Is It Okay To Be Depressed and Black?
Come Home: The Advice Column. Where you hold the answers.
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“Is it okay to be depressed and black? Everyone looks at me like I have it together. I feel like I have to hold it together because that’s all I seen growing up. I’m 22 with a full time job bills, while in college full time and I am not happy at all. I feel like I’m just existing. I don’t feel like I’m living or like any of this is worth it.”
Baby - if I could give you the biggest, longest hug - I would. If you are both depressed and black, then yes it’s always okay. In fact, it’s more than okay. To be black and depressed is revolutionary in a world judging our value by our labor. To be black and depressed is claiming your humanity in a world forcing you to be subhuman in power and superhuman in utility.
I am not, and never again will be on Team Strong Black Woman. I am Team Black Woman Who Sobs Uncontrollably For Minor Inconveniences. I am Team Black Woman Who Melts Into Amorphous Liquid When I’m Overwhelmed. I am Team Black Woman Who Has A Peace Of Mind Because I Said No.
I am Soft Black Woman, and you deserve to be too. The simple answer is: yes. The complicated answer is: no, but every moment you stand in the fullness your emotions and states of personhood as a black person is a challenge to a world wanting to keep you burdened by fixing its reality, instead of facing and surviving your own.
Have you ever allowed yourself to be fully depressed without shame, and do you know how to identify what depression looks like for you?
Black women experience depression as failure. You are not failing. You are entitled to experience absolutely any and every emotion on the spectrum as deeply, as long, and as intensely as it comes. In fact, we cause ourselves so much harm - we turn an open wound into a lifelong scar - by not allowing ourselves to heal on our own time. When we pick at the scab, we pick at the little bits of new growth and freshness we can find in letting ourselves go through the process of healing because it’s unsightly and irritating. Since you’ve written in, I assume you’ve heard what I’ve heard. You’ve known what I’ve known - what I’ve been harmed, disregarded, and manipulated into knowing. The world is terrified of depressed black women.
I find an interesting pattern in how we speak of darkness and blackness. Both held in contempt. Both shamed into nonexistence. Both portrayed as the antithesis of goodness and knowing. The world hates what it doesn’t understand, what is selectively undiscovered, and the world only understands depression through the lens of privilege.
White men are allowed to “have a bad day” and murder people. They are granted grace for mental illness where mental illness does not even play a role, as a scapegoat. When white women are depressed, they assume archetype of what society views as someone suffering from mental illness. They are allowed hopelessness, to become elusive toward their friends, family, and commitments, to step away from the paradigm of productivity, to call out sick without contest, to become agitated with discomfort, to feel too fatigued to engage fully or excitedly with their clients, colleagues, classmates, bosses, professors, friends, and family. They may even be offered enough grace to take the day for mental health, an empathetic touch on the back by someone who cares enough to let them know. In zero disregard to the horrors of feeling swallowed whole by depression or their own humanity, they are allowed to feel lousy and appear lousier and still have jobs, friends, and lives. They are allowed to be depressed safely by way of privilege.
Of course you feel alienated from the experience of depression, like you can’t abandon your post as stable force in your little universe, because society relies on your loyalty to strength.
When black women are depressed, we are viewed as a threat to comfort. When we don’t dip every word in honey before it passes through our lips, don’t sugarcoat every syllable - they call us angry and aggressive. When we keep our heads down on the job or call out sick one time; we’re lazy and we’re slipping on our responsibilities. In actuality - their responsibilities they’ve grown accustom to us carrying, too. When we feel fatigued, unable to muster up the smiles that disarm; they call us unapproachable, “not a team player”, and rude. So depression could show up in one of two ways:
Allow ourselves the liberty of expressing “depression” as it’s understood, as our fairer counterparts are afforded - and risk losing our jobs, our relationships, and our security/safety in society
Perform Strong Black Womanhood by tolerating everyone’s expectation of our superhuman abilities, to be swallowed whole by those expectations to the point that we lose our identity outside of them
When I was around 17, I experienced my first extended depressive episode. It lasted years, with bouts of joy here and there, and it looked like option 1 until I learned the circumstances and people around me were ill-equipped to support me, and pivoted to option 2.
My grandmother and uncle passed away within the same year, both quickly and very young, and my mother dipped into an intense depression herself, holing up in her room for days on end. So really I lost three people, had no available caretaker, and I was drowning in sorrow, 30 college applications, extracurricular activities, and maintaining my GPA to finish high school strong. I had descended from being a sunshine-y, straight-A student, to completely detached and truant. I started talking back, challenging rules for attention. At least one day a week, my limbs felt too heavy to get out of bed, and I had to call in my absence. My eating disorder was out of control, and I gained 50 pounds that year prior to college.
I completely erased my senior year in high school from my mind, making it as invisible to my mind’s eye as I felt. Invisible. I didn’t have the tools then to vocalize my hurt, to code switch my emotions to make others comfortable, and I didn’t believe anyone was safe enough to confide the vulnerable truth. I experienced and presented textbook depression as a child with a community of adults who agreed by both law and social contract to care for me, and not a single one saw me. They saw rage, they saw laziness, they saw rebellion, they view me with contempt and disgust, even my own mother. I know the truth - had I been a white woman, I would’ve received the soft landing space that a young, black women experiencing grief, loss, and depression deserve.
When I got to college, I was still deeply depressed and remained depressed until age 23. Except instead of going within, I expressed my hopelessness with my own inner turmoil by escaping it entirely via others. I found out how to be rewarded and supported conditionally as a black woman with depression. Partying, working constantly, getting my school work done in the early morning hours, I over-functioned and showed up for everything in my life at half tank, and left myself with fumes. Dating someone who was even more depressed than I was at the time, I learned how to say “someone else has it worse.” Nobody saw me then, and I didn’t see myself, but at least I wasn’t hypervisible in the vitriol of sleeping all day with droplets of liquified ice cream in my bed. That didn’t seem like an option for me.
It hurts to admit, but I’ve lost months at a time of my life to depression, feeling like dark matter - dense, undiscovered, suspended beyond space and time - existed inside of the cavities of my chest. I’ve lost even more time performing light, when I felt dark, and shaming myself out of discovering this part of myself. Like trying to make the moon clearly known in the day time. I didn’t feel safe presenting the truth, so I ran toward what was expected of me and lost myself. Much of society is inclined to ask more of black women in peril instead of less. You are allowed to step out from underneath the burden of expectation. There are pockets of safety, and we have to find them and unravel there.
We have to hit “unsubscribe” from the suffering of being unseen in depression and in hopelessness. It will require a quiet strength of seeing yourself first. Depression will not look the same for you as it does for them. Be a witness to your dark places, instead of a judge. Those of us who spend enough time in darkness learn to see in it.
Who is benefitting from you “having it all together?” Who is holding you?
I suspect in many ways society depends on us playing superhero instead of being human - unable to access certain parts of ourselves deeply - because they think having access will become the source of our villain origin story. Where we revolt and unravel the fabric of society with us. And they just might be right. I guess the question is - villain to who? The only thing black women are a villain to in honoring their darkness and asking for their community to usher them through, is something I’d love to watch destroyed anyway.
It sounds like the label of Strong Black Woman has failed you, as its failed all of us. And I’m so sorry, because you deserve a soft landing place, and seem to be between the jagged edges of responsibility in such a malleable place in your life. We all deserve a chance to be fluid enough, still in transition from one place to another in our live’s, open space to dive more deeply without fear, while still being held - like the ocean between continents. And despite the harshness of the external world, we have to create an inner world where such a space exists. It starts with letting love come to your aid, and being honest with yourself and your people about where you’re at. I trust you have chosen your friends because they are a reflection of how good of a person you are, because they know how hard you work to keep it all together, because they are there waiting to catch you before you fall. Let them show you how wonderful you are, how deserving you are of being taken care of and nurtured.
Black women are built from community at the atomic level; we know how to identify community, we know how to build community, and we know how to create refuge in community. It is now our time to learn how to seek refuge in it. Think of who this person or these people could be for. Who you can text in those really tough, hard-to-discover feelings and say "I can’t feel my fingers enough to make dinner, can you send me delivery or whip something up for me?” They are there.
What are your choices?
When you wrote “because that’s all I seen growing up,” I knew then I was corresponding with another ancestral warrior, a cycle breaker. You know what you do not want your life to become. You know how much you were not provided for in having your pain swept under the rug for later, only to realize later was never coming. You know the formula to your happiness, and you know what being happy means. You are not as hopeless as you may feel at any time, and I’m gonna offer you in advice what black women are truly seldom given - choices:
Finding happiness in our most overwhelming places in life requires small commitments to joy, and this is particularly true when you’re depressed. When you’re really going through it, have a list of very small tasks, activities, or stimulants you can either complete by yourself OR you can ask someone to help you with to lighten your load. Preferably a task someone can help you with because small shit be hurtin’ the most when we don’t get it done, and it’s a nice reminder of support.
Challenge your concept of time. You are 22, and you have a big, beautiful life before you. Nothing is passing you. Nothing. Are you rushing yourself in some ways because Twitter and IG make you feel like you’re behind? You have a lot on your plate at once. Is there any way you can delay some of your “goals” in order to create happiness for you right now and in the long term? Sometimes we can keep the goal, and switch up the method to get to a place of contentment.
Definite “worth it.” Worth it to who? Worth it how? If it is of value to your family, to your community, to your followers, then maybe it’s not worth it. Your happiness is more valuable than literally anything in your life, but sacrifice doesn’t always feel good.
When I picked up my life at 23 to moved to a new city where I knew nobody in my industry, basically rendering my diploma as worthy as toilet paper and putting a huge question mark over my future, I also decided my own happiness was my priority. I could not put a price on it if I tried. And you know what? I struggled more financially, emotionally, and mentally more in the last three years than I had ever prior, but it felt like I was struggling up, and not in a full circle. I’m not stuck in one place by other people’s expectations of what I should’ve or could’ve been because I define value for myself. Make a priority list. You are worth it, this I know.
Put it down!
It sounds like you just boarded a plane to your future, and I am really proud of you. I’ll say that again - I’m really proud of you!! You are working for your current self in taking care of your needs, your future self in investing in your education, and your past self in trying to heal what you know you can’t take into this next leg in your journey. This shit is hard, and requires fortitude that is almost impossible to explain unless you’ve been pushed to the choice of destroying your limits or being crushed by them.
So let’s talk about what you’ve got in tow. You have a suitcase full of dreams, which is so light it feels like nothing at all. This is presumably what you’re doing all of this for. Then, you have carry-on full of actual real life responsibilities like paying those damn, scam ass bills. Finally, you are lugging a full duffle of bricks, and she’s gotta go.
You seem split down the middle. There’s a real you who exists beyond the surface, who needs support, who needs rest and rejuvenation without consequence, who values your peace and believes you can have that and your dreams. Then there is another you who feels like other people don’t know the real you, who doesn’t know how to distinguish who you are from what you provide, who feels like working beyond your capacity makes you more special or valuable - this perception is entirely expectation. Bricks. If you are making yourself miserable by trying to provide for other people when you don’t have enough, you’re trying to complete your diploma in X time to make someone else happy, or you’re doing all of this amazing work with people who don’t support you or your dreams - something has got to give baby, and it ain’t gon’ be you. We’re all invested in your peace, my love.
Depressed, black woman - You are carrying so much on those shoulders, and I want to challenge you to put something down, and trust the world to continue revolving when you rest. Trust the world to love you when you rest.
I’m going to grant you permission to put down the expectation of grit and struggle to complete everything by yourself and doing it pristinely. I’m going to grant you permission to tell the voice in your head telling you people won’t support you when you fall, telling you you’re only worthy of love and respect when you show up perfectly packaged, telling you to not be human because it is too scary - to fuck off. Those ideas have protected you for a long time, they’ve gotten you this far, they’ve made you this amazing, brilliant person, but we can lay them to rest now because you are on the verge of breaking. I’m granting you permission to fall apart, so you can become whole again.
Here are some resources for black women, for anyone reading:
Reintroduce yourself to the world as someone who needs and accepts help. Yes, depression and blackness can exist in the same person. Beautifully. Divinely. With Intention. You are proof. Never forget to come home.
With Love, Always
Kendra <3
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