sad black girls

Everyone knows about Angry Black Woman. Everyone sees them everywhere. Anger and sadness are two sides of the same coin called dissatisfaction. One is external, one is internal. Woman internalize, men externalize.

(Women should be sad, huh? So does anger make black women masculine?)

I am not angry, and I’m not a woman. Blackness is perceived regardless of my will, but what I’m really into is crying. I’m a Sad Black Girl. Sad Black Girls listen to King Krule and Radiohead. We read Kafka and shouldn’t read Schopenhauer. We smoke loud and we’re lonely clouds. We own hi-fis. We ruminate. We close our eyes.

Sad Black Girls are tomboys and robots. We don’t wear pantsuits. We know that anger is a secondary emotion that hides fear or hurt or sadness. Our emotions are purer, primary? We hurt and we fear and we cry. We don’t have formal diagnosis. The doctor says we’re not in pain.

Sad Black Girls are probably too passive. Some of us are maladaptive daydreamers, still talking to imaginary friends at the age of 21. Between the lot of us, we have millions of paracosms. If you’d like to enter one, listen up for a bit.

Sad Black Girls existed all over everywhere, until the 60s. And then there were afros. “By the 1970s, a majority of empirical studies found that Blacks had high self-esteem,” but we weren’t born then. Some of us have natural hair and some of us have been teased for it.

Happy black girls compare themselves to other black girls, but Sad Black Girls go to lily-white schools. We blame ourselves, but maybe it’s not our fault. Is it? Isn’t it? "The person of color is caught in a Catch-22: If she confronts the perpetrator, the perpetrator will deny it." Sad Black Girls tend to overthink and do nothing.

Sad Black Girls have learned culture-bound syndromes from white girls. Some of us vomit, slit our wrists, become hikikomori. We use self-deprecating humor, sarcasm. We get all As. Our moms are not tigers but our peers’ moms are, and we care about our peers.

Sad Black Girls cannot be seen by God. We aren’t blessed. We should smoke less often, be less fatalistic. Someone tells a Sad Black Girl to pray, and she doesn’t, and she stays sad. We are too rational to believe in #BlackGirlMagic.

Sad Black Girls maybe kinda know the difference between self-esteem and racial-esteem. Kinda? Collective self-esteem, right? Sad Black Girls are loners, of course, we don’t have reflected glory to bask in. We have cut off the reflected failure with a boxcutter, but we cut too much, oops.

Some of us secretly love To Be Young, Gifted, and Black even if we can’t get past the corniness.

Angry Black Women are out there fighting for something today. They are empowered, entrepreneurial, independent. They are role-modeling. They have overcome adversity.

Meanwhile, the Sad Black Girls are crying until their defense mechanisms rust. We are giving up, learning helplessness. We are being abused right now, physically or emotionally or without realizing it. We are doing what we're told. We’re being silent. We bear with it, thinking of other places, maybe England, anywhere but here.

(A roach skitters. A siren screams. A couple argues in the street. What are we doing here?)

Someone mistakes a Sad Black Girl for an Angry Black Women and calls her strong, places a burden in her arms and sends her along. There are no Evergreens for us, no all-girl schools or sanatoriums. There is no place for weakness in blackness. Sad Black Girls are crushed by life quite quickly, maybe there are none already.

unrequited love for the human race

Imagine never feeling comfortable, ever, except with alone (or drunk, or (sometimes) with family). Social anxiety is kind of like having a one of those nausea-inducing crushes, except it holds for the whole human race: you want to make a good impression, you're hyper-aware of everything wrong about you, and failure is your worst nightmare but you can't stop thinking about failure even though it makes failure more likely. So of course 90% of your day is spend imagining and remembering past and possible failures.

Sometimes you manage to do or say something cool, but then you have to immediately run away so you don't fuck it up right after. Sometimes you decide to cut your losses and not even try. That's always easier.

Almost every action is on the conscious incompetence level of the four stages of competence. You know you suck, you know you suck, you know you suck. Or worse, sometimes the stages get broken and you believe you suck and you feel that you suck but you don't actually know if you do. All you have is a constant sucky feeling without adequate proof.

You do know that everything, even smiling, takes extra brainpower. People can probably tell that you have to force yourself, and some will dislike you for being "fake."

The part of your brain that says yes, I am secure and comfortable and loved by others never quite switches on. If you are clever enough, you can reason your way into believing that you're safe, into believing that people want you around. Sometimes. Like, only if they actually return texts and stuff like that, start conversations with you and check in when you withdraw.

And you're going to make social mistakes because they're necessary to learning, but mistakes during adulthood mean missed job opportunities or lost wages, falling behind in life because of the ways you've already suffered. The solution is often exposure therapy, but sometimes you feel guilty for testing things on people:

"Will this person mind if they're the first person I've ever asked on a date?"

"Can I tell them that their behavior makes my anxiety worse?"

"Should I thank this person for helping me overcome my fear by actually showing up?"

"Should I hide that this took all my courage?"

And since social anxiety isn't agoraphobia nor general anxiety nor stage fright, you may be perfectly fine in the anonymity of crowds, but break into a cold sweat when you receive a phone call. Or you may be in your element with public speaking, presentations, and other professional situations that can rely on scripts, but have no idea how to relax or "hang out." Or maybe acting is freeing in a way you rarely feel in the day to day, because it is a mask. But then you go home and can't leave your room and have to skip dinner because you can hear your landlady through the door and you can't deal with another person being in the kitchen the same time as you, especially because you feel like living garbage in the vulnerable state of sweats or pajamas.

I personally wonder if people want me around when I'm not being "useful." A couple friends indicate that they want me around for my own sake, but for most, people there is an unspoken obligation to perform, give, or act in specific ways. Even if the obligation isn't there, I always feel it. Maybe it is always there.

Nothing completely erases the suspicion that most people are only friends with me out of pity. Nothing can turn off the hypervigilance that makes my eyes, my mind constantly scan for signs of rejection. The suspicion does grows quieter, very nearly vanishes with people I can read well. It also alerts me to people I should distance myself from, so that we don't hurt each other. That's one of the upsides of anxiety, that is it a deluxe version of the Gift of Fear.

Something like that.