“I can’t afford to stay in the same place.” This is what I tell myself every time I want to quit or give up. I literally —mentally, emotionally and physically—cannot afford to stay in the same place. There’s more that I see in me, and there’s more that I want to do. I refuse to stay here. I refuse to never see me at my best. I refuse to never have new, better, happier and joyful experiences. I refuse to have come this far and only go this far. Thus I am constantly —and obsessed with—adjusting and readjusting myself. How can I be better? Where can I fine tune? What skills do I need to improve upon? What foundational things need to be reassessed and addressed? I keep a journal. Everyday I write about how I’m feeling, what’s going on in my world, what’s going on in the moment, what I’m struggling with and what I want to see happen or change. After at least three months, I go back over my entries writing notes about what happened, filling in the details and explaining what happened. Although no one outside of myself reads this journal, it’s amazing to revisit old words and old thoughts and to compare how I feel now about the same situation to how I felt about it then. It’s a great way to see how much I’ve grown. Things that I thought were huge problems then don’t even exist now and things that seem big now, I’ve oftentimes overcame before. I read and reread these entries frequently. I find that it holds me accountable and keeps me from catastrophizing. It’s also been a great way to stay encouraged, stay focused and keep growing.

My utopian vision for optimal mental health in Black communities is cognitive restoration. It’s important that we are conceptually and contextually aligned with what is going on within ourselves and within our communities so that we can make effective changes, especially because we, very often, have to be our own advocates. I know that simply existing can be exhausting for us from time to time. It always seems as if there’s something going on and plenty of someones who couldn’t care less about us, our mental health or our well-being. However, I also know that there can be a shift from reactive thoughts and behaviors to responsive thoughts and proactive behaviors and when we are in a responsive state, we are poised to make better decisions. Healing centered around well-being puts us in a position to move forward. Psychological well-being sits on six pillars: self acceptance, autonomy, personal growth, positive relationships, environmental mastery, and purpose in life. People need positive contributions and achievements in each area in order to improve their mental health. This is what the program I’ve created is focused on: truly figuring out self and making impactful adjustments that have long lasting and sustainable positive outcomes. We can’t heal people; we can’t fix them and cannot do the work for others. Mental health and healing are intimate and personal journeys, we cannot tell people what’s important to them. My program is designed to help people connect their own dots. Everyone goes through the human development process. Racism, sexism, and poverty are all layers added into, or on top of, each layer and stage of development. So while so much of healing is peeling back the societal layers, we still need to address the “normal” deficits within our own development. Were we loved? Did we feel safe? Do we know how to regulate our own emotions? Do we understand how we’re feeling? We were taught how to plan for life? Where are we and where are going? How we view and solve these internal problems affects how we adjust and respond to external problems. Yes, Black communities have very unique and specific challenges that need to be addressed and solved; however, basic life problems and needs must be met and solved individually before they can be solved communally. Once individual success and progress is achieved, individuals can come together and work on providing solutions that contribute to communal success. If we want Black communities to improve and achieve social justice, the quality of living for Black individuals needs to overwhelmingly improve. Financial literacy: the average Black person and Black family needs to be out of debt. The everyday person needs to have a job, or be creating jobs, that pays beyond the nation’s average. Misogyny, patriarchy—the treatment of women, Black women, needs to addressed. How our families function, from how we create them to how we maintain them, needs to be addressed. How we work and interact with one another needs to be addressed. We need new habits and a new normal and while it may take some time, these are all things that can definitely be fixed. There’s no magical pill and no short cuts, just hard, intentional and focused work. If the Black community is going to achieve mental health care from the medical world and social justice, it’s going to be because we, individually and collectively, got better and positioned ourselves to positively navigate change.

Education immediately followed by opportunities. You cannot have one without the other. What good is it to receive a ton of information on how to solve problems, how your brain neurally functions, how to breathe, how to mediate, and the important pancetta of talking, sharing space and taking time if we don’t provide people the opportunity to do so? It is incredibly frustrating to have new and helpful information that you can’t implement. We need to educate. We need safe spaces to talk, communicate, put all of the information and experiences —whether good or bad— on the table and then we need to nurture the people in those spaces. Create communities that provides safe living spaces for people who “need a break” or a getaway, who don’t feel safe at home or who needs access to resources that can move them forward in their life. It’s important, and necessary, to support the growth and journey of individuals specifically after they seek and petition for help. I didn’t have anyone to talk about being sexually assaulted until I was graduating from college (I was a child when it happened) and it wasn’t until years after graduating that I was able to share what happened with anyone else. Being able to share that burden with other people, not having to bottle it up, pretend or deflect changed my life. They were able to point me to resources, give me the space and the grace to help me sort things out and support me while creating a healthy mental environment for myself: backing up my boundaries and encouraging me when I needed it. No one should have to “figure it out” on their own. Whenever we talk about mental health and helping people, space and opportunities should be included in the discussion.