An Ode to My Mental Health

by Kyra-Lianne Samuels I wake up and feel the sorrow wash over me and smile into the familiarity. The comfort is soon followed by guilt, shame, dread. “It’s not supposed to be like this,” I think. “I wasn’t put on earth to suffer,” and yet. And yet. The indignity of my reaction leads to a new wave of remorse. At least I’m already in bed. I never got up anyway.

Being biracial

As a child, race and ethnicity were issues far removed from my mind. It wasn’t until my teen years that I realized that having a white mother and a black father meant that I was right at the center of two different spheres racially, and because of their different cultural backgrounds, also ethnically. The older I got, the more I realized that the importance of race was more prominent than what I’d initially thought.