Every May, Mental Health Awareness Month arrives and the internet fills up with the same content. Green ribbons. Self-care checklists. Reminders to drink water and go outside.

And every May, I find myself thinking: this is not the conversation Black people need.

Because the version of mental health awareness that gets amplified every May was not built with us in mind. It doesn't account for what it costs to be Black in America. It doesn't name the specific weight we carry in our bodies, our relationships, our communities or what happens when that weight goes unaddressed for a lifetime.

Dr. Arline Geronimus at the University of Michigan spent 40 years proving what Black people have always known in our bodies: the stress of racism doesn't just hurt it ages us. Biologically. Cellularly. It deteriorates the heart, the nervous system, the endocrine system. She called it weathering.

You are not aging. You are weathering.

And the silence, the one we inherited, the one that was once protective is making it worse.

This month I'm having a different conversation. One about the stigma we were handed, the weight we are carrying right now in 2026, and what it actually looks like to begin putting some of it down.

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