A letter to Black men with anxiety: You are seen

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.

To every man of color holding it together:

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 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 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.

You can be surrounded by people who love you and still feel utterly alone with what’s going on inside you. That’s not weakness. That’s what happens when we never learned we were allowed to need something.

The Exhaustion Behind the Mask

I know that isolation from the inside: the performance of okayness, the exhaustion that has nothing to do with sleep, the quiet questions that sit on your chest before your feet hit the floor.

Am I enough? Am I doing enough? You carry that alone because you were taught that a man who is struggling is a man who is slipping, and being a Black man means holding that line even tighter. So you grip. You go quiet. You disappear in plain sight.

I see the same wound in the young men I serve every day, some of them teenagers navigating homelessness, who have been performing strength since before they had any business having to.

When Trauma Takes Root

The streets taught them trust is a liability, that the safest version of yourself is the hardest one. When you’ve had to fight for every resource, your nervous system doesn’t switch off just because someone offers you a safe space. What looks like aggression is often terror. What looks like resistance is often a young man who has been let down so many times that hope feels dangerous.

A Moment on 125th Street

I think of one young man I walked alongside for years, thoughtful, present, the kind who made you lean in when he spoke. Over time I watched something shift in him, a dimming, the kind of decompensation that happens when the weight of surviving without a real foundation finally catches up to a person.

I remember the day he walked out of our drop-in center’s shower, unclothed, and kept walking, straight out onto 125th Street, right in front of the Apollo. I ran after him with a blanket. When I reached him and wrapped it around his shoulders, I saw embarrassment on his face, but also relief. Like some part of him still believed he mattered enough for someone to run toward him.

That’s what silence costs. When we teach young people of color that pain is something to outrun, not something to name, it doesn’t disappear. It waits. Eventually, it finds a way out.

BIPOC Mental Health Month: Breaking the Silence

During BIPOC Mental Health Month, I’m saying it plainly: I am a Black man who struggles with anxiety and self-doubt, and I am learning, slowly and imperfectly, to stop treating my pain like a secret.

If something in you just exhaled reading this, I see you. You are allowed to share your pain. And when you do, the people who love you will run toward you.

This op-ed appeared first in The Root. It has been edited for length. For the original, visit www.theroot.com/a-letter-to-black-men-with-anxiety-you-are-seen-2000117160.