You know how all of this feels frightening and overwhelming and kind of like a living nightmare? Well that’s mental load. And it’s what Black people have to carry around with us every single day, for our own survival. (Thread of course)

We all carry mental loads with us: experiences, processes, traumas and a billion mental shortcuts to get us through each day. It’s just that as a Black person, I also get the joy of interrogating every interaction in my life with: is this a racism?

By now, I hope it’s really fucking obvious why I have to identify racism and react to it with perfect accuracy as soon as possible, but for anyone who can’t read the room: it’s because racism will fucking kill me.

So in order to be alive and well and survive to the next day, my mental load isn’t just about parsing systems to keep me fed and clean and healthy, but navigating all of that with the risk that any given interaction could kill me if I don’t do everything exactly right.

What is super fun about this extra credit mental load is that racism is every fucking where. And at any given moment, I could read it wrong, or I could react wrong, or I could just run into someone who wants me dead (because racism), and bzzt — game over, kaput, done.

Racism isn’t just in people. Oh no: it’s in housing and infrastructure and money and cleaning and even talcum powder. It’s in the food and the water and the goddamn air. And while it will take a bit longer, that racism will kill me just as dead as the kind from human hands.

That is the burden carried by every Black person in this country, day to day. Some days it’s quieter; many days it is very loud. A few days, it is completely unbearable. And because of racism, none of this work — not the act of it nor the reason for it — is recognized.

That means Black people in this country have been processing of all of this suffering, struggle and anguish the whole time, and you’re only aware of when it spills over because we can no longer contain it.

Our tragedy pours out into the streets, finally visible, and all we hear is that we are to blame for it. Blamed, when we are the dam holding it back. Blamed, even though the only reason it has broken through is because it is too fucking heavy to bear.

The blame becomes something else we have to carry. Something else we need to show that we can handle, or else the racism that suffuses every level of our existence will get *worse,* and we will have “earned” it.

Every Black American you know has to function in this paradigm to one extent or another (even the rich ones). And we have to keep going through our regular days, doing regular work, while dealing with constant racism and willful white obliviousness. Surviving.

That mental load is a monstrous weight on a mind. It’s made a lot worse on days like these. There is no compensation. No refuge except the ones we make for ourselves. No understanding or compassion. Because racism.

So as you (as a not Black person) rev up your social media to editorialize about how bad rioting is, or to “see both sides,” or to whine about how stressful all this news is, please consider that you are seeing just a fraction of the reality that we live in, and then: don’t.