Chief Experience Officer
GRAV
August 31, 2023
chapter 1
personal
journey and
realizations
“Loving oneself isn’t hard when you understand who and what ‘yourself’ is. It has nothing to do with the shape of your face, the size of your eyes, the length of your hair, or the quality of your clothes. It’s so beyond all of those things, and it’s what gives life to everything about you. Your own self is such a treasure.”
—Phylicia Rashad
What does protecting your peace, a state we often struggle to define, look like to you? Most of us have a vague idea of what that looks like. But pinpointing it can be elusive. And we’re not sure exactly how to get there. For some, it looks like a blue sky with the sun peeking through a fluffy white cloud. Or like a grassy field of dandelions that we can frolic through and blow fluffy white clouds on green stems to make our dreams come true. For others, it smells like incense, sage, and essential oils. How about lavender or jasmine bubbling gently in a bamboo diffuser? While we wait to enjoy the delectable meal we know will be worth the wait, it smells like our mothers’ cooking on a Sunday night, and the first bite is a warm taste of heaven.
Peace feels like seeing an Outlook calendar blank for the day, just like an untouched canvas waiting for us to paint our day. It feels like a warm squeeze from our best friend—a hug that feels as comforting as a fluffy blanket on a cold day. That feeling of safety from the world, even if only for a few moments. We never want it to end and giggle once it does, only to give one more squeeze for the road. It feels like the relief that comes when our ride pulls up to airport arrivals. We sigh and smile because we’re home. We are where we belong.
When delving deeper into the notion of peace, we inevitably confront the questions: Do we mean Zen? Rest? A spa day? Relaxation? A massage? But how do we relax when our minds are constantly racing? Yet, despite its enticing imagery, for most of us, peace seems so hard to come by, and if we have it in any measure, we want to protect it at all costs. It’s painfully fleeting, so the question arises: How can we truly achieve and maintain it? We don’t have time to take stock of what it is, let alone enjoy it. We want to bask in it, but first, we must find it. And there don’t ever seem to be enough hours in the day. There’s so much to do.
The struggle doesn’t stop there. There’s so much we want to say, but how do we find the words to express the weariness we feel? Yes, we are tired. We are exhausted. And the fear of telling anyone that we are running on empty is enough to make us ignore that we are pouring from an empty cup. We’re giving ourselves to everyone willingly and selflessly. But who is filling us up? How do we replenish what has been depleted, and why can’t we identify the source of the tension we constantly feel? We can’t explain it, so we ignore that nagging question and “power through” it all. The weight of the world bears down on us, yet we’re still expected to keep pushing through.
The burdens become heavier as the days go on. We’re tired of fighting. We find ourselves worn out from the relentless demands of life. We shouldn’t have to bear it all. We shouldn’t have to save the world. We need to take off our capes and save ourselves. Just as flight attendants advise passengers to secure their own oxygen masks before assisting others, we need to prioritize our own well-being first. We must do that before assisting others like small children, the elderly, our neighbors, our coworkers, our siblings, our best friend from high school, our sorority sisters, the people at church, and the homeless family panhandling at the gas station. The list goes on and on. But somehow, we are always the last checkbox, instead of being at the top of the list.
Moreover, the pain of always being last on the list intensifies. As the weight mounts, it becomes clear: We’re tired of pretending that we’re okay. We’re not okay. And that’s okay. It’s natural to feel exhausted when you’re constantly faced with situations that make you feel overworked, undervalued, underpaid, and overlooked. This exhaustion is not just physical but also emotional and mental, as the energy we spend justifying our worth can be debilitating. If we know that, then we can figure out how to fix it. You can’t fix what you don’t name. You can’t heal when you don’t acknowledge your hurt. You can’t grow without stretching yourself to learn that protecting your peace does not have to mean sacrificing yourself. Protecting your peace means prioritizing yourself. And by prioritizing yourself, you can begin to feel whole again and leave behind that nagging feeling that something is wrong that you’re afraid to identify or name.
What do I mean by whole again? Many of us have been broken, whether we realize it or not. For many of us, recognizing our struggles is the first step on a healing journey. But there are those among us who have yet to begin this journey of self-awareness and healing.
For those who keep telling us to forget our past, our pain, and the horrors endured by our foremothers, why? We have to name our hurt and pain to understand where the generational trauma is coming from. Only then can we call foul to those who would erase our history from the history books, gaslight us, and tell us to “stop being divisive” and move on. Anyone who has been through trauma knows that part of the healing process is acknowledging and understanding that we are not to blame for our doubts, insecurities, or reactions to this daily assault on our senses. The ultimate gaslight is creating an alternate universe and narrative that forces us to forget the past and believe that it never happened, that if it did, it’s irrelevant to our existence today.
Both from anecdotes shared by our parents, mentors, and friends, as well as from our personal experiences, we’ve learned there’s no point in going from pet to threat. These bills have got to get paid, Baby Girl. You already know that. And nobody needs to see those tears. We tell ourselves there’s no point in crying because our tears cause resentment. Confusion. Suspicion. Fear! No one will pat us on the back, comfort us, thank us for our vulnerability, or compliment us for our “self-awareness.” We’ll receive no “kudos” for highlighting the importance of mental health and well-being from coworkers, friends, or strangers.
We’ve been told we’ll be called “emotional.” Angry? They’ll wonder if we can still do our job effectively. They’ll ask if the pressure is “too much” for us. Our tears have always been seen as a weakness and never as a strength. For Black women, unearthing emotions means having to confront what those emotions mean. And that takes time that we don’t have. While we balance traditional roles—running our homes and caring for children and parents—we also pursue careers, generate income, and even earn advanced degrees. We’re in school part-time to get another degree so we can fight for that raise and promotion we know we deserve. So, taking time to think about our needs, our peace, and our emotions and what they mean is never part of the plan. It never has been in any meaningful way because there isn’t enough time in the day.
You wake up and cry in your kitchen before the kids rise for school. Later, as you shower, your tears merge with the stream of water. Hot water. Hot tears. Hot mess. You cry. You cry on the way to work with the radio turned up to drown out the sound of your pain. The bass drops, just like your heart, into the pit of your stomach. Sitting in your car in the parking lot, you suddenly find yourself pounding on the steering wheel, and you’re not even sure why. You just know that you have pent-up anger that needs to go somewhere. Anywhere. Tears in the bathroom stall during lunch or rapidly blinking during team meetings on Zoom. You know it’s best to turn off your webcam and mute your mic.
Then finally, you sink your weary body into bed at night, knowing the respite will only last a few hours until you have to do this all over again, to infinity. It seems never-ending yet slow, like a car crash you see coming but can’t stop—no time to warn or protect yourself from the impending danger ahead. There’s nothing you can do, so you sob into your pillow at night, exhausted tears of frustration. Alone in your pain because nobody wants to see a Black woman cry.
This ongoing pain and the sacrifice of our true feelings all come down to one thing: we don’t allow our emotions to be seen or heard. Our anger or tears are not acknowledged or examined, even if they’re valid. It means our souls cry out, but what they tell us never meets our consciousness, let alone the surface of our existence. Our existence becomes putting one foot in front of the other and pushing forward no matter what. There’s no time to stop and think about what that means. There is only time to do what needs to be done: take care of everyone else, pay the bills, climb the corporate ladder, get more education, lobby for promotions, and take care of business. But there is always a cost to doing business. We know that to be true. And there is much to be said about protecting our peace versus the cost of doing it. And who pays that cost? Ultimately, it’s us.
As Black women, we often embrace the idea of protecting our peace quietly and alone because it seems to be the easiest way forward. The battles of the world seem insurmountable, and often they are.
Protecting our peace means holding our tongues.
It means silence.
It means not sweating the small stuff. If we start thinking about the small stuff, it may band together with the big stuff and become an army of stuff. The stuff will become a huge snowball we know we can’t control as it gathers steam and rolls over everything we’ve worked so hard to build. And we can’t have that. That would be disastrous, right? So, it means putting our heads down and continuing to work harder, even though we know we’ve already worked hard enough. But we know that no one cares about our tears, is there to wipe them, or wants to see them.
Protecting our peace has come to mean bottling up our emotions so we don’t explode. And our emotions are always bubbling just below the surface. We’re irritated. We’re anxious. We’re scared, even though we can’t identify one thing that we’re scared of. There are just so many, and many we haven’t even named, not even to ourselves. But leaving it unnamed makes it even more scary. We don’t even ask ourselves what we’re afraid of because we fear the answer.
We do know we’re afraid of being labeled angry, irritable, and difficult, without knowing that those symptoms often indicate we are in mental distress and our emotional well-being is suffering. But we’re told that showing those emotions will harm our success. So, we learn to hold our emotions in check. We go with the flow. We swallow the lump in our throat until it feels scratchy and dry. The tears will well up anyway, only to be blinked back rapidly. We can’t let them fall. We won’t let them fall. We don’t.
Yet, in the face of this emotional struggle, we confront a distressing truth: Nobody seems to care when Black women cry. So, why bother? From a young age, we’ve learned that our tears go unnoticed. Our own communities have conditioned us to suppress our emotions. The media and the broader world around us cosigned that bill. Then, at work, we learn from our own experiences that it is imperative to suppress any valid emotions—such as anger, frustration, grief, or a sinking, nagging sense of life’s overwhelming weight—and stop crying. We’re afraid of paying the ultimate cost. Our emotions may repel that very same community that warned us of the danger long ago.
We’re not sure exactly when or where we learned that ability. The ability to repress and suppress seems to be coded into our DNA.
We understand inherently that losing control of our emotions means we may miss out on professional opportunities. We’ve been told since we could understand who we were that grabbing those opportunities is the only way to fulfill our destiny.
We already know we’re going to have to work twice as hard. We were told that as well. So why add emotion to an already arduous task? The game is rigged, and it’s already going to be harder for us.
Emotions will only take us out of our game. And we don’t have time for that if we want to win. So we go into each interaction stoically and unfeeling. Our game face is on. We don’t remove it until the game is over. And we don’t know when that will be.
To protect ourselves means avoiding friction in our relationships because, as many of us feel, it’s our job to nurture and care for everyone and everything. Dealing with our feelings about how overwhelming and burdensome that has become means we may lose control of ourselves. And we’re afraid of what that may mean. Where will we put all of these feelings of discomfort, disappointment, and sadness once we unearth them and hold them like soil in our fingers? What will grow once we examine all of that? What does that soil look like underneath all of that? Is it fertile? We suspect it’s not soft and warm, but more likely hard and dry, like clay, because that’s how we feel inside. But what will we do with that knowledge? What can grow from that? There was a rose that grew out of concrete. But can we do that? We don’t know. How can we nurture the earth beneath our feet and make it black and rich like we know it should be?
Protecting our peace has meant not asking any questions. We curtail those feelings, hide those emotions, both good and bad, and don’t allow ourselves to cry. So, we hide our tears behind the mask that smiles. We bite our lips to suppress the churning in our belly and the rapid heartbeat that warns us to run. Fight or flight! It’s a natural reaction. Our hearts race, our hands shake, and we feel confusion. And later, we will be triggered when we feel danger again. It’s a normal response to PTSD. We know that intellectually. But we’re talking about our mind and its response to our environment. And our mind is telling us to flee. But we know we must sit still and “be good.”
Protecting your peace is not something that’s “nice to have.” It’s mandatory for your survival. Your health, both physical and mental, is your wealth. Actively caring for both aspects can help you conquer life’s challenges with ease and resilience—not the promotion, the raise, the degrees, the accolades, the accomplishments, or your title. All of those are nice to have. And we all need to pay our bills. I know we don’t live in a utopian world where everything is taken care of. And even if we did, what would the role of Black women be? I can only guess. So, work and responsibilities are a part of all of our lives. However, beyond societal expectations, and amidst all the external obligations, your biggest responsibility remains to yourself. It is impossible to pour from an empty cup, and you deserve peace. You deserve rest. You deserve to take time to think about what makes you happy and to bask in that feeling every day if you need to, and whenever you need to. You deserve all of that and more, Sis. And I promise you that once you start to do that, you’ll see what you’ve been missing, and you’ll want more.
Slowing down will speed you up. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but when you give yourself the gift of time, it can make your actions more deliberate and your decisions more thoughtful. This results in overall increased productivity and peace. Taking time for yourself and appreciating yourself teaches you that you are the most important thing. Your body and mind will reward you for that, and then you can go back to conquering the world if you want. But first, think about taking care of yourself. The world won’t crumble without your steady hand. Place that hand on your chest and breathe in slowly. Fill your lungs and slowly exhale. Now do it again. Take note of how good that feels, and know that’s exactly what you need and deserve. Centering yourself in this moment means you are free to give as much or as little of yourself to others as you wish, but only when you’re whole. Remember, saying no is a right; it’s a complete sentence that requires no further explanation or justification. So if you don’t want to take care of everyone, you don’t have to. You never did. It’s an impossible task anyway, which sets you up to burn out and hurt yourself in the long run. It’s time for you to take care of yourself.
This book is for Black women seeking coping strategies to handle stress, enhance wellness, and heal from unpacked trauma through practices rooted in African tradition. Protecting My Peace gives them a glimpse into the healing practices of ancestral care. The ultimate goal is to encourage habits that foster growth and consistency and leverage evidence-based strategies. This results in measurable outcomes for increased well-being.
