JOSIE PICKENS SHARES HER PERSONAL BOUTS WITH SUICIDAL THOUGHTS, AND HOW COUNSELING AND SHARING BURDENS WITH OTHERS MAKES FOR STRONGER MENTAL HEALTH
After reading the news of For Brown Girls creator Karyn Washngton’s passing, I immediately went to tapping away on the keys of my laptop. The late 22-year-old’s story of dedicating much of her daily life to empowering Black women, and even the possibility that she ended her own life, felt eerily familiar and close to home.
The peculiar thing about doing the work to uplift others is, the world often forgets that the worker also needs uplifting, that the work becomes heavy, that frequently the work is being performed to soothe one’s own soul. And that when one lives even a small portion of her life publicly, that public too often expects perfection. The expectation is that s/he has conquered those challenges s/he advocates against, and that s/he is therefore the face of overcoming.
The reality is, however, that there’s sometimes no such thing as overcoming—not wholly, not forever. Overcoming is daily work, and we often fail miserably at it. Many days we are doing our best to survive, and some of those days we may not be 100% sure that surviving is what we truly even desire.
And we are dying…
Masking up as superwomen is killing us—whether we meet that death as a result of suicide or the stresses that lead to heart disease and other serious, life-threatening illnesses. According to Lottie Joiner’s recent post at The Root, stress accelerates the aging of Black female bodies, and Black women between the ages of 45 and 55 are “biologically 7.5 years older than White women” of the same age.
I don’t know Karyn’s personal story enough to comment on why she possibly chose to commit suicide. But I know for certain my own story. I’ve battled depression and anxiety much of my adult life, with some bouts making me feel like I was stuck in a cave-sized hole that I was unable to climb out of.
A most recent period of depression came as I was building a name for myself as a writer, particularly a writer who’d struggled through many of the difficulties Black women face and had come out on the other end. A bit bruised, but smiling. What my readers may not have known was that, upon moving back to my hometown due to some legal and child custody issues, I was struggling daily to get out of bed, to eat, to sleep, and to care for my daughter.
Image courtesy of Ebony