like most black women
i sometimes struggle with strength
its shadow shrouds my body like a sheath
this strong
this stoicism
this unending security
disguising pain so well it feels normal
i have walked around carrying things long dead
too heavy to keep, but too familiar to put down
all for the sake of so-called strength
weighing me down
the wait and weight of it all
the wait in isolation and solitude,
the weight of isolation and solitude,
the wait for a cure,
the weight of death,
the wait for justice,
the weight of racism,
the wait for rescue,
the weight of fear
broke my strength
into too many pieces to put back together
into too many pieces to re(claim) wholeness
pre-COVID
sickness was skin-deep
and i walked around tired and broken for so long
that i mistook my brokenness for strength
the weightiness as survival
so i sent my representative to teach my classes
this twin-self shows up when i am not able,
when i am too tore up to pretend or perform
she smiles more than me, says “fine” when people ask how she is doing
she swallows anger
and pretends she isn’t grieving
she masks the fact that her body is signaling flight
and covers the bags under her eyes with concealer and big glasses
her half/here stance is repeated for the first few months of quarantine
the full two hours of classes
the duration of back to back to back meetings
and while sitting on the tissue covered treatment table
in the doctor’s office
she’s strong
i’m not
* * *
I already couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a black woman I loved who had an autoimmune disease,
now my mirror-reflection reasoned with how long I had had it, how I didn’t know, where or from whom it had come from, this inheritance.
My maternal great-grandmother died when she was 34 years old of an aneurism and hypertension. A homemaker in rural North Carolina in 1934, she was just months past giving birth to her 8th child when she took her last breath. When I was diagnosed with hypertension in my early 20s, I didn’t wonder where it came from, I wondered what took it so long.
This new illness was paternal—impossible to trace until I asked my father who pointed to the women in his family who I only know by name, now including me.
The symptoms made me feel like I was burned out, fatigued or lethargic—indications that had always lived next door to my hyper-productivity and overcompensation.
Constant fatigue.
Low libido.
Unexplained weight gain.
Foggy brain.
The antithesis of strength.
My white man doctor only furthered my feelings of confusion when I listed my symptoms, and he invalidated them every time I tried to explain something wasn’t right. For over a year he had me convinced that it was all in my head, or just the inevitable transitions of getting older, so I should get over it.
Out of embarrassment and a fear of being perceived as lazy I didn’t trust anyone with the truth of my exhaustion, or the ways I had to prepare like a preteen awaiting the arrival of first menses. For me, it wasn’t bleeding, but odorless watery discharge, unexpectedly running down my legs and through pads and tampons, often while I stood in front of a classroom, in a grocery store line, looking for a book in the library—other times while shopping, or driving, or sleeping, or cooking. I started wearing layers of clothes, sweaters I could tie around my waist, dark jeans and black pants that would disguise the widening wet circle between my legs that looked like pee stains until dried.
Google had me thinking I was ovulating, until it occurred more sporadically, or that I had an STI, even though I had not had unprotected sex. All my tests were normal. The white woman nurse practitioner was sympathetic, but unable to diagnose me beyond confirming that my test results were all negative. There was no comfort in the normal results when my body was still shifting beneath me, making it hard to pull myself out of bed, and when I did wearing two pair of panties to capture my normality.
The opposite of strength.
I couldn’t think straight or concentrate. Writing was slow, when possible, and sleep was insatiable. I had hair loss, lower back pain and always felt overheated. I decided I must be perimenopausal. It was the only thing that made sense. I found a black woman hormone specialist and made an appointment. After bloodwork to determine what, if any, hormone treatment could make me “feel better” she began reading off all of my deficiencies,
“B12,
Vitamin D,
iron,”
by the time her list was interrupted to ask, matter-of-factly, if I was “on medication for my thyroid disease” I stopped hearing her. What the hell was a thyroid? And what did she mean by disease?
She immediately prescribed medication for my Hashimoto’s Disease and it took months of trial and error, bloodwork, and increased dosages to translate to wellness. Like my blood pressure pills, which I have been taking since I was 25, I will have to take them everyday for the rest of my life to fend off premature death. The thyroid pill I take every morning, on an empty stomach, makes me feel more normal, but I am also on hormone replacement therapy to help with the other symptoms and to have enough energy to manage my life.
Black women often have to doctor ourselves. It was my best friend, a breast cancer survivor in her 30s, not my general practitioner, who suggested I see a gastrointestinal specialist when I complained, as I had all my life, of feeling bloated all the time. The doctor diagnosed me with IBS-C and gave me another pill to take, every day, for relief for the chronic and incurable condition.
I sometimes feel guilty because I cannot cope in the ways my mother and foremothers did. If I am tired, I know they were tired, but they somehow pushed through the exhaustion to work thankless jobs, raise children by themselves, participate in community service and thrive. They never got hormone therapy, or had access to pharmaceutical medications before Medicaid, and they didn’t have the luxury of supplements that they didn’t make themselves. I worry about their undiagnosed pain and their unacknowledged trauma. I worry about how strength normalizes discomfort and tiredness. I am working to replace it with self-awareness and self-care.
No more causal casual callous claims of neutrality
No more naïve notions of normal
No more normalizing strength.
No normal.
No(rmal).