Looking after your mental health is important for everyone, but as a Black woman, the frequent examples of the violence I could encounter due to my skin colour and my gender, as well as the discrimination that’s hidden in plain sight, means that I feel a particular responsibility to ensure that I stay well mentally.
Something I lean upon most as a way of taking care of my mental health is by talking about these fears and frustrations. I’m really lucky to have people in my life who can speak to their own experiences with prejudice, and will understand exactly how I’m feeling without needing to justify exactly why an interaction hurt me.
By allowing myself to say exactly how I’m feeling, it helps shed a weight and a pressure that would continue to build if I kept it to myself. By having people around who can empathise with a message that looks as simple as ‘?????’, I know that this isn’t something only I’m experiencing.
But while I’ve found that seeking solace in the words of others can be a comfort, disconnecting is also something that I’ve found incredibly useful as a way of making sure my mental health stays intact. As someone who makes a living from being aware of the news and writing about it, I find it can be difficult to completely silence the ills of the world.
However, by committing myself to leaving my phone in another part of the house for a few hours, just a couple of times a week, it gives me a break from being so acutely aware and actively focused on all the things that wear me down.
In the time where I actively create distance from social and mainstream media, I find it soothing to channel the time and energy I’d spend scrolling into something creative. I’ve been casually teaching myself to play guitar for a few years, and while I’m no Lianne La Havas or H.E.R. quite yet, there’s an undeniable thrill when I hear myself playing a song better than I did at the start of the month.
While I’m focusing on holding down metal strings with one hand, and moving the other in a rhythm that makes sense, there’s no brainspace left to drown in the ways that the world can be a painful place. By working on a skill that I’ve always wanted to learn, it’s an act of self-care in that it’s something that brings me joy and is an achievement purely for me.
The final tool that completes my emergency self-care kit is by exercising regularly. Though it’s sometimes a struggle to forgo another episode of Love is Blind to put on a pair of trainers and leave the house, I know that I am guaranteed to feel refreshed and more centred once I’ve broken a sweat. When I successfully squeeze in a 5K run before the start of the working day, it’s a reminder that I’m strong and capable.
By sharing my personal methods of self-care, there’s a quiet worry in the back of my mind that people will see these as basic distractions rather than fixes. However, I hope that in being honest about the ways I look after myself mentally, it might help others to make small changes to help themselves.
To Black women and women of colour reading, I want you all to make sure to do what you can to prioritise your mental health, in whatever ways this means to you. Existing at the intersection of being a woman and an ethnic minority in the UK, discrimination and frustration can feel like our default setting.
But we deserve to have mental peace as much as anyone else – so wherever you can find a way to achieve it, do it as often as you need to, as there’s no way we can have the energy to fight, and thrive, without making sure we take our wellbeing seriously.