Don’t Tell Me to Calm Down

| Photo courtesy of Joshua Oyebanji on Unsplash.

The opinions reflected in this OpEd are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of staff, faculty and students of The King's College.

For most of my life, I have tried to suffocate my rage. I’ve done it to shrink myself down into a space where I wouldn’t be perceived as the “angry Black girl,” or the “angry Black woman.” That was before I remembered who I was. But more on that later.

When you’ve gone to predominantly white institutions (PWIs) your whole life, you learn to assimilate. To not be “too much,” too expressive, too bold. Both Black men and women experience this in some form when they attend a PWI, whether they are aware of it or not. For most of my life, I was unaware. I just knew that my parents moved me to different white, Evangelical Christian schools because as immigrants from Jamaica, they wanted the very best for me. And the very best meant a classical, private school education when it was available. And a classical, private school education usually meant classes where I’d be the only Black person. Not the only Black girl. Only Black person. 

At first, it didn’t really bother me. I was used to it. Snide, ignorant comments and microaggression, mostly about my 4C, wonderfully fluffy afro-textured hair, made their way into my brain during middle school, but I shrugged them off. I’d flippantly say that they’d rolled off my back because those people were just stupid and didn’t know what they were talking about. But then I started to hide, mostly underneath hoodies, so I could cover my head. In the sweltering Florida heat, you could find me with a hoodie on. Hoodies became my best friends; they shielded me from any more hurtful remarks. 

I hid again in high school, this time under the cover of wanting to be someone I was not. I went to a public school, and it was here that the first subtle feelings of undesirability began taking root in my mind. I’d see the white girls with their jock boyfriends and their “American Teenage Dream” lives plastered all over social media, which made me feel even worse. All the teen movies I enjoyed (that I’d watch to make me feel even more sorry for myself) only had white girls as the main character, with the occasional Black friend as a side character. This constant influx of media that I never felt represented in also began to take a huge toll. I’d research if something was wrong with me because it really feels like that’s the case when you’re a teenage girl and a boy hasn’t looked your way even once. My search history looked a little something like this:

Why have I never been asked to a school dance by a boy?

How to glow up as a black girl (YouTube).

I hate my 4C Hair.

Those might seem outlandish to read, but those are real feelings I was experiencing, and many Black girls in predominantly white spaces have this shared experience as well. All the “teenage romance experiences” that other girls were having, I never partook in. No getting asked out, no cheap high school dates, no prom-posals, no school Valentine-grams. No one seemed to find me particularly interesting. Maybe it was because I didn’t dress up? I didn’t want to stand out too much. Or maybe it was because I didn’t know a lot of guys? No, I was on the track team, and I knew so many other athletes. Then I had the most horrible thought. What if… it was because I was Black?

Of course, if a person avoids you like the plague and wants nothing to do with you solely because of your skin color, it’s probably best you stay away from that person anyways because they are racist. Boys at my high school weren’t doing that, they just… didn’t seem to notice me. I’d feel the anger rise in the back of my throat and swallow it down. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, I’d tell myself. But when you’re 16 and you just want to go out to the mall and the movies with a cool guy, it does matter. I never allowed myself to feel those feelings of disappointment fully because I was constantly told by people who cared about me that I should just “calm down,” and that I shouldn’t “let those silly little things get to me.” They were silly little things that felt very astronomical at the time, but I just stuffed them down.

When I got to college, another super white space, I knew what I was getting myself into. I’d been at PWIs literally almost my entire life. What was another? What I didn’t know at the time was that all the emotional feelings of undesirability and the feeling of being unheard that had been suppressed over the years were bubbling up inside of me like Mount Vesuvius. I didn’t know that I was about to erupt. I spent my freshman year, again, trying to be someone I was not, someone who I thought I was but wasn’t me at all. 

I remember watching the movie Something New, starring Sanaa Lathan and Simon Baker. In the very beginning of the film, four Black women are at a restaurant for a Galentine’s Night since they were all single. One of the women remarked that they were the “42.4% of black women [who] have never been married.” Her accountant friend and main character, Kenya, played by Sanaa Lathan, retorted back saying that even if “42.4% of us never get married, that still means 57.6% of us will.” Sadly, the odds are still completely stacked against us, her friend replied, saying that this phenomenon was “mostly acute among African-American women who are educated professionals.” I heard that and my heart sank. Here I was on the path to obtaining my Ph.D. (Black women are the most educated group in America), and this movie was telling me it was only going to get worse? I looked up more information about it and unfortunately, the statistics are dismal. Not only are Black women the least likely to get married than other races of women, we are also considered the least desirable race of women in the dating pool.

What does a Black woman do when she hears news like this? Especially one who hasn’t felt desired in the first place? Does she A) Bite her tongue and smile, B) Get furious at the constant portrayal of being a victim, C) Grieve, or D) All of the above? I fill in a little neat black bubble next to D and then angrily scribble a giant circle in hot, furious red ink around all the answers.

Christian colleges tend to produce a lot of marriages. “Rings by Spring,” they’re called. Not only was I hearing Christians talk about this college meeting then getting married, but non-Christians as well, who’d gush about how they met their spouses in college. Something about that seemed really off to me. Maybe it’s because I’d never had a romantic experience and was entering my last teen year. No, something really had to be off with me. So I started therapy. 

The thing about therapy is, it doesn’t work if you put on an act the whole time and pretend like nothing’s wrong, like pretending the thunderstorm raging inside your soul is raining cupcakes and sparkly glitter. The facade lasted for a little bit. And then Mount Vesuvius erupted. Nearly a decade of pent-up rage at my situation: the horrible feelings of being invisible and unwanted, somehow unloveable and cast to the side. Not pretty enough, not good enough, not enough, not enough, not enough! I thought I wasn’t supposed to be too much? I thought I should know my place, to make sure I gave the rest of us a good name. Maybe I’d never been asked out, but I got good grades. I didn’t get invited to parties, but I had trained hard as a sprinter. None of that mattered though, I learned in therapy. The feelings that spewed out of me came out steaming and resentful. 

And so I sat with my Rage. I sat and listened to her. And as C.S. Lewis said, “I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.” That’s what therapy taught me. I wasn't just pulling this anger out of nowhere. I was literally grieving, mourning a “teenagehood” and life I wish I had, this great sense of loss overwhelming me. In anguish over statistics telling me I wasn’t good enough. Trembling and reluctant to say how I really felt because in situations where I thought I was able to show how passionate I was about something that bothered me, I would be told that I needed to calm down.

Don’t tell me to calm down. I have every right to express myself, to be loud about the things that matter to me. 

Don’t tell me to calm down. I refuse to put myself in the box fashioned for me, trying to make me another obedient little sheep.

Don’t tell me to calm down. I am worthy of love just as I am, I don’t need to become “more spiritually mature,” or a “holier Christian,” to gain a  relationship.

Don’t tell me to calm down. I will no longer allow out-of-context Bible verses to dictate to me how I should never get upset.

It’s easy for people to throw Black women onto the “strong, Black queen” pyre, leaving us to burn as heroines and simultaneously drown as damsels in distress. My advice to those who do that, knowingly and unknowingly, is to reach out. Some of us gave up trying asking for help because people continually call us “strong” and that we can “handle anything life throws at us!” We have. We’ve been handling it for 400 years in this country, many years in others, and our hands are aching, so we’re trying to set it down. But there’s pushback that comes along with that. The image of the Black woman has been constantly vandalized with portrayals of struggle, disdain and hyper-independence, that whenever a Black woman is just living her life leisurely, she’s questioned about it. 

I could go on, but Black women are tired. We are tired of the stereotypes, the statistics and the pity. We are returning to the true essence of ourselves: expressive creatives who deserve to take up space. I remember who I am now. Underneath all of the performative plaster caked over my innermost self is a beautiful expression of the Divine. A reflection of God Herself (I know I bothered the theologians with that one. God is Spirit, remember?). God is creative and expressive, nurturing and kind. The Ultimate Embodiment and Source of pure, undeserving, unconditional Love. Hearing that I was created in God’s Image and His Likeness in Sunday School became a broken record as I got older because I did not truly know who God was. In this deconstruction of my faith that I’ve had in college, coming to understand who God truly is now, makes being created in Her Image a whole different thing.

This is after. I let myself feel Rage, and I sit beside her when she comes until she removes her roaring mask to reveal her true face: Grief. Usually, Grief shines the light on an issue I have a burning passion for resolving, such as racial injustice, greedy governmental power, the neglect and mistreatment of innocent children in India, as well as starvation and homelessness right outside my front door here in New York City.

Are those depressing statistics a reflection of who I am and who I will eventually become? Not at all. Because I am ever-evolving, always-becoming, and on this planet I don’t intend to have a final form and then just die. That is such linear thinking. No, I will exist forever, for eons and eons. The real me. 

So you don’t get to tell me to calm down. This human experience has been given to me, to feel its full range of emotions through the perspective of a Black woman in America. So I plan on doing the most I can with it to make sure other women like me feel seen, heard and represented. That they are told it’s okay to tap fully into who they are, free to create and express themselves, whether it be through painting or belly-laughter. That they are more than enough, loved right where they are. 

Brianna Jacobs is a junior JCS major. She is the Social Media Editor for EST and Photo Editor for the EST Magazine. She enjoys doing elaborate eye makeup looks and has recently taken up learning the martial art Muay Thai.