I was so captivated that I immediately began envisioning myself as a young professional. I wanted to dress like Jacqueline, played by Robin Givens. I wanted to amass the level of success Jacqueline had amassed. And I wanted that big, bouncy blowout.

But more important than the aesthetics and the superficial stuff, I wanted her confidence. Her self-assuredness. Her ability to practice self-love by centering herself.

Basically, when I was a kid, I wanted to be Jacqueline, not Angela.

And I know that is an incredibly unpopular opinion, but hear me out…

Angela, played by Halle Berry, was a beautiful person, both inside and out. But I watched her spend so much of that movie being self-sacrificing and giving, only to have all of that goodness go unappreciated by the man she loved so deeply. It felt like she was constantly swallowing parts of herself to get along, keep things positive, and maintain the peace.

Until she couldn’t anymore…

Eventually, she became cold. And along the way, she lost touch with some of the things that had once brought her joy: her hobbies, her passions, her community service.

I also think we often lose sight of the real villain in Boomerang.

It was Marcus, not Jacqueline.

Marcus betrayed Angela, the woman who nursed him back to life after the debilitating heartbreak he experienced with Jacqueline. And yet somehow, for more than three decades, Black folks have pitted these two women against each other. You almost always hear that every man preferred Angela and every woman wanted to be Angela.

But there is something about the final scene that has always stayed with me.

Marcus shows up at Angela’s new job hoping to win her back, and he brings along the children from the art class she once taught in a low-income neighborhood. When Angela sees them, her face changes.

Her heart melts because, in that moment, she begins to remember herself.

The woman she was before Marcus.

The woman who had passions and interests and a life that belonged to her.

And maybe that was the lesson I absorbed as a 10-year-old, even if I did not yet have the language for it.

Jacqueline always remembered herself.

And because she remembered herself, she was able to show up fully as herself in her personal life, her relationships, and her professional life.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about what it means to remember myself.

My life currently feels like an assembly line.

I wake up and move through my daily hygiene routine, wake my daughter up, change her, feed her, make bottles, pack her daycare bag, bathe her, and get us out the door. After I drop her off, I come back home and begin my workday, preparing lectures, teaching, seeing patients, responding to students, and moving through everything else my work requires.

Then I pick my daughter up from daycare, and we begin our evening routine.

Rinse and repeat.

And whenever I do have a moment to myself, that moment is rarely actually mine. It becomes an inventory check of everything required to keep our lives moving.

Do I need to order Genevieve’s formula? Does she need more clothes? More diapers? More wipes? More solids? When is her next pediatrician appointment? What do I need to pack for daycare tomorrow? What am I forgetting?

Even the spaces between responsibilities become responsibilities.

When I was a sixth-grade student at Jean Gordon Elementary School, we had something called USSR time: Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading. For 30 minutes, we were expected to sit quietly and read a book of our own choosing.

I hated it.

I wanted to talk and laugh with my friends. I remember one of my friends loved comics, and she would get so excited when USSR time started because she could disappear into whatever comic she was reading. I was so envious of her enthusiasm that when she offered me one of her comics, I tried to convince myself that I was into it too.

I was not.

The truth was, I just didn’t want to sit quietly and read. I didn’t want to be alone with my own thoughts. So I would whisper and giggle with my friends instead and, of course, get in trouble for not reading.

It is funny to think about now because, at this stage of my life, uninterrupted silent reading feels like an absolute luxury.

I crave the quiet mind I once tried so hard to escape.

For most of the day, my brain is occupied by an endless rotation of responsibilities. There are all the things required to care for Genevieve. There is work, work, work (I have 3 jobs) my clients, my students, my teaching, my deadlines. There is always something that needs to be done, ordered, scheduled, remembered, answered, prepared, or anticipated.

And then there are the thoughts I cannot simply complete and cross off a list.

Not a day goes by that I do not wonder:

Is the cancer back? Is it coming back? When?

That fear, almost clandestine in nature, finds its way into the spaces between everything else. It is there while I am working, driving, listening to a podcast, caring for my daughter, doomscrolling social media, taking a shower, and getting ready for bed.

It is another kind of mental occupation, one that does not offer a task to complete or a box to check.

Just elevated cortisol and adrenaline and a body that sometimes seems to remain on alert even when there is nothing immediate to run from.

This is just a small peek into my very busy mind.

So these days, reading is an escape.

For a little while, I can leave my own life and enter someone else’s story. I can become absorbed in another person’s world or immerse myself in learning about something that interests me. My brain gets to focus on something that is not a responsibility, a fear, or a problem I need to solve.

So when Black Women for Self, founded by Samjah Iman, hosted its Booked for Self gathering, an intimate evening where women came together with their books, journals, wine, and, in my case, hot tea, I knew I wanted to go.

Still, everything seemed to be getting in the way of me showing up.

There was work to do. Things I needed to handle. People who needed something from me. Tasks calling my name.

Then I remembered a text reminder that had been sent for the gathering:

“Remember yourself! Don’t back out of this gathering because there’s work to do, because someone needs something from you, or because another task is calling your name. The to-do list will be there girl. Tonight, show up for yourself.”

Remember yourself.

There was something about those two words.

They reminded me of a passage from bell hooks’ All About Love, where she writes:

“We all need to rid ourselves of misguided notions about self-love. We need to stop fearfully equating it with self-centeredness and selfishness. Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it, other efforts to love fail.”

And I was reminded that remembering myself is a loving practice.

So I pushed past the to-do list, the work demands, and the persistent feeling that I should be somewhere else doing something productive, and I went.

I arrived a little late and with a pounding headache. But Samjah welcomed me with a smile, a hug, and a seat right next to her.

I looked around the room and saw Black women settled into whatever they were reading.

They looked so peaceful…So at ease. And I could not wait to join them.

When I first opened my book, the sixth grader in me immediately thought, “Okay, but when do we get to the part where we talk?”

Some things apparently do not change.

But I followed the flow of the room and started reading.

And after a while, I could actually feel the stress leaving my body.

My shoulders relaxed. My mind stopped racing through tomorrow’s responsibilities. I stopped mentally checking the diaper supply. I stopped thinking about emails. I stopped running through my work. I stopped anticipating what someone might need from me next.

Then I came across a line in my book:

“What we hold on to perpetuates our reality. What we let go of creates new possibilities.”

I sat with that for a moment.

What was I holding on to?

The stress…the busyness…the never-ending inventory running through my mind…the tasks and to-do lists…the constant feeling that I should be doing something, producing something, handling something, anticipating something.

And perhaps most of all, I was holding on to the confinement I have been feeling in this stage of my life…the sense that I am moving along an assembly line of responsibilities, day after day, with very little space to simply exist outside of what needs to be done.

So, for that hour, I told myself, “girl, let it go!!!”

And I did.

That does not mean the responsibilities disappeared.

They did not. I just disassociated from them for an intentional pause.

The formula would still need to be ordered. There would still be emails waiting for me. My clients and students would still need me. Tomorrow morning, the assembly line would start all over again.

But in that moment, I did not have to carry any of it.

I gave myself permission to put it down.

And suddenly, a new possibility emerged…I could exist outside of my responsibilities. Even within this demanding season of my life, there could still be moments that belonged only to me.

And so for that hour…I simply read.

My mind got to go somewhere else.

The final hour of the gathering was spent sharing. We talked about what we were reading. We laughed and we also learned from one another. The different forms of literature around the room generated conversations I never could have anticipated and also connected us in such a beautiful way.

At some point, while I was laughing, talking, and sipping my tea, I realized something.

My headache was gone.

I think about that sixth-grade girl now. The one whispering to her friends, watching the clock, waiting for USSR time to end.

She had no idea what a gift it was to be given 30 uninterrupted minutes in which nobody needed anything from her except to sit quietly and disappear into a book.

I know now.

At this stage of my life, I do not need to be reminded to read.

I need to be reminded that I am allowed to pause.

And during that pause, the formula can be ordered later. The email can wait. The work will still be there.

The to-do list will always find me.

And that is what it means to let go…not abandoning the responsibilities that make up our lives, but refusing to allow them to hold us hostage every single moment of the day.

Remembering myself means recognizing that I am more than the things I am responsible for.

And I think that is what 10-year-old me saw in Jacqueline all those years ago.

A woman who, whatever her flaws, never seemed to forget that she belonged to herself.

Sometimes remembering yourself looks like something profound.

And sometimes it looks like the ordinary magic of a book, a cup of hot tea, a room full of Black women, and an hour in which your mind finally gets to belong to you.

I have always wondered what it feels like to sink my bare feet into soil. In theory, it seems like it would feel as grounding as people say it does, but I have never actually tried it.

Still, I can imagine the feeling because there are ordinary moments of Black family magic that create that same sense of rootedness for me.

When I was a child, every Fourth of July, “The Village” gathered at my cousin Lynette’s house. The Village was a close group of my mother’s girlfriends…a community of women who raised their children alongside one another. Each woman arrived with her family and a dish to share. My family always brought New Orleans-style barbecue shrimp.

It was a pool party, so everyone showed up in swimsuits. The children stayed in the water until our fingers and skin were wrinkled like raisins, getting out only for bathroom breaks and food. It was one of the days we looked forward to all year: laughter, love, family, food, and fun.

I returned to that tradition for a long time. Then I became a young adult and started making Fourth of July plans with my friends. As the years passed, those plans faded too, and eventually I realized that I had begun doing absolutely nothing for the holiday.

Until this year.

My mother still goes to Lynette’s house every Fourth of July. This year, she asked me to come and bring my daughter. I told her I would, but when it was time to leave, I was exhausted. Getting myself and an infant out of the house felt like more than I had the energy to manage. Still, I pushed myself because I did not want to disappoint my mother.

The moment I arrived, I realized it was exactly where I needed to be.

The pool was once again filled with family and friends, but now there was a new generation in the water…our children. I felt like a child again while also watching my own daughter enter a tradition that had helped shape me. I laughed, talked, ate some of the best peach cobbler I have ever tasted, and allowed myself to be held by something familiar.

I was also reminded of the supportive nature of collective care. There were family members and friends available to hold and entertain my daughter. I did not have to care for her alone.

Somehow, when I was feeling overwhelmed and convincing myself that I was too exhausted to go, I had forgotten about the added benefit of help. One of my cousins held my daughter while I sat and peacefully ate my peach cobbler without balancing a baby on my lap or rushing through my dessert.

Maybe that is part of why it tasted so good.

Or perhaps it was the scoop of ice cream I allowed myself to indulge in.

It felt like what I imagine sinking my bare feet into soil must feel like.

I felt balanced. Grounded. Rooted in a place and among people who reminded me that I belonged.

In a world that feels increasingly superficial, I hope we will collectively hold on to these ordinary Black family traditions because they are magic. The healing and connection I receive from an intimate family gathering extend far beyond the gathering itself. These moments may appear simple, but they fill the soul in ways that large, elaborate events surrounded by acquaintances often cannot.

They also remind us that care was never meant to be carried alone.

I think it will become increasingly important for us to return to the traditions, rituals, and routines that ground us in who we are—and remind us of who and where we come from.

Some environments do more than make space for us.

They return us to ourselves.

Back in 2018, there was a really good legal drama called For the People. It ran for only two seasons before it was canceled, but one particular scene has stayed with me.

The clerk of court, played by Anna Deavere Smith, was an anchoring presence who kept the young lawyers grounded and in check. In one episode, she described the changing relationship between herself and her aging mother, for whom she had become a caretaker.

Her mother kept saying, “Flippity flop.”

At first, she thought the phrase was connected to some kind of cognitive decline. But her mother eventually explained that she was describing the reversal in their relationship. She had once cared for her daughter, and now her daughter was caring for her.

Flippity flop.

I have moments like this with my own mother quite often.

I am not her caretaker. She is vibrant, still working, fiercely independent, and living a full life….so much so that her social calendar is more packed than mine! She lives a very abundant life. Still, there are moments when I can feel our roles beginning to shift. Strangely, even as that shift takes place, she continues to mother me.

A few years ago, my mother was having difficulty regulating her blood pressure. The episodes landed her in the hospital several times, and each time, I dropped everything and rushed to be by her side.

During one of those hospital visits, I remember thinking, I hope I have a daughter so she can be there for me when I am older and experiencing changes in my health.

I said it out loud.

My mother looked at me and said, “Baby, even with a child of your own, there ain’t no guarantee they’ll be there.”

I knew what she meant. Having children does not guarantee that they will have the willingness, resources, emotional capacity, or physical ability to care for you. Children are not insurance policies against loneliness, illness, or aging.

Still, I remember being afraid that as I grew older, I might be all alone.

A few years later, I got married. I also experienced breast cancer, IVF, a high-risk pregnancy, a C-section, and, ultimately, the birth of a healthy baby girl. Those years brought more hospital visits than I could have ever imagined…more heartbreak than I could have ever imagined and required an ineffable amount of emotional strength.

And each time, it was my mother who was by my side.

Even in her late seventies, she was still showing up to care for me.

And while all of this was happening, my mother was also aging. I began noticing a shift that becomes more pronounced with each passing year.

When we go somewhere together, I am usually the driver now. When I am running an errand, she will sometimes jump into the car simply to ride along with me. When she hosts a holiday, I help plan the menu. I teach her about emerging technology and explain the latest references in pop culture. I make sure she gets home safely. I worry about her health and the decisions she makes about it. I ask questions about her appointments. I police her diet more than she would probably like.

And yet, when life becomes frightening or uncertain, she is still the person who shows up beside me.

She is still mothering me while I am slowly learning how to care for her.

On Friday night, I realized that I had left my laptop in a hospital auditorium after delivering a brief presentation. I began to panic and called one of the doctors who had been there. She immediately contacted security, and they found it and agreed to hold it for me at the security desk.

I was enormously relieved, but this meant that I needed to drive back to the hospital around nine o’clock that night. I had just put my daughter to bed, but I felt an urgent need to take care of it immediately, so I dashed out of the door.

My mother called as I was backing out of the driveway. When I explained what had happened, she said, “Oh, I wish you would’ve called me sooner so I could ride with you.”

“No worries,” I told her. “I’ll pick you up.”

So I drove to her house first, and then we headed to the hospital together.

After retrieving the laptop, I got back into the car and asked, “You want to stop for ice cream?”

She said, “Sure.”

Neither of us needed ice cream. But for a brief moment, I wanted to extend an obligatory errand into an opportunity to spend more time with my mother. I wanted the night to become something more than retrieving a forgotten laptop. I wanted to sit beside her a little longer, talk a little longer, and stretch an ordinary moment beyond its natural ending.

These are the moments when I find myself standing in both deep gratitude and anxiety about how much time we have left together. I am grateful that she is still here, still willing to jump into the car simply to accompany me. At the same time, I am painfully aware that these moments are finite.

And so, perhaps in an effort to show the universe that I am grateful, I try to extend them. I add ice cream to the errand. I take the longer route. I linger in the car. I search for small ways to ask time to slow down.

And I am holding a paradox in these moments. I am deeply grateful that my mother is still here, still mothering me. I am also grateful that I have the capacity to care for her. Yet every act of care reminds me that our time together is finite. It reminds me of the ethereal nature of time, how quietly it moves and how little control we have over its passage.

So alongside the gratitude, I am also holding sadness. There is an anticipatory grief in noticing her aging, even while she remains vibrant and fully present. I am grieving something that has not happened, but that I also recognize is inevitable.

Perhaps that is part of what makes the flippity flop so tender. It is not simply a change in responsibility. It is a reminder that time is moving, that our relationship is changing, and that neither of us can remain in these roles forever.

On Father’s Day, my daughter spent the day with her father and his family. Later, my parents and I met them at a restaurant. The moment I walked in, my daughter began to cry.

My mother-in-law remarked, somewhat tongue in cheek, “She was just fine before you got here.”

“Maybe it’s the crowd,” I said.

“Well, she’s normally fine with crowds,” she responded.

And I replied, “She’s a baby…this is what babies do.”

But inside, I was thinking about what it means for your mother to feel like home.

That is a privilege not everyone gets to experience.

After a long day of work or a full day of social activity, there is freedom in returning home. Home is where you can release what you have been holding, where you can experience the full breadth of your emotions without editing them for someone else’s comfort.

That is what my mother has always meant to me.

Being at home with her has not always looked pretty or polite. Sometimes it has come with frustration. Sometimes it has come with tears. But with her, I have been able to be my most transparent and vulnerable self.

In that moment at the restaurant, the peace I felt came from realizing that I am now someone’s home.

My daughter had spent the day engaging with people, taking in unfamiliar sounds, faces, and activity. When she saw me, perhaps she felt safe enough to release whatever she had been holding. In the midst of the emotional dysregulation that comes with being a baby, she knew she was home with me.

Her tears did not feel like evidence that something had gone wrong.

To the contrary, they felt like trust.

Now that I am raising a daughter of my own, I think differently about what all of this means.

Becoming Genevieve’s mother has made me more conscious of the relationship I want to build with her. I want us to remain connected as she grows, not because she feels indebted to me, but because our relationship feels loving, safe, and spacious enough for her to keep choosing it.

I do not want to raise her with the expectation that being a “good daughter” means one day organizing her life around my needs. I do not want her to believe that my sacrifices as her mother create a debt she will eventually be required to repay.

There is a particular false ideology around dutiful daughters, especially daughters who are dependable, nurturing, emotionally attuned, and accustomed to anticipating the needs of others. I want to raise her to be disabused from the false ideas that serve as a prison to the full personhood of any woman. We praise the daughter who rearranges her life, coordinates the appointments, remembers the medications, prepares the meals, manages the crises, and quietly absorbs the emotional weight of a family.

Her devotion is treated as natural. Her exhaustion is rarely considered.

Caregiving can be an expression of profound love, but it should not be the price of being loved by your mother. It should not be demanded through guilt, obligation, gender, or the belief that a daughter owes her mother the same level of sacrifice her mother once made for her.

My mother’s care for me has been extraordinary. Her presence throughout cancer, pregnancy, childbirth, and the uncertainty surrounding each experience has deepened my gratitude for her. It has also shown me that care is most meaningful when it is freely given.

That is what I hope to create with my own daughter.

My hope is that when Genevieve grows into adulthood and finds herself navigating many competing demands, I will still be able to support her. I hope I can make her life feel lighter rather than becoming another responsibility she must manage.

And I hope that, within the fullness of her own life, she will sometimes choose to extend an ordinary moment with me. That an errand might become lunch, a quick visit might become an afternoon, or a ride home might become a stop for ice cream neither of us needs.

Not because she feels obligated to give me more of her time, but because we enjoy being together.

That is the relationship I hope to build with her: one in which care continues to move in both directions, and our time together is extended by desire rather than duty.

I hope to build a relationship in which she wants to call me, visit me, ride in the car with me, and perhaps care for me when I need support. But I also hope she knows that she is allowed to have a full life of her own. She is allowed to establish boundaries. She is allowed to consider her capacity. She is allowed to love me without abandoning herself.

Perhaps one day our relationship will also flippity flop.

And she will become the driver, explaining technologies I do not understand, helping me make decisions about my health, or calling to make sure I arrived home safely. And she, too, will begin to notice my aging before I am ready to acknowledge it myself…One day, she will become me…

But I do not want that future care to be what anchors our bond.

I want the relationship we build to be rooted in love and not preparation for what she may someday do for me. I want to mother her in a way that gives her something different from obligation…a sense of belonging, emotional safety, and the freedom to become fully herself.

Perhaps that is what makes this season with my own mother so emotionally complicated. The roles do not reverse all at once. There is no clear moment when the mother becomes the one who is cared for and the daughter becomes the caretaker. Instead, the relationship stretches to hold both realities.

She can still be my home while becoming someone I feel increasingly responsible for protecting.

I can still be her baby while becoming the person who checks whether she made it home.

And now, I can hold my own daughter while imagining a future in which our roles may also begin to shift.

Flippity flop.

With the new A Different World series coming, I have been thinking about the original characters, not simply as sources of nostalgia, but as cultural texts.

Shows like A Different World helped shape my expectations for who I aspired to become.

They influenced my dreams, my ambitions, and the life I imagined for my future self. Hillman showed me Black people who were educated, accomplished, culturally grounded, intellectually curious, and committed to something larger than themselves.

As a child, I thought I was simply watching television.

I did not realize that these characters were also teaching me what kinds of Black women deserved admiration, what success should look like, and how a “good” woman was expected to move through the world.

They were shaping my cultural expectations before I even had the language to recognize it.

As a child, I idolized Kim Reese.

Kim was intelligent, hardworking, dependable, talented, ambitious, and remarkably disciplined. She earned excellent grades, worked multiple part-time jobs, sacrificed much of her personal life, and remained available to the people she loved. No matter how overwhelmed she was, Kim showed up.

She appeared to embody everything a Black woman was supposed to be.

Kim also became part of the future I imagined for myself. I wanted to be accomplished like her. Disciplined like her. Dependable like her. I wanted to become the woman who could manage everything, excel at everything, and still be there for everyone.

But adulthood has changed the way I understand her.

Kim was perfect in the particular way Black women are often expected to be perfect: endlessly capable, consistently productive, emotionally contained, and useful to everyone around us. We are praised for how much we can carry without asking whether carrying it is harming us.

These expectations do not merely exhaust Black women. They dehumanize us.

They teach us that our value rests in our ability to perform, achieve, endure, and care for others, often while denying our own physical and emotional needs. What looks like discipline from the outside may also be chronic overextension. What appears to be strength may be a person who has learned that falling apart is not an available option.

Kim worked until she fainted from exhaustion.

She pushed herself despite having limited financial resources. She surrendered the Orange Globe scholarship in protest of apartheid in South Africa, choosing moral conviction even though the loss placed an additional burden on her. She continued to excel academically, support her friends, and pursue her goals, even when doing so demanded more than her body could sustainably give.

Kim was also deeply betrayed by two people she loved.

She knew that Freddie, one of her closest friends, was involved with her boyfriend, Ron. Yet Kim said nothing. She carried that knowledge until Freddie finally confessed, and even after the betrayal, Kim maintained their friendship.

When I was younger, I might have understood that silence as maturity, grace, or emotional strength. Now I wonder what it cost her to suppress her anger and absorb that betrayal without confrontation.

Black women are frequently celebrated for surviving what we should never have been expected to tolerate.

We are encouraged to forgive quickly, remain composed, protect the feelings of others, and avoid disrupting the community, even when we are the ones who have been harmed. Our capacity to endure becomes more culturally valuable than our right to protest, withdraw, demand repair, or leave.

Whitley Gilbert, on the other hand, was presented as everything Kim was not.

The show often invited us to see Whitley as elitist, spoiled, snobbish, dramatic, and self-involved. Kim was grounded and self-sacrificing. Whitley was demanding and preoccupied with her own desires. Kim was the kind of Black woman we were taught to respect. Whitley was the kind we were expected to criticize.

As an adult, however, I see Whitley differently.

Whitley prioritized herself and her well-being. She believed that she was valuable and expected the people around her to recognize that value. She had high standards for her life and for the relationships she accepted.

Certainly, Whitley had flaws. Her class privilege, elitism, and early prejudices were real. But her self-regard was not necessarily evidence of selfishness. In many instances, it gave her the emotional capacity to show up fiercely for other people.

Whitley was not so depleted by martyrdom that she had nothing left to offer.

In fact, she was often a devoted and protective friend to Kim.

When Kim fainted from exhaustion, Whitley urged her to take care of herself. When Kim lost the Orange Globe scholarship, Whitley tried to find a way to replace it. When Freddie and Ron betrayed Kim, Whitley had Kim’s back.

Whitley understood something Kim did not always appear to understand: loving other people does not require abandoning yourself.

We see that same self-respect in Whitley’s romantic relationships. When Dwayne went on a date with another woman and could not firmly tell Whitley that he wanted her and only her, she ended their engagement.

She did not bargain for clarity. She did not make herself smaller to preserve the relationship. She did not accept uncertainty simply because she loved him.

She held true to the value she saw in herself.

One of the most memorable expressions of Whitley’s self-regard came during the episode addressing intimate partner violence. Gina told Whitley that she could not understand her circumstances because Whitley had always had somebody.

Whitley responded, “That’s right. And her name is Whitley.”

I never forgot those words.

As a child, I was taught to admire Kim’s sacrifice. As an adult, I understand the psychological protection embedded in Whitley’s declaration.

There is something powerful about knowing that even when relationships change, people disappoint you, or external support disappears, you have cultivated a relationship with yourself that you can trust.

Perhaps Whitley’s self-centeredness was not always a character defect. Perhaps, at times, it represented a form of self-preservation that Black women are rarely encouraged to practice.

Black women are often taught that goodness requires self-denial. We are expected to prove our love through sacrifice, our strength through suffering, and our loyalty through what we are willing to tolerate. A woman who places herself at the center of her own life may be described as selfish, difficult, arrogant, or demanding.

Meanwhile, the woman who neglects herself while serving everyone else is called exceptional.

But exceptionalism is a dangerous standard for personhood.

Kim deserved rest before her body forced her to stop. She deserved relationships in which she could express anger and require accountability. She deserved to pursue her ambitions without having to prove that she could survive without adequate support.

And perhaps Whitley deserved more credit for refusing to disappear inside the lives of other people.

Revisiting A Different World as an adult has made me question which Black women we are taught to admire and why.

Were we drawn to Kim because she was admirable, or because her sacrifice made everyone around her more comfortable?

Were we frustrated by Whitley because she lacked compassion, or because she insisted on being treated as though her desires, boundaries, and emotional needs mattered?

The answer may not require us to choose between them.

Kim’s discipline, integrity, and commitment to community were genuine strengths. Whitley’s self-regard, relational boundaries, and willingness to advocate for herself were strengths too.

Perhaps the healthiest version of Black womanhood exists somewhere between them: the ambition of Kim Reese without the self-abandonment, and the self-worth of Whitley Gilbert without the elitism.

A woman who can show up for others without disappearing.

A woman who knows that she deserves care, not only because of everything she contributes, achieves, or survives, but simply because she is human.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I went to an urgent care facility in a predominantly white neighborhood to get tested.

While I waited in line, I watched an older white woman berate the Black woman working at the front desk. She demanded to skip the line and refused to provide her insurance information because she “just wanted her temperature checked.”

She explained that her neighbor was one of the doctors at the facility and had told her she could come in and have it done.

The woman behind the desk calmly explained the facility’s protocol and asked her to follow the same process required of everyone else. She refused and continued to speak down to her until a Black nurse practitioner came from the back and defended the employee. The woman left angrily, offended that her request had not been granted.

I had a physical reaction to watching the encounter. My body was pulsing with rage.

This happened during a period when racial injustice was erupting around us. We were watching videos of carceral violence against Black people circulate across our screens. At the same time, the pandemic was exposing racial health inequities that Black communities had been describing for generations.

Black people were more likely to be exposed to COVID-19 through frontline and essential work. Many were living with health conditions shaped by environmental injustice, chronic stress, and inadequate access to quality care. Black communities were losing family members, neighbors, elders, and community leaders.

In the middle of a public health emergency that was disproportionately devastating Black communities, I watched a white woman demand special access to care while verbally attacking a Black woman for asking her to follow basic procedure.

Her privilege was palpable.

She believed proximity to a physician should exempt her from the rules. She expected the facility to accommodate her and treated the front desk worker’s enforcement of protocol as an affront.

Meanwhile, the Black woman behind the desk was expected to remain composed. She had to regulate her face, voice, and emotions while someone actively denied her dignity.

Those of us witnessing it absorbed something too.

I could feel the anger moving through my body, but there was nowhere for it to go. I could not fully intervene without risking escalation. I could not separate the interaction from the racial violence and preventable loss unfolding around us.

So I stood there carrying rage while trying to appear calm.

This is weathering.

Weathering is the cumulative bodily impact of living with racism, vigilance, restraint, and repeated threats to one’s dignity. It can affect the person being targeted and the people who recognize themselves in what they are witnessing.

Later, the nurse practitioner who had intervened was the clinician who saw me. We processed the encounter together.

Neither of us had to explain why it was disturbing or debate whether race had shaped what happened. We understood each other.

That understanding did not change the system, but it created a moment of recognition inside an experience that had been dehumanizing.

I think about that moment when people talk about “Black privilege,” particularly in healthcare. The phrase is often used as though any advantage, relationship, or access experienced by a Black person is equivalent to white privilege.

It is not.

White privilege is structural. It includes the expectation that institutions will accommodate, believe, and protect you. It is the confidence that your frustration will be interpreted as justified rather than threatening. It is the freedom to demand special treatment without fearing that your behavior will be used to judge your entire racial group.

What people call Black privilege in healthcare is often the relief of being cared for by someone who recognizes the risks we face and does not require us to prove that our pain is real. It is the ability to relax because we trust that the person treating us will see our humanity.

When I became pregnant at 42, following breast cancer treatment, I transferred my care to a friend who is like an older sister to me. She is an obstetrician-gynecologist, and I trusted her completely.

My pregnancy carried several risks. I was of advanced maternal age and had a recent history of cancer. I was also aware that Black women face disproportionate risks during pregnancy and childbirth, regardless of income, education, or professional status.

I did not move to her care because I wanted to skip lines or receive treatment outside of established protocols. I wanted a physician whom I trusted to do everything in her power to make sure that I lived and that my baby lived.

That was it.

No VIP demands. Just ordinary care from an extraordinary doctor.

The distinction matters.

White privilege in healthcare can appear as an expectation of preferential treatment. Black “privilege” is often access to the safety, attention, and belief that should already be available to every patient.

Knowing my physician did not make me confident that the rules would bend for me. It made me confident that she would listen to me.

I was not using a personal relationship to gain special access. I was relying on a trusted relationship because I knew the healthcare system does not protect all patients equally.

For many Black patients, choosing a Black physician is an act of harm reduction. It can reduce the emotional labor of having to explain ourselves and protect us from dismissal, stereotyping, and the dangerous underestimation of Black pain.

It can also create moments of collective witnessing.

That is what happened between the nurse practitioner and me in the urgent care room. We were acknowledging the racial dynamics of an encounter that had affected both of us.

Racial stress becomes more damaging when we are required to deny it. The body experiences the offense, but the person is expected to complete the appointment, return to work, care for others, and continue as though nothing happened.

The body still keeps the record.

This is why racial inequity in healthcare cannot be dismissed because some Black people know doctors, have high incomes, hold advanced degrees, or receive good care in particular moments.

A Black woman can be a physician, professor, lawyer, or executive and still enter a hospital knowing that her symptoms may be dismissed. She can have excellent insurance and still worry that her pain will be underestimated. She can have a trusted Black doctor and understand that the relationship feels protective because the broader system has not earned her trust.

Access to that relationship is not evidence that structural racism has disappeared. It reflects the networks of care Black people have built within systems that have often failed us.

We refer and advocate for one another. We intervene when we see harm occurring. We create forms of safety where the institution has not provided them.

That is not privilege as white privilege operates.

It is relational safety, cultural recognition, and survival.

In a healthcare system where Black people are still fighting to be believed, protected, and kept alive, that safety may be the closest thing to privilege we have.

This has nothing to do with money, status, or a lack of gratitude. I am deeply grateful for my life. But gratitude does not require me to deny the parts of my life that feel constricted. It does not mean I must stop longing for something different.

When I say that I want a bigger life, I mean that I want more spaciousness. I want room for joy, laughter, love, happiness, and inner peace. I want a life in which I can be fully present, rather than constantly moving from one responsibility to the next. I want peace to be part of my life, not simply the reward I receive after every task has been completed and everyone else’s needs have been met.

I frequently think about an episode from the third season of the FX series *Atlanta*. The season finale, titled “Tarrare,” centers on Van, who has been traveling through Europe and living in Paris.

When one of her old friends encounters her, Van is almost unrecognizable. She speaks with a French accent. She has adopted a different style, a different personality, a new romantic relationship, and an entirely new name. She is no longer Van. She is Tarrare.

On the surface, the episode is absurd, unsettling, and at times difficult to follow. But beneath its surrealism is the story of a woman who has become disconnected from her former life and from the person she once understood herself to be.

Van had been trying to manage the overwhelming responsibilities of motherhood while navigating an inconsistent relationship, limited support, financial instability, and uncertainty about her own identity and future. She had been attempting to hold everything together without enough resources or care being extended toward her.

In many ways, she was living out her own version of the Superwoman Schema. She suppressed her distress, resisted vulnerability, remained determined to succeed despite limited support, and prioritized caregiving over her own emotional needs. She continued carrying the weight until she could no longer carry it.

Eventually, her life came to a screeching halt in the form of a mental health crisis.

Van fled. She traveled through Europe, assumed a different identity, and temporarily left behind the life that had become unbearable to inhabit, including her role as Lottie’s mother.

When the episode aired, many Black women were deeply critical of Van. They were angry that she had left her daughter. The expectation seemed clear: regardless of what Van was experiencing, a mother was supposed to remain present, responsible, and grounded.

Yet I felt enormous compassion for her.

At the time, I was not a mother. Still, I understood the exhaustion of trying to carry everything alone. I understood the desire to flee, to escape the life in which you are always the responsible one, and to start again as someone who is not defined by what she can endure or provide for others.

I understood the fantasy of becoming unreachable.

There is a clinical condition known as dissociative amnesia with dissociative fugue. It is a rare state involving memory loss connected to one’s identity or personal history, often accompanied by unexpected travel or wandering. In some cases, a person may become confused about their identity or assume a new one. Van’s fictional experience resembles elements of this condition, although a television narrative cannot provide enough information for an actual diagnosis.

In the episode, the identity Van has constructed begins to collapse when her friend asks how her daughter, Lottie, fits into her new life. At the mention of Lottie, Van loses her French accent, begins destroying the kitchen around her, and finally confronts the pain she has been trying to outrun. She acknowledges how lost she has felt and decides that she needs to return home.

Lottie’s name restores Van’s connection to her previous life, but the episode leaves us with a more complicated question: What happens when the life to which someone must return is also the life that helped break them?

We often talk about childhood trauma and its enduring influence on adulthood. We understand that early experiences can shape our relationships, coping mechanisms, nervous systems, and beliefs about ourselves.

We talk far less about the trauma that can occur during adulthood.

Adult trauma can emerge in our personal relationships, our workplaces, our caregiving roles, our experiences of loss, and the slow erosion that occurs when we are expected to function under relentless pressure. It can result from a single devastating event, but it can also develop through accumulation: chronic stress, betrayal, isolation, financial strain, unsupported caregiving, professional harm, medical crises, divorce, grief, or years of being required to remain strong without being cared for in return.

Sometimes adulthood itself becomes traumatic.

Because we do not always have language for these experiences, we often fail to recognize them as injuries. We describe ourselves as tired, overwhelmed, burned out, anxious, unmotivated, or simply not feeling like ourselves. We try to become more disciplined. We reorganize our schedules. We purchase planners. We establish new routines and promise that next week we will manage everything better.

But efficiency cannot heal an injured life.

Sometimes the desire to escape is not evidence that we are selfish, irresponsible, or ungrateful. Sometimes it is information. It may be the mind’s way of communicating that the life we have constructed no longer contains enough room for us.

I do not want to disappear into another country, adopt a new name, or detach from the people I love. But I understand the part of Van that wanted to become someone else. I understand what it means to fantasize about a life in which no one needs anything from you and no one knows you as the person who can always handle more.

I no longer want to wait until I am in crisis before giving myself permission to change my life.

My dream of a bigger life is not a rejection of responsibility. It is a rejection of the belief that responsibility must consume nearly every part of me.

I want to create a life in which love does not primarily appear as labor. I want relationships that allow me to be supported, witnessed, and cared for, not merely relied upon. I want enough space to notice my own feelings before they become emergencies. I want to experience joy without calculating how much work is waiting for me when the moment ends.

I want to laugh without rushing.

I want to rest without bargaining with myself.

I want to love without disappearing.

I want inner peace that is not dependent on my ability to keep everything under control.

Perhaps the bigger life I am dreaming about is not bigger in the conventional sense. It may not require more accomplishments, more recognition, more possessions, or more evidence that I have succeeded.

Perhaps it is bigger because there is finally more room inside of it.

More room for softness. More room for support. More room for pleasure and play. More room to acknowledge what adulthood has taken from me and to decide what I want to reclaim.

More room for me to remain present in my own life.

I do not want to create an entirely new identity in order to survive the one I currently inhabit. I want to build a life in which I no longer feel compelled to escape myself.

I want a life that I do not have to flee in order to feel free.

I was born in New Orleans East…literally at Methodist Hospital located in New Orleans East. The first home my family owned, the home where I spent the entirety of my childhood, was located in New Orleans East.

This origin story detail is significant because my relationship to the East is not abstract. It is not just a place I study, critique, or comment on from a distance. It is where I came into the world. It is where I learned family, community, school, friendship, safety, identity, and belonging. It is home.

My parents were both originally from the 7th Ward, a historically Black neighborhood with deep cultural and community roots. My mother can trace her family back to the 7th Ward for eight generations. And that was the story of so many of my friends growing up in New Orleans East. Their parents came from older Black neighborhoods like the 7th Ward, Hollygrove, Uptown, Pontchartrain Park…all places with history, memory, culture, and generational weight.

But we were different.

We were sort of the first generation to be born into the East, rather than having migrated there. Our parents brought with them the traditions, aspirations, and community values of older Black New Orleans neighborhoods, and we were supposed to be the generation that built something new from that inheritance.

We were building what our parents had known, but in a new place.

In the 1990s, New Orleans East was understood very differently than it is often talked about today. It was seen as a place where Black professional and middle-class families were building lives. It was not perfect, but it was beautiful. It had neighborhoods with well-kept homes, families who knew one another, children who grew up together, schools, churches, restaurants, movie theaters, The Plaza, and subdivisions that sat along bodies of water.

There was a real sense of community.

Being from the East carried its own identity. When someone asked where you were from and you said, “The East,” assumptions were made. Often, they were positive assumptions about your family, your upbringing, your parents, your stability, your access to resources.

Now, were we proud in the same way that children from older, historically Black neighborhoods were proud? Not exactly. We did not necessarily boast about the East in the same way that kids from the 7th Ward, Hollygrove, Uptown, or Pontchartrain Park might boast about their neighborhoods. Sometimes we were even considered a little “lame” because the East did not yet have the same deep historical identity that those neighborhoods had.

But that was also the point.

We were new.

We were still settling into our collective identity.

The East was not lacking history. It was in the process of making it.

And it was rich in what Tara Yosso calls aspirational capital, which is the ability of communities of color to hold onto hopes, dreams, and possibilities for the future, even in the face of structural barriers.

That was the spirit of New Orleans East in the 1990s.

It was not simply a place where Black families lived. It was a place where Black families were imagining forward. Our parents were not just buying houses. They were investing in futures. They were creating stability, building community, raising children, joining churches, enrolling us in activities, sending us to dance classes, taking us to meetings, expecting us to serve, lead, achieve, and belong.

The East held the dreams of a generation of Black families who believed that their children could inherit something more expansive than what they had been allowed.

That is why the disinvestment of New Orleans East is so painful. It did not only disrupt infrastructure. It disrupted aspiration. It disrupted the future that Black families were actively building.

To talk about New Orleans East in the 1990s is to remember a whole ecosystem of childhood, family, faith, recreation, service, and Black middle-class life.

It was sno-balls from Rodney’s on a hot day. It was seafood from Dockside. It was Sunday mass at St. Maria Goretti. It was softball at Kenilworth Park and dance lessons at Syrell’s. It was high school Sweet Sixteens at Ro-Jé’s Ballroom, where we dressed up, took pictures, danced, and felt like we were part of something.

It was also Jack and Jill teen meetings at Methodist Hospital and volunteering at Lafon Nursing Home which were spaces where we were learning leadership, service, responsibility, and care for elders.

These were not just places. They were rituals and traditions embedded in the rhythm of our lives..

They were the texture of growing up in the East. They were how community happened — through food, church, sports, dance, celebrations, service, and the familiar places where everybody seemed to know somebody. These were the institutions and gathering spaces that gave the East its own rhythm.

The East was also where we were formed…not just where we lived.

And that is part of what makes the loss so difficult to explain. Because when people talk about disinvestment, they often talk about buildings, businesses, roads, hospitals, schools, and infrastructure. And all of that matters. But for those of us who grew up there, disinvestment also means the erosion of the places that held our memories.

It means losing the ordinary rituals that made a neighborhood feel like home.

Before New Orleans East became a symbol of what the city neglected, it was the place where we lived our ordinary, beautiful lives.

I did not fully understand the beauty of New Orleans East until it was no more. Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on the East. But Katrina did not create the neglect. It exposed it, accelerated it, and made it harder to ignore.

What happened after Katrina is what still feels unresolved. New Orleans East was not rebuilt with the same urgency, imagination, or investment that other parts of the city received. What had once been a thriving Black community became, in many ways, a symbol of abandonment.

And so I hold this paradox: I grew up in a beautiful community, and I know that to be true because I lived it. But I also have to accept that the East, as I knew it, no longer exists in the same way.

There is a term I have been thinking about in relationship to New Orleans East: solastalgia.

It is different from nostalgia. Nostalgia is the longing you feel for a place you have left. Solastalgia is the grief you feel when the place you love is still there, but no longer feels like itself.

That is how I feel about New Orleans East.

The streets are still there. The neighborhoods are still there. The geography is still there. But the essence of what I knew…the feeling, the community texture, the sense of promise, the everyday beauty has been profoundly altered.

That is a very particular kind of grief. Because you cannot simply go home to resolve it. Home is still there, but the home you knew is gone.

I remember when that shift became very real to me. We were about six years post-Katrina, and The East was barely alive with the pulse of post-disaster recovery. A friend of mine was looking for a house at the time. She was frustrated because she felt like she was going to have to buy in New Orleans East because she could not afford to live anywhere else.

And she said, “You think I want to live in the East?”

I remember being shocked. I was offended. Not because I did not understand that the East had changed, but because I still carried the memory of what it had been. I still carried the East of my childhood…Methodist Hospital, The Plaza, Rodney’s sno-balls, Dockside seafood, St. Maria Goretti, Kenilworth Park, Syrell’s, Ro-Jé’s Ballroom, Jack and Jill meetings, Lafon Nursing Home, beautiful neighborhoods, Black families building lives.

Her statement was one of my first encounters with the depth of the negative perception that had taken hold after Katrina. It was painful because I realized that the East I remembered and the East other people were now describing were no longer the same place.

And in that moment, I felt the rupture.

I felt what it means for a community to still exist physically, but to have its meaning transformed in the public imagination. I felt what it means when a place that once signaled Black possibility becomes spoken of as a last resort.

That is the wound of disinvestment. It does not just change buildings and businesses. It changes how people talk about a place. It changes what people believe is possible there. It changes whether people feel proud to claim it.

The East did not just lose investment. It lost control of its own story.

For those of us who grew up in New Orleans East before Katrina, the grief is complicated. We are not romanticizing it. We know it was not perfect. But we also know it was beautiful. We know it held families, rituals, aspirations, institutions, and a vision of Black community that deserved to be protected.

So when I talk about the disinvestment of New Orleans East, I am also talking about the interruption of Black possibility.

I am talking about a community that had families, infrastructure, businesses, schools, churches, culture, service, and aspiration, but was allowed to decline rather than being meaningfully restored. I am talking about what happens when a place that once represented Black middle-class stability and possibility becomes treated as disposable.

And for those of us who were first-generation New Orleans East children, the loss is even more specific.

Our parents came from historically Black neighborhoods with deep roots. The East was supposed to become ours. We were going to be the first generation to make it ancestral. We were going to be the ones to build the stories, the history, the mythology, the landmarks, and the generational pride.

We were going to be the first.

But disinvestment interrupted that possibility.

What was lost was not just property value. It was community memory. It was continuity. It was the chance for our children and grandchildren to say, “My family has been in New Orleans East for generations,” with the same pride that my mother can say her people go back eight generations in the 7th Ward.

That is what makes the story of New Orleans East so painful.

It is not just that a neighborhood changed.

It is that a future was taken.

During the stage of intimacy versus isolation, the developmental question is often: Will I share my life with someone, or will I remain alone?

For me, that question was complicated by the arbitrary nature of luck in love and life. While many of my friends, family members, and peers were finding partners, getting married, and starting families, partnership remained a void in my life. It was not because I lacked desire. It was not because I had not imagined that life for myself. It was simply not my reality at the time.

And so, I poured myself elsewhere.

I poured myself into my career. Into community work. Into volunteer initiatives. Into children. Into schools. Into building something that felt meaningful. In many ways, I was answering the ache of isolation with contribution. I was creating connection through purpose. I was building a life that mattered, even if it did not yet look like the life I had privately longed for.

That is part of why Navigate NOLA means so much to me.

Long before I gave birth to Genevieve, I gave birth to Navigate NOLA. I nurtured it. I labored over it. I protected it. I watched it grow from an idea into a body of work rooted in children’s emotional well-being, healing-centered practice, public psychology, and systems change.

And now, I find myself in an interesting and tender paradox.

I am raising a baby during the season of life when I also feel deeply pulled toward generativity…toward birthing and nurturing my career, my scholarship, my teaching, and my body of work. I finally have what I longed for, for so long: motherhood, a child of my own. Genevieve is everything I dreamed of. She is one of the great joys of my life.

And yet, I am having this experience at a time when many of the people around me are shifting into different seasons. Their children are older. Their marriages are more established. Their lives seem to have moved into another rhythm. And so, in some ways, it feels lonely again.

There is loneliness in longing for a life that has not yet arrived.

But there can also be loneliness in finally receiving that life later than the people around you.

There is a strange grief in realizing that the thing you prayed for came, but it came on its own timeline. And now you are trying to hold what you once wanted, while also honoring what you built while you were waiting.

That is the paradox I am living inside.

I am a mother.
I am also an institution builder.
I am raising a child.
I am also raising a body of work.

And I think it is important for women to say this out loud.

Because so much of women’s societal value is still placed on having children, as though motherhood is the only legitimate form of legacy. But women give birth to so much more than babies. Women give birth to organizations, movements, classrooms, books, ideas, community practices, healing frameworks, and ways of seeing the world that did not exist before us.

Not every woman desires motherhood. Not every woman becomes a mother. Not every woman’s legacy is biological. And even for those of us who do become mothers, motherhood is not the only thing we are here to create.

Men are often given permission to dream about legacy through work, leadership, institution-building, and public contribution. Women are too often asked to locate our legacy only in the private sphere, only through sacrifice, only through caregiving, only through children.

But generativity is larger than that.

Generativity is what we create.
It is what we nurture.
It is what we repair.
It is what we teach.
It is what we build so that someone else can stand on firmer ground.

For me, this stage of life is asking me to honor all of it: the child I gave birth to, the work I gave birth to, the loneliness I survived, the community I built, and the legacy I am still becoming brave enough to name.

The story goes back to the 1800s, when coffee became scarce and expensive. New Orleanians, unwilling to give up something that had become part of daily life, began adding chicory to their coffee. Chicory helped stretch the coffee. It made it last longer.

But over time, chicory became more than a substitute. It added depth. It added richness. It added something earthy, warm, and comforting.

And I think there is a lesson in that.

Because life stretches us too.

Our bodies are beautifully designed to adapt. When something stressful happens, our nervous system responds. Our heart rate may increase. Stress hormones may rise. Our bodies help us survive, problem-solve, protect ourselves, and keep going.

But when stress is repeated, prolonged, or unrelenting, the body begins to pay a cost.

That cost is called allostatic load.

Allostatic load is the wear and tear that builds up in the body when we are constantly adapting to stress. It is what happens when our stress response systems have to keep turning on again and again, without enough time, space, or support to recover.

And over time, that load can affect both our physical and emotional health. It can show up as anxiety, exhaustion, irritability, brain fog, difficulty sleeping, tension in the body, and the feeling that we are functioning on the outside while slowly becoming depleted on the inside.

And I know this because lately, I have been pushing myself way too hard.

My entire body has been pulsing with anxiety, trying to manage all of the things: teaching, new motherhood, nonprofit leadership, and the demands of being a psychotherapist.

I have been fully stretched.

And in full transparency, I have also been straddling an identity crisis.

I have had to sit with the reality that I can no longer show up in the same ways I once did — in organizations I belong to, in communities I am part of, and in spaces where I have often found meaning, connection, and a sense of purpose.

And that has made me feel isolated.

It has made me feel alone.

At times, it has made me feel like less of myself.

Sometimes, I feel like an observer watching other people live out the life I once had — attending the meetings, showing up in the rooms, participating in the work, carrying the conversations, and moving through the spaces where I used to feel so deeply connected.

I was surprised by how painful it was to realize that part of my identity had been tied to my ability to show up, to participate, to lead, to serve, to be present, and to be available.

And when I could no longer do all of that in the same way, I had to confront the question:

Who am I when I cannot show up the way I used to?

That, too, is a kind of stretching.

And I started to feel the effects of that stretching in my body.

So about three weeks ago, I went back to therapy.

And while therapy did not magically remove the stress or take away all of the responsibilities I am carrying, it added something.

It added support.

It added space.

It added a place where I could hear myself think, feel what I had been holding, and remember that I do not have to carry everything without care.

And that matters.

Because when we are stretched, something has to be added.

When we extend ourselves for too long, something is also being subtracted from us.

We subtract energy, patience, clarity, and rest.

We subtract from our capacity to feel grounded, connected, spacious and whole.

And this is where coffee and chicory offers us such a beautiful reminder.

When the coffee was stretched, something had to be added.

The same is true for us.

When life stretches us, we cannot keep pouring from what is already depleted. We have to add something back in.

Support.

Rest.

Boundaries.

Nourishment.

Community.

Therapy.

Prayer.

Movement.

Stillness.

Joy.

Whatever helps our body remember that it is psychologically safe to exhale.

Adding support is not weakness. Squad care is our strength!

It is how we extend ourselves without emptying ourselves completely. It is how we build resilience without romanticizing exhaustion. It is how we honor the body’s need not only to survive stress, but to recover from it.

So today, I want to invite you to ask yourself:

Where am I being stretched right now?

And what needs to be added?

Because you were never meant to survive on depletion alone.

Like coffee and chicory, there is something powerful that happens when we honor what has been stretched by adding what is needed.

This is your reminder to add before you empty.

To replenish before you disappear.

And to come back home to yourself, one small act of care at a time.

Not everyone has access to rooms where dermatologists, mental health professionals, wellness practitioners, and community members are gathered in conversation. Not everyone has a friend group, professional network, or trusted community where health information is explained in ways that feel clear, culturally grounded, and useful. And too often, the information that does reach people is either overly clinical, overly commercialized, or filtered through social media in ways that can create confusion, fear, shame, or misinformation.

Part of my work is rooted in communicating psychological knowledge: translating complex information about mental health, stress, trauma, identity, relationships, and the body into accessible public discourse. This matters because people should not have to be experts to understand their own health. They should not have to know the right person, be in the right room, or have the right credentials to access information that can help them care for themselves and their communities.

This recap is my effort to extend the conversation beyond the women who were physically present at the Skin Sense event. It is not a substitute for medical care, therapy, dermatological treatment, or individualized assessment. But it is an invitation to think more deeply about the relationship between skin health, emotional well-being, stress, shame, aging, identity, and the particular pressures Black women carry in our bodies.

My hope is that this reflection helps make the conversation more available, more understandable, and more affirming — especially for those who may not otherwise have access to these kinds of conversations.

One of the things I wanted to emphasize during the Skin Sense panel discussion is that skin health is not just cosmetic.

From a mental health perspective, our skin can be connected to stress, inflammation, hormones, sleep, grief, anxiety, burnout, and the way our bodies carry chronic emotional strain. Stress may not be the root cause of someone’s acne, eczema, psoriasis, alopecia, hyperpigmentation, or other skin or hair concern, but it can absolutely be a contributing factor.

Chronic stress activates the body’s stress response system. Over time, this can increase the release of stress hormones and inflammatory chemicals in the body that may create the conditions for flare-ups, breakouts, hair shedding, fatigue, and other physical symptoms to worsen. This does not mean that people are responsible for their symptoms. It does not mean that stress is the only explanation. And it certainly does not mean that medical care is unnecessary.

It simply means that the mind and body are connected.

We cannot think about the skin as separate from the nervous system. We cannot talk about skin without also talking about sleep, stress, hormones, grief, anxiety, burnout, and care.

And for Black women, we also cannot talk about skin and hair without talking about identity, confidence, culture, professionalism, desirability, and how we are perceived in the world.

Skin Is Not Just Appearance

When we talk about eczema, acne, alopecia, hyperpigmentation, or aging skin, we are not just talking about appearance. We are also talking about self-esteem, shame, stress, access to care, and quality of life.

For many Black women, appearance carries additional weight because of racism, sexism, colorism, texturism, and respectability politics. Historically, Black women have been judged through harmful stereotypes that frame us as unprofessional, undesirable, unkempt, hypersexual, angry, or less feminine.

Because of that history, appearance can become tied to safety, dignity, competence, and survival.

For Black women, appearance has also been one of the ways we have tried to resist unwanted identities mapped onto us by society.

Historically, Black women have been forced to contend with deeply harmful archetypes and stereotypes — the Jezebel, the Mammy, the Sapphire, the Strong Black Woman, the angry Black woman, the hypersexual woman, the woman presumed to be less feminine, less innocent, less competent, less worthy of softness, protection, or care. These identities were never ours. They were imposed on us. But they have shaped how Black women are seen, judged, disciplined, desired, dismissed, and treated in schools, workplaces, health care settings, public spaces, and intimate relationships.

And so, for many of us, appearance became one way to push back.

To be clear, our beauty practices are not only about oppression. Black women’s relationships with beauty, hair, skin, adornment, and style are also creative, cultural, joyful, spiritual, and deeply rooted in identity. But we also have to name that, for many Black women, there is a survival logic attached to looking “presentable,” “polished,” “kept,” or “put together.”

In some ways, we have tried to redress the harm by presenting perfectly.

Many of these lessons begin in Black households very early. They start with something as simple and familiar as our mommas, grandmothers, and aunties acting as the “ash police” — making sure we were moisturized from head to toe before we walked out the door. Knees, elbows, ankles, hands, faces: nobody was leaving the house looking dry. On the surface, this was care. And it was care. It was tenderness. It was grooming. It was love.

I often think about a 1956 photograph by Gordon Parks, taken in Mobile, Alabama as part of his Life magazine photo essay, “The Restraints: Open and Hidden.” In the image, Joanne Thornton Wilson stands with her niece, Shirley Anne Kirksey, beneath a red sign that reads “Colored Entrance.” They are impeccably dressed, in the way we often see Black Southerners of that time period dressed — elegant, intentional, and church-ready in their Sunday best.

It is one of my favorite images.

The photograph captures so much at once: the violence of Jim Crow, the dignity of Black Southern life, the beauty of Black women and girls, and the quiet insistence on being fully human in a world determined to deny that humanity.

A couple of years ago, while watching the Gordon Parks documentary A Choice of Weapons, I heard the photograph discussed and learned that decades later, Joanne Thornton Wilson expressed deep frustration that Parks had not told her that her slip was showing in the image.

I remember being stunned.

Here I was looking at this iconic photograph and seeing beauty, dignity, history, and the essence of Black Southern womanhood. But she saw what felt to her like a flaw. She saw a detail that disrupted the presentation of perfection.

That moment has stayed with me.

It was a sobering reminder of how pervasive and enduring respectability politics can be, and how much pressure Black women have felt throughout history to present perfectly — even in the face of systems designed to humiliate, diminish, and dehumanize us.

Because sometimes the demand to look “kept” is not just about beauty. It is about survival. It is about dignity. It is about refusing the identities that have been forced onto us. It is about trying to make sure that even when the world places us beneath a sign that says “Colored Entrance,” we are still seen as composed, elegant, worthy, and fully human.

But it was also a lesson.

It was one of the ways respectability politics got passed down through the body. It taught us that how we appeared in the world mattered. It taught us that being visibly “kept” could shape how we were treated. It taught us that our bodies would be read before we ever opened our mouths.

For Black girls, appearance often becomes an early language of protection. Hair done. Skin moisturized. Clothes neat. Face clean. Body covered. Edges laid. No ash. No visible signs of neglect. No giving people a reason.

And many of us carry those messages into adulthood.

We may feel pressure to look composed even when we are falling apart. To look rested when we are exhausted. To look polished when we are grieving. To look desirable when we feel disconnected from our bodies. To look professional in environments that already question our competence. To look “well” even when we are not well.

So when our skin flares, our hair sheds, our complexion changes, or our appearance shifts, it can activate more than insecurity. It can activate generations of messaging about what it means to be seen, respected, protected, and safe.

This is why conversations about skin and hair cannot be reduced to vanity. For Black women, appearance is often carrying history, family teaching, cultural pride, survival strategy, and emotional weight all at once.

Many Black women feel pressure to look “put together” even when they are exhausted, grieving, stressed, sick, overwhelmed, postpartum, caregiving, working multiple roles, or simply trying to make it through the day.

So when our skin flares, our hair sheds, our complexion changes, or our appearance shifts, it can feel emotionally loaded. It may feel like more than a skin concern. It can feel like a threat to how we are seen.

And being seen matters.

When Stress Shows Up in the Body

The body often communicates what we are carrying emotionally through physical symptoms. Sometimes the skin becomes one of the places where stress, burnout, grief, and overwhelm show up.

This is not about blaming people for being stressed. It is about recognizing that many people are living inside systems, relationships, workplaces, and caregiving responsibilities that keep their bodies in a constant state of activation.

When the body is chronically activated, it may have a harder time resting, repairing, digesting, connecting, and healing.

That is why skin health conversations must make space for the whole person.

Yes, we need dermatologists. Yes, we need accurate diagnoses. Yes, we need evidence-based treatments. Yes, we need sunscreen, moisturizers, medications, protective styles, scalp care, and consistent routines.

And we also need to ask:

What is happening in my body?
What is happening in my life?
Where am I holding stress?
Where am I unsupported?
Where am I constantly performing wellness instead of actually being well?

Shame, Isolation, and the Need for Community

Skin and hair concerns can affect confidence, intimacy, and social functioning. Some people begin avoiding pictures, events, dating, professional opportunities, or social spaces because they do not want to be seen during a flare-up or period of change.

That isolation can deepen the emotional burden.

Shame thrives in silence. Shame thrives when we believe we are the only ones struggling. Shame thrives when visible symptoms make us feel defective, unattractive, or less worthy of care.

This is why we have to normalize these conversations.

People need to know they are not alone because their skin is changing. They are not less beautiful because their hair is thinning. They are not less professional because they are experiencing a flare-up. They are not less feminine because they are aging. They are not less worthy because their body is asking for care.

The goal is not to pretend that appearance does not matter. In the world we live in, appearance often does matter. But we also need spaces where Black women can be seen beyond appearance.

We need spaces where we can tell the truth about what our bodies are carrying.

Nervous System Regulation Is Not Just “Calming Down”

During the panel, I also wanted to make clear that nervous system regulation is not just about calming down.

It is about helping the body feel safe enough to rest, repair, digest, connect, and heal.

Daily practices like sleep, hydration, movement, breathing, prayer, meditation, journaling, therapy, and meaningful connection can support both emotional wellness and physical health.

But I want to be careful here: wellness should not become another performance standard.

A supportive routine does not have to be expensive, complicated, aesthetic, or perfect. You do not have to buy every product, attend every class, drink every green juice, or turn your healing into a full-time job.

From a mental health perspective, the basics matter: sleep, water, stress reduction, movement, nourishing food, consistent routines, and emotionally safe relationships.

The goal is not perfection.

The goal is support.

Aging Is Not a Departure from Participation in Beauty

For women over 35, skin changes can intersect with hormones, stress, caregiving, work demands, perimenopause, sleep disruption, parenting, grief, and the emotional weight of constantly showing up for everyone else.

But aging is not a departure from participation in beauty.

Too often, women are taught to understand aging as loss: loss of desirability, softness, relevance, visibility, femininity, or value. And for Black women, those messages can be especially loaded because our beauty has always been contested, scrutinized, politicized, and misunderstood.

We have to resist the idea that beauty belongs only to youth.

Aging is evidence of living. It is evidence of survival, becoming, mothering, grieving, loving, laboring, learning, enduring, and continuing. Our bodies change because we are alive. Our skin changes because we are alive. And those changes do not remove us from beauty.

Healthy skin care is important. So is developing a compassionate relationship with a changing body.

We deserve to care for our skin without hating our aging.

We deserve to care for our bodies without being at war with them.

We deserve to look in the mirror and see a person who has lived, survived, stretched, loved, lost, created, nurtured, worked, endured, and kept going.

Aging does not make us less worthy of adornment, softness, pleasure, care, or being seen.

Aging is not the end of beauty.

In many ways, it is just a new beginning, as you evolve into a new version of yourself.

A Practical Guide to Emotional Well-Being Support

Because this piece is also about access, I want to close with something practical.

It is one thing to say, “Seek support,” and another thing entirely to know what kind of support to seek, who provides it, and where to begin. The mental health care system can be difficult to navigate, especially for people who are already tired, overwhelmed, uninsured, underinsured, or unsure whether their concerns are “serious enough” to deserve care.

So I want to offer a brief guide — not as a prescription, but as a starting point. Emotional well-being support can take many forms, and the right path depends on what someone is carrying, what they need, and what kind of care is available to them.

Therapy and Counseling

Therapy and counseling are foundational forms of mental health support. They may be offered individually, with couples, with families, or in groups.

Common therapy providers include:

Licensed Clinical Social Workers, or LCSWs: Clinical social workers provide therapy, assess mental health concerns, and often understand people within the broader context of family, community, culture, systems, trauma, and access to resources.

Licensed Professional Counselors, or LPCs: Professional counselors provide therapy and support for emotional, behavioral, relational, and mental health concerns.

Psychologists: Psychologists often provide therapy and may also conduct psychological testing, diagnostic evaluations, and cognitive or emotional assessments.

Psychiatrists: Psychiatrists are medical doctors who specialize in mental health. Some provide therapy, but many focus primarily on diagnosis and medication management.

If you are looking for a space to process stress, grief, anxiety, trauma, relationship concerns, identity questions, burnout, or life transitions, therapy may be a good place to begin.

Medication Management

Some people benefit from medication as part of their mental health treatment plan. Medication can be supportive for depression, anxiety, trauma-related symptoms, mood disorders, sleep issues, attention concerns, and other mental health conditions.

Professionals who may evaluate, prescribe, and monitor psychiatric medications include psychiatrists, psychiatric or mental health nurse practitioners, and medical psychologists in jurisdictions where they are authorized to prescribe.

Medication is not a moral failure. Needing additional support does not mean you are weak. For many people, medication is one part of a larger care plan that may also include therapy, community support, lifestyle changes, spiritual practices, or other healing resources.

Psychological and Educational Assessment

Sometimes people need more than general support. They may need diagnostic clarity, cognitive testing, learning assessments, or a better understanding of emotional, behavioral, or academic functioning.

Psychologists may conduct psychological, cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and learning assessments. Psychiatrists and mental health nurse practitioners may evaluate and diagnose mental health conditions. Educational diagnosticians may assess academic skills, learning disabilities, and special education needs.

Assessment can be helpful when someone is trying to better understand anxiety, depression, ADHD, autism, trauma-related symptoms, learning challenges, cognitive concerns, or school-based needs.

Nutritional Psychiatry and the Gut-Brain Connection

Some people may also be interested in how nutrition affects mood, stress, and emotional well-being. Nutritional psychiatry explores the relationship between diet, the gut, inflammation, and mental health.

This does not mean food is a cure for mental health concerns. It does mean that nutrition, digestion, inflammation, and emotional well-being can be connected.

For people who want to explore this area, a nutritional psychiatrist, registered dietitian, or other appropriately trained health professional may be helpful.

Supplemental Holistic Supports

In addition to therapy, medication, and assessment, some holistic practices can support emotional regulation and stress reduction.

These may include yoga, mindfulness, meditation, sound bath meditation, breathwork, prayer, journaling, somatic practices, and support groups.

These practices are not substitutes for clinical care when clinical care is needed. But they can be meaningful additions to a person’s wellness plan.

When exploring holistic treatments, it is important to make sure practitioners are properly trained and certified in their area of practice. Safety matters. Training matters. Cultural humility matters. Trauma-informed care matters.

There Is No One-Size-Fits-All Path to Wellness

The point is not that everyone needs the same kind of care.

The point is that people deserve to know what care is available.

They deserve language for what they are experiencing. They deserve options. They deserve providers who understand their full humanity. And they deserve access to information before they are in crisis.

Some people need therapy. Some need medication. Some need assessment. Some need rest. Some need safer relationships. Some need a dermatologist and a therapist. Some need a primary care provider, a nutrition professional, and a support group. Some need help naming that what they are experiencing is not just stress, but grief, trauma, anxiety, depression, burnout, or chronic overwhelm.

The most important thing is to choose support that aligns with your needs.

And you do not have to wait until everything falls apart to seek care.

Ultimately, wellness is not about performing perfection.

It is about having the support, knowledge, safety, and care we need to live more fully in our bodies.

And perhaps that is the real invitation of this conversation: to move beyond simply asking Black women to look well, and toward building the kind of conditions that allow us to actually be well.

Immediately, my ears perked up.

I could not wait for my stylist to swing my chair in the direction of the television so I could see for myself. Until then, I sat there impatiently, half-listening and half-scrolling, trying to piece together what was happening in real time. I picked up my phone, opened Instagram, and my timeline was already filled with New Orleans claiming Pope Leo as a Black Creole man from the Seventh Ward.

As a New Orleans girl whose own family origins are in the Seventh Ward, I was tickled.

Not because I believed it. Not at first.

It felt like one of those local New Orleans jokes that starts in somebody’s group chat, travels through a hair salon, lands on Instagram, and becomes local truth before anybody has had time to verify a thing. I laughed because it sounded like us. Of course New Orleans would find a way to claim the Pope. Of course the Seventh Ward would somehow be involved. Of course Black New Orleans would have jokes, receipts, and commentary before the Vatican had even finished its formal introductions.

But then the story started to shift.

Local genealogist Jari Honora had uncovered Pope Leo XIV’s Black Creole roots in New Orleans. And that changed everything for me. I was no longer reading it as a joke, or as a playful act of New Orleans claiming kin where we could find it. I was reading it as history.

I knew Jari Honora’s work. Years ago, I attended a genealogy workshop he led at Le Musée de f.p.c., and I had been a fan of his scholarship ever since. So when I saw his name attached to the discovery, I understood that this was not rumor. This was not merely New Orleans doing what New Orleans does. This was archival work. This was historical recovery. This was the paperwork speaking.

The viral discovery of Pope Leo XIV’s Black Creole ancestry was treated, at first, as a surprising New Orleans twist…part humor, part hometown pride, part collective “I know that’s right.” But beneath the jokes and the joy was a much older story…one about racial passing, legal classification, family silence, and the property value of whiteness.

And in New Orleans, race has always had paperwork.

It has lived in baptismal records, census ledgers, orphanage files, draft cards, property deeds, street names, school admissions, church pews, and family secrets. Long before America learned to call race a social construct, New Orleans had already perfected the bureaucracy of racial contradiction. Here, bloodlines could be intimate while legal status remained violently policed. A white man could father Black children and still leave them nothing. A Black child could be born into a family with property, culture, language, and lineage, and still be rendered disposable by the racial order. A brother could board a train and become white, while the brother left behind remained trapped inside the consequences of Blackness.

Cheryl Harris gave us the language for this.

More than 30 years ago, in her landmark Harvard Law Review article, “Whiteness as Property,” Harris argued that whiteness has never functioned merely as racial identity. It has operated as property: something protected by law, recognized by institutions, inherited across generations, and used to determine who may belong and who may be excluded. Like other forms of property, whiteness conferred rights: the right to use, to enjoy, to possess, to transfer, to defend, and to exclude.

Harris begins her article with the story of her own grandmother, a light-skinned Black woman who passed as white in order to obtain work in Chicago. That personal story becomes the entry point into a larger legal and social argument. Whiteness had material value. It could mean employment, wages, safety, mobility, and the possibility of survival. But that access came at a cost: silence, invisibility, self-denial, and the constant fear of exposure. Passing was not simply a personal choice. It was a response to a racial order that made whiteness valuable and Blackness vulnerable.

I was reminded of Harris’s brilliant work when I read Susan Saulny’s New York Times essay, “A Family Secret No More,” which excavates the secret history of the DeGrange family. Saulny traces her lineage through New Orleans, through Creole Catholic archives, through family photographs, through orphanage records, and through the painful story of two brothers whose lives diverged under the weight of America’s racial regime.

Her great-grandmother, Minerva Davis, was a Black Creole woman from a property-owning family. Her great-grandfather, Ned DeGrange, was a white man from a powerful Confederate family in New Orleans. Together, they had four children. But when Minerva died of pneumonia at age 41, Ned could not bring his Black children into his white Confederate family home. His father, Colonel Joseph DeGrange, refused to acknowledge them. So the children were sent to be raised by the Sisters of the Holy Family. The boys were placed in the Lafon Orphan Asylum for Colored Boys.

That detail is devastating. These children were not without family. They were rendered orphaned by racism.

Later, two of the DeGrange brothers would come to embody the cruel logic Harris describes. George DeGrange remained in New Orleans, identified as Black, worked as a bricklayer, and lived within the constraints imposed on Black life in the Jim Crow South. His brother Edward left for Chicago and passed as white. In one census, both brothers were marked Black. Years later, Edward’s World War II draft card identified him as white. That shift was not merely symbolic. It was material. It changed what the world made available to him.

This is where Harris’s theory becomes painfully concrete. Whiteness, once recognized, became a form of property. It gave Edward access to anonymity, employment, middle-class life, social mobility, and protection. It gave his descendants a different foundation on which to build their lives. Saulny notes the contrast between the branches of the family: George’s son had to leave school to help support the household, while Edward’s son, raised within whiteness, had access to educational and professional opportunities that helped create generational stability. Pope Leo XIV descends from that branch of the family.

The point is not to condemn Edward for passing. In a society that attached danger, poverty, and humiliation to Blackness, passing was often a strategy of survival. The scandal is not that some Black Creoles chose to disappear into whiteness. The scandal is that America made disappearing rational.

The scandal is that whiteness carried such value that it could determine whether one inherited protection or exposure, property or poverty, legitimacy or abandonment, kinship or silence.

This is why the DeGrange family story feels so deeply New Orleans and so deeply American. It echoes Plessy v. Ferguson not because the facts are identical, but because the underlying property interest is the same. Homer Plessy, a light-skinned Creole man from New Orleans, challenged a racial order that gave whiteness legal and social value. Harris reminds us that Plessy was not only denied a seat in a railcar; he was denied the property interest attached to being recognized as white. His claim to whiteness, and to the privileges that flowed from it, was rejected by law.

More than a century later, Saulny’s family history reveals the same racial architecture at work. In one generation, a white Confederate patriarch could refuse his Black grandchildren. In another, one brother could cross the color line and acquire the protections of whiteness, while the other remained Black by law, Black by sight, and Black by consequence. In another, that hidden inheritance could reach all the way to the Vatican.

Whiteness as property strikes again in the Big Easy.

But this time, it does not arrive through the familiar story of Plessy v. Ferguson. It arrives through a family secret. Through a New Orleans orphanage. Through a Chicago draft card. Through Catholic records. Through Creole silence. Through a brother who passed and a brother who stayed. Through a Pope whose family history carries the marks of racial passing.

While, New Orleans did not invent whiteness as property, it has always known how to preserve the receipts.

We started exchanging stories about our mothers’ besties and homegirls. The women who dropped by the house without needing a formal invitation. The women who came through after work, on weekends, after church, before errands, or just because. The women whose presence was so familiar that they became extensions of our families.

They were not technically our aunts, but they were absolutely our aunties.

They knew our parents’ stories. They knew our childhood personalities. They knew when we were being grown, when we were being shy, when we were being dramatic, and when we needed a little extra love. They witnessed us becoming.

As we talked, we found ourselves reflecting on what it meant to grow up surrounded by that kind of collective care. There was something deeply beautiful about being raised not only by your mother, but by a circle of women who loved her, loved you, and understood that care was never meant to be carried by one person alone.

Melissa Harris-Perry gives language to this when she writes about “squad care.” In her essay, she pushes back against the way self-care has been packaged as something we are supposed to purchase, perform, and perfect alone. She reminds us that we live inside networks of people who care for us, hold us, correct us, protect us, and sometimes save us when we cannot save ourselves. For Harris-Perry, the truth is not simply that care matters, but that care is relational. It is something we give and receive inside “webs of mutual and symbiotic relationships.”

That is what my friends and I were really talking about.

Not self-care as scented candles, spa days, or quiet time stolen at the edges of exhaustion. Not self-care as another task on a woman’s already impossible list. We were talking about squad care. Auntie care. Homegirl care. The kind of care that shows up through unlocked doors, extra plates, shared discipline, hand-me-down wisdom, emergency babysitting, porch conversations, laughter in the kitchen, and women who know your whole family history without needing the footnotes.

And then we talked about how far we have drifted from that.

How many of us are raising children in silos now? How much of motherhood has become scheduled, isolated, overextended, and over-managed. How often we are expected to do alone what our mothers, grandmothers, aunties, cousins, neighbors, church members, and homegirls once did together.

Harris-Perry’s framing is important here because it reminds us that the problem is not that women do not know how to care for themselves. The problem is that we have built social expectations that require women, especially Black women, to survive without enough shared support. We praise individual resilience while quietly dismantling the communal structures that made survival possible in the first place. Squad care disrupts that lie. It insists that needing people is not weakness. It insists that dependence, reciprocity, and mutual aid are not failures. They are evidence of our humanity.

Shortly after that conversation, I found myself visiting with one of my aunties, one of my mom’s best friends. In the middle of our conversation, she stopped and complimented my outfit.

I laughed and said, “Oh, Auntie BJ, I just got this and it was cheap. You want me to send you the link?”

Without missing a beat, she said, “Girl, you know I can’t see. Just order me one.”

And we both burst out laughing.

Of course, I ordered her one.

But later, I kept thinking about that small exchange and what it meant to me.

My mother raised me alongside a circle of smart, accomplished, stylish, beautiful women. Women who had presence. Women who had opinions. Women who knew how to put themselves together. Women who moved through the world with their own kind of vindicated high prerogative…elegance, confidence, humor, strength, and flair.

To be seen by them has always meant something to me.

To be complimented by them still feels like a big deal.

This particular auntie has always had an amazing sense of style. Think boho chic meets Tracee Ellis Ross. Effortless. Bold. Creative. Beautiful in a way that feels lived-in and fully her own. So when she likes something I am wearing, I take it as a serious compliment.

Over the years, we have developed a little routine: if she likes something I have on, we order her one too.

And honestly, I love that for us.

It feels like more than a shared outfit or a quick online order. It feels like a thread connecting the past to the present. It feels like the little girl in me still being affirmed by one of the women who helped shape my eye for beauty. It feels like an encouraging nod from an auntie whose style I have admired for as long as I can remember.

That is also squad care.

Sometimes squad care is dramatic. Someone comes to get you off the floor. Someone locks the door you left open. Someone helps you find the therapist. Someone tells you the truth when our emotions about our emotions get in the way of grief, shame, or fear and distort our sense of what is possible.

But sometimes squad care is quiet and ordinary.

Sometimes it is an auntie telling you, “you look good girl.”

Sometimes it is ordering her the outfit too.

Sometimes it is the laughter that comes from being known so well that you do not have to explain the whole thing.

Sometimes it is being reminded that you come from women who saw beauty as part of self-expression and creativity, style as a kind of language, and presence as a form of power.

That is the thing about aunties.

They are not only the women who babysat us, corrected us, fed us, or showed up at family gatherings. They are also the women who gave us mirrors. They reflected back possibility. They showed us different ways to be women. Different ways to be beautiful. Different ways to be powerful. Different ways to belong.

Some were soft. Some were sharp. Some were glamorous. Some were practical. Some were hilarious. Some were deeply spiritual. Some could read you with one look. Some knew how to make a house feel full just by walking through the door. And all of them were their own kind of strong. You felt safe, supported and cared for while in their presence.

And together, they created a world around us.

A world where care was communal.

A world where children belonged to more than one household.

A world where women leaned on each other, laughed with each other, told the truth to each other, and helped raise each other’s babies.

Harris-Perry writes that squad care reminds us there is no shame in reaching for one another. I keep returning to that idea because so much of modern womanhood, and especially Black womanhood, teaches us to be ashamed of need. To be ashamed of asking. To be ashamed of being overwhelmed. To be ashamed of wanting more support than a journal, a bubble bath, or a deep breath can provide. But our aunties knew better. They knew that care was not supposed to be private, hidden, or individualized. Care was supposed to circulate.

I think that is what my friends and I were longing for that day. Not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, but a return to something sacred and practical. A way of life where community was not an aesthetic, but an obligation. A practice. A rhythm. A responsibility.

And maybe the work now is to remember that this kind of community did not happen by accident.

It was built through showing up.

Through dropping by.

Through checking in.

Through helping without being asked.

Through letting children see adults loving each other out loud.

Through refusing the lie that a mother should have to be everything to everyone all by herself.

It was built through the ordinary magic of chosen family.

So yes, I ordered Auntie BJ the outfit.

Because that is what we do.

We share the link. We place the order. We laugh. We remember. We keep the thread going.

And somewhere in that small exchange, I was reminded that collective care is not only found in grand gestures. Sometimes it is found in an auntie complimenting your outfit, asking you to order her one too, and reminding you that you are still being seen by the women who helped raise you.

That is squad care.

That is auntie care.

That is the village, still enduring.

Lately, I have felt so disconnected from myself that I can barely connect to my own intuition, my own gut, my own inner voice. In fact, the world around me has felt so loud that I cannot always tell if my inner voice is actually mine, or if it is the expectations of everyone else speaking through me.

And so, thanks to the advice of my friend Sam, I have been walking the neighborhood every time I feel overwhelmed. Not to exercise. Not to be productive. Not to count steps. But simply to reconnect with myself.

Because the truth is, being disconnected from yourself feels lonely.

I know we often think about loneliness as being alone, but you can feel lonely and not be alone. You can be surrounded by people, responsibilities, relationships, work, family, and noise, and still feel profoundly lonely if you are disconnected from your own self. I think I feel most lonely when I am disconnected from me.

For today’s mental health moment, I want to talk about the ways Black women sometimes disconnect from ourselves in order to survive.

Relational-Cultural Theory gives us a helpful concept called strategies of disconnection. These are protective strategies people develop in response to shame, trauma, racism, sexism, relational harm, and chronic disappointment in relationships. They are not simply pathology. They are survival responses. They are the ways we learn to preserve safety, belonging, or connection when being fully ourselves has not always felt safe.

One strategy I keep thinking about is the concept of “moving toward,” which closely connects to the trauma response of fawning. Fawning is not just being nice, helpful, or agreeable. Fawning is when we try to stay safe or connected by becoming what other people need us to be.

I want to sit specifically with fawning and what Relational-Cultural Theory calls “moving toward” because I think this may be one of the most dangerous strategies of disconnection for Black women. Not dangerous because it is wrong, and not dangerous because it did not once protect us, but dangerous because it can be so easily mistaken for connection.

Moving toward can look like closeness. It can look like care, emotional intelligence, loyalty, helpfulness, and love. It can look like being the one who checks in, anticipates needs, smooths over conflict, and makes sure everyone else is okay. But sometimes what we call connection is actually self-abandonment.

Sometimes we are not moving toward others from a place of authenticity. Sometimes we are moving toward others because we are afraid of disappointing them, because we do not want to be perceived as difficult, selfish, angry, needy, or unavailable, or because we learned that our safety depends on being useful, agreeable, impressive, or emotionally convenient.

That is the danger of fawning. It tells us, “I am staying connected,” when in reality, we may be disconnecting from ourselves. We may be connected to everyone’s expectations but disconnected from our own needs, connected to everyone’s moods but disconnected from our own body, connected to everyone’s crises but disconnected from our own exhaustion, and connected to being needed but disconnected from being truly known.

For Black women, this can become especially complicated because the world often rewards our self-abandonment and calls it strength. Fawning can look like over-functioning. It can look like being dependable, impressive, emotionally contained, low-maintenance, and endlessly available. It can look like anticipating everyone’s needs before they are even spoken, keeping the peace, managing other people’s emotions, avoiding conflict, and performing strength even when we are exhausted.

Because this kind of functioning is often praised, it can be hard to recognize as disconnection. People may call us strong, resilient, selfless, or inspiring. They may admire our ability to keep going. But underneath that praise, many of us may be quietly losing connection with ourselves. We may not know what we need, what we want, what brings us joy, or what we like outside of what we are good at, responsible for, or needed for.

This is where emotional suppression, caregiving, caretaking, showing up strong, and pushing through no matter what becomes more than a cultural expectation. It can become a strategy of disconnection. We learn to earn love, safety, belonging, and approval through usefulness. We move toward others by becoming needed, excellent, and easy to care for because we have convinced ourselves not to require much care.

So when we fawn, it may not look like fear. It may look like excellence, leadership, caretaking, being the dependable one, or high functioning. But it is still a mask, because high functioning is not the same as being whole. And being needed is not the same as being connected.

That is the part I want us to pay attention to. True connection should not require us to disappear. It should not require us to silence our needs, override our intuition, ignore our resentment, or perform a version of ourselves that keeps everyone else comfortable.

A relationship, a role, a job, a family system, or a community that only accepts us when we are over-functioning is not asking for connection. It is asking for access to our labor without full regard for our humanity.

Sometimes, high-functioning depression is hiding inside of that. It does not always look like falling apart. Sometimes it looks like meeting every deadline, caring for everyone else, leading the meeting, teaching the class, answering every message, showing up polished, and still feeling disconnected from joy. Sometimes depression is not a collapse. It can also be a quiet disappearance, where the self gets buried under responsibility, the body gets ignored in the name of productivity, desire gets swallowed by duty, rest gets tangled up with guilt, and joy gets reduced to usefulness.

So maybe the question is not simply, “Am I connected to other people?” Maybe the deeper question is whether I am connected to myself while I am connected to them. Can I hear my own voice? Can I feel my own body? Can I tell the truth about what I need? Can I say no without collapsing into guilt? Can I disappoint someone without believing I have lost my worth? Can I be loved without being useful?

That is where reconnection begins. Not with abandoning others. Not with becoming cold or unavailable. But with refusing to abandon ourselves as the cost of belonging.

So the question becomes, how do we come back to ourselves?

One answer may sound simple, but I think it is deeply important. Find a hobby.

Not a side hustle, another degree or credential, or something that has to be monetized. Not something that proves your discipline, productivity, or excellence. A real hobby. Something you do because it brings you pleasure. Something you do badly, slowly, inconsistently, or playfully. Something that does not have to become content, income, service, or achievement.

A hobby can become a small act of reconnection. It asks us to remember what we enjoy. It gives us permission to be beginners. It allows us to practice pleasure without performance.

Maybe it is gardening, dancing, pottery, walking the neighborhood with no agenda, reading fiction, arranging flowers, learning an instrument, painting, cooking slowly, joining a book club, or taking pictures just because something beautiful caught your eye.

The point is not the hobby itself. The point is that it belongs to you. It is a way of saying, “I am more than what I carry, produce and who needs me. I have meaning and purpose outside of doing…I have it in just being.”

That is your homework assignment for the week. Pay attention to where you may be fawning, over-functioning, or performing strength as a way to stay connected to others. And then ask yourself gently, what helps me reconnect with me?

I began to consider ending treatment and referring her to another therapist, perhaps a white woman. Ironically, she had been referred to me by a white woman therapist who cited “cultural differences” as the reason she could not continue treating her. Yet despite our shared race and gender, I, too, was experiencing cultural differences with this client. I love being Black. I love being a woman. I love being a Black woman. And in many ways, we were sitting across from one another inhabiting entirely different realities of Black womanhood.

Following one particularly difficult session, I remember feeling a profound sense of defeat. Then an idea unexpectedly surfaced in my mind: what if I tried bibliotherapy? She was intellectually curious. Perhaps I could expose her to Black women writers.

And so I did.

That decision changed the trajectory of our therapeutic relationship. More importantly, it transformed her relationship with herself and the way she saw Black women.

What I did not fully understand at the time was that Black women writers had already done the same for me.

There are certain passages that alter the way you see the world because they alter the way you see yourself. That moment came for me while reading Women, Race & Class by Angela Davis. In a brief but powerful passage, Davis notes that enslaved Black women “worked on the levees in Louisiana.” I stopped reading and sat with that sentence for a long time.

I had never imagined Black women as part of the labor force that created the original levee system. Despite being a lifelong New Orleanian, despite living in a city whose very survival depends upon levee protection, I had never been taught to envision enslaved Black women as part of the physical infrastructure of this place. I understood the levees abstractly as engineering, as public works, as storm protection. But I had never considered whose hands built them.

And yet, their labor continues to protect us still.

Every day in New Orleans, we live within the afterlife of that labor. The levee system affords us the possibility of remaining here, of raising families here, of building community here, of loving this city despite all of its contradictions. The thought overwhelmed me: Black women, whose humanity this country refused to recognize, quite literally helped construct the conditions that make life in this region possible.

What struck me even more deeply was that it took a Black woman writer to help me see Black women more fully.

That realization carries its own grief. How many parts of our history remain invisible because the people who lived it were denied authorship? How many dimensions of Black womanhood have been obscured by historical narratives that reduce Black women to caricature, service, endurance, or suffering without fully accounting for our intellectual, political, emotional, and material contributions to society?

Black women writers do more than document history. They restore vision.

They help us see what dominant narratives trained us not to notice. They recover buried truths and expand the boundaries of who we believe Black women have been, are, and can become. Through their work, we encounter parts of ourselves that history attempted to erase.

Reading Davis’s words made me realize that Black women were never merely adjacent to history. We were and continue to be architects of it. We are builders of cities. We are shapers of political movements. We are theorists of democracy. We are laborers of the literal and metaphorical foundations beneath this country.

And yet so much of our history remains untaught. How Black women’s contributions are remembered is ultimately up to us. We carry a collective responsibility to preserve an accurate cultural memory, to tell the truth about who Black women have been, what we have built, and the worlds we have shaped despite every attempt to erase us from the story.

That is why Black women writers matter so profoundly. They do not simply give us information. They give us language, memory, recognition, and possibility. They expand the boundaries of who we believe Black women have been, are, and can become.

Despite the immense joy, love, and gratitude that motherhood has brought me, I am also navigating anticipatory grief, emotional exhaustion, and what feels at times like a complete absence of optimism. I have come to realize that my productivity in this season is not necessarily a marker of wellness, but in many ways, a coping mechanism that has become almost pathological.

Postpartum recovery, tamoxifen, cancer survivorship, caregiving, teaching, nonprofit leadership, and the grief and disorientation that can accompany major life transitions have all slowly chipped away at my emotional well-being. And while I have spent much of my professional life encouraging others to prioritize their mental health, I also have to be honest about how easy it is to neglect ourselves when we are caring for everyone else.

Lately, I’ve been recognizing my emotional state for what it truly is…a signal from my body. It is a signal that I need support, that I need rest, care, space to process, and the kind of intentional tending to my emotional well-being that cannot happen through productivity alone.

So for me, that means returning to therapy regularly after a far too long hiatus brought on by motherhood, responsibilities, and the lack of willingness to consistently carve out time for myself.

And if any part of this resonates with you, maybe this is your reminder too. You do not have to wait until you are completely depleted to seek support. You do not have to earn rest. You do not have to carry everything alone. Sometimes healing begins with simply being honest about the fact that we are struggling.

During that season of my life, my incredible therapist introduced me to a concept that has stayed with me ever since: relationships of inspiration versus relationships of deprivation.

Relationships of inspiration are often slow, steady, grounding, and deeply nourishing. They are usually built within the ordinary moments of life…the mundane routines, the quiet conversations, the consistency, the emotional safety, the feeling that you can simply exhale and be yourself. Ironically, these relationships are sometimes labeled as “boring” because they do not keep you trapped in cycles of chaos and emotional unpredictability.

In contrast, relationships of deprivation are often built on intoxicating highs and devastating lows. They pull you into emotional rollercoasters that can feel passionate and consuming, while simultaneously leaving you depleted, anxious, and constantly chasing the next moment of connection, validation, or relief. It is the emotional equivalent of reaching for a carrot dangling just out of reach.

Since being introduced to this framework, I have used it as an analytical tool whenever a relationship no longer feels good or aligned for me. And this extends far beyond romantic relationships. It can apply to friendships, workplaces, institutions, family systems, or even our relationships with ourselves.

This concept has helped me stay grounded in my values and clearer about the things that genuinely bring me peace, fulfillment, and emotional well-being. It has also reminded me that life is mostly made up of ordinary moments. Our lives are not built in the grand gestures or dramatic highs. They are built in the everyday moments…the quiet mornings, the check-in texts, the shared meals, the laughter, the reliability, the people who consistently show up.

And often, the people who can sit with you in those ordinary moments with care, steadiness, and love…those are your people.

In the year 2012, the broader New Orleans community was in the midst of post disaster recovery, and New Orleans youth were facing a significant mental health crisis, with young people experiencing PTSD at rates more than four times the national average. What I was witnessing was not simply an individual behavioral health concern. It was a population level crisis shaped by chronic exposure to trauma, structural inequities, and environmental instability.

At the time, I was working at an organization, where we partnered with schools and youth serving community-based organizations to deliver comprehensive sexual education programs. As part of that work, we also conducted emotional wellness screenings. At the time, we were seven years out from Hurricane Katrina, but the storm’s impact was still pulsing through the lives of New Orleans youth.

I remember the long lines of students that would form after each screening, students who had endorsed suicidal ideation and needed immediate risk assessment. The sheer volume was overwhelming. It would take me hours to work through crisis response protocols, and there was rarely, if ever, a school based mental health professional on site to assist. Resources were painfully scarce. Referrals took forever to track down, and even longer to result in care.

Our data confirmed what we were witnessing. New Orleans youth were experiencing significantly higher rates of exposure to violence, abuse, and trauma. As a result, they were far more likely than the national average to develop PTSD and to suffer from depression .

That was the moment I understood that proximity alone was not enough. I felt a calling not only to be present with the crisis, but to help build something that could respond to it at scale.

And so began my journey to create Navigate NOLA, which has become my quiet revolution.

My work has always been grounded in the understanding that childhood trauma must be treated as a public health crisis. One that requires data driven analysis, early intervention, trauma informed systems, and community-based solutions. Through Navigate NOLA, I have worked to operationalize this framework by integrating social and emotional learning into schools, expanding early childhood mental health services, training educators and youth serving professionals, and contributing to research and evaluation efforts that demonstrate the long-term impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences. This work reflects a broader movement to treat trauma not as an isolated experience, but as a preventable and addressable condition that demands systemic, cross-sector intervention .

Since its inception, this work has reached over 3,000 children and more than 1,000 professionals, embedding trauma informed care into the institutions that shape children’s daily lives.

But this is not just my story.

Black women across the country are building quiet revolutions that have massive collective impact. And yet, much of this work goes unseen.

At the top of the year, when the estimate that 600,000 Black women were out of work began circulating, I felt a deep sense of urgency. Not just concern, but alarm. There are so many Black women doing deeply impactful work that is often under recognized, underfunded, and undocumented, but undeniably transformational.

That is the nature of quiet revolutions.

The work does not always create a loud boom. It moves quietly through communities, systems, and relationships. It shifts culture. It builds capacity. It creates healing. It creates respair, the intentional act of restoring what has been broken, reconnecting what has been severed, and making whole what systems have fragmented. And yet, the impact is the boom.

So while we may not always receive the visibility and recognition, we will absolutely feel the absence of our impact when it is removed. We will feel the structural consequences of Black women being collectively sidelined.

What we often fail to name is that these quiet revolutions are a form of cultural wealth. As Tara J. Yosso reminds us, communities of color have always carried forms of capital that are rarely recognized by dominant systems. What I am calling a quiet revolution is, in many ways, an expression of resistant capital, the everyday work of challenging inequity while building new possibilities for the future. It is also aspirational, grounded in the belief that something better is possible even in the face of persistent barriers. It is social and navigational, built through relationships, knowledge sharing, and the ability to move within and across systems that were not designed for us. And it is familial, rooted in traditions of care, survival, and intergenerational wisdom that have sustained our communities for generations.

Quiet revolutions have always been led by Black women. It is endemic to who we are.

In the mid-1800s, Lily Ann Granderson established a midnight school for enslaved people in Natchez, Mississippi, operating from 11 pm to 2 am because Mississippi law prohibited their literacy and imposed severe punishment. She educated hundreds under the cover of darkness.

This was a quiet revolution.

And it was not an isolated one.

We are living in a time where our cultural memory institutions are under attack, and several weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit the Amistad Research Center. While I was there, I spent time reading the meeting minutes of the Ladies Friends of Faith Benevolent Association, founded in 1914. What struck me was that at nearly every meeting, these women were taking up collections to care for one another and for their broader community.

There was nothing performative about it. No headlines. No recognition. Just consistent, intentional acts of care and collective responsibility.

It was a powerful reminder that Black women have always been building systems of care long before formal institutions existed. So much of what we now call movement work, mutual aid, or community-based intervention has always lived in these quiet, disciplined practices of showing up for one another. The work I lead today through Navigate NOLA stands in direct lineage with these traditions, extending them into modern systems of education, health, and community care.

Throughout history, these acts have taken place at the hands of Black women who possessed the vision and foresight to understand what their work would mean for generations to come. These quiet revolutionary acts have advanced justice for marginalized communities and created respair in times of profound hopelessness.

My quiet revolution, for the past ten years, has been working to redress systemic failures that have resulted in childhood trauma being normalized rather than treated with the urgency of a public health crisis. Through education, policy advocacy, clinical practice, and community-based intervention, I have worked to build systems that promote healing, strengthen resilience, and create the conditions necessary for children to experience emotional well-being.

This work is also about respair, restoring what has been broken, reconnecting what has been severed, and creating pathways toward wholeness in the face of historic and ongoing harm.

This is my quiet revolution, what is yours?

I want to take a few moments to reflect on something many of us have experienced, even if we have not always had language for it. It is the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, shift that can happen in how we are perceived in professional and social spaces.

There is a concept known as the “Pet to Threat” phenomenon, coined by Dr. Kecia Thomas. It describes a pattern where Black women are initially welcomed, affirmed, and even celebrated. We are seen as impressive, articulate, and full of promise. In those early moments, we may be mentored, supported, and viewed as exceptional.

But it is also important to name why we are often welcomed.

We are welcomed for our labor, for our work ethic, for productivity, and for our ability to carry, to fix, to produce, to perform…

As long as our contributions align with maintaining the system, we are valued. As long as we are overdelivering, accommodating, and not disrupting, we are seen as assets.

But over time, a shift can happen.

As we begin to step fully into our voice, assert our expertise, set boundaries, or challenge inequities, the perception of us can change. The very systems that benefited from our labor can become unsettled by our leadership.

And in that moment, we are no longer simply productive. We are perceived as disruptive, no longer agreeable, labeled difficult, no longer exceptional and ultimately framed as a threat.

The same qualities that were once praised can suddenly be recast. Confidence becomes arrogance, assertiveness becomes aggression, and leadership becomes intimidation.

That shift is not just frustrating. It can take a real toll on our mental and emotional well-being.

Many of us begin to carry the weight of navigating how we are perceived. We may overthink our tone, soften our delivery, or hold back altogether. There can be stress, burnout, and even moments of questioning our own instincts or worth. The emotional labor of constantly calibrating ourselves in response to others is exhausting.

And so, in those moments, I want to offer a practice that allows us to hold both our truth and our peace.

It begins with what we might call a hot letter. This is a letter you write in the heat of the moment, when something has triggered frustration, disappointment, or anger. You write freely, honestly, and without censoring yourself. You name what happened, how it impacted you, and what you wish you could say. This letter is not meant to be sent. It is meant to create space for your emotions to exist without suppression.

Then, we pause and shift into what we can think of as turning to wonder.

Instead of reacting immediately, we ask ourselves a few grounding questions.

What am I really feeling right now?

What do I need in this moment?

How can I respond in a way that aligns with my values, my well-being, and my long-term goals?

This practice does not dismiss what we feel. It honors it. But it also gives us the opportunity to respond with intention rather than urgency.

If you have ever experienced the shift from being celebrated for what you produce to being scrutinized for what you challenge, it is not because you became too much. It is because you moved from working within the system to questioning it. And as we ascend into leadership roles, we carry a collective responsibility to Black women to honor our prerogative to question and disrupt inequitable systems.

Because disruption is not simply about resistance. It is also about responsibility. It is about how we use our voice, our access, and our power once we have it.

As Toni Morrison reminds us, “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.

And systems often resist that kind of responsibility. But it is where our collective power resides.

So as you move through your week, I invite you to notice those moments. Not to internalize them, but to name them. To give yourself permission to feel, to reflect, and then to choose how you respond.

Protecting your peace is not passive. It is a deliberate and powerful act of leadership.

Last weekend, I attended an intergenerational conference for Black women organized by a philanthropic collective committed to community care, leadership, and legacy building. I had the opportunity to facilitate a session within the Girls’ Track, designed for high school and college aged participants. What unfolded in that space was both deeply affirming and profoundly sobering, offering a critical window into the lived experiences of Black girls and the enduring nature of racialized and gendered inequities.

The session opened with a reflective activity in which participants were asked to identify women who inspire them, women in whom they see themselves, and women they aspire to become. Their responses spanned public figures, maternal influences, and peer networks, particularly sister friends. As participants shared, we identified common themes related to resilience, visibility, care, and ambition. This opening exercise served not only as an entry point into identity formation but also as a grounding mechanism for collective storytelling.

We then transitioned into the lab component of the session, where participants critically examined representations of Black women and girls across media, television, and film. Using these portrayals as analytical anchors, the young women explored how dominant narratives shape both perception and lived experience. Importantly, these discussions became a conduit for personal testimony. Participants began to share their own encounters with racism and sexism in educational spaces, articulating how harmful stereotypes are often projected onto them.

They described experiences of hyper-sexualization by both peers and adults, disproportionate enforcement of dress code policies, and the constant negotiation of respectability through code switching. Several participants spoke about the anxiety associated with navigating Eurocentric beauty standards, particularly as it relates to hair and presentation in academic and professional contexts. These narratives reflect what scholars have long documented as the adultification, surveillance, and disciplining of Black girls’ bodies in institutional spaces.

One account, in particular, was striking in its familiarity. A participant described a scenario in which a Black girl and a white girl wore the same outfit, yet only the Black girl was punished for violating the dress code. This moment resonated deeply with me, as I had experienced the same inequity at the very same school more than two decades earlier. The persistence of such disparities underscores the structural nature of these injustices and the slow pace of institutional change.

As I listened to the participants, I found myself not only bearing witness to their experiences, but also reflecting on my own. Their stories surfaced an internal reckoning around worthiness, specifically, how my own experiences in Black girlhood shaped a persistent sense of not being good enough. What I did not have at their age was the language to name what I was experiencing. I did not yet understand intersectionality or the ways in which systemic inequities structure everyday interactions. Without that framework, I internalized these experiences as individual deficiencies rather than manifestations of broader social forces.

In the absence of that understanding, I adapted. I learned to overperform. I learned to anticipate expectations and exceed them. I learned to equate productivity with value. What I now recognize is that this pattern, what might be described as pathological productivity, was not simply ambition or discipline. It was a compensatory strategy developed in response to environments that signaled, implicitly and explicitly, that my worth was conditional.

This reflection also brought me to consider my own experiences with high functioning depression, a form of emotional distress that is often obscured by outward success and competence. The ability to show up at a high level, even while internally struggling, is frequently misread as resilience. However, in many cases, it reflects a learned necessity to maintain performance in order to secure belonging, validation, or safety. For many Black girls and women, this dynamic is further reinforced by cultural expectations and structural conditions that reward endurance while obscuring vulnerability.

What felt particularly significant in the space with these young women was that they are developing a different relationship to their experiences. Their ability to name injustice as structural, rather than personal, disrupts the internalization that shaped my own developmental trajectory. While they are not immune to the pressures of overperformance or the pull of the Superwoman Schema, they are, in many ways, better positioned to interrogate and resist it.

At the same time, I observed the early internalization of the expectation that Black women must remain strong, self-reliant, and perseverant in the face of persistent adversity, often without support. The participants articulated a commitment to excellence and endurance, yet this was frequently coupled with an implicit understanding that they must do so alone. I invited them to reflect on this pattern, to consider its costs, and to imagine alternative ways of being that allow for vulnerability, interdependence, and care.

We intentionally left that portion of the conversation open ended, creating space for imagination and future inquiry. It was a moment of collective pause, a recognition that while awareness is critical, transformation requires both individual and structural shifts.

Following the session, I rejoined the larger conference and sat beside the mother of one of the participants, an old friend of mine. In conversation, I shared that the school we once attended appeared to have changed very little, given her daughter’s current experiences. What she shared next reframed my understanding of our own history.

She revealed that during our eighth-grade year, a racist assumption made by the school’s principal led to her being withdrawn from the school. This decision, made to protect her from a harmful environment, was not widely known among our peers at the time. I was struck by the injustice of that moment, particularly given who she is. She is exceptionally accomplished, having attended and graduated from the top ranked high school in our state, entered college with advanced standing, and ultimately earned a doctoral degree. And yet, she was misjudged and marginalized by an authority figure whose bias shaped her educational trajectory.

The irony is not lost on me that her daughter now attends that same school. While the leadership has changed, the underlying narratives about Black girls persist. However, there is also a critical difference. My friend shared that her daughter is actively engaged in challenging inequities within the school, using her voice to disrupt the very systems that once silenced her mother.

She said she has the voice I did not have back then.

There was something profoundly healing in that statement. It illuminated the intergenerational arc of resistance and reclamation. The courage and advocacy of the daughter not only signal progress, but also serve as a form of repair for the mother’s past experiences. It is a reminder that while systems may be slow to change, the people within them are not static.

What I witnessed that day was not simply a reflection of persistent inequity, but also evidence of evolving consciousness, collective resilience, and the transformative power of voice.

There are moments in our lives that seem, at the time, fleeting and inconsequential, comments made in passing, assumptions left unchallenged, feelings that surface and then recede. And yet, years later, those same moments return with unexpected clarity, revealing themselves not as isolated events, but as formative sites of meaning making. They become part of the quiet architecture through which we come to understand ourselves.

One such moment for me occurred during adolescence. I was in an on again, off again relationship with a boy who, in a casual conversation about the future, expressed a hope that our hypothetical children would inherit his hair. His comment was not framed as critique, nor was it delivered with malice. It was, instead, offered as a preference, an aspiration shaped by an unspoken hierarchy of desirability. When I challenged the biological premise, he further clarified his meaning by referencing a peer whose hair more closely aligned with dominant aesthetic standards, long, silky, and socially affirmed. He asked, “Do you think their hair will at least be like hers?”

In that moment, the question did not feel hypothetical. It felt evaluative. A quiet, final attempt to negotiate proximity to desirability. An assessment that, whether intentionally or not, positioned my hair, and by extension, me, as something to be worked around rather than fully embraced.

What I recall most vividly is not the content of the exchange, but the affective residue it left behind. I felt, in that moment, a quiet displacement, an implication that something inherent to me existed outside the boundaries of what was considered beautiful or desirable. He did not explicitly name my hair as deficient, but he did not need to. The logic of the hierarchy was already familiar.

Importantly, I did not consciously reject my hair. I understood it as thick, textured, and resilient. But neither did I locate it within the realm of beauty. It existed, in my own self-concept, as neutral, unremarkable, uncelebrated. That neutrality, I now understand, was not benign. It was shaped by the absence of affirmation within a broader sociocultural context that privileges proximity to Eurocentric standards of beauty. In this way, I was not resisting the hierarchy, I was accommodating it.

What is particularly instructive, in retrospect, is not that I internalized these messages, but how selectively I challenged them. I was comfortable disputing the biological impossibility of his claim, asserting that our children would necessarily reflect both of us. But I did not interrogate the underlying assumption that my hair texture was inherently less desirable. That premise remained intact, unexamined.

Years later, I encountered a moment that reactivated this earlier narrative in ways that were both immediate and disorienting. My husband, while reflecting on the physical characteristics of our five-month-old daughter, remarked with pride that she had inherited his hair, soft, curly, and shiny. When I noted that infant hair evolves over time, and that mine had looked similar at her age, he expressed surprise. After seeing a photograph of me as an infant, he acknowledged the resemblance but appeared momentarily disappointed.

In that moment, I experienced what W. E. B. Du Bois describes as dual consciousness.

I was not simply present as a mother observing her child. I was simultaneously my adult self and my fourteen-year-old self, interpreting the moment through a lens shaped by earlier experiences of aesthetic hierarchy. I became acutely aware of how I was seeing myself, and how I imagined I was being seen.

Without prompting, I began to qualify my daughter’s hair, describing it as softer, shinier, less tightly curled. In that moment, those qualifiers were not neutral descriptors. They functioned as a quiet defense, an attempt to signal that her hair was not “as bad” as mine.

What is important, however, is that I did not actually believe that to be true.

I did not believe that her hair was meaningfully different from mine at her age. And I did not believe that my hair was bad.

And yet, I found myself constructing that distinction anyway.

Not because I was responding to something that had been explicitly stated, but because I was anticipating a response. I was attempting to manage what I imagined might be disappointment in something I had passed down to her.

In that moment, I was not simply speaking as myself. I was speaking through an awareness of how my hair, and by extension her hair, might be read within a broader aesthetic hierarchy.

This is where dual consciousness becomes most visible, not in what is said to us, but in how we preemptively respond to what we imagine could be said.

This reflexive response revealed something important. I was not engaging with the present moment as it was, I was engaging with it as it had been historically structured in my consciousness. The past was not behind me. It was active, informing my interpretations, shaping my emotional responses, and guiding my attempts to manage meaning in real time.

Previously, I understood this as holding two truths. But more precisely, it is the ongoing navigation of dual consciousness, an awareness of self that is always in conversation with the social meanings imposed upon it.

At the same time, there is another force at work, a strong internal locus of control.

This internal anchoring allows me to maintain a sense of worth that is not fully contingent upon external validation, even as I remain aware of how external systems operate.

And what has become increasingly clear is that this dynamic is not confined to a single moment or domain. It extends across my professional, personal, and relational life.

In my professional life, I occupy roles that do not neatly align with traditional hierarchies of value. As a professor of practice, I exist outside of the tenure track system that often defines academic legitimacy. I do not have an extensive publication record, yet I bring a depth of applied, interdisciplinary knowledge into the classroom. Through the lens of dual consciousness, I am aware of how my position is perceived within academic hierarchies. Through an internal locus of control, I remain grounded in the value of what I offer.

As a licensed clinical social worker, I practice within a mental health ecosystem that often positions social work at the margins relative to other disciplines. Despite holding advanced licensure and doctoral training, I am aware of how the profession is hierarchically situated. And yet, I know that what I offer as a clinician, grounded in relational, contextual, and systems-oriented care, is both distinct and essential.

In public health, I function as a practitioner rather than a researcher. I lead programs, design interventions, and engage directly with communities. This work is impactful and far reaching, yet often differentiated from research-based authority. Again, I hold both awareness and grounding simultaneously.

This duality extends into my personal and family life as well. I come from a family structure that resists conventional norms. My parents are divorced, and yet they remain deeply connected. They spend holidays together, share meals, and maintain a relationship that defies traditional narratives of separation. In contrast, my husband comes from a more traditional family system, one that operates within clearer boundaries and expectations.

Within this contrast, I am aware that my way of being, my orientation toward family, autonomy, and connection, may not always be fully legible or valued within more traditional frameworks. And yet, I do not experience my upbringing or my path as deficient. I experience it as expansive.

Perhaps one of the earliest expressions of this internal anchoring emerged long before I had the language to describe it. As a child, I decided that I would attend Spelman College after watching Boyz n the Hood. The film presented Spelman and Morehouse as spaces of possibility within a world marked by constraint. That image stayed with me. It became a North Star.

And when I arrived, I found myself surrounded by extraordinary Black women whose brilliance felt expansive and undeniable. I often questioned whether I belonged. And yet, even in that questioning, there remained a quieter knowing.

I have also come to understand that this experience is not solely individual, but shaped by geography and cultural context. There is a similar juxtaposition that exists for Black people who are raised in cities with a strong, visible, and culturally reinforced sense of Black identity, cities such as New Orleans, my city of origin, as well as Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. In these contexts, Blackness is not experienced as marginal, but as normative, expansive, and worthy of pride. It is reflected in culture, community, leadership, and everyday life.

I have come to understand this as a form of privilege, as it is not the dominant experience for many Black people in the United States, particularly those raised in environments where Blackness is more consistently positioned as other. Growing up within a context that affirms Blackness can cultivate a strong internal grounding, a sense of identity and worth that is less dependent on external validation.

And yet, even with that grounding, we are still required to navigate a broader societal context that does not value Blackness in the ways that we have come to value ourselves and our communities. This, too, is an expression of dual consciousness, the simultaneous experience of pride rooted in cultural affirmation and awareness of structural devaluation. It further reinforces the importance of an internal locus of control, not as a denial of systemic inequities, but as a necessary anchor in the face of them.

This is the work. The exhausting and seemingly insurmountable work…

Not simply holding two truths, but navigating dual consciousness while remaining anchored in an internal locus of control across every domain of life.

It is the ability to see clearly without becoming defined by what is seen.

And to move through the world with the quiet, persistent knowing that you are enough.