Growing up in my African household, emotions were never acknowledged in any meaningful way. They were treated like background noise — irrelevant, messy, and ultimately useless in the grand scheme of survival. Life was hard. That was the understanding. The expectation was clear: tough it out, push through, and survive. Mental health did not exist in conversations. It did not exist at all.

Looking deeper, I realize now that in many African and broader communities of color, mental health is not even seen. If you take a close enough look, you will notice something heartbreaking: everyone’s baseline is depression. Survival and silence are normalized, and emotional distress is dismissed as weakness or unnecessary drama. If someone dares to express their pain, they are brushed aside — and if that person happens to be male, the dismissal is even harsher. Vulnerability has no place in survival mode.

Pride and appearance govern the way many African families function, mine included. My family — both direct and extended — is messy. Messy in a way that poisons every layer, like peeling an onion and finding each layer more toxic than the last. But no matter how poisoned, the outer layer must remain intact, shiny, perfect. Image is everything. Problems are buried, not solved. Emotions are denied, not faced. Generational pain is passed down like inheritance, gift-wrapped in silence and pride. We were not a family who healed; we were a family who hid.

Religion layered another suffocating silence onto mental health. Struggles like depression or anxiety were rarely named for what they were. Instead, they were explained away as possession, curses, or a lack of faith. When someone showed signs of distress, the response was not empathy or intervention — it was to leave it to God. Pray harder. Repent. Hope that deliverance would come. Therapy was mocked, ridiculed, called a “white people thing.” Seeking help outside of prayer was seen as betrayal. As a child, I prayed so much and so hard. I re-accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior countless times, each time believing that maybe this time, I would finally be worthy. Each time, life only got harder.

When I tried to bring up mental health within my direct family, I was met with blank stares and emotional unintelligence so profound that it felt like screaming into a void. I tried different words. Different tones. Different approaches. I tried explaining trauma gently; I tried expressing anger; I tried crying. It did not matter. They could not see it because they had no framework to understand it. To them, I was overreacting, being dramatic, making problems where there were none. They could not recognize my pain because they could not even access their own.

From a very young age, I understood that adults were not my friends. They were not my safety nets. They were figures who appeared when convenient for them, and I had to be careful not to disrupt that convenience. I learned to deal with sadness, fear, and overwhelm by myself. I became a master of bottling emotions, polishing the outside until it shined with stoicism and false perfection. My needs became hindrances, and the lesson was clear: stay silent, stay small, and maybe — just maybe — you will be loved.

There were unspoken rules about emotions in my house. Do not talk back. Do not explain yourself. If accused, defend yourself at your own risk. Any attempt to speak was often met with beatings far harsher than the situation required. Punishment did not teach me to behave better. It taught me to lie better, to hide better, to perfect the art of deception. It taught me that being caught was the real crime, not the action itself.

I felt invisible. Disconnected. Forgotten. Anger became my only real emotion, directed outward at everyone and inward at myself. A few days ago, a Snapchat memory from six years ago resurfaced: a video of me in middle school, distorting my face with a filter, laughing as I said, “This is what my face actually looks like — burnt toast, a burnt pickle — think of anything burnt and that’s me.” It was supposed to be funny. But it was not funny. It was a reflection of deep, internalized hatred. Hatred taught to me through years of emotional neglect.

In the African and Gabonese community, strength is measured by silence and success. If you have food, clothes, and shelter, what could possibly be wrong? To show emotional struggle was to invite judgment, pity, or worse — mockery. Especially if you were male. Vulnerability was, and often still is, a liability.

Mental health was not only invisible — it was actively misunderstood. “Just pray about it,” they would say. I prayed until my knees hurt. I prayed until I felt nothing at all. And still, the heaviness never left. Severe mental illnesses were seen not as cries for help but as spiritual failures. Individuals struggling were labeled possessed and brought to churches for deliverance rather than therapy. There was no room for the possibility that emotions were real, valid, and deserving of care.

My personal breaking point came when I wrote my first suicide letter and turned to self-harm. I cried myself to sleep night after night, calling for my mother in the dark, knowing she would not come — and even if she did, she would not know what to do. I have recordings from that time — recordings of myself ranting, begging for my parents to see me. In one, I was seventeen years old. Seventeen. And still invisible. Still unseen. Still unheard.

I even showed my stepfather my self-harm scars once. I had reached a point of no return. I thought surely, surely this would be enough for someone to care. To this day, he has not said a word about it. Nothing changed. My pain was acknowledged only through silence — as if ignoring it would make it disappear.

Unlearning what I was taught has been brutal. It meant accepting that my entire life had been built around surviving rather than living. It meant confronting the fact that what I had always thought was love was often just control, fear, and pride dressed up as care. Healing is still a work in progress for me. Therapy has helped. Facing my emotions instead of bottling them has helped. But the road is long, and the wounds run deep.

If I could change one thing about how African families approach mental health, it would be to make the parents less stubborn — to create space where children are listened to, truly listened to, without attack or dismissal. Emotional pain needs witnesses, not judges.

To any young child of any cultural background hiding their pain because they are scared no one will understand: hang in there. I see you. I understand you. You are not alone. It is a long, tiring, and frustrating road. But it is not impossible. If you have to let go of certain ideas, people, or even family to begin living, think about it. Your pain is valid, even if others cannot see it. Your story matters, even if it is inconvenient to those who raised you.

This is not trauma Olympics. Your experiences are valid. Your grief is valid — the grief for the family you could have had, the grief for the person you could have become if things had been different. Healing is not betrayal. Healing is survival — this time, survival with a purpose: to finally live.