How can we help our community talk about mental health?
It’s honestly putting those words into our toolbox. We don’t talk about depression. We don’t talk about anxiety, because there’s a baseline level of stress and anxiety you live with being Black in America. It’s almost like functioning dysfunction. You live at this baseline level of post-traumatic stress, and you normalize it, and you live with it and it’s always right there underneath the surface. You’re told that you’re stronger, you’re told that you persevere. How many times do we tell them that because of the color of your skin, you will have to be a little smarter, a little better? This is the pressure we continually put on ourselves. We accept this underneath the skin, this constant array of anxiety, about just being who we are in our own skin. In order to combat it, we need to normalize talking about our emotions, our feelings, our obstacles, and our stressors.
