Alex’s Reviews > You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience > Status Update

But when we're not emotionally vulnerable, we miss out on opportunities to have more authentic human relationships. It's harder to draw closer to our children. It's harder to draw closer to our parents. it's harder to draw closer to our romantic partners and friends. We never tap into the things that are bothering us, or we're struggling with because we can't acknowledge that we're hurt.

As long as our only legible emotion is anger, we are never shamed. These are the rules that I learned and spent most of my early life following, religiously. Here's what I was not taught. Black men model manhood after those who oppress us. We measure our humanity against the humanity of those who seek to kill us, our family, and maybe most of the planet.

A misguided theology of suffering. The shame narratives that define too many of our experiences haven't come out of nowhere. They are deeply rooted in a westernized, white supremacy-laced theology unknowingly embraced by the black church

The shift that needs to happen is one that aligns with the gospel the most. Embracing mystery leaves room for our own mysterious emotional responses, and allows love to fill us up in ways that our certain faith never could.

For three days, parents don't have to wonder what's going on with their children out there. But the downside, the part of this alleged certainty that does the most harm to black women is that it has a tendency to wield shame as a mechanism for keeping us in those boxes, even when we choose not to be. We find our safety there, and anything that disrupts that box is ousted like a demon or called one directly.

It is also the trauma of systematic denial of resources or stability needed to address the pain and aftershocks of massive collective trauma and daily assaults and indignities. We have survived through a persistent commitment to life by filling simple lives with big love and a commitment to justice. And the truth of the matter is that the need for healing does not disappear because we have found a way to survive.

You commit yourself to some of the worst emotional pain you have ever felt. I committed myself to that pain. You want to literally crawl out of your skin. It is not linear or exponential. And sometimes you realize that shame, hiding, shrinking, suffering is infinitely easier in the short term than the arduous and intentional work of getting spiritually and emotionally free.

And I lean over to my little boy, kissing the top of his head. I let my heart swell with joy over his very existence in my life, for that little personality that is intrigued by zippers and pockets and hoods. I will love him harder, and in this become softer. I will be vulnerable, open to being hurt, because I trust that my joy in him cannot be taken away.

I look back now and I wonder how much of it had to do with the weight of family complications and how much of it was what my brother had, the affliction of adolescence, the natural irritation of growing up, let alone growing up black.

This shame is going to kill us.