Though I’d been planning a solo trip to the Kent coast for weeks, I knew that the best place for me was home.
Days prior, three young girls had been horrifically killed at a dance class in Southport. Instead of mourning for the lives taken, groups of racist, Islamophobic white supremacists felt emboldened to attack Muslim people and other people of colour indiscriminately. Some even set asylum seeker hotels alight.
I’d seen footage of visibly Muslim women and men brutalised in their communities. A Nigerian man had his car destroyed while he was out working as a carer. As a Black woman, it felt unwise to be away from the safety of the home and surroundings I knew in South London – so, I cancelled my trip. As much as I wanted to assert my right to exist anywhere in this country, and feel the sun and sea on my skin, I had no idea where violence might break out next. It wasn’t worth the risk of being the target of people who believed I didn’t belong, and wanted to make sure I felt it.
Women of colour in the UK are struggling to feel safe, as police and local communities across the country brace themselves for a night of far right violence.
Though far-right rhetoric has steadily gained traction in the UK in the last decade, watching riots break out up and down the country this summer felt like another level of hostility that was near-impossible to bear. I couldn’t concentrate on my writing, so instead numbed myself with repetitive games of phone Tetris and old Real Housewives episodes.
How could I be expected to function when it felt like the world was on fire?
Of course, this was far from the first time I’d felt the effects of a world full of racism.
Growing from a Black girl into a Black woman in the UK, I’ve dealt with incidents from being kicked out of my friend’s front garden because ‘only white girls can play here’, to having to defend myself against a cab driver who called me out for ‘not paying’ in front of some new university friends. (Of course, I’d paid, but for some reason, he assumed I was the one who was trying to short-change him, rather than the other three white women in the car.)
I’ve experienced working at several media companies and publications, and soon realising that I was the only Black person on the floor that I’d see all day. Though my colleagues were welcoming, and made efforts to engage me in conversation, the fact that I couldn’t see anyone who resembled me told me that my position in these spaces could only ever be temporary.
There are so many ways that the world has managed to show me that it doesn’t consider how I feel; endless touch points where I’ve questioned whether I belong, because the environment I’m in seems intentionally ill-fitted and unwelcoming, and largely unwilling to change.
Microaggressions, which are acts of subtle discrimination towards people of a marginalised identity, are often the ways that the wrongs of the world make themselves known in my life. Rather than having someone yell disgusting slurs in my face, the most common ways I’ve experienced racism have been in ways that might seem indirect, but have an effect for days, weeks and longer. Over time, this can start to eat away at your mind. You start wondering whether you’re being overdramatic, or if you’ve made it all up.
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.
You can’t ‘magic’ your way into fair treatment or justice.
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.
