Many people don’t know, but I’m a trained counselor (yes, a graduate degree in counseling).

I’ve been asked to share what I mean when I say I’m tired.

Below are five ways racism causes trauma and illness:

1. It triggers past traumas of racial injustice. That time it was experienced and no one knew, or the time when it was overtly done to you—like a scab ripped off a wound that just stopped bleeding.

2. It activates physical stress responses, worsening our physical and mental health and every other chronic mental and physical illness that we have become more likely to develop and pass on to our children.

3. It causes unsafe feelings. You question if you can jog, sleep, or walk through a park safely. This can leave you feeling like there is nowhere to feel fully safe from physical danger or harm. It also makes you feel like there are no spaces to safely express the grief.

4. It adds to generational trauma, inherited from our ancestors. From forced enslavement, to 400+ years of abuse on every level, to public lynchings, to Jim Crow laws—all of this is passed down as legacy to us from family who taught us how they fought to survive those eras.

5. It can trigger grief, sadness, anger, pessimism, and/or apathy from the reality that every system we have to engage was designed to benefit those who do not have brown skin—leaving us with continuous scaring from unjust systems that do not have our equity in mind.

Then, we are asked to accept it all and move on. It’s tiring and it’s exhausting.