A Soft Black Woman’s Journey to Spiritual Entrepreneurship
From A Soft Black Woman’s Journey to Spiritual Entrepreneurship by Rowana Abbensetts-Dobson
What does it mean to be soft?
To me, “soft” means living in peace and ease, although I know it can be described differently by others. Soft means I get to be delicate. I get to claim the privileges of femininity. I’m vulnerable. I cry. My emotions matter. It’s the power of flow over force. It’s rest. It’s my self-assured safety, which is by no means guaranteed in this Black and female body. Yes, safety is a requirement for softness.
I have to say that throughout my life, physical safety was never something I had to search for, although I could make an argument for my emotional and mental safety. For the most part, I had a loving and protective upbringing, but it still didn’t stop the influences of mainstream society from seeping into my mind. There were issues beyond our control impacting me without my consent. I would have to become “strong” to survive in the world as a Black woman.
Before I reclaim softness, let me tell you about why I rejected it in the first place.
I used to believe that I wasn’t tough enough. I remember starting my freshman year of high school and thinking, “I have to be tough. I have to be an impenetrable wall. I can’t let people in. I won’t let anyone see me cry or think they hurt my feelings.”
I had realized early on that I could be teased and taunted or mistreated simply because someone didn’t like the way I talked or carried myself. From a young age, I tried my best to be inconspicuous and appealing to others. I didn’t want to rock the boat or be ridiculed. In my own family, I often felt that way.
My parents are both immigrants from Guyana, a country at the northern tip of South America with a rich Caribbean culture. It’s a culture that I understood early on values “hardness.” It wasn’t unusual for people to make jokes or ridicule you for small things, whether it was your immediate family, extended family or family friends. These jokes were generally thought of as a harmless way to show love. I understood this, but I was always seemingly more sensitive than the rest of my family, and it often got to me. During my adolescence, I found myself experiencing anxiety about going to family functions or having people over for holidays and birthdays. I learned to become a muted version of myself that no one could really find fault with. At the same time, I grew up in a culture where family was everything. Family was everything, even at the expense of one’s mental health. I watched my mother go above and beyond her whole life, often exalted as the rock of the family, but as a mother, sometimes distant. I yearned for the emotional closeness I saw in other mothers and daughters. At first, I blamed the fact that she had to work so much, but as I got older, I began to understand that work was just a scapegoat for emotional vulnerability.
Vulnerability is not something that Caribbean people do well. We love to brag about who had it the hardest, tell stories of how far you had to walk to school or cross a river in a boat to church every Sunday, working the farm for your next meal, the lack of good medical care, and the struggles of poverty. Caribbean folk love to tell the American-born generation that we just don’t get it. We don’t get how hard it was back there and how easy we have it here, but one thing I’ve learned as I have delved into resolving my own traumas is that those hard times don’t stay buried in a distant land. They embed themselves in our DNA. They get passed on in the form of anxiety and depression, ADHD, Autism, and more. They wait for the generation brave enough to dig it up and work it out because, too often with the older generation, they are just not ready to do that. They have escaped the “hard life,” but it has made them hard in return.
It's nobody’s fault, of course. Parents do what they must to survive and make life better. I understand that. But every cause has an effect. For me, the effect was that I was a soft girl who began to understand that how I was, my natural state of being, was not okay. I had to have thicker skin and not be quite so delicate. The word “Soft” has a negative connotation in the Caribbean. “Soft” can mean that you’re mentally disabled. In other words, you have different needs, and in a society where it’s survival of the fittest without very many resources to accommodate those differences, you’re likely to be discarded or tossed to the wayside, locked up in a mental hospital, and labeled a problem, a burden. Luckily for me, I was born in a country and a time where therapy and mental health have become somewhat normalized. I’ve been given the opportunity to learn more about myself instead of shoving down my differences.
By the age of 17, I was beginning to recognize that I was suffering from anxiety and depression or at least those were the labels to put on me at the time. Really, I was at the beginning of a long process of coming into awareness that I was a high-functioning ADHDer masking to fit in. I was feeling the symptoms of suffocation. My true self was begging to come out, but there was always the fear that I would not be accepted as I was.
The first line of action was to go on antidepressants. Zoloft. After all, the college application season was upon me and soon after that, the beast itself, college! I needed these thoughts and feelings managed, tucked and put away. I needed to be normal so that I could continue to achieve. That was another thing. Not only was I meant to be normal, but was also slated as a “gifted” kid. Since elementary school, I was put in the talented in gifted program where me and my parents, as well as the parents of several other high-scoring kids were told that we had a special aptitude for learning and needed more of a challenge. These days, as all of the gifted kids are now grown up, we reflect on the fact that gifted often coincided with neurodiversity whether it was ADHD, autism, anxiety or depression later in life. There were behavioral markers of the “gifted” we were socially awkward with good grades for the most part. Math was never really my thing, but early on, I showed an aptitude for reading and writing. Us “gifted” kids tended to have our specialty areas. This carried on through high school where I was in all of the AP classes (except for Calculus).
These options were presented as an alternative to my weirdness, an answer to my mental suffering. I wasn’t a misfit, I was “gifted.” My classmates and I competed for the highest GPAs and to get into top colleges. I ended up at Kenyon, which was known to take kids with my kind of gift for the English language. As I’m typing this, I’m crying. Maybe I’m realizing for the first time that I was always an outcast or an outlier. It was as if society is set up with a net to catch us, the ones whose mental energy was a bit different from others but could still be harnessed. They needed us to believe that we were okay. If going to college taught me anything, it was that the gifted kids are not okay. As I learned more about myself on my mental health journey, I saw some disturbing symptoms mirrored in my classmates; anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and narcissism. It was hard to look away from myself or others. It was hard to ignore the pain, and the fact that so many beautiful people were suffering, trying to fit a standard that was never meant to be sustainable for us.
In college, I tried to cope with my mental health as best I could. There was the prescription medication I was taking, which often left me feeling emotionless and void of creativity, which I hated. I was also in therapy at the campus counseling center. As one of the few Black women on campus, I often I had to explain my experiences as an Afro-Caribbean Black woman to my therapist, a white woman, but she was a very empathetic person, and she understood as best she could. She encouraged me to start journaling my feelings, and I did. Writing became my main outlet during that time. I filled notebook after notebook, writing almost obsessively during every free moment.
One popular coping mechanism on campus was drugs and alcohol. I had been a strict good girl in high school, so I took college as my opportunity to let loose, with often disastrous effects. The first thing I learned was that I could not party like the white girls. The white girls were white and would always be white, they would always have this blanket of purity over them whereas I, an awkward virgin, could be called a slut because a guy looked my way. I knew it had to do with the color of my skin.
Although many felt comfortable disparaging me during college, I was beginning to awaken to the fact that I had something particular about me that would strongly attract some but agitate others — a certain magnetism that I certainly never asked for, but often made me the villain or an easy scapegoat in the stories of my classmates. As much as I tried to keep to myself, people seemed to want create their dramas around me. Often, I danced in the chaos. Often, I fanned the flames of the fire. It was interesting to see the waves I could make. There was one point during my senior year that I was so infamous in certain groups that I started to make up my own rumors just to see what would stick. Some call it the final stages of madness. I call it finding freedom in social bondage.
To me, soft is a fantasy.
You know how they say to be delulu about life? As a Black woman, you can never truly be delulu enough because society will try to humble you so fast. But you can dream. No one can monitor my dreams and tell me that it’s not possible for me to live in peace and harmony outside of the rigid systems of white supremacy and capitalism.
I hold on to the hope for a rested and well-cared-for body, opportunities for my children to grow up healthy, happy, and intellectually fulfilled, and have the best chance at whatever career they desire. I want to have the option to not get run down by life, but I don’t think that’s how it works, even for the most rich and famous among us.
Sometimes, you have to pull back the labels, and allow yourself to just be.
