#Black Women and Depression

[lia-serrano]

© Lía Serrano

//

[ms-hells-bells]

black women proliferating through the highest caliber of international sports, achieving amazing things :)

black women feeling as if they have to provide an unprecedented level of hyperfemininity and male gazed performance while competing at the highest caliber of international sports :(

[thequeenskeep]

Melancholy

The Monster Beneath the Bed

“What is armor after all but a cage that moves with you?” -Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of my Nonexistence

Spirituality and awareness are a double-edged sword. Nothing is so haunting as Truth. Life consists of many roads, all leading to the same place. When death is the ultimate ending what are we to do in the meantime? What am I meant to spend my life doing while I wait for death, only to realize my soul will never cease? Energy cannot be created or destroyed. I am eternal as I pray for release.

To be born human is a curse unlike any other. Life exists naturally. It simply is. To be human is to be more. To be aware is to know without knowing. If you asked me if I wanted to be a primordial force, aware of everything and nothing simultaneously, with the capability to control all, I would laugh in your face. As a human, the concept is tremendous; however, for us, it is natural. A Queen rules as the bee stings and a bird sings.

I often feel like a piece of clothing. There are days when I am worn proudly and preferred. I am loved and experienced. Afterward, I am set aside to be cleansed. I am lumped with those like me, intimately idyosyncratic. I am submerged, drowned, drained, and dragged. Sopping, I am unfurled and inspected. The stains of life unremovable but scrubbed nonetheless. Do my stains make me unlovable? Will I be discarded if I am imperfect? After rigorous waters, I am thrashed and blasted by a heat so unbearable I fear I will burn to dust. Heat and pressure builds gems, but who would ask for this? If beauty is pain, why contest?

Eventually, I am discarded unwearable, unloveable. I crumble haphazardly from the hands of those I've loved. I wait to be rediscovered. I am touched by many and passed around. I wait until I come around; until I see myself reflected back, young and innocent. Enamored by the expression of myself, I wear myself proudly. I return home to the place I love and realize I was only lost. I was always home, and I was always loved. I am love.

[punkeropercyjackson]

Not to put a certain shitty someone on blast but it's wilder than the old west that y'all be like 'I love women so much🥰🥰🥰' and then can't even handle girls that don't fit into the idea of traditional white femininity.If you saw the black women and tgirls i want,you'd tell they should try something new with their hair and ask when their estrogen is gonna kick in

[gravalicious]

Source: Ashley D. Farmer - Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (2017: 24)

“I was a slave. I was part of the “paper bag brigade,” waiting patiently in front of Woolworth’s on 170th St., between Jerome and Walton Aves., for someone to “buy” me for an hour or two, or, if I were lucky, for a day. That is the Bronx Slave Market, where Negro women wait, in rain or shine, in bitter cold or under broiling sun, to be hired by local housewives looking for bargains in human labor. It has its counterparts in Brighton Beach, Brownsville and other areas of the city. Born in the last depression, the Slave Markets are products of poverty and desperation. They grow as employment falls. Today they are growing. They arose after the 1939 [sic] crash when thousands of Negro women, who before then had a “corner” on household jobs because they were discriminated against in other employment, found themselves among the army of the unemployed. Either the employer was forced to do her own household chores or she fired the Negro worker to make way for a white worker who had been let out of less menial employment. The Negro domestic had no place to turn. She took to the streets in search of employment – and the Slave Markets were born.” - Marvel Cooke - “I Was Part of the Bronx Slave Market” [The Daily Compass, January 8th, 1950]

[phoenix-joy]

"Black queer women have shaped American culture since long before the era of gay liberation. Decades prior to the Stonewall Uprising, in the 1920s and 1930s, Black "lady lovers"—as women who loved women were then called—crafted a queer world. In the cabarets, rent parties, speakeasies, literary salons, and universities of the Jazz Age and Great Depression, communities of Black lady lovers grew, and queer flirtations flourished. Cookie Woolner here uncovers the intimate lives of performers, writers, and educators such as Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Gladys Bentley, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Lucy Diggs Slowe, along with the many everyday women she encountered in the archives.

Examining blues songs, Black newspapers, vice reports, memoirs, sexology case studies, and more, Woolner illuminates the unconventional lives Black lady lovers formed to suit their desires. In the urban North, as the Great Migration gave rise to increasingly racially mixed cities, Black lady lovers fashioned and participated in emerging sexual subcultures. During this time, Black queer women came to represent anxieties about the deterioration of the heteronormative family. Negotiating shifting notions of sexuality and respectability, Black lady lovers strategically established queer networks, built careers, created families, and were vital cultural contributors to the US interwar era."

[kouhaiofcolor]

"....When did we get to the point where natural hair is no longer associated with ...Black People? Black Women?"

Non blacks pls dni.

Have to amplify this woman's valid and articulate short on the relevance of this topic bc, whew smh, I have discussed the same thing here — and am both just as disturbed (and honestly? a little let down?) by Black Women letting go the equity we had in natural hair. Esp just to pick harmful maintenance/norms right back up. I do understand that we, as a race of women all by ourselves, have sooooooo many odds stacked against us regarding what we do with our hair and how we take care of it, but I cannot for the life of me understand what the purpose or benefit is supposed to be in returning to things that actually harm us disproportionately.

For good measure, she also spoke more directly and at length about this issue, it's toxically influential spaces and platforms — as well as the colorism, texturism and misogynoir in general at it's core. So glad I'm not the only Black Woman being transparent about how backwards the nhc/nhm is going.

[nwonkunknown]

She knows who she is… she just forgot for a little while…

[redheadedfailgirl]

I really wish people who think trans women aren't treated like women could see the endless amounts of social and emotional labor demanded of them, both to be legitimately seen as women, and as payment for rejecting maleness. Because holy shit I don't think they understand. The amount of people who have asked me to be their lifeline when they need a suicide watch is insane. The amount of people treating me as their personal therapist is astonishing. There is genuinely no other explanation for some of the shit people do than that trans women are the proverbial whipping girls of the queer community and we have to shoulder people's emotional burdens alone.

[unnamedunknown]

BORDERLINE

Born in bane shadows, screaming and weary 

Only half of a heart is left beating 

A dark hole inside evermore teary

Praying, asking if this feelings fleeting

My father's tormented hands grip me tight 

Mother's words, a vengeful venomous bite 

Iniquitous lovers leave me in fright

I believe God abandoned me that night

Memories chase, chaos prospers this way 

Sudden euphoric bliss bubbles and twists 

Blinded by rage, leaving only dismay 

The innocence of youth – short-lived; I miss

In my restless sleep, a whisper I hear 

Sleep now, my child, you have nothing to fear

[diaryofa20somethinglovergirl]

Time to enjoy life even when I don't want to

Decided to try enjoy my life even when its upside down. Depression can't hold me down.

Qué será, será Whatever will be, will be The future's not ours to see

[rey-jake-therapist]

I post about so many different medias of various style I sometimes stop and wonder if it confuses people who follow me, or consider doing it.

I imagine that it's probably you guys in this meme, trying to figure out what exactly I'm a fan of:

[alilaro]

the barbie movie should be state-sanctioned mandatory viewing

[words-in-silk]

I’ve been through a lot in my life as a black neurodivergent woman but recently something that really broke me once again was to notice that the only people that expressed any kind of empathy/sympathy or emotion towards my life baggage and said “I’m so sorry you went through all of that violence” were my psychiatrist and my psychologist. none of the people around me, none of my friends, none of my family members, -let alone my aggressors- never expressed any kind of compassion towards all the humiliation, negligence and abandonment I went through. the only thing I keep receiving is too much demands, to forgive, forget, get over and to “get better” as if some of those extreme violent situations were simply so easy and simple to fix.

[free-grandmaa]

I love myself

As intensely

As deeply

As passionately

As painfully

As I once hated myself

[bantuotaku]

I love this track and the visual are A1!🤌🏿

Thank you Meg for being vulnerable with us💖🫂🐍

Make sure you check in on your thick skinned friends!👀🫶🏿