“We wear the mask that grins and lies… With torn and bleeding hearts we smile.”

Paul Laurence Dunbar

This powerful quote is from the poem ” We wear the mask.” Reading this really made me look deeper into not only my mental health and the mental health themes that affect my black community. As I looked deeper into these issue, I read some valuable information about mental health as it pertains to a specific community. First I breezed through the normal signs and symptoms of depression like “feeling sad or ‘blue'”… Then I went through a scenario of a person who keeps getting up every morning feeling like they just woke up on the wrong side of the bed. They forget to pack lunch the night before, they leave their coffee at home, they show up to a meeting late, and feeling all over the place. They then have a hard time calming down after the morning craziness but instead of going for an outdoor walk or taking a break to listen to music, etc., they lie their head on their desk in total exhaustion with their mind still racing with thoughts. They seem to have another series of unfortunate events that afternoon and the whole thing starts back up again the next day….

To be honest, this scenario felt like a normal day in my life growing up. Things were always extra chaotic and sometimes I felt like I could not catch a breath. Life has no breaths and it seemed like it was not supposed to have fun parts, like having to study or practice on the little free time I had outside of school to be “better” than everyone else. But this piece of literature was pointing out that this is a scenario where you should start to seek professional help before things get worse (or just talk to someone about what you are going through instead of closing yourself off). I could not believe that I always thought running around with your head cut off was the way life works. That I always had to be working and I could never take that time for myself. I underestimated how much of a person I am… What I was doing in the past wasn’t living, it was just survival.

This book also pointed out how differently people need to approach the black community about mental health problems due to the several layers encompassing this essential part of ourselves. Our mental health is something we have trained ourselves to hide and to add these layers on because we used to need it to survive. Now that all of these layers are on and have been for so long, it has become difficult to pull them back to let us breath and grow… because all these layers are doing now is holding us back.

None of this means we are weak but we are just misunderstood and we need more research on us. All of this made me think how I need to do everything in my power to stand up for my peers in the field of research. Tools are out there for us, we just have to make sure we are using the right ones. I think working on myself has revealed that my feelings have stems so deeper than I have ever imagined.

Though I am reading, learning, taking medication, and regularly seeing a therapist, I feel like I am stuck. I keep going through the same scenarios over again that were obviously traumatic throughout my life, and I’ve dissected them, and tried my best to re-write them. My self confidence is still continually improving but I still feel this need to always wear this mask when I don’t want to. I feel like a figurative mask is not all bad in daily life. I don’t want to curse out a random person in the grocery store, but it is not needed for times when I need to clearly communicate my feelings.

I don’t know why I always worry about someone else’s happiness over my own, but just a couple of days ago I about had it. Work has been its usual stressful but I had my management say and do things to me that I was not happy with at all. This went back all the way to my two week medical leave I took three months ago because of my depression and when I returned I was completely ignored by them. My seat was given away along (I was moved to a different floor) with my entire job duties and they claimed they were not trying to isolate me. I have been persistently asking management to meet with me to discuss but it had been pushed off for those months until HR got involved. The meeting happened the other day and I was told that I need to move past this problem.

Now, what does all that have to do with wearing a mask? I feel because I constantly wearing this happy face mask whenever I’m at work even if I am saying I disagree with something, I am being perceived as if everything is fine… even when shit was on fire. I always talk in therapy about how I am getting better at voicing to other people how I feel but I realized I also need to work on how I say it. And I also feel it is not wrong to express my feelings in a respectful manner without a smile on my face. My worst fears came true when my manager told me to move past the problem and to be honest I cried for a good 30 minutes after that meeting but I am still here and I am still alive. This invisible standard of “strength” I told myself to upkeep is doing nothing but tearing me down. Constantly wearing a smile on my face does not define who I am at my core. I am an emotional being and that is okay. We are all emotional beings and if I can have empathy for others why wouldn’t someone do the same for me?

This is going to be a long and tough thought to manage but I know it is possible.