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Something in my spirit compelled me to write this today. I don’t know who needs it but I feel it heavily in my chest ….
Dear Black Men,
Come sit with me a while.
Allow me to remind you that you are more than what this cruel world has tried to convince you to be.
You are not merely survival.
Not merely labor, performance, protection, or silence.
You are the quiet mystery,
the stoic strength,
the foundation upon which generations have leaned without ever fully asking how heavy the weight became in your hands.
You have been taught to swallow grief like it is weakness,
to bury tenderness beneath hardened skin,
to survive first and feel later — if ever at all.
And still…
you continue to love.
You continue to provide warmth in a world that has so often met you with coldness.
I see the exhaustion hidden beneath the laughter.
The pressure behind the composure.
The little boy inside the man who learned too early that vulnerability was dangerous.
But softness was never the absence of masculinity.
Feeling deeply was never failure.
There is nothing weak about a man who allows himself to be human.
You deserve spaces where your voice is not interrupted by expectation.
Where your pain is not criminalized.
Where your gentleness is not mistaken for fragility.
Where you can unravel without shame and still be held with dignity afterward.
You are allowed to rest.
Allowed to speak.
Allowed to ache.
Allowed to be loved beyond what you can offer others.
And despite everything this world has projected onto you,
there is still something sacred in the way you rise each day and continue trying.
That resilience is not invisible to me.
Neither is your heart.