Yesterday, I learned about the idea of intergenerational trauma and the ways the “Strong Black Woman” schema can shape how Black women learn to survive.
And something about it really stayed with me.
Because sometimes I wonder: How much of what I call strength is actually survival that I learned to normalize?
The ability to keep going.
The ability to figure everything out yourself.
The ability to work through exhaustion.
The discomfort with asking for help.
The feeling that resting means you are falling behind.
The belief that if you don’t take care of everything, nobody will.
The instinct to make everything look okay, even when you’re quietly falling apart.
Maybe some of that isn’t simply personality.
Maybe some of it is what happens when survival becomes so familiar that you start mistaking it for who you are.
And I think that is what makes the idea of intergenerational trauma so powerful to me. Sometimes what gets passed down isn’t a specific story that someone sits you down and tells you. Sometimes it is a way of responding to the world.
You learn to be prepared.
You learn not to depend too heavily on anyone.
You learn to make something out of nothing.
You learn that being vulnerable can be dangerous.
You learn to carry things quietly.
And then one day you realize that you are exhausted from carrying things you were never meant to carry alone.
I don’t want to reject my strength. My strength has gotten me here.
But I also don’t want survival mode to be the only way I know how to live.
I want to learn the difference between being strong and having to be strong.
I want to learn that receiving support does not make me weak.
That rest is not laziness.
That softness is not irresponsibility.
That asking for help does not mean I have failed.
And that I can build financial security without living my entire life in fear of losing it.
Maybe healing, for me, isn’t becoming a completely different woman.
Maybe it is becoming a woman who finally understands that she doesn’t have to earn safety by suffering for it.
P.s.
Just a girl navigating her 20’s
Dose Of Chevvi 