The 7/3 Journey
Stories of healing, growth, and transformation
The 7/3 Journey is Dr. Kim's personal writing space — a place where she thinks out loud about leadership, healing, identity, creativity, and the winding road of a life being lived with intention.
The name comes from July 3rd — a date that holds personal significance in Dr. Kim's own journey of becoming. The essays, reflections, and stories here are written from inside the process, not from the summit looking back. They are honest, specific, and written for anyone who has ever needed to know that someone else is on a winding road too.
The 7/3 Journey is one part of the KinJour Gathering: not a program or a curriculum, but an open invitation. Come read. Come think. Come gather your thoughts alongside someone who is gathering hers.
What You Will Find Here
Essays on leadership — what it actually takes, what it costs, and what it gives back.
Reflections on navigating predominantly white institutions while staying connected to your whole self.
Writing on creativity, rest, healing, and the radical act of deciding that your interior life matters.
Stories from the road — the pivots, the losses, the small and enormous moments of becoming.
Who This Is For
The 7/3 Journey is for anyone walking their own winding road and looking for a companion voice. It is not advice. It is someone thinking honestly on the page — and inviting you to gather your own thoughts alongside her.
Explore the latest reflections below. If something resonates, share it. And if it sparks something in you, Dr. Kim would love to hear.
Tending to Your Legacy—Now
Legacy isn’t a far-off milestone. It’s not something we write in our retirement speeches or only whisper about in eulogies. Legacy lives in the daily—how we move, how we show up, how we speak truth even when our voices tremble. It's in the spaces…
Stitched with Love: Pillows of Legacy and Sisterhood
Every morning, as I step into my office and settle at my desk, I'm greeted by a collection of pillows. Each one is unique, some handcrafted with love and care, all given to me by women who have profoundly impacted my life. These pillows are more than just decor…
From Darkness to Healing and Empowerment and Joy
About a year ago, I was doing a deep clean of an old filing cabinet, one that had seen some of the final years of an abusive and toxic relationship. I hadn’t looked at many of the files in that cabinet in over a decade as they stirred up memories that, in my darkest days of healing, would threaten to tear me back down. But on this day…
Fortune Cookie Wisdoms
Every so often, life serves up a reminder in the most unexpected places… almost sounds like the opener to a Tolkien novel. But recently, while enjoying a meal out, I cracked open a fortune cookie to reveal a slip of paper that read…
Worth Every Step: Reflections on My Doctoral Journey
4,599 Days
Four Thousand Five Hundred Ninety-Nine Days
It took me exactly 4,599 days from the day I embarked on my first attempt at a Doctor of Philosophy degree to the moment I completed my Doctor of Education degree. Nearly 12 and a half years—a period marked not just by academic pursuit but…
Reflections on Self-care and REST
Our society is built around a mentally, emotionally, and physically unhealthy premise that we need to be working, hustling, and grinding in order to live. That we only deserve to rest when our jobs are completed. But whose subjective opinion determines when the work is done?
On Boundaries and the HARD PASS
HARD PASS.
I’ve used this phrase over the last few years in my lexicon, mostly in jest during comical moments with friends and family when talking about things that I really don’t want to do… or eat. And trust me, there are a LOT of things I don’t want to do or eat. We’ll save my pickiness for another post.
Hope, light, love, and peace
The truth is, I’m not the same person I was a week ago…a year ago…before the pandemic wreaked havoc on the world.
I meannn… I was a cheerleader.
I can’t remember the first time I realized I wanted to be a cheerleader. It might have been the time my parents took us to an East Carolina University game when we lived in North Carolina. I was around seven years old at the time. It might have been noticing the cheerleaders on the sidelines while my dad was watching sports on TV. I just remember that it became a “thing” for me for many years to come, just short of an obsession.
TWO DATES
There are two dates on the calendar that have taught me the most about life. And it’s not that other dates don’t have meaning. But these two dates… sometimes they come in loud and hard and challenge me not to break. Other times, they sneak up on me with barely a whisper and shake me to my core.