By Danielle Elizabeth Stevens As a young Black girl growing up in a poor, single-parent household in Long Beach CA, I watched day in and day out as my mother hustled around the clock to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads. Resilience and fatigue found home with my mama through…
4 Suggested Boundaries And Techniques While Writing About Trauma
By Luna Merbruja Dearly Beloved, If you are reading this article, it’s probably because you’re taking the time to start intentionally processing your trauma. I know the pathway to beginning a healing journey is often met with overwhelming confusion and too many starting points. Perhaps in your search for a starting place, you found this…
Living Beyond Survival: 11 Tips for Women of Color in Academia
By Karen B. Hanna *This piece was first published in Hyphen Magazine’s Fall 2015 Health Issue. Survival has not always been my primary mode of being. A middle-class upbringing, loving parents and an Ivy League degree made me believe I could succeed at anything. As an American citizen, I do not fear deportation. I am not…
Dear Black Women, Femmes, & Girls, A Love Letter For Us
By Danielle Stevens Dear Black Women, Femmes, and Girls, Who are neglected and ignored within public discourses around police violence and brutality; Who are told our stories do not fit into mainstream narratives of state-sanctioned anti black violence because it is ‘derailing’; Who are told our quota of acknowledgement has been reached because that one…
For Black Folks Who Still Need Healing When The Fireworks Aren’t Enough
By Danielle Stevens | Co-Founder of This Bridge Called Our Health They tell us celebrate independence today; that every July 4th we celebrate America, these “United” States. and we are supposed to forget everything that has happened, we are supposed to forget we have never been free. Are we to pretend today? Pretend that the…
How To Be Tender With Your Grief While Holding Orlando In Your Heart
By Danielle Stevens | Co-Founder of This Bridge Called Our Health your grief is stardust. vast and kaleidoscopic elusive, and yet so familiar. personal and divine. a dark, stormy, tumultuous and breathtaking rebirth an emergence a melancholy ending and always a new beginning. As a Black queer woman living in the US, I am consistently…
Re-Imagining #WorldHealthDay: Challenging Dominant Discourse and What Health Actually Means for Women and Femmes of Color
By Danielle Stevens and Annie Alexandrian | Co-Founders of This Bridge Called Our Health (This Bridge Called Our Health is a volunteer-run platform for Black women, femmes, and girls, and non-Black women, femmes, and girls of color. We have launched a fundraiser for #WorldHealthDay. Click here to support our work) Today is #WorldHealthDay, an annual day…
Do Not Share The Video: Laquan McDonald and Anti-Black Dehumanization in the Era of Digital Media
By Danielle Stevens | Co-Founder of This Bridge Called Our Health We must be more mindful about the videos and images that we post. In the age of digital and new media, the spread of urgent information and breaking news is expeditious and far reaching. Although the surge of social media as a tool…
Cruzando: My Road to Healing
By Sandibel Borges 1999. Leaving Hidalgo, Mexico by car on a journey to the state of Washington with my family. It feels like the longest trip of my life. The scenery keeps changing as we get further north. The trees look different. The colors, the smell, the freeways and roads… everything is changing. I don’t…
Self-Preservation as Self-Care: How to Set Healthy Boundaries
By Nneka Okona *Republished from For Harriet on September 16th, 2015* Zora Neale Hurston, the foremother of Black women’s literature, so eloquently penned that Black women were “de mule uh de world” and even many, many years later, we can see how this statement still rings true. Black women are seen as the pillars of strength in…
“Fall for Someone Else, but Catch Yourself”, By Megan Duenas
The biggest indication that provides insight on the way things were is through writing. The writing that is as potent in the veins as the heartache felt after a breakup. Or the pain felt when your parents tell you you were the one who broke the family apart because of your relationship with an older girl….
“She Would Never Commit Suicide”: Editor’s Note About the Ableist Discussions around Sandra Bland
By Danielle Stevens, This Bridge Called Our Health Co-Founder & Editor-In-Chief I think some of the discourse emerging from these #IfIDieInPoliceCustody &#WhatHappenedToSandraBland conversations are dangerously limited. Folks are saying “Sandra Bland was mentally sound” and “Black women like her would never commit suicide”, etc. Not only are we upholding precarious and dehumanizing ‘strong black woman’…
