I am a Black man who struggles with anxiety and self-doubt. I am also a man who is learning to stop treating his pain like a secret that needs to be kept.
I want to tell you something I’ve spent years learning how to say out loud: I have anxiety. Not the kind that’s easy to name at the dinner table. The kind that finds you at 3 a.m. when the house is quiet, and everyone you love is asleep—and somehow that stillness becomes the loudest room you’ve ever been in. The kind that walks into a meeting with you, sits right beside you while you’re speaking, and whispers, ‘Who do you think you are?’ just loud enough that you start to believe it.
I overthink. I self-doubt in ways that don’t match what people see from the outside. The thing nobody talks about is how lonely that is—because from the outside, everything looks fine, and so you learn to let it look that way. You get good at it. You smile in the right places. You lead the meeting. You hold the room. You go home and hold the family. And somewhere in all that holding, you forget to ask who is holding you.