This is my maternal grandmother, Ruby.

As a kid, she was my EVERYTHANG. You couldn’t tell me she didn’t hang the moon and the stars. She was a NO LIMIT SOLDIER. She held the line for everyone. She took in every family member who needed a roof; she was always doing something heroic.

I wanted to be just like her. I wanted that iron-clad strength. I never saw her stumble. I never saw her fall. I NEVER saw her cry. She was a "bad somebody"—always composed, always holding it together.

When I was nine years old, I watched her waste away from colon cancer, and my world tilted off its axis. I had lost my one true love and my greatest protector.

It’s interesting because I don’t talk about her a lot. But she is the silent engine behind every bit of work I do with Black women.

But not for the reasons you might think.

As an adult, I didn't let my relationship with my grandmother end at the cemetery (and not in a "spooky, woo-woo" way). Through my own therapeutic grief work, I began to study her life more closely.

I stopped looking at her through the worshipping lens of a beloved granddaughter. I started looking at her through the eyes of a clinician.

What I found was terrifying.

I realized that while I felt her unconditional love every day as a little girl, I didn’t actually know her. I only knew how she made me feel. She was so deeply embedded in "Superwoman Syndrome" that her own identity had been erased by her utility.

As I began counseling everyone from young Black girls in college to older women in the community, I realized we were all reading from the same script. We were all taught "strength" by the women we loved most—but it’s the exact same strength that is currently killing us.

The Body Keeps the Score

This is what the research says about the "Superwoman Syndrome": All that emotional weight we carry doesn't just vanish into thin air. It doesn’t stay in our heads. It migrates. It works its way into our tissues, our bones, and our blood.

Basically, that superwoman cape we’re so proud of? It eventually starts to feel less like power with poise and more like a straitjacket.

We’ve all heard the lie: "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." But a woman in a study flipped it, and her words haunt me:

"What doesn’t kill you... will make you sick."

Let that land for a second. She was right.

The women in these study were the ones who finally connected the dots. They looked at the migraines, the hair loss, the panic attacks, the weight gain, the depression, and the tragic pregnancy outcomes.

They realized their bodies were keeping a detailed ledger of every ounce of stress they "strongly" carried.

 The Question That Gets Me

We ALL say we want to be "soft" now. It’s the new trend; it’s the new buzzword. But are we actually doing the work of softening, or are we just fantasizing out loud?

We claim to hate the "Strong Black Woman" narrative, yet we continue to wear it in our minds like a diamond necklace. We walk through the world, heads held high, failing to notice that these very jewels have become a noose. And it is tightening. It is strangling the literal life out of us, and the most deceptive part—the part that breaks my heart as a clinician—is that we stand there complimenting the fit of the rope in the mirror.

I think about Ruby, when I read what one woman said about her grandmother.

I never saw her cry, yet this woman suffered a lifetime of sickness—diabetes, breast cancer, a nervous breakdown. It wasn't until she was gone that I realized she was just internalizing the world until it tore her apart from the inside out.