What I’ve been trying to do is keep my mind moving and pushing forward. We all deal with death differently. I’ve written about this before and I try to remind people that not everyone deals with death the same. Crazy thing is, is that people assume that you are good and that life goes on the same way, but it really doesn’t. I live a life to where I can remain positive and just accept what enters and leaves my life. I believe I’ve come to this point after my dad died. Before I would kind of care about the moves of the people around me but I truly don’t care at this point. I shutdown and disappear to save myself.

I was told I should care more about other people’s situations and be as supportive as possible but when your the strong friend for everyone, you tend to get drained. Everything becomes overwhelming and you shutdown to protect yourself from falling apart. Disappearing and healing yourself is always priority over anything. When people try to force you to get better all you can do is take a step back. Being forced to do anything, tends to make the outcome a lot worse. This goes in line with what I wrote about previously. Your tolerance level to deal with certain things going on around you. We can only tolerate things so long before we just have to take a step back.

Sometimes I feel that depression for black men gets overlooked and get told by society to man up. I tend to not care what society has to say but I get uncomfortable speaking to people about certain things especially when it comes to feelings. It’s weird because I am a very direct person, so the next best thing is to shutdown and write down my thoughts. Shutting down is the safest thing for me to get back to my center and move past the negatives in my life.