Deidre Clark
The morning after Birmingham nonprofit leader and life coach Deidre Clark posted about betting on herself, she went back and added something she’d left out. “What changed wasn’t my determination, my worth, or my goals,” she wrote. “It was my circumstances.”
It’s a small sentence that carries a lot of honesty, and it’s the truest thing Clark has to say about the leap she’s taken this year.
Clark traces nearly everything about herself back to Ensley, where her family has lived for more than a century. “The schools, the first church, my granny, the institutions and people I know lived in Ensley,” she says. She now lives in Eastlake, but Ensley is still home, shaping a person before they have words for it.
What she didn’t have words for growing up was permission, or the lack of it. “I used the script that was handed to me,” she says. “Questioning the how and why of my life didn’t come until much later. It didn’t feel malicious. It just felt normal. In retrospect, it feels crazy.”
That questioning eventually built something. In her 20s, grieving a brother who was murdered when she was 12 (a gifted artist, not an athlete, in a neighborhood that rarely made room for boys like him), Clark started Kuumba, a program born of that loss, reimagining the space Black boys in Birmingham schools could take up.
Years later, restless in a job that no longer fit, she paid her own way through a life-coaching certification, one payment plan at a time, because waiting for someone else’s permission to lead had stopped making sense. A fellowship later sent her to Latin America, where she built a peer-mentoring program across a language barrier with nothing but patience and a little Spanish. “I was affirmed in my ability to do hard things,” she says. “I wanted to prove to myself that I could find meaning in my life.”
By any measure, it’s a determination story. And Clark isn’t backing down. But she wanted the fuller version told, too: the one beneath the highlight reel.
“The first post was so romantic,” she says of her original bet-on-yourself message. “Part of that story was so messy.” She’d taken three weeks off work, she admits, “without crying—so much frustration.” The tenacity was real. So was the toll. “The in-between is hard,” she says. “If I share honestly, I hope they know it’s worth it. If it’s hard, you can try again tomorrow.”
That’s why the follow-up mattered. Clark is quick to identify what made her biggest leap possible: financial relief and FMLA leave, not just grit. She doesn’t see the two truths as being in tension. “If you’re worried about keeping the lights on, you don’t have the time to think creatively,” she says plainly. “I was afforded an opportunity without my circumstances changing first. They don’t feel contradictory to me at all.”
It’s a distinction she’s protective of, because she’s watched inspiration talk do real harm. “I don’t contribute to that,” she says, gently but firmly. “There is nothing inherently special about Deidre Clark.” For anyone still in survival mode, still carrying the determination but not yet the circumstances, her advice isn’t a bigger leap. It’s a smaller one. “What is the smallest thing you could do? Do that,” she says. “I would hold hope with them and affirm that survival mode is not their inheritance.”
Clark’s Becoming You card deck grew out of a harder season still—the loss of Brian, her partner of 10 years. She’d expected, at some point, to get back to who she was before. She didn’t. “There was no going back to her,” she says. “What was left was an opportunity to understand who I was becoming.” She keeps a line pinned to her Threads bio now: Disruption is not the enemy to your becoming—it is the door to it.
Ask her what “still becoming” looks like a year from now, and she won’t pretend to have a plan. “I go through life with open hands,” she says. She’s leading a facilitated Becoming You workshop this month, and beyond that, she’s simply watching for what’s next: for herself and for the women she hopes to keep walking alongside.
What she wants most for this story is for it not to flatten into an easy lesson. “We go through the hard things,” she says. “Look at her now.” The truth she’s chosen to tell is less tidy than that, and more useful: the beautiful and the difficult, she says, coexist—often at exactly the same time.