It Does Get Better!
During your 20's life becomes your best teacher, mentor, parent, friend, or all the above. However, have you ever wondered why? Life is REAL; it doesn’t sugar-coat the truth, baby you through each change and challenge, and teaches you valuable lessons which can benefit your future. In addition, life does provide different forms of protection from danger, you just have to pay attention to the signs it has provided. Noticing all the subtle nuances of your life over time, your decisions along with the reactions your decisions cause in others, is how you learn the valuable lessons that will only benefit you throughout your lifetime.
In 2017 I’d finally reached an all-time low within my mental, physical, and emotional health and well-being. Simply completing the daily drudgery of my life was an arduous conquest that I created for myself by allowing my past transgressions to wear my spirit down to the point of breaking. I had become the broken individual. Due to my brokenness I projected my insecurities, problems, and negative traits onto the ones I loved most which caused many people to learn to love me from a distance. It was not until I was in the state of losing someone who I dearly loved that I realized that I needed to begin taking control of my mental health and well-being.
I decided it was necessary to seek professional counseling on how to overcome my obstacles and manage life’s stipulations in a healthy manner in October of 2017 during my junior year of college. While receiving help from a therapist, I was left to wonder who I wanted to be when I graduated college and in what direction I wanted my life to be headed. As a result of my therapy and time working on myself, I had an epiphany that I wanted to be happy internally so I could exude it externally to others. At that moment I decided that I wanted to love who I saw in the mirror and stop portraying the facade of forced happiness that I was accustomed to showing the world. I no longer wanted to live with the burdens that were defining me because I realized I was not living. I merely was surviving and exhausting myself just to “look happy.”
My first step in mastering the duality of my happiness was accepting what I was blessed with externally and being able to feel beautiful in my own skin. This part of my journey began with my crown, my hair. As an African-American woman, at some point in your life you will beg to question yourself, “Do I meet the standard of what society calls beautiful?” And the simple answer is “No, you won’t.” Why? Because African-American beauty is a unique subset of beauty standards that not all of society may accept.
However, what matters most is what you define as beautiful. Throughout learning to love my 4B-4C hair I learned that loving and learning how to maintain my “mane” is a process. No twist out or wash-and-go is going to be perfect overnight. So why should I expect my journey of self-love to be any different? In the same fashion that it takes time to train hair to handle new products, learning to admire who you are when you look in the mirror follows suit.
As the end of my junior year slowly approached and summer was right around the corner, I began to love who I was becoming. I learned how to speak more positively, eliminate unhealthy relationships and traits, and how to take ownership of my faults instead of making excuses. It was amazing to feel some of the burdens slowly lift off my shoulders and finally feel the happiness within my smile.
Later that year I started to grasp the concept that “It Does Get Better!” and your down days do not seem so bad once they are behind you. I love who I saw in the mirror when I first woke up in the morning, because I was in my most raw form. I learned how to love the coils within my hair texture, my acne marks that now look like freckles. All this happened while I was on the way to learning how to accept the deep parts of my past.
When you have not been taught the proper language to describe how you are feeling, it can be shocking to attest to your friends and family the importance of proper mental health care. The first step to making a change is acknowledging that there is a problem. Whether you decide to take the next steps to get help can be very POWERFUL because that shows that your mind is open to growth. See, growth is what life has to offer, and that growth will never come easy. Yet, it is worth every dime and second you put into it. My story shows that with time and diligence things can get better, but you have to do the work! After-all, who wouldn’t want to walk around with a million-dollar smile!