When I was 6 years old, my mother transferred me and my sisters from the predominantly Black public school in our neighborhood to one with a more diverse (read: super white) student body in Manhattan. While I wasnt the only Black girl in my class, I was one of a handful and I was new, which made me stick out even more. Most of the other Black students attended the school since kindergarten and had already adjusted to an environment structured around values set by white educators and parents.

It was there that I remember my earliest experience with racial microaggressions. For one, classmates laughed at me because I referred to the teacher as Ms. a sign of respect at my previous school instead of calling her by her first name, which was the norm at this one. Being thrust into this setting made me hyper-aware that I was an outsider, creating an unsettling sensation in my chest that I now know to be anxiety.

Theres a feeling that many people of color learn to live with when they find that they occupy a space that was not intended for them. Its an aching desire to crawl into oneself and hide. As a little girl, I didnt have the words for it. My parents knew the feeling but didnt appear to have the words either. They insisted that my sisters and I would be OK because the school mirrored a society wed soon be thrown into and expected to succeed in as adults.

I grew up in a household where our American Dream was Black excellence. On the surface, Black excellence is simply the celebration of the success of a Black person. At its root, however, it measures a persons ability to attain mainstream white standards of success despite facing constant adversity. As I understand it now, Black excellence means adhering to respectability politics , a deceptive vehicle that measures my worth by standards set by white men.

Theres an emotional tax that Black Americans pay in their professional lives, which is essentially how the heightened experience of being marginalized affects our health and well-being. Its also commonly known in our community as the Black Tax, when corporate culture requires us to work twice as hard to get the money and recognition white men do.

Nevertheless, weve persisted. Growing up, my friends referred to my family as the Cosbys because my parents were professionals whose careers afforded us upward mobility. My parents raised us to believe that we should aspire to the same. I was encouraged to go to the best schools, get the highest grades and present myself in a way that would make me most palatable to future (white) employers. This often left me feeling as though I had to shrink myself by not being too opinionated. It also manifested in an inability to trust my gut and a quest for unreasonable perfectionism. I was seeking external validation, and I was in deep.

After a college degree from a respectable school, whether it be an Ivy or HBCU, the checklist of Black excellence follows as: a fancy professional title, no major vices, a home to call your own, a perfect marriage, and then kids to carry on the legacy. And so, as you can imagine, I found myself completely conflicted at my first obstetrics appointment. A kid out of wedlock at 26 was not on the checklist.

During this time, I was two years out of graduate school and still desperately struggling to land an interview, let alone a job. Nothing about the situation I found myself in aligned with the vision I subscribed to for so long. I found it very difficult to get work that matched the vision I had been given for myself. I told myself there was something wrong with me. I wasnt married, I was still living in my family home, and to make ends meet I took on short-term temp gigs. Even those dried up at the peak of the pandemic. I was barely capable of caring for myself, it appeared, and I had no stability nor a plan in place to take care of another person.

Part of me felt like I was undoing everything Id worked for and everything my ancestors worked for. Ultimately, my decision to have my son was rooted in understanding life after my dads passing. I wanted so badly to be joyous for following an intuitive decision. But I felt like a failure.

Why was it so difficult for me to find joy in starting a family on my own terms? It was in moments of deep reflection that I realized I was living by guidelines meant to protect the way people perceived me while rejecting my most natural expressions of life and my appreciation for it.