Reclaiming My Time: A journey back to my whole self
What happens when faith becomes a cage-and loss, betrayal, and love force you to finally choose yourself?
In Reclaiming My Time, Alexis Harvey delivers a powerful, unflinching autobiography about growing up in a strict religious organization where control was mistaken for devotion and silence was expected as righteousness. As one of the only African American families in the congregation, Alexis and her siblings lived under rigid rules that governed their clothing, their social lives, their bodies, and their futures. Pants were forbidden. Movies, skating, bowling-ordinary childhood joys-were sins. Church came first, always.
But this is not just a story about restriction. It is a story about awakening-often forged through heartbreak and loss.
As Alexis begins to question the beliefs she was taught to never challenge, Jay enters her life and later betrays her trust, forcing her to confront painful truths about love, accountability, and self-worth. When Jay's actions lead him to prison, Alexis is left to navigate the aftermath-recognizing that incarceration became the only place where he could face his wrongs, begin healing, and be held accountable, even as she learned the necessity of choosing herself.
Amid this unraveling, Alexis suffers the profound loss of her mother, a grief that reshapes everything she thought she understood about faith, family, and survival. Mourning becomes both a breaking point and a turning point-one that compels her to examine inherited beliefs, release guilt, and redefine strength on her own terms.
With honesty, reflection, and hard-won wisdom, Alexis traces her journey from indoctrination to self-determination-examining how fear, faith, culture, betrayal, and grief shaped her identity, and how healing opened the door to love again-this time rooted in mutual respect, safety, and truth rather than control or sacrifice.
Each chapter weaves lived experience with reflection, inviting readers to confront uncomfortable truths about power, religion, relationships, and resilience.
Reclaiming My Time is for anyone who has lost a parent, survived betrayal, questioned their faith, or believed they were too broken to begin again-and discovered that reclaiming your time also means reclaiming your capacity to love, to choose, and to live freely.
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