Tag Archives: Black Women

mental health

Black Lives Matter

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I have been so outraged by what has been going on in my country concerning the death of George Floyd, an innocent BLACK man who was murdered by police. On my social media accounts, I have been outspoken about my support of the Black Lives Matter movement and in my personal life, but I still feel like I am not doing enough.

I think I feel I am not doing enough because I still filter myself when I am around my mostly white friends and colleagues mostly because that is how I’ve been trained my whole life. I have these conversations about my blackness with my family but I struggle as a black woman being completely unfiltered around my white friends.

I am still hurting so much and I feel I am grieving the death of George Floyd and all the unjust deaths that have occurred due to systemic racism and implicit bias.

I am still fearful of being a victim of violence.

I am still learning how to speak up but I worry about my overall safety..

How do we as black Americans begin to heal and recover from all of this….

I have been pondering this question but I feel the movement is the first step into our healing process as our pain is being seen right now.

PhD

How on Earth did I get into a PhD program

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Really though, someone please tell me how I did it.. especially at my dream school….

For the past few years I have been saying I would apply and then it came time to actually apply and interview…. then overnight it seems I became a future PhD candidate. But the thing was it wasn’t overnight.

Though I see myself as a slightly average PhD applicant, I showed my dedication to research over the years. I’ve had some substantial experiences that have stuck with me and I am passionate about specific areas of research.

I want to briefly note how I think I got in with my less than perfect grades and GRE scores (though that exam may be a thing of the past anyways). This will probably change as I actually start my program but this is how I think I got into Columbia Univ’s program:

Quality over Quantity

I had a few unique laboratory experiences that seemed all over the place but they were experiences that I learned a great amount of information and put a great amount of work into. I was also able to talk passionately about them during my interview. Surprisingly, the interviewers were more interested in my lab work in a plant diagnostic laboratory than one of my higher profile cancer laboratories

Be Unique

This leads me to my next point was that I was unique. I was non traditional and had a unique set of skills to bring to the table. I was artistic, active in sports, and causes that I care about. I didn’t trap myself in lab all day, I went out and lived my life and had a good work life balance.

I am (or at least try to be) a good scientific writer

I had a lot of writing experiences from writing protocols to assisting with writing grants with my PIs. I had a lot of writing under my belt and still keep up with it to this day. Also proofread the fuck out of your personal statement.

I can talk science

I had a lot of practice during my Masters program with presentations and talking about scientific papers and research which the interviews seemed to really like. Talk with confidence and talk like you know what you’re talking about. Just try it out and even if you are wrong it will be okay, it is way better than not trying at all.

I own my whole identity

This is something that has just helped with my confidence in general. I walked into my interview with my two nose piercings, queer af, and being my apologetically black self. This showed them that I owned every part of myself and was confident as a person already. Maybe they liked it, maybe they didn’t but confidence always gets you where you need to go.

Poems

Perfectionism

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For me, starting is not the hardest

It is maintaining.

I keep talking myself out of doing things

Something might happen, I might upset someone, or do something bad.

These thoughts cloud my mind

Turning my clear lake into a middy pond.

Then, as those bad thoughts gain more power and momentum

They began to drown me.

I was constantly fighting against them, trying not to be dragged under.

But the lake just got more dangerous and rough.

It felt like it will be impossible to go back to my original state of peace.

That crystal clear lake.

After a while, I forget what I was even striving for.

I forget how that clean lake felt in my head.

But then I decide to stop fighting the waves.

I float…

I allow myself to be imperfect and to be messy.

I talk out my thoughts with people or write them out to try and let them not get too polluted from the muddy waters.

The waves slowly begin to calm

There are still ripples I feel, still disturbing the lake in my mind

But I understand that they can’t hurt me and I don’t need to fight them.

I know I am still under those slightly muddied waters and nothing can change that.

I just have to let the debris settle.

mental health

I wear the mask

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“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.

mental health, Poems

Done staying silent

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I spent most of my life, holding all of my thoughts and feelings in. Thinking that I was what was wrong with the world. The psychic damage passed down through my grandparents and then my parents, left a gaping hole in my soul. They did not know how to help with mine because they had covered theirs up with a thin piece of cloth. They did not want to dive too deep into mine, as they were afraid of ripping open their old wounds. I looked around at all the paler faces around me. Their chests had no sign of emptiness. They were shielded from this pain, due to ignorance passed down from their grandparents and then their parents. Because ignorance is bliss right?

Because they had no hole in their chest like me, I wanted so badly to be like them. They seemed to admire me when I did so. My chest slowly began to get covered up by a thin cloth and for a while I felt okay. Then, I opened my eyes and recognized the invisible poison building up within me and around me. I panicked, moved too quickly, and ripped my cloth. Everything that was there before leaked back out again, except there was more. It consumed me. I was drowning.

I felt myself give up and sink to the bottom of the hole, heavy with my thoughts. I felt as if I would never be good enough, smart enough, pretty enough… Why bother trying to swim to the top, I asked. I will never measure up to everyone’s standards. Swimming to the top was too hard and I am too heavy. I felt the weight of my words on my back, holding me down.

In those deep waters, I saw a blurry reflection from above the water. She looked like me. She looked like a goddess with her dark brown skin and thick black hair. She was reaching a hand out. She looked so beautiful and at peace even from so far away. I could feel myself wanting to be up there with her but realized my thoughts were still holding me back. I started tugging at my weights. I twisted and turned in the water, fighting with myself. I started screaming, “I like who I am! I am worthy! I belong to myself! I owe it to myself! I have no limits!” The weights broke off and I began to swim to the surface. In the back of my mind I thought about how easy it would be to just sink to the bottom again, but then I remembered how agonizing it was, and swam even faster.

As I breached the surface, I was met by the warm sun. I floated on top of the water and pondered to myself. How did I get to that point? That hole was too deep to be caused by just my own pain? Who else helped to dig that hole?

All of a sudden, I realize the hole I had once been sinking in, has closed up. I am lying in shallow water. I sit up and hug my knees to my chest. I rest my cheek on my wet thigh. I am grateful to have made it out. I never figured out where the woman I saw in the water went, but I knew I had to share what has happened so no one else would be stuck in that place again.