Like many children of immigrants and BIPOC families, I had always been taught to silently endure pain and difficult situations. I used to beam with pride when former employers praised how calm and flexible I remained under extreme stress, even when I knew these were toxic working conditions. And even though I knew better, I still trudged through last year thinking I could bear it all, that I’d come out stronger at the end just like my father had always insisted — until it almost broke me.
I do not exaggerate when I say I spent much of 2023 crying. My almost-decade-long relationship was on the rocks, as was my general mental health while I dealt with grief from the death of my grandfather, severe depression in the aftermath of a physical assault, and burnout to the point of constant work nightmares and inflamed joints and muscles. There seemed to be no joy left in the world, with unimaginable acts of hate, mass violence, and death on full display everywhere we turned, and I began to lose faith that any of us could do anything at all to stop it.
“Have you heard of the sunk cost fallacy?” my therapist asked over Zoom one day. “At some point, it’s not worth enduring anymore just because it’s always been that way. Something needs to change.” I began to realize this wasn’t strength at all. I was simply in pain.
Around that time, stories of hope began to surface on the news: Palestinian resistance movements, fundraisers, moments of racial solidarity. And on the other hand, social justice activists were calling for people to stop praising them for their “resilience.” It made sense. In our toxic positivity culture, the media romanticizes the “courage” and “strength” of people who shouldn’t have to endure or adapt to genocide and oppression in the first place, and society has now even come to expect unrealistic resilience from people of color, which in turn deflects people from speaking out at all.
Dr. Malaka Shwaikh says in her essay “
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