Daria Burke’s life wasn’t easy growing up. Her parents split up, and her mom struggled with grief and addiction, forcing Burke to think about where her next meal would come from, a safe place to live, and a way out of poverty at a young age.
As an adult, she became a marketing executive in the beauty industry, but her hunger to understand her own mind led to a season of deep self-investigation, resulting in a new book, Of My Own Making: A Memoir.
Weaving together brain science and personal history, Burke considers experiences of kids coming out of poverty and trauma in a way that may challenge readers' assumptions.
Burke starts her book by describing one Wednesday evening which prompted her to research the tragic passing of her grandmother. She was looking for an obituary, but found an article with the photograph of the accident that caused her grandmother’s death.
“Something broke open in me, and it felt like the clearest breaking of my heart,” Burke said. “And, at the same time, [an] invitation to look at what that loss had done to me in ways that I hadn't examined.”
A week later, she came across the work of Canadian psychologist Norman Doidge. He described trauma and demons of the past as not necessarily paving a path to destruction, but sitting quietly, waiting to undo us when we least expect it. He also brought the term “neuroplasticity” into Burke’s lexicon, which presented her relationship with trauma in a new light.
“While, yes, we could tell ourselves that the worst thing that has ever happened to us had no impact, or that it's no longer a presence in our lives, the promise is also that we can form a new relationship to those stories, Burke said.
Of those stories is her experience growing up in Detroit. Burke felt it essential to unpack how the decline of the city impacted its people. According to Burke, when trauma is looked at on a personal or individual level, it can be described as a personality. When looking at the proliferation of trauma, it’s often described as a cultural problem, something she feels happened in Detroit, a poor, majority Black city at the time.
“There's a saying, and it's this idea that your zip code is a better predictor of your health than your genetic code,” Burke said. “That was for me, you know, exploring Detroit as a place to show how you can both come from a place and, air quote, overcome it.”
Burke’s chronicle of both "coming from and overcoming" Detroit started while attending Renaissance High School, where she met kids who lived an upper-middle class life. According to Burke, after a point, the brain can become conditioned to scarcity, violence, and poverty. But at the high school, she saw people formed in defiance of the circumstances around them.
“Those early instincts that there was a different way of moving, and that there is a different way of being in community and seeing environments that felt healthier and more positive, was reinforced for me,” Burke said.
Burke will be in Detroit May 13 for an event with Fresh Air’s Tonya Mosely at the Detroit Public Library.
Hear the full conversation with Daria Burke on the Stateside podcast.
