To Be Exhausted By Our Own Black Girl Magic x Paula Gillison- Akinwole

I am finding myself exhausted with a lot of the expectations in my life. Not because the expectations exist, but because I am a black woman existing in a world with those expectations. Facts are, if you’re an adult human, then you’ve got responsibilities. Can’t be avoided, Angelica Pickle style. Some people have the privilege of having a lot less responsibilities than others and/ or a person may have the resources to allow someone else to manage their responsibilities. But for black women, especially in a world where Black Girl Magic has been coined as a phrase that describes our excellency, those expectations feel like an impossible burden and Black Girl Magic becomes the cross we carry.

Black Girl Magic “is a cultural movement created by CaShawn Thompson in 2013 to celebrate the beauty, power, resilience, and overall awesomeness of Black women and girls.”
All of that is well and dandy. I remember learning the phrase in my early 20s and feeling excited by the truth that my inherent black woman-ness was being recognized for the super powerful existence that it is. I’ve even written pieces on this very blog describing black women as superheroes because black women are celebrated as being the mothers of all creation, saviors of civilizations, the face that launched a thousand ships, and the anchor that holds together the community. But a lot of those expectations are because a patriarchal society has put everyone (and everything- I see you dog lovers) above black women.

Black Women Are The Anchor Being… And other references to super heroes, mythology, & folklore.

My inability to do a thing and not perform with excellency is a plaque on my brain and a thorn in my side. I expect myself to succeed, to be amongst the top performers, to be worthy of praise, to win. I’m not particularly good at doing poorly at things. If I do something poorly, it’s because I’m doing bad real good. If I lose a board game, I’m the Biggest Loser bruh, so technically I won! And that is not to say I operate in perfection or am naturally an overachiever. Far from it actually. I admittedly fail a lot and will talk myself out of trying something if I’m afraid I won’t be good at it.

Now facts are, I’m neurodivergent, and that has impacted me in ways that took me till my 30s to figure out. I didn’t know I was actually OCD, even though everyone said it about me. I didn’t think I had ADHD until my old boss suggested it. But I knew something was different about the way that I thought about and processed life. I just called myself anal. I thought I was a stickler and a perfectionist. I knew my keen attention to detail allowed me to hone in on the minutia while others were looking at the big picture. I recently bragged to someone about how the lines of PGARTistry journals were perfectly centered and formatted for the cleanest and most precise hand writing. They looked at me like I was speaking martian.

My divergences helped me excel in the things that I did, particularly as an employee. Every job I’ve ever had, I moved up quickly. I became the poster child for doing the job well. I earned the bonuses and had the high scores. My first management gig, I wasn’t even 21 years old yet. Because I wasn’t a great student, I didn’t excel in college even though my teachers were frustrated because they knew I was smart, but I just wasn’t interested in doing the work. And one thing about me, you can’t convince me that something I believe is unnecessary will aid me in the future. So I found a field and I stuck with it: Customer Service and Account Management. By the age of 30, I had over 10 years of experience and had worked for some major companies like T-Mobile, the Better Business Bureau, the Economic Development Office, and the newspaper.

Now let me sidebar here because there is a frustrating stereotype about black women in leadership, specifically millennials or older. They say we suck at it! And anytime this conversation comes up, it eventually reveals to me the fact that the black people who worked with black managers expected us to give them some slack. And that’s not to be dismissive of other one-off situations but the math ain’t been mathing. Black women often work for white men and giving anyone slack is a recipe for losing our jobs. I do recognize that some women lean way too hard into male patriarchal standards in order to prove themselves. And that’s wack. But black people have to work together to support each other. If I’m your manager, work hard because you want me to succeed. Don’t take advantage of me because we kin folk. And then as your manager, I’m going to put you up for that promotion when it’s time. I’m gonna give you the highest raise based on the work you’ve done. I’m going to advocate for you and every space.

The following section discusses this topic in relevance to my job- skip it if you don’t want more backstory.

I’ve been at my current job for almost 10 years. It was a startup company that I literally prayed for. I had just read an article about Facebook and people who worked for the company in the early days, but didn’t believe it would be successful. This article was following up with them years later to see if they had any regrets. Some didn’t, some did. And I thought to myself: As a person with over 10 years of experience and no college degree, if I got in at the ground floor of a start up, then I should be able to rise to the top quickly. So when I got the call that a new start up was looking for customer service representation, I threw my hat in the ring and was the obvious choice.

Things were going great at first. When hired, the department didn’t even exist; it was just me and the secretary. I was able to use my 10+ years of experience to build it from the ground up. No lie. I hired the people, developed the scripts, wrote the SOP’s, put policies in place, even handled all my own HR work, and structured the department to the biggest I could get it. I would come in at 5 AM and not leave until after 6PM sometime days- salaried, because I believe in the work we’re doing. At that time I was promoted from associate to supervisor to manager within two years. I was the only Black manager in the company after having been the only Black employee for the first year, and the only other Black employees in the entire company were the ones I hired. Once we were too big, I helped with the outsourcing of the department and then developed over 100 associates overseas while simultaneously building a new department internally- same process all over again. I managed that new department until Covid forced us to lay off everyone. Then I worked the entire department by myself until I eventually got some help because I was going out on maternity leave.

The company grew to a pretty big deal and I felt like my time was coming. Surely all the work that I had done would land me an executive level position. I had never gotten a negative write up, no one complained about me; the opposite actually, I was constantly praised. I did the job excellently. They “valued me” so much that anytime a new person was hired, they would meet with me. Not because they reported to me or would work with me, but just because I was a wealth of knowledge, expertise in the field, and excellency for the company. I waited my turn for years. The company got bigger and bigger. But as more people came on board, the gap between myself and the CEO grew wider. I was further and further from the top and then one day, I got demoted out of the blue. I was told there was gonna be a restructuring so I was back to the supervisor for now. At first, I thought this could be a good thing. I would get my position back eventually and a raise would come with it. But that never happened. So I tried applying for a different role within the company, one that I was uniquely qualified for as I’d been the only one who had done it for years. But I didn’t get it. And then someone else got hired for my old management role. Eventually, I looked around and noticed that everyone who was still at the company from when I started years ago was at an executive level position while I was just one step from the bottom.

I spoke to everyone from my boss all the way up to the CEO reminding them of my worth and trying to prove myself before it became very apparent to me that I was never gonna get any further than I was. I couldn’t help but see the writing on the wall. There were two differences between myself and the others that I could quantify. One. I was the youngest one there. I was married and had a kid but still the youngest by about two years. Second. I’m a black woman. The stereotypes about who I was were creating biases against me that subconsciously made leadership look over me every time they looked for someone to fill a role. White employees who had multiple complaints against them were being moved from department to department and being promoted rather than let go. People were given ridiculous new titles as if Donald Trump himself had spewed words for job placements. One employee even had his job description changed and the work given to me rather than making him do his job better after I complained about his inadequacies. Despite every good-natured and good-will conversation suggesting that there was something else I could do to earn my spot, it was painfully clear that no one was going to give me what I rightfully deserved. Which is the reason why I’m a full-time college student looking forward to graduating next year and giving myself the opportunity to throw up the deuces!

Now back to our regularly scheduled program….

In every area of my life, my obsession with excellence either created more work for me, gave people around me the false permission to weaponize their incompetence, or caused folks to subconsciously leave me right where I am. Like a well-oiled machine, no one wants to fix what is not broken. Not recognizing that the machine wants to be unplugged, the machine wants to be upgraded, the machine knows it’s been working well for years, but would like the opportunity to prove it can do more. The machine has 30 different settings, but folks keep using the same one or two and refuse to see what more the machine can do. The machine is not being utilized to its full potential.

I am that fucking machine! And it’s not just in the workplace. It’s also in relationships.

Women are reared to know how to cook and clean and raise the children and manage the house because it is a necessity for our survival whether as single women or spouses. When we get our partners, we now have the responsibility of doing all these things for them and the children also. But men have the luxury of simply waiting for someone to come around to assist them. They might get taught how to load clothes or wash a dish, but not how to be good partners to their wives and help her with all the things; they get trained to delegate while we get trained to be submissive. When men get married, they get a helper. When women get married, they get a list of chores to add to their plate.

As I’m contemplating the next steps for me, officially separated from my ex but still living in the same house, I find that my load hasn’t changed much. My ex stopped doing for me a long time ago in many of the way I needed, and he will say the same of me. My declining health impacted our marriage and so in return, it seems, he chose to relinquish the duties the patriarchy suggested were his. Then he decided to end our marriage. Despite the fact that I have been operating outside of the patriarchy on his behalf for years, choosing to work full-time and be the primary caretaker for our home- suggesting unconventional ways of handling the pressures society had placed on both of us. But when he got sick of the patriarchy, he just put everything down and didn’t pick up the parts that were on-the-other-side like women often do.

For example: If a woman decides to be a stay at home mom while the man goes to work, she’s expected to handle the household and the kids by herself. If a man decides not to work while his wife is the bread winner, she better hire some help or plan to cook, clean and take care of the children once her shift is over.

Black girls being magical was supposed to encourage us and remind us of our power, but was never meant to clue the rest of the world into our secrets. They now know how smart and capable we are. They see our bodies as weaponry and crave us as a tool to be used. For the work we can do, for the cool points we give, for the way our culture is exciting and thrilling, for how we can be handled, but never for who we are or our humanity. The magic is not the problem. Hear me loud and clear! The magic is not dark or cursed. It, however, has been made known to unkind people who benefit from us and off of us and want to keep us on our place. They siphon it off of us.

To the black girls who don’t feel like magic, the ones who recognize that this is all just regular excellence and not divine endowment, you are allowed to not be a spectacle. You’re allowed not to claim that all that makes you special is from something other worldly or outside of yourself. You don’t have to think of yourself as magical to think of yourself as worthy or good or excellent. You just are.

And to the black girls who choose not to be excellent for the sake of other people or to prove yourself. It’s facts that you do not have to get a PhD to be worthy of what you deserve, knowing that they prefer nepotism over meritocracy anyway. You shouldn’t have to work three times harder just to get half of what they got. I wish you could exist outside of their gaze and away from their expectations. You’re allowed to be ghetto, sassy, loud, full of yourself, savage, ambitious, righteous, and all the things in between.

I wish I could too, exist outside of their gaze. Somedays, I feel ashamed of myself for staying in relationships that have not loved or served me. I cringe knowing that I have been played and I’ve been choosing the devil I know because it’s easier. I also give myself grace knowing that I’ve been managing all of this on my own- while being a full-time student, holding down a full-time job, a part-time job and a side hustle. Then I still manage to make sure my kid is fed, happy, and healthy with his homework done and a well coordinated outfit for each day of spirit week. I’ve been seeing a therapist for two years consistently to manage my traumas while also taking water aerobics classes at the ass-crack of dawn so that I can stay active. I’m also a diabetic who’s dealt with all of the frustrations that come with uncontrolled blood sugars. And not to mention that I’ve been grieving for the last two months after losing two best friends in a 30 day period.

So yeah, the responsibilities of life have been a motherfucker! Some days, I’m masking so well that by the time I get home, I don’t even recognize myself. Some days, I can’t mask another second and I fall apart at the seams. But the expectations of life? I don’t have to own those. Other people’s expectations of me are not a blueprint or a roadmap for how I need to behave or who I need to be. I choose who and how I be. I reserve the right to be my own goddamn magical self, and I shall not let others siphon that off of me.

In the words of Hippolyta,

“When I was a kid, I thought I was big enough to have every right to name something out of this world, and then I just started shrinking myself. By the time I met you, I’d already gotten so small. And I thought you knew how big I wanted to be. I thought you saw me. But you just stood by and let me shrink myself more for you…. They say that to women like us because they know what happens when we are free; free to hate when we must, free to kill when we must, free to bring destruction when we must. That is our freedom, That is our prayer, no matter what they think of us after we grind them into dust. That is our love!”