Before You Call Me a Strong Black Woman
By: Dayna Renée Donovan
Tags: Mental Health, Slavery, Strong Black Woman, Domestic Abuse, Racism

The Strong Black Woman is a myth, a trope with deep roots in slavery. Slave masters used it to justify splitting up families, raping, and beating women, and then forcing them to labor for this nation. Those women had no choice. Today the phrase is used as a way to dehumanize us and to comfort the person offering the backhanded compliment, “You’re so strong.” It absolves them of helping us or acknowledging our pain. It absolves them from acknowledging the blessings they have in their lives.

Four years ago my car was t-boned. Prior to that I was a distance runner. I have only been able to run less than ten miles total in the years since. From a psychological standpoint, losing the ability to run is traumatic, as is chronic pain.

After the accident, only my coworkers checked on me and made accommodations. I didn’t hear from anyone else for weeks, months even.

Not my family, but they’re not good people. Not the people who called themselves my close friends. They did not check on me because, and I quote, “You’re strong. I thought you’d be fine.”

My body was broken. I was in pain, barely able to walk or sit for long periods of time and none of the people in my life could conceptualize that $16,000 in damage to my car could result in enough pain for me to need help.

You know who checked on me? A man whose favors I rejected for over a year. At the time, I didn’t know he had been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. I was isolated. I was vulnerable. He used that as an opportunity to slide in and take advantage of me.

Early on, I kicked him out of my condo, but he wouldn’t leave. He beat me savagely on a regular basis, repeating the abusive patterns of my mother and brother. That man mentally, emotionally, and verbally abused me, took every dime I had in savings, spent every dime I earned before I was paid, and opened and maxed out credit cards in my name. I was stuck.

My friends said, “Girl, you are strong. You should leave him.”

My life was in danger, and all they had to offer were words. No action. When I did leave, they were nowhere to be found. Again, they said, “Oh, you’re strong. I thought you would be fine.”

I wasn’t strong. I left him to survive. His beatings did further damage to my already damaged spine, ultimately impairing the spinal discs that control my ribs and my chest wall. My chest wall no longer moves when I breathe. I have trouble breathing all day long, as a result.

He and I had no community property so the divorce should have taken no longer than a few months. He dragged it out and left me with the lease, which without him draining my funds, I was able to afford.

What about family support? You ask. My family followed me across the country, bringing my brother, who was physically violent towards me, depleted my financial resources, stalked me, and threatened me multiple times. One message he oft repeated was, “I will never let up. I live for this.” My parents and my brother used their wealth and connections in an attempt to ruin my career and end friendships. When I was in crisis, they were nowhere to be found. It was a nightmare. I wanted to die yet I woke up every morning.

I’m tired. Every month I paid out of pocket for my lawyer and paid down bits of the debt the ex created in my name. When the divorce proceedings hit month nine, I took out a lien on my car to pay my moving fees. Although I left the home in the same condition it was in when we moved in, the landlady told me I deserved to be punished for whatever the narcissistic ex told her. She kept my deposit. I was in the middle of following directives from the attorney general to sue her, and rightly so, when the pandemic hit, and I was laid off.

Despite all my efforts, even using the Law of Attraction which has served me well in the past, I have not recovered. Things are not going well. I tell people I am not okay, how dire my situation is, and many respond with, “You’re strong. You’ll be fine.”

I’m still not fine.

I tell them how close I am to running out of money and they either respond with, “You’re not doing the [Law of Attraction] work,” or “You’re strong, you’ll be fine.” I only get up in the morning because I am still alive, not because I’m strong. Each day I have two choices, get up and feed my pets and slog through the day, or kill myself.

Add oppression to the list of challenges. At one job that I loved so much, a new coworker bullied me for months before my boss acknowledged the problem. One day the coworker flew into a rage and pushed me in front of my boss because I couldn’t meet with her right away. Instead of addressing it, he closed his office door. I had to go to the owners of the company, who offered an investigation instead of a solution. I left the company. Half a year later they fired the woman and promoted my boss.

At another company, a coworker was horrified when he witnessed how poorly I was treated by our superiors. The discrimination was so strong there that even though I did more quality work than anyone my coworker had worked with in his decades with the organization, I was constantly yelled at and put down. On top of that, my boss didn’t believe I was in pain on the days I came to work wearing a back brace and could barely walk. He routinely mocked my physical ailments.

I do not blame him. I blame the stereotypes. The White lens still views Black women as animals. We can’t possibly feel pain. I had little choice but to stay. I was going through a divorce and the myth of the strong Black woman meant I could handle that pain on top of everything else, all on my own, and come out unscathed.

What I shared here is only a fraction of the abuse and struggle I have faced in my forty years on this Earth. No one is strong enough to survive all that alone. The amount of cortisol running through my system is toxic.

Imagine living a life where a majority of people who claim to care about you discount your struggle and dehumanize you by dismissing your feelings about the abject torture you’ve endured with the idea that since you are strong it will all work out. Since you are strong, you are not afforded the space to be depressed or sad or scared.

You meditate. You see a therapist. You cry alone. You take care of yourself as best you can. You soldier on because people peer pressure you into believing a life full of nothing more than scrambling to survive is a life worth living.

Imagine a life in which other humans rarely allow you to ask for help and support and, when they do, you fear you’re burdening them with your humanity. After all, the larger portion of the world around you, including those who claim to love you, show you over and over again that you don’t need support or care or basic human decency.

My world is on fire and instead of offering water, many in my support system offer empty words. I am tired. I am human, and my life runs the gamut of emotions from exhilaration and joy to depression and despair.

Black women deserve the same compassion and community that women of every other race receive. We are soft, we are vulnerable, and sometimes hopeless, in a world that refuses to see us as anything more than strong and angry. We only do things alone because the institution of White America and the toxic family structures passed down from slavery have made people blind to our humanity.