SWAT Servant with a Testimony

The book opens by presenting itself as a hard-won testimony, framed from the start in military and spiritual language: “spiritual boots on the ground,” “the Abyss,” and the image of a black butterfly struggling toward transformation. Before the narrative begins, the author positions faith as something proven under pressure, not in ease, and the front matter reinforces that message through attestments from friends, family, and ministers who describe her as someone who lived faith in the furnace. Those voices already establish the core tension the memoir will explore: a devoted servant can be faithful, accomplished, and publicly effective, and still be brought low by a suffering no one can readily explain. The book is also explicitly introduced as an account of psychosomatic struggle, with several early notes insisting that mental and physical suffering intersect, that such suffering is real, and that people who are dismissed by medicine are not imagining what is happening to them.

The foreword sets the symbolic framework. The black butterfly becomes the central metaphor for a transformation that happens in darkness, slowly and painfully, in a chrysalis where old forms dissolve before new strength can appear. The author compares her ordeal to Egypt—not a geographic place, but “the place in your own body where you become enslaved to chemistry, hormones, exhaustion, and fear.” That phrase immediately locates the memoir in the body as much as in the spirit. Her deliverance, she says, did not come as a dramatic rescue but as the gradual acquisition of survival skills she never wanted to need. She describes seven years trapped in that chrysalis, unable to measure progress, unable to see what was happening, only aware that she was becoming too small for the life she had known and not yet ready for the one she was becoming. The medical system, meanwhile, could not name what was happening; tests came back normal while she disappeared, pound by pound and capacity by capacity, until the woman who had been the Minister of Music could no longer sing, go to church, or do anything but survive.

That opening theological and symbolic frame continues in the preface, where Carter explains why she wrote the book at all. She says she never intended to write about the worst season of her life, but over seven years she lived in “the abyss,” a deep, dark place where her mind and body conspired against her, doctors found nothing, and yet everything was wrong. She lists what was lost there: her voice, her dog, her weight, her balance, and nearly her faith. The memoir is defined as a survival story, not a medical manual and not a spiritual how-to guide. It is for the woman awake at 3 a.m. with a racing heart while test results insist she is fine, for the minister who cannot make it to church, for the servant abandoned by those she faithfully served, and for anyone trapped in a season that seems to have no exit. She names the kinds of material readers will find: panic attacks, emergency-room visits, people who stopped calling, rubber bands on the wrist, fidget spinners, pineapple juice, and an armory of self-diagnosed remedies. She also names the people who did show up—Sister Tracey, Sister Toovi, Minister Novella, Brother Tory, Mother Ada, Sister Jennifer, Sister Toya—and the unexpected messenger, Stephan, who would later matter deeply in her emergence from isolation.

With Part One, the narrative drops into April 2017 and the beginning of the abyss. Carter says plainly that she was “stuck in Egypt, enslaved for seven years,” and that she had to fight “like a SWAT team” to get through it. She defines “drawn-out” as a process stretched far beyond reason, and from there the memoir begins with the practical trigger that seems almost too small for the devastation that followed: she told the choir at rehearsal to pray for her because she had run out of her supplements. These were natural supplements for female hormones, and she had relied on them for balance. After about a month without them, “Egypt came calling.” The understated way she tells it only heightens the dread; the body’s collapse is shown to begin in a moment of ordinary oversight. She immediately casts the experience as bondage and cries out for God to draw her out, but the book insists that extraction is not instantaneous. Sometimes, she says, one must go through hell.

The early journal entries and ER episodes establish the core pattern of the memoir: symptoms appear, tests fail to explain them, and Carter begins building a private system of survival. The symptoms are emotional and physical together. She records relief from back, neck, and shoulder pain, nervousness, hot flashes, and glucose issues; later entries show her walking alone as a victory, massaging her fingers and toes, using vinegar-soaked cotton balls in her ears, writing worries on paper, meditating twice daily, and stopping compulsive internet surfing. Her routines are not presented as luxury or self-care in the modern sense, but as necessary interventions. By 2018, fear has turned walking into a prison; her heart races, she gets lightheaded, and panic drives her back home. Lavender oil, lavender tea, stress sprays, rubber bands, hand squeezers, and spinners become part of the daily fight to remain functional.

As the abyss deepens, the memoir introduces the first institutional betrayals. Carter cannot go to church on Sunday, something unimaginable for the Minister of Music. She goes to the emergency room repeatedly; intake tests, admissions, more tests, and still nothing. She is treated, checked, and sent home without answers. She is admitted for a couple of days, poked and prodded, and again told nothing is wrong. Yet her body is screaming, her mind fracturing, and her spirit suffocating. The same pattern continues with her worsening ENT problems: ringing in the right ear, balance issues, vertigo, balloon endoscopy, MRI, fluid behind the ear canal, and doctors who offer no satisfying remedy. She starts to treat herself with steaming, pineapple juice, and other natural methods because she must become her own healer when healers fail her.

The opening also introduces the emotional structure of the book: God’s silence, the question “Do You hear me?”, and the shock of hearing, “You are not exempt, my child.” That answer does not soothe her; it frightens her. It tells her that suffering is not being withheld from her, and she must endure like everyone else. She turns to research, starts reading symptoms online, guesses at hypoglycemia, buys sugar tablets and orange juice, and becomes obsessed with checking her blood sugar. The false lead exposes how desperate she is for a name, any name, that can explain what is happening. At the same time, she is losing her lifeline when Anthony Martin, her assistant, gets a better job. He had been walking her dog, doing her laundry, and running errands, so his departure leaves her more isolated just as her body becomes less reliable. By the end of this opening movement, she is widowed from competence, stripped of certainty, and forced to keep asking God the same question while beginning to learn, one painful step at a time, how to survive in the dark.

From the point where the crisis has begun to spread beyond the initial shock, the memoir shifts into the long, grinding work of naming what is happening and trying to stay functional inside it. Carter’s journal entries from 2017 through 2019 become the first major evidence of how she cobbles together survival from tiny, practical acts. On August 10, 2017, she describes a rare moment of relief as pain in her back, neck, and shoulders eases, her nervousness lifts, and she waits for a stress spray while managing glucose and flashes. By the end of August, the victories are still small but concrete: she walks alone, massages her toes and fingers to settle her nerves, uses vinegar-soaked cotton balls in her ears to open her sinuses, writes worries on paper, meditates twice daily, stops compulsive internet surfing, keeps her hands occupied, and uses essential oils to anchor herself. The language of the entries makes clear that she is building a personal care system out of necessity, because the body and the mind are feeding each other’s distress.

By April 2018, the fear has hardened into prison. She forces herself to walk around the block, but panic attacks, lightheadedness, racing heart, and popping veins send her hurrying back home. Lavender oil, lavender tea, rubber bands on her wrist, meditation, prayer, crying, and repeated self-talk become part of a daily campaign to convince herself she can still move through the world. Even basic life becomes fraught: her stomach knots up with gas and ache, and she keeps stress busters, hand squeezers, and spinners nearby. By late 2018 she is losing weight while her body shrinks along with her world. The memoir stresses that this is not imagined suffering; it is physical decline that no one can explain.

The first real shift in tone comes in late 2019 when she begins layering in affirmations and spiritual companionship. After reading Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life, she stands in front of the mirror and speaks release over anxiety, menopause symptoms, and nervousness. She writes thirty-one affirmations and records them on her phone so she can carry them everywhere. Around the same time, church connections flicker back in through phone calls with Sister Toovi and Minister Tracey. Those calls matter because they mark the difference between abandonment and the few people who still help her feel human. Tracey invites her back into choir work for the Christmas program, then later tells her the church has chosen someone else to teach the choir, a disappointment that stings but also pushes Carter back toward her keyboards and practice. The memoir keeps showing that encouragement comes in tiny portals, not grand rescues.

As the illness deepens, the book broadens into its first full argument about psychosomatic suffering. Carter describes the emergency room carousel: repeated visits, normal tests, admissions, more testing, and the maddening refrain that nothing is wrong even while everything is wrong. She is frightened, exhausted, waking in the night with a racing heart, and unable to go to church, which is almost unthinkable for someone whose identity had been built around reliability and public ministry. The hospital can offer neither diagnosis nor relief. At this stage she starts to understand herself as a “health guru” out of desperation, researching symptoms online and trying to solve the mystery alone.

That self-research briefly latches onto the wrong explanation when one ER visit suggests low blood sugar. She buys sugar tablets and orange juice, tests her blood obsessively, and mistakes a temporary drop caused by not eating in the emergency room for chronic hypoglycemia. The false lead matters because it shows how desperate she is for a name for her condition. A diagnosis, even a mistaken one, feels better than being told there is nothing wrong when her body says otherwise. The memoir refuses to treat that confusion lightly; instead, it presents it as the natural result of being frightened, dismissed, and left to self-interpret every signal.

The same season brings another loss that exposes how fragile her support system is. Anthony Martin, her assistant, leaves for a better job after having held together parts of her life that she could no longer manage herself. He had walked the dog, done laundry, and run errands, and his departure strips away the last practical scaffolding at precisely the moment she most needs it. She starts calling neighbors to help walk Lady Carter, because she is too weak and too stressed to do it alone. The memoir makes the dependence plain: she is not only sick, she is gradually losing the infrastructure that allowed her to function.

A major sorrow follows with Lady Carter, the dog who becomes both companion and emblem of the life she is trying not to lose. Carter tells how Lady first found her, a dirty white dog that jumped into her car as if choosing her. She names her Lady, dresses her in pink, gives her a princess bed, and later learns the dog’s true name had been Bella, given up temporarily by a family that could not keep her. The story is funny, affectionate, and tragic all at once, because Lady becomes a refuge during Carter’s emotional collapse. When the dog later develops inflamed back pain and has to be put to sleep, Carter is devastated. She does not mourn properly because she fears breaking completely. The loss sits on top of everything else: the illness, the isolation, the deadening absence of church life, the sense that God has delayed deliverance far past what she can bear.

The memoir then pushes deeper into the physical symptoms themselves, showing how anxiety and grief become bodily states. Carter’s ear rings constantly, her balance is off, she experiences vertigo, and an MRI shows fluid behind her ear canal. She undergoes a balloon endoscopy, bleeds heavily afterward, and later turns to steaming, pineapple juice, humidifiers, and saline sprays. The details matter because they show the body as a battleground where stress appears in the ears, nose, throat, stomach, legs, and voice. Her legs feel weak, her stomach is chronically tight from clenching, she wakes at night with adrenaline dumps, and she keeps a phone nearby in case she needs 911. She is afraid to leave the house, invents excuses to avoid people, and walks daily in a constant internal debate between panic and stubborn faith. The routine is less about fitness than resistance: if she stops walking, she fears the abyss wins.

The chapter on her self-diagnosed remedies gathers these practices into a survival system. Sage oil, lavender oil, fidgets, rubber bands, meditation, aromatherapy, hot and cold mist units, air purifiers, hypnosis, acupuncture, prayer, singing, watching TBN, walking, video games, daily podcasts, anointed oil, and pineapple juice all become instruments of regulation. None cure her overnight, but each one gives her a way to endure another day. Even her routine is regimented: reading before meditation, TV later at night, prayer twice a day, and the repeated mantra “This too shall pass.” The book’s first big practical lesson is already taking shape: survival in the abyss depends on building your own care network when the formal systems fail, and on accepting that healing may arrive only in fragments.

The pressure of that psychosomatic season eventually sharpened into something more than private suffering: it became a theology of endurance, a witness that the body can carry terror just as surely as the mind can, and that dismissal can wound as much as illness itself. When the medical answers stayed flat and the symptoms kept multiplying, she finally gave the condition a name of her own, psychosomatic disorder, not because she believed the pain was imaginary, but because she recognized that fear, grief, stress, and isolation were writing themselves into her flesh. That recognition changed the way she fought. She began to see that the issue was not one isolated malady but a whole system under siege, and that survival required attending to mind and body together, day by day, with discipline that looked almost like warfare. She kept walking even when her legs felt weak and off-balance. She kept working even while her clients never suspected she was barely holding together. She kept meditating, reading, praying twice daily, listening to podcasts, watching Jentezen Franklin on TBN, and using breathing tools, fidgets, rubber bands, and video games as ways to interrupt the spiral. The book lingers on this practical intelligence: no single remedy solved anything, but together they formed a way to stay present long enough to make it through another night.

As the illness stretched on, she also had to face the cost of being unavailable to the people and rituals that had once defined her. The absences pile up painfully: her stepfather’s funeral, her niece’s funeral, the eulogy she could not deliver at her goddaughter Rahquell’s mother’s funeral, two weddings, a group trip with her hired agents, and even church obligations where she had once been the reliable minister of music and singer. Every missed event cut deeper because it was not only a social absence but an identity crisis. She had always been the one who showed up, the one who sang, officiated, directed, encouraged, and carried others. Now she was the one calling to say she could not come, too afraid to get on a plane, too weak to stand in front of people, too trapped in her own body to fulfill the role everyone expected. That loss of public self was one of the book’s sharpest pains: the abyss did not merely make her sick, it stripped away the competence and visibility that had long anchored her sense of worth. Even her four-octave voice, the instrument through which she had ministered and prayed, went silent. She could not sing anymore, and she had to learn how to grieve that without collapsing into despair.

What kept her from collapsing completely was a small circle of people who actually came near. The book makes a hard distinction between those who disappeared and those who showed up. Sister Tracey, Sister Toovi, Minister Novella, Sister Jennifer, Sister LaToya and her husband, Brother Tory, Mother Ada, and others brought prayer, food, cards, visits, and calls. Some prayed over her at home, some sat with her in hospital rooms during tests that still found nothing, and some simply kept checking in when everyone else had gone silent. The contrast matters because it becomes part of the memoir’s moral map: faith is proven not in declarations, but in the people willing to bring soup, lay hands, drive to appointments, and remember you when you are no longer useful. Even the church, which had put her on the prayer list and sent a pastor by a few times, was experienced as distant compared with this faithful remnant. She was devastated by the inconsistency, but she also learned to receive grace from the people who did come, and to stop measuring God by the disappointments of the institution.

A major turn comes when she meets Stephan, the “knight in shining armor” whose brief presence unlocks her emotional cage. He begins as a business contact on a Jamaica trip, then becomes a friend through calls and conversation, and then the first man in years to draw her out of her ice queen isolation. Their first meeting is almost cinematic: music blasting, a long hug, a shared meal, her nerves racing while she hides the depth of her crisis. The relationship does not become a lasting romance, and in fact it exposes how differently they see presentation, fashion, and companionship. He prefers a plainer look; she refuses to give up wigs, makeup, or her glamour. Still, his real function in the story is transformative rather than romantic. After meeting him, she says the shackles fell off, the collar disappeared from her throat, and she was able, for the first time in seven years, to return to church the following Sunday. Stephan did not stay, but he served as the unexpected messenger who reminded her that she could still feel, still connect, and still be wanted. The coat she accidentally left in his car becomes a lingering symbol of unfinished attachment, yet she ultimately frames him as a season, not a destination, a key rather than a home.

That opening leads directly into the more reflective second half of the book, where she broadens her private story into advice about showing up, overcoming fear, trusting the process, and embracing rest. The memoir insists that survival in darkness is not dramatic heroism but the stubborn accumulation of tiny acts: one more walk, one more prayer, one more breath, one more day. She also begins to look outward, speaking to women who feel dismissed, gaslit, or alone, and to anyone who has been told their symptoms are “just stress” when they know their body is screaming. The final movement turns her suffering into testimony and purpose. Her voice returns. Her wings, as she keeps saying, grow back. The black butterfly emerges from the chrysalis not unchanged, but transformed, carrying the weight of what it took to survive and the knowledge that deliverance arrived slowly, painfully, and through a combination of faith, practical self-care, and the mercies of the few who refused to let her disappear.