I want to talk about something a bit more serious today, which is about how being a person of colour in this world can affect your mental health. To be honest, no matter what your ethnic background, I think being someone who reads the news in 2020 is probably going to affect your mental health.
How do you cope with everything that’s going on in the world?
This isn’t a rhetorical question; I would love any advice or tips on this (besides just never reading the news… although sometimes it feels like this is the only solution).
We have multiple concentration camps in the world disguised as immigration detention facilities in the US or reform camps in China. We have climate change causing huge devastation to so many places in the world. We have official ‘hostile environment’ policies towards immigrants in the UK that make it so hard for people that have had to flee their countries and come here seeking safety to actually be able to access it and deal with their trauma. We have well-known authors of some of our favourite books using their platforms to spread hatred towards trans people. We have continued prolonged systemic racism and police brutality towards Black folk all over the world.
Every time I read about another Black person that’s been murdered by the police, I physically cry and take it so personally – I cant cope with how regularly it happens and how brutal it all it is.
Then of course we have that little thing called a global pandemic going on in the world – and as someone with a lot of relatives and friends in the healthcare sector, and a lot of relatives in both the US and India (which I believe currently are the top two countries for Covid-19 cases), it’s hard not to worry about this and feel anxious about everything that’s going on.
Within my Desi community, mental health isn’t something we talk about loads or always take that seriously – and I’m lucky that my parents have taken mine seriously and encouraged me to use therapy etc. because I know not everyone is in that position. Sometimes when I am struggling with my mental health, I question whether I’m just making it all up in my head or making excuses for myself – especially when I know that there are so many people in the world that have things so much worse.
Sometimes when I look around at everyone else, it feels like no one else is affected by everything that is going on in the world – that either they choose to ignore what’s happening or that they can separate their mental wellbeing from it.
To be honest, at first I thought it was completely wrong to just switch off from what is going on in the world – after all that is not a luxury that people who are experiencing things first hand get to do. But then I realised as I was reading everything that was going on and trying to speak up about it, I was completely burning out. I was already experience burn out from the anti-racism work I was doing in my firm (which I talked about in my blog called ‘the Story of my lockdown’) and this was being compounded by being distressed by everything else going on in the world. I ended up just getting to a point where I couldn’t do anything at all, I couldn’t get out of bed or think straight. I certainly couldn’t use my privilege or platform to do anything positive.
So I have realised that sometimes we do need to take a break from everything that’s going on in the world so that we can recuperate and use our energy effectively.
The other thing is, there probably are loads of other people who feel the same way about all of this, but we don’t talk about that openly. Whilst we share graphics on instagram about the different things people should read, or listen to, or learn about, we don’t share pictures of ourselves in tears because of everything we are learning. We don’t really talk about the burnout we experience through trying to engage in activism.
I also felt immense guilt for the minor things in my life I was getting stressed about – like my exams, meeting work deadlines, keeping up a gym routine. How much privilege do I have for those to be the things I am worrying about right now in the state of everything else going on in the world?
I am trying (and struggling) to work out how to focus my energies – do you pick one area of trauma in the world and focus on that? My focus has always been on anti-racism, but the thing is that racism really permeates every part of our society. Once you start learning about systemic racism in the world, you realise the role it plays in the inequalities within our criminal justice system, our healthcare system, climate change – literally everything!
How can you not be filled with existential dread once you come to this realisation?
The other area that you realise is permeated by racism is the workplace – especially if, like me, you choose to engage in diversity and inclusion practices at work. Now of course this blog is focussing on the negative aspects of this, and I want to make clear that 99% of the time, the D&I work I do is so rewarding and makes me feel like I am using my platform and privilege for positive things. I generally get so much positive engagement from people, and I do generally feel safe and valued in my workplace.
But today I need to talk about what it’s like the other 1% of the time, because I never talk about this and as such I am misrepresenting what things can really be like.
I’ve spoken to a few different people from different firms who are involved with their ethnicity networks and doing anti-racism work with the corporate space. Everyone I spoke to said they experienced some level of burnout during May when the world suddenly woke up to the fact systemic racism exists.
Everyone said the same thing – that they were saying the same things at work that they had always been saying, but now people were listening. There was this double edged sword where people wanted to make the most of the engagement, but were also so distressed and upset by everything that was going on in the world – especially for the Black folk or those with Black children that were involved with this kind of work.
And while I can wholeheartedly say that the engagement I had this time round in May was fully positive from my firm, that’s not the way it always is when we talk about race in the workplace. If someone I work with doesn’t agree with a report I’ve written or a spreadsheet I’ve pulled together, I feel a bit disappointed that I didn’t do a better job but ultimately it doesn’t affect me on a personal level – I correct it, learn from it and move on.
But if someone doesn’t like one of the anti-racism resources or events I’ve helped to organise, or disagree with the fact we talk about race in the workplace at all, it feels really personal. It feels like I’ve failed to use my platform effectively to do something about racism and it really upsets me. I know I need to learn to develop a thicker skin around this, and I definitely have done to some level over the past year or so. But in all honestly, it is hard, and I do sometimes think my life would be easier if I just didn’t do any of this work at all. Again, that is not how I feel the vast majority of the time – but it happens sometimes.
So there’s certainly a mental health impact of being involved with anti-racism work as a person of colour in the workplace.
But even if you aren’t involved with this kind of work, there’s also just the impacts of just being an ethnic minority in the workplace; of having to deal with slightly racist comments made by people that no one else addresses, of having to experience micro aggressions or of feeling like people don’t understand why you are affected so much by things that are going on in the world to people who look like you.
Some of you may remember the terrorist attack that took place in a mosque near Regents Park earlier on this year. Most of you probably don’t remember this, and this isn’t your fault. This attack did not make the headlines in the same way that terrorist attack headlines fill our newspapers when they are perpetrated by brown people. In fact, the police never officially labelled this attack as a terrorist attack. The attack involved a (white man) going into a mosque and shooting innocent people, so I don’t think there’s any shadow of doubt that this was a terrorist attack.
This mosque is close to the London office of my workplace, and I was working here the day after the attack happened. It is also the local mosque for some people from my work. As such, I don’t think it should come as a surprise to know that it felt extremely distressing to know this had happened so close to home.
But for me the most distressing thing about this attack was not just the devastating murder of so many innocent people so close to where I sometimes work.
It was the way this attack was reported by the media and the way other people in the firm were talking about this.
There was just radio silence. No one even seemed to know it was happening, and the media didn’t seem to care. I know that if there had been a terrorist attack where white people had been attacked, the response would have been different. It just made it very clear to me how much less brown lives are valued in the UK than white lives.
I spent my whole train journey back home crying that day, and I couldn’t even explain why – I hadn’t known anyone that was killed in the attack. But it felt so personal, and I think lots of these kind of events that happen in the world do really affect us in a way our white dominated workplaces don’t always understand or empathise with.
I had another experience that happened to me last year that I haven’t really been able to talk about, but it had a huge impact on my mental health.
But this blog has now become very long, so more on that in next week’s post.