I Am Black - I Do Not Get Depressed: Choosing to Move Forward Through Life's Detours

By Mary Nganga

This is a conversational and thought-provoking book intended to make you rethink, relearn, and reinvent your life. The book is intended to make you talk and converse about mental health and to challenge you to fully thrive rather than merely exist in your current season of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cocoon to Wings Publishing
• Release date: Apr 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9781953497963

Book preview

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I AM BLACK – I DO NOT GET DEPRESSED

Copyright © 2024 Mary Nganga

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the express written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permissions requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-1-953497-95-6 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-953497-96-3 (Digital)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024904257

Published by Cocoon to Wings Publishing

7810 Gall Blvd., #311

Zephyrhills, FL 33541

www.CocoontoWingsBooks.com

(813) 906-WING (9464)

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Scriptures marked AMP are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, AMPLIFIED VERSION® Copyright © 2015 by The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, CA 90631. All rights reserved.

Scriptures marked ESV are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, ENGLISH STANDARD VERSION® (ESV®): Copyright© 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission.

Scriptures marked KJV are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, KING JAMES VERSION (KJV): KING JAMES VERSION, public domain.

Scriptures marked NIV are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION® (NIV®): Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scriptures marked NKJV are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW KING JAMES VERSION®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Dedication

"A good man leaves an inheritance to his grandchildren,

but the sinner’s wealth is stored up for the righteous."

Proverbs 13:22

This book is dedicated to my handsome young men, Ryan and Jeremy. May this memoir remind you to live fully and intentionally and overcome any limitations you may face.

You have been a mirror in refining this workmanship,

and I continue to learn from you.

I love you, Ryan.

I love you, Jeremy.

To the moon and back 100,000,000 times.

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This is a conversational and thought-provoking book intended to make you rethink, relearn, and reinvent your life. The book is intended to make you talk and converse about mental health and to challenge you to fully thrive rather than merely exist in your current season of life.

Now, get your vanilla latté, get comfortable, and let’s get started.

Enjoy!

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Prologue

I was driving along the highway that morning. It was a toll road with speed limits of 75 miles per hour, where multiple drivers would go above 80 miles per hour. The highway had several steep elevated regions that had some twists and turns. At one point, I was in a hilly area, and both sides were water-filled valleys. As I was crying and driving, I felt a strong feeling and a voice saying, What is the purpose of this? Just end it. You are the problem. Roll the car over. The voice, sound, or feeling was so strong and so clear. I agreed with it, with the thoughts ruminating in my mind: Yes, what was the point of all of this? End it. The kids will be in a much better place; everybody will be happier. Remember how everyone was happy when you were upstairs before you descended to the kitchen? All these thoughts raged through my mind convincingly, and in a split second, I started to veer my car off the lane to the shoulder…

Chapter 1

Black Does Not Crack, or Does It?

Okay, before you all come to attack me, sit down, take a sip of your hot creamy latté, and calm down. Relax and walk with me as we talk about this interesting topic. I love deep conversations, and I want to engage you in this one.

Mary, you have depression. I will prescribe you some antidepressants, and I need you to start therapy and come back in a few weeks, said my OB-GYN at my six-week postpartum appointment. I quickly retorted: No, I do not believe that is accurate. I am black, and I am African. I do not get depressed. At this time, as embarrassing as this could be, I was a nurse practitioner with A LOT of mental health experience and practice in palliative care. But I still believed that I was exempt from this disease. My genetic makeup, resilience, education, and career had apparently made me exempt. And the mere thought of such a diagnosis was an insult to my whole makeup. However, I was so far from the truth, and I was severely depressed.

I wish this were the lowest part of my life. Nope, there were other lows. Stay tuned. I cannot talk about cracking without understanding the foundations. So, I will start from the beginning, as all stories have a beginning that can contribute to the current situation. I am the last born in a family of four. I grew up in an ordinary middle-income family in Kenya. I never lacked any food, shelter, or housing. Neither did I ever consider that we were poor, as we would be looked at from an American perspective. I walked three miles to elementary school daily and three miles back home from the ages of seven to 14 years old, whether it rained or not; that was our norm. Everyone else in the village did so because it was a normal thing for elementary school kids.

We had everything we needed at home, with both parents working and highly esteemed in the community. I was considered the different one in the family since I was very introverted and preferred reading novels to having friends. My cousins tell stories of where they would all gather to visit our home, and I would be in my room reading. I loved reading. I still do, but with kids and all, I do not have as much time. I am, however, an avid learner. I love learning about all sorts of things. I will be looking at the moon at one time and then spend almost an hour learning about space, stars, and comets before realizing I just got distracted and wasted a whole hour. My mind is an active organ that I need to put a leash on in most cases due to constant over-analyzation and overthinking, which can be detrimental in some cases.

Okay, back to me growing up. (You see, I veer off really fast. Get ready to go back and forth as we converse.) So, I loved learning. I did not really have a choice, now that I think about it. The gap between my siblings and me made it such that I sort of grew up alone. My older siblings were in high school, and back then, it was the norm for high schools to be boarding schools; hence, they were away from home. From about the age of 9, I was home alone. With my mom being a teacher and my love for learning, I was always in an after-school, weekend, or holiday tutorial program (think of Kumon). I remember we had several huge rocks in our front yard, and whenever I was free, I would spend countless hours teaching the rocks while holding a long stick to beat them when they did not answer correctly, as I had seen in school. I can see some psychoanalysts diagnosing the little girl with trauma and emulating seen behaviors to cope. Calm down and take another sip before you call child protective services. Every single child growing up experienced this. For some much-needed cultural competence, beating/caning/whooping was the norm when I was growing up in Africa. I know and realize that just because something is a norm doesn’t mean it does not leave indelible marks on life that often influence you as an adult. But when it is all you know, then you do not view yourself as a victim. More on that in the next few chapters. I would leave school and come home with the palms of my hands swollen from all the beatings I got from my teachers for talking in class, being late, or whatever small thing they came up with. They would be swollen and hurting for days. Then, I would get another beating at home for not following all the school rules. And that was the norm. Your neighbors and parents’ friends were also allowed to discipline you as well; hence; child rearing was indeed a community duty and not just the nuclear family.

Learning and school have always come easy for me. I used to be embarrassed by this very fact and would hide any of my accomplishments, trying to fit in with everybody else. I loved and still love learning. I love the challenge of learning something new. Part of this hunger is the knowledge that the more you learn, the more you realize how much you do not actually know. Ignorant people think there is a cap to learning, but there really isn’t. Now, before you start throwing stones, consider that learning is not about sitting down in a classroom or earning degrees. It is about getting into conversations that enlighten and expand your thinking. The Bible says, in Proverbs 13:20 (NIV), Walk with the wise and become wise for a companion of fools suffers harm. Learning is so much more than the brick-and-mortar idealized form of learning. It is capturing new ideas daily from your circles, your children, your peers, and life itself. The moment you stop learning and growing, you start the process of dying. (Read that again.)

Learning is about being open to a new ideology, whether you agree with them or not. It’s about comprehending or just trying to understand another person’s perspective and deciding for yourself what to accept, thus expanding your preset ideas and beliefs. There is a common saying in my vernacular dialect that says, A person who does not travel thinks that only his mother knows how to cook. The more exposed one is, the more diverse they are in not only their taste buds but also in their belief systems. Without being open to new conversations and new people, you will always be stuck at the same level that you are in, yet falsely believing that your ways are right. Once you expand your thinking and engage with people who look and think differently, you expand your learning. You do not have to incorporate everything you learn, though. Do you eat fish with its bones? Do you chew on the ribeye’s bone? No, take the meat and throw the bones away. Consuming everything is both unwise and foolish and can have detrimental effects. First Corinthians 10:23 (AMP) says, All things are permissible, but not all things are beneficial or advantageous. Choose wisely.

I did very well academically, studying at an excellent high school, Alliance Girls High School. This was a boarding school, as most high schools are in Kenya. You live and study there and only go home for the holidays. As a result, it was a major transition for all children as they transitioned into a boarding school at the age of 13 or 14, hence learning to be more independent, laundering their clothes by hand, and not having their parents taking care of them. It remains the highest-performing school in Kenya today. It was such an honor since I was among the very few people in my neighborhood to attend that school. But I felt like an imposter. Imposter syndrome is real. When you get used to the ordinary, the extraordinary almost feels foreign. And you must work yourself into accepting and embracing the extraordinary. Unfortunately, at 14, I had not mastered that art and felt like I did not belong. The Kenyan high school selection utilized a quota system for fairness in which national high schools would have to select top students from all over the country. There was also an unstated system where the rich and famous would pay their way into admission to these top schools. As a result, these national schools had the most diverse selections, from the richest to the poorest kids. This school was located 20 miles away from home. However, since it was a national school, there was a conglomeration of every tribe, social class as well and international student represented. It was the first time I met people from all over the country and experienced different languages, habits, etc. That is where I felt my love for learning began, despite the imposter syndrome.

I was never the smartest in high school unlike in elementary where I was always at the top, but I was also never in the lower end, either. That’s the change that comes with having the smartest kids in the same schools. While we were all used to being the smartest in our various elementary schools, we all got challenged higher in high school. That is a life lesson, too. If you are the smartest in your circle, it is time to challenge yourself by enlarging your circle. You soon realize there is so much more that you need to learn. Take an inventory now and decide what needs to be done. I was mainly in the top ten with very studious and very bright students. Again, the imposter syndrome probably never left me. I always wanted to fit in and be something different than I was. I could not fit in with the very rich, who had their wealthy parents visit them weekly and bring them all the snacks in the world. Moreover, I could not fit in with the very poor either, as we were so different. I was in the middle but never quite sure where I belonged. I did not really embrace myself in my teens and always wanted to be someone else. Back at home during the holidays, I wanted to be the same as everybody else but was viewed as the smart kid, so I could not fit in either, despite my desperate attempts to not be viewed as different. Yet, in school, I wanted to fit in because I felt different.

High school was the beginning of my life with God. I was introduced to the Word of Life Ministries Camp, an organization founded by European missionaries in Kenya for high school students. They would come to the high school to minister and introduce God to the students as well as provide camps during holidays, solely to know God intimately. I went there every holiday for the entire four years of high school. We were mentored by young adults and