A Note from Habeebah on Taking Care

“I found god in myself and I loved her fiercely.”

Ntozake Shange

Greetings Beloved Friends,

Mental Health Awareness Month has come and gone, and while I spend my days working in service to the mental wellbeing of children and families, I submit to you that as each day passed in the month of May, the person whose mental health was most often on my mind was my own. 

Like so many others, I have struggled greatly while bearing witness to the destruction of lives, families, and communities in Gaza, Sudan, and Congo. And I have wept many days, overcome by deep despair, for the loss of children in these places, as well as here in the U.S. It has been difficult to sustain a sense of hope when there seems to be no sustainable path to ending violence of such scale and magnitude, even when the victims are children. 

My struggles with how willingly we let children suffer are not new.

My life’s work is predicated on the suffering my brother and I knew as children, which followed the suffering of our parents and grandparents, and the ancestors before them, during their childhoods. Structural violence is hardest on the children.

I arrived at a decision to serve vulnerable youth with an Adverse Childhood Experiences Score of 8. In starting my work over 20 years ago, I didn’t realize how much I would need to do to preserve my health and wellbeing, given all that I had already endured, so that I could serve children in a sustainable way. 

In late 2019, more than three years after a traumatic birth experience and four years after losing my brother, both following a series of other difficult events, and months before a global pandemic, a stark realization hit me and required my immediate action: I was not ok. 

My first step was to find a Black woman counselor to process the loss I was feeling—so much had changed and was changing in my life. Realizing that all change is loss, I started giving voice to the loss. As I gave voice to the loss, the things I needed in order to achieve healing became more and more clear. 

Not only was I needing the support of a mental health practitioner, I needed support for other dimensions of myself. Every aspect of me that had been touched by adversity and trauma needed loving, expert care. After changing direction with a new executive coach, a way of framing this need became clear to me and I called it my Constellation of Care. 

In my definition, a Constellation of Care is a purposefully curated, deeply practiced and culturally responsive group of healing-centered practitioners who are selected with intention to support one’s wellbeing. These practitioners are informed by history as well as by discipline to attend to the domains of self that are regularly harmed within a misogynistic, capitalist and white supremacist society. These include the physical, psychological/emotional, relational, spiritual, and professional aspects of identity. 

Needless to say, the women who are part of my Constellation of Care have been working hard to support me and women like me, along with themselves, given what we have faced as human beings since the early days of 2020. Truth be told, Black women have been feeling the weight of the burdens we carry since well before the pandemic. Consider this piece from 2018 for a point of reference: https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/mental-health/2018/08/15/i-stopped-playing-the-strong-black-woman

I won’t pretend that creating a Constellation of Care has been easy. There are too few Black women practitioners in the domains of life that I’ve noted, and it has been important to me to have as many Black women practitioners as possible. Nonetheless, by sharing my desire and intention to manifest this construct in my life, I have been able to engage some truly stellar women to support me over the years. I even navigated transitions in providers without completely falling apart in the process. And when I’ve gotten close to falling apart, I’ve reminded myself to look up, look out, and connect with this purpose-driven group of women.

We are long overdue to put on our own oxygen masks and attend to our needs for care and nurturing. We have a responsibility to ourselves, our families and our communities to be healed, even in the absence of justice. 

Check out this conversation I had with Lawna Gamble, the first in my Constellation of Care, to get a sense of what our conversations were so often like as I started a healing journey that has yet to end. 

Peace and Blessings,

Habeebah

June 3, 2024