Have you ever felt alone or abandoned? Well, if you’re anything like me you’ll recognize that I have. Recently, I’ve noticed how much my confident, turnitive nature makes passive aggressive people uncomfortable. I live in an environment where it isn’t necessarily the popular thing to be honest and transparent. A person can completely disregard one’s feelings, and when given the opportunity to confront the individual about it he or she ignores the “elephant in the room” to avoid conflict. That’s not me. However, it doesn’t make you the most popular person in the room.
The flipside of the coin is I’m a natural leader. While I know it is a blessing, I’d be lying if I didn’t say it often feels like a curse. As I’ve mentioned in some of my past blog posts, I was among the popular crowd at my high school. It was a status I think I received by default because I chose to mask myself. I missed out on doing things that I loved because I was popular, and I knew that if I allowed myself to be 100% me I would no longer have any friends. Thankfully, this trend did not follow me to college. God has a serious sense of humor. My senior year of high school, my entire world crashed before my very eyes. My “nana” who practically was my 2nd parent passed away. My mother was in the middle of her third marriage, and it was BAD. My grandfather was struggling with Parkinson’s Disease & Diabetes. Although I am black, and let me be the first to tell you that the stereotype of “strong, African-American families” is just that a “stereotype.” My nuclear family has always been small. Do I have other family members? Yes, but that doesn’t mean when there’s a crisis they’re there to support. It’s just the cards we were dealt. With all this going on, I ended up being my grandmother’s caretaker. I was with her up until the very moment she died, and it crushed my soul. I graduated high school without the one person who’d been the most supportive person in my life.
You’d think a swarm of people surrounded me at this vulnerable moment in my life. I was popular. I was a member of the Pop Ensemble. But they didn’t. This was my wake-up call that popularity is overrated. When I went away to college in the fall, I went through one of the darkest moments of my life. My very first day of school I received a call that my grandfather passed away. A month later my maternal grandfather suffered a massive stroke and was placed in a nursing home which he remained for several months until his death the following year. I had no idea what “grief” looked like or what grief counseling consisted of. I had no idea what mental health looked like even though my mother has always been a huge advocate. Since it didn’t directly affect me, I put that part of her life behind me. I chose to walk around believing nothing was wrong, and unfortunately because of my Christian background I would hear things like “I pray the spirit of depression and oppression out of your body.” And, I thought that was enough. Now, I’m all for prayer. But God puts mental health professionals on this planet for a reason. Prayer is awesome, but you also have to be proactive as well which means get professional help. It was a feisty, 4’9 Jewish professor with the largest unibrow I’d ever seen sit me in her box corner office to discuss mental health more particularly my own. WHAT?! She had a little pamphlet about counseling, and explained to me the importance of seeking help. She failed me that semester too, and I absolutely deserved it. However, she has remained a prominent professor in my corner since. With help from God, I went to counseling and learned more about myself than I ever had before. It was as if a dark cloud shifted away from my backyard.
That summer I returned home to Nashville, and I remember losing friends left & right. Some will say I had a big head, others still to this day say “I have a chip on my shoulder.” But I will tell you, “I started speaking up for myself.” Counseling taught me to be more assertive and honest about my feelings. It helped nurture the need for me to be 100% honest and transparent with myself. I’d always been the popular one who went along with the status quo even though I had my own thoughts, feelings, and opinions. I never questioned what others in that crew said or did. That changed, and guess what? The circle changed as well.
I encourage my brothers & sisters to start looking deeper in the mirror. Refute the popularity syndrome: the need to be liked by iconic, ignorant, asinine asses. At the end of the day, if you’re in your darkest moment and you can’t call on your “popular” friends to be in your corner then let me ask you this question. Are you really popular?
