and confusing. She never really knew her father, and her mother had a fury in her that kept her children from asking any questions or approaching her much at all. Denise found out that she had older siblings when she had a crush on a neighborhood boy and her cousin explained that he was actually Denise’s brother. She found out about a sister by noticing a photo in an album at her grandmother’s house and asking whom it was.
Trying to figure out such basic information as family ties made Denise quite a detective. Her mother told the children very little, and though she could be fun and outgoing, she didn’t know how to express love for them. There was little in the way of conversation and no affection whatsoever. It was a barren environment.
Denise found comfort in all types of music. She found that certain song lyrics seemed to validate her feelings. When she heard Prince sing “Let’s Go Crazy,” it let her know that someone else understood the way she questioned the world and its meaning.
She also loved words and the dictionary. Denise would write poetry as a way to express her feelings and then hide it so that no one would see it.
Early on, Denise was labeled as a bad child. Since there was no one to explain things to her, she explored and tried to figure things out on her own. This frequently got her in trouble. For example, there was a black cat at her grandmother’s house that everyone chased away. Denise was only seven at the time and she thought that if this cat weren’t black, he would have a better life. So, she got a can of white paint and a brush and painted the cat white. The poor cat died and the word went out that Denise hated the cat and intentionally killed it. Nothing could have been further from the truth, but the “bad” label stuck.
Denise says that she comes from several generations of abused and abusive women, so it is not surprising that she began running away from home when she was eleven to escape the cruelty there. She was always returned to her mother, where she endured the instability of many moves and a string of stepfathers.
When she was in the ninth grade, a construction worker raped Denise near her home. Her mother’s rule was that Denise had to be home when the streetlights came on; and, because she was late, her mother began hitting her with a belt as she came in the door. She was in shock