When you never have time to mourn — because of the demands of life and the frequency of our deaths — it wears on you emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. And in a time when Black kids are aware of racial injustice more than ever, suicide rates among Black youth have outpaced the suicide rates of their white peers. It’s not that big of a leap to connect the two.I’m sure my boss would’ve been fine with me taking some time off or working from home, but I honestly didn’t want to. I wanted to be distracted by work. It was my way of staving off That Moment.If you have a mental illness, then you know what I’m talking about. That Moment is when you notice that something that you can normally do with minimal effort, like getting out of bed, showering, or keeping a clean room, is all of a sudden too difficult to accomplish. And it hits you that, once again, you’re in the midst of an episode that you’re unsure you’ll be able to recover from.I’ve dealt with depression and anxiety for most of my life. They’ve been around for so long that their presence is almost comforting, like old friends that are slowly trying to kill me. But it wasn’t until college that I realised how much racism affected my mental health.My therapist, who was also a Black woman, pointed out how years of dealing with the insistent racism that came with being one of the few Black people in my rural Wisconsin town wore me down emotionally and mentally, which is why it made sense that I spent the summer after high school physically unable to get out of bed.It was also around that time that I learned about Trayvon Martin’s murder through social media. After that, thanks to digital activism and the work of Black writers, I became fully aware of the breadth and depth of the systematic oppression of Black people. Back then, I watched, read, and shared everything I could find about racial injustice. I spent hours getting into Facebook arguments with people who fervently believed that Black people deserved to die, engaging with them no matter how crappy it made me feel afterwards.That was back when I hadn’t had That Moment. But that all changed after I found out that Trayvon Martin’s murderer wasn’t going to jail. The next day, I walked to my apartment door but, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t step outside. At first, I couldn’t leave my apartment because of fear. Since the courts had made it clear that it was open season on Black people, I was terrified of what awaited me outside. Fear morphed into self-protection. My thinking was that, if I isolated myself, then I could escape the reality of how Black people are treated in America. It was a full month before I could actually open my door and walk outside.I love that most of my social media feeds are filled with people passionately advocating for racial justice, but I wouldn’t have been able to leave my apartment if I didn’t become aggressive with my self-care, and that meant unplugging once in a while. It was a hard lesson to learn, but I realised that sometimes taking care of myself translated to spending my time watching funny vines, going shopping, or getting a massage. Not being on all the time doesn’t make me less “woke,” it’s the key to my survival.