Member-only story
This Is Us
As a Black Woman, I’m Either Hyper Visible or Utterly Unseen
I’m a complex, multidimensional person, and deserve to be seen as such
I was only five years old the first time I mentally code switched and went into another person’s experience. My father was never able to handle the pain caused by the sickle cell anemia I was born with, and it was in the throes of a painful sickle cell crisis that I learned he couldn’t cope with hospitals. Children are very perceptive to their parents’ emotions, and in that moment I could feel his terror and helplessness pulsing within me as if it were my own. During that experience I decided that I had to be strong for the both of us. I was too young to manage all of my pain, my fear, and his anxiety; so, I minimized the agony in my body in order to diminish his panic.
In doing so, we would all be okay.
Little did I know that this skill of diminishing myself would become an asset when I moved from Togo to America, where there is a strong societal standard for making other people comfortable. As a child, I internalized that being a good American citizen meant never getting into trouble, never asking for too much, never being ungrateful, and the list didn’t stop there, despite how doing so sometimes endangered my life. As I…
