Okay, so if you’re not following me on Twitter and you’re a Black Writer, Black Author, or are a part of the Neurodivergent community, you need to be following. Why? Because I’m going to be responding to the blog post or the story of a different author every week. This one is going to be a written response, but please expect a recorded response later this week as I am setting up my Podcast, The Squeeze.
Now to the meat:
Author Tangela Williams-Spann, author of Sad, Black, and Fat, which is a book of poems and essays, is also known as @Twillspann on Twitter and for much of her social media, made a blog post about being resilient, and what that word really means. I’m just going to touch on it a little bit because I plan on doing a podcast response to this article because it means a lot to me as a writer and a person.
Altogether, from what I gathered from this post is how Tangela makes it clear that self-care is important for everybody, but it’s extremely important for those of us who are neurodivergent, and especially if you’re Black and neurodivergent. She also goes into how people as a whole are waking up and understanding their self-worth when it comes to these jobs now that the COVID pandemic (she said “Panasonic” and I lost it! LOL!), has proven that a lot of jobs have the flexibility to be done from home. And then, she stated what the dictionary definition of resilient is: the ability to “recover quickly”(Oxford).
Chyyyyyyyyyyyyyy….!!! (sips wine)
So I made some notes, and I will go into further details in the podcast when I record it, but this was my takeaway:
Resiliency is not about how fast you can recover from a situation.
Resiliency is about how you bounce back, and if you even try.
Just trying to even bounce back makes you resilient, because it takes a strong mind, a strong heart, and a strong spirit (even when your body is failing you), to look around at your unfavorable situation, to look at your rock bottom and it’s muckiness and it’s yuckiness to have the audacity to even think to just get up.
I often tell people to think about how, when you’re in between a rock and hard place…you still got room to breathe. Learn to be thankful for just that before you think about the green pastures.
I’m all about baby steps!
Then! Tangela went into the importance of filling your own cup.
She listed several ways that people fill their cups, but this really hit home for me in a different way. This is a very important thing to work on when you are rebuilding yourself. Some of us, especially those of us that are neurodivergent because there are just some things we can’t wrap our heads around that just seems to come so naturally to neurotypicals.
We, as people, all have several cups to fill, we have: Physical cups, Mental cups, Spiritual cups, and then we have Love cups.
That Love cup is the most important cup to fill first.
The thing is, a lot of us grow up thinking that we need to find people to love us, that we have to prove ourselves worthy of being loved, we have to work so hard to win the seal of approval from somebody else that in reality can’t even meet us halfway.
This is something I wish someone would have shown me, and broke it down to me as a young girl and a young woman, what it really means to love yourself…how to do it.
You haven’t seen anything until an illness that your friends and family may think is a joke, comes and snatches your whole livelihood away and all you have to rebuild with are crumbs. And while you’re building, they’re busy stomping on what you’re trying to recover. Keep building!
People who love you because of how you look, your job, your money, they love it when all you have is good news to share with them…dem people don’t love you, baby.
That’s not love.
Love is when you fall apart, they bring the glue and cement and try to help you put those pieces and crumbs back together again (all the king’s horses and all the king’s men? Humpty Dumpty called them the GOATS!) And this is just love from people.
Love for yourself is embracing the darkness you found yourself in, and all the wisdom and knowledge that came out of that darkness. It’s refusing to pick up a call because you just woke up and haven’t had your coffee and meditation time yet, it’s wearing clothes that make you happy and feel good, it doesn’t matter if somebody else doesn’t like it, it’s talking to your pets, it’s embracing how goofy you are and trying hard every day to be a better version of nobody else but you.
It’s being able to close your eyes at night, with glee, because you know you woke up that day and tried. You had the audacity to even try.
That’s resiliency.
Tangela! I loved this article so so much! Please keep doing your thing, Sis!
If you’re reading this and you need a pick me up on the regular, Tangela’s blog can be found at Twillspanwrites.com where she writes about various topics about mental health and being neurodivergent. Please follow her on Twitter @Twillspann