Gizelle Clemens

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Lately, God’s been winking at me.Which is funny, because grief has also been making itself very comfortable, like it pay...
04/22/2026

Lately, God’s been winking at me.

Which is funny, because grief has also been making itself very comfortable, like it pays rent here! It is right on schedule as we head into May and June.

So let me try something I’ve never done publicly before. If you love me, like me, or have ever said “I got you”…I’m asking you to actually HAVE ME on a few specific days.

Put these in your calendar. Set a reminder. Send a text. A meme. A “thinking of you.” You don’t have to write a novel or be prolific, I will receive it anyway you send it.

Mother’s Day (because… please be serious)
June 11 — my mom’s birthday
June 23 — the day she was killed
October 16 — my birthday (yes, that too)

And honestly? Thanksgiving. Christmas. Valentine’s Day. Because grief doesn’t clock in and out. It freelances.

I’m saying this out loud because I want to normalize asking. Some of us need to be held proactively, no just when we break down or when it’s obvious. Sometimes it is when our body already knows what time it is, even if nobody else does.

Special shoutout to the few people who do this for me without ever being asked. Y’all are elite. Top tier. Hall of fame behavior.

The rest of you? Now you know.

I’ve been called a habitual linestepper for naming hard things and asking directly. I don’t just wear that, I tailor it. 💅🏽

And one last thing, ig you’ve ever snapped at something small or felt yourself get taken out by something that “shouldn’t” have mattered that much. Little darling, that might not be about that moment, it might be grief keeping receipts.

Start tracking it. Not to control it, but so it doesn’t control you. Because once you know its patterns, you can stop letting it catch you off guard.

And maybe, just maybe, we can start showing up for each other with a little more precision. ❤️

Approximately six months ago, I had the incredible opportunity to share the TEDxWilmette stage with Amber Anderson Johns...
04/09/2026

Approximately six months ago, I had the incredible opportunity to share the TEDxWilmette stage with Amber Anderson Johnson in front of a packed house of around 300 passionate listeners. Now, just a few weeks away, I’ll be returning to the stage—but this time for a more intimate gathering of about 30 people—to dive deeper into how care and connection fundamentally shape our relationships.

There are only a few tickets left, grab yours at this link in my bio!

My TEDx talk has quietly become a gathering place.Not in the loud or viral way people usually mean when they talk about ...
02/11/2026

My TEDx talk has quietly become a gathering place.

Not in the loud or viral way people usually mean when they talk about impact, but in the human way. It moves from person to person. Someone sends it to a friend late at night. A teacher plays it for a class. A team shares it during a meeting. Friends and families sit, gather, and press play. People are seeing themselves and each other through it.

Because of that, I am offering something simple.

If you gather people (formally or informally) and you watch my TEDx talk, We Are The Wells, I will join you afterward for a VIRTUAL or LIVE conversation.

This is not a keynote and it is not a performance. It is a real dialogue.

The themes in the talk are not abstract. They live in bodies, relationships, and daily life. They show up in exhaustion, in quiet grief, in disability, in adaptation, and in the ongoing effort to care for one another inside systems that were never designed to hold us.

When we gather, we can talk honestly about:

- burnout and depletion
- grief that does not yet have language
- interdependence
- belonging beyond buzzwords
- what it actually means to sustain each other in real life

We can explore how we learn to tend the wells around us rather than settle for survival.

Some gatherings are organizations. Some are classrooms. Some are simply friends and family who love each other and want to stay connected.

All of it counts.

This offering is for teachers, facilitators, team leads, and community organizers. It is also for people without formal titles who know how to gather others, who feel responsible for the emotional temperature of a room, and who step in when connection begins to thin.

It is for anyone who understands that connection and care aren’t backup plans. They are infrastructure.

If that sounds like you, I would love to sit with you and your people.

Send me a message.

Let us be wells for each other. Let us tend what sustains us.

www.wearethewells.org to watch my TEDx and gather your people.

Image Description: Gizelle Clemens smiles while speaking onstage at TEDxWilmette 2025, wearing a purple dress and a patterned blue jacket under stage lights.

Five years ago, a benign tumor embedded itself in my spinal cord and quietly rearranged my life.Just two weeks later, on...
01/07/2026

Five years ago, a benign tumor embedded itself in my spinal cord and quietly rearranged my life.
Just two weeks later, one of my closest friends, AnnaRose King, lost her battle with malignant tumors of her own.

Back then, life felt unbearably unfair and maybe it was. I had already buried my mother, Heather Clemens, in City of Newark, NJ - City Hall eleven years earlier, suddenly and violently, long before I was ready. Add the ordinary heartbreaks of loving, losing, hoping, becoming, and it would have been reasonable to believe I had already endured enough. But grief, it seems, does not consult our capacity to endure more.

Still, just as God did in 2009, God met me again. In the stillness of Northwestern Medicine and Shirley Ryan Abilitylab hospital rooms and in the loneliness of home. In the slow, often unseen work of picking up the fragments of a life and learning how to live inside a body and a future that would never return to what it once was.

I hesitate to call what followed “new.” It felt more like a remembering and a reaching inward toward something deeper, older, and already present.

Five years later, I am deeply proud of who I am becoming. There are moments when I ache over all I have had to carry and then I pause, and I see it differently: look at what I survived, at what held, and what grew.

People may celebrate the accolades, the milestones, the visible wins. (LinkedIn has the highlight reel.) But my quiet triumph has been learning to loosen my grip on internalized ableism, to stop measuring my worth by endurance, speed, or productivity.

I always resisted hustle culture, especially the version that asks Black women to disappear inside effort and call it excellence. But the disability community gave me language. It gave me permission. It gave me a deeper understanding of care, not as weakness, but as wisdom.

Five years later, I am still here. Changed, yes, but more myself than ever.

Image Description: A Black woman stands in tall green grass on a sunny day, wearing a strapless black dress and gold jewelry. She looks calmly at the camera while holding a colorful butterfly cane, with a leg brace visible on one leg.

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Chicago, IL
60611

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