Being Black by Angel Kyodo Williams

Author:Angel Kyodo Williams
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

If you don’t learn to care for and nurture yourself, two things can happen. The obvious thing is that you will not be strong enough to deal with what life has to offer you. Even though the most painful moments in life just feel like pain when they are happening, those moments contain the greatest opportunities for growth and maturity. It’s up to us to see this and take advantage of those opportunities. There are lessons in disappointment, heartbreak, and death. But if we are emotionally unstable, these events can cause us to break down or grow angry and bitter. Rather than recognize and take away a lesson, we go forth with more pain and anguish.

The other, less obvious thing that can happen if we don’t practice good for ourselves is that despite our best intentions to stop creating evil and adding to suffering in the world, if we don’t feel nurtured and cared for, we can grow resentful. On the outside, everything you do seems generous and selfless. Inside, you begin to ask questions. “Why am I always the one doing everything? I am hungry too, but I am the only one cooking. I feel sadness but I am always the shoulder to cry on.” This is very, very dangerous and the source of deep unhappiness. Special attention has to be paid to making sure that you feel nurtured and strong so that you do not envy other people’s acceptance of the goodness that you offer to them.

In the flurry of our daily activity, taking care of yourself can easily be forgotten. You must practice good for yourself. Practice good for YOU every single day you are alive from this very moment forth. Do it with joy and apply every fiber of your being to it. Give it your perfect, undivided attention. In contributing to your own well-being, you give yourself agency, you foster trust and confidence in yourself. You empower yourself. You get to know who you are and gain experience in the crucial lesson of self-responsibility. If you take responsibility for your well-being, you will be able to take responsibility for all of your actions. You will be better prepared to care for, nurture, and share with your community.

This is your life. Even if there is another one after this, this is the one that you are in. It’s the one that you must make the best of. Black people’s history of oppression in this country has made most of us hold on to one extreme or another. We are completely self-gratifying, caught up in how much we can accumulate and benefit our individual selves. We allow our worth to be determined and our lives to be driven by our financial and material gain. Or, maybe owing to our historical experiences, we sometimes function in a blind, slavelike mode of doing for everyone to the exclusion of ourselves. We can become our own merciless masters. We have no regard for our precious lives and sacred selves.

You are worthy.

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