Artwork By ThisRespekArt, Photo Credit: Christopher Smith
It’s June, which makes it Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month. And judging by what I’ve seen online this first week of June (and truthfully well before that), there’s far too many cats who desperately need to attend to their mental health.
In other words - a lot of you dudes out there are down bad and sinking and it’s all over the ‘Gram, Twitter, etc.
I ran across something someone shared on Threads, and it revealed how this issue is hiding in plain sight. The statement read (and I’m paraphrasing so my apologies to the original poster), “Maybe these young men wearing shiesties are doing so more to hide their hurt, but we’re not ready to talk about that.” Imagine - wearing a full-on balaclava mask so no one sees your pain is the HEIGHT of stifling your issues.
But I get it - there’s too many young men out there who are hiding their pain in plain sight or just not hiding it at all. And truthfully, there’s a lot of supposedly grown ass dudes right there with them. “Extended adolescents” (that’s courtesy of Dillard University President Walter Kimbrough) are out here being loud without reason or purpose and it’s harming us.
I see brothers I know dumping on WNBA player Angel Reese, a Black woman in jokes in one breath while complaining how women don’t pay them attention or are gold diggers. I see people like Gilbert Arenas and others trashing Karl-Anthony Towns and others with homophobic slurs and using the term“zesty” like that gateway drug. Dudes overdoing it on hookah, barely seasoned fast food chicken chains to hide tastebuds destroyed by COVID, and “honey packs” that are probably wearing their cardiac valves out. All to not confront the trauma they carry with them.
To those who read this far and muttering to themselves about how wrong I am - welcome to the kennel because you’re a hit dog hollering. The visceral anger that I see online is a reflection of what’s really going on in some of these dudes’ minds. And its truly unhealthy.
But I’m not writing this to completely run them down. No, what I believe is that we have to confront and address all of the trauma we’ve had instilled within us from when we were young, what’s already in our DNA. We have to commit to not carrying baggage that aint ours.
Therapeutic counseling helps. I underwent years of it to process the death of my father, caregiver therapy and more sessions to handle the death of my mother. I lost both my parents in the span of four years, before and after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
If I didn’t have that, plus a highly supportive family both blood and chosen - I don’t know if I would be the person I am now, or even be here. And that’s the bottom line. We are losing so many to violence, against each other and themselves through suicide. The Black community and other communities of color as well as those ofthe LGBTQ+ community and those disabled are under more pressure than before with a federal administration that would rather we be extinct or out of the way somehow. We have to speak up and speak out. Challenge those we’re cool with. Ask sincerely and honestly about their well-being. Be open to them asking you the same thing. Check in.
If you’ve read this far, and you feel like you’re a brother that is in need of some help with their mental health - I urge you to open up about it. Rocks break and crumble under storms that rage continually. There’s a couple of resources below that I’ve set up links to. I hope that you use them if needed, and share them with others you feel could benefit from them.