In my practice as an identity reclamation coach, I work with BIPOC folks who feel disconnected yet hopeful about reconciling their feelings about their identity, existence, and the meaning of their lives. The beauty of this work gives us space to confront and wrestle with the stolen, the lost, and the historical identities bestowed upon us that do not truly belong to us. This is fundamentally existential work, which grants us space to explore the shadows, the ‘ugly’ sides of the human experience that often bring shame, despair, and uncertainty.

My existential curiosity about my melancholy began in the early 2000s. With the explosion of the emo subculture, my natural disposition finally found a home where it wasn’t judged a defect or a complaint. Within that ‘sad girl’ aesthetic, my demeanor was normalized. Yet, even as I was being ‘seen,’ I was still just scratching the surface of what that melancholy meant to me. To be honest, I’m still exploring its origins, but here’s what I’ve been uncovering about the role melancholy plays for me and for any other saddie baddie navigating a [Black] body.

What is melancholy?

Melancholy is often relegated to the realm of individual psychology, famously explored by Freud in Mourning & Melancholia. His definition, however, is too limited and abstract for a Black existentialist framework—or for anyone whose lived experience falls outside Freud’s narrow lens. He describes melancholy as a sense of loss the individual cannot fully name, a regression into the self, or a withdrawal into the self to grapple with the ‘object’ that doesn’t exist. Freud’s reference to the loss of the object implies that it’s imaginary, but for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, the loss of the object is real. The ‘object’ is one that BIPOC folks can name, i.e., confronting the truths of a hostile and harmful history, agency, and essence.

The Faces of Black Melancholy

My melancholy feels lingering—an almost sorrowful mood accompanied by psychic distress. It is a mood that leads me into an existential state of questioning. It feels like overwhelming, abysmal gloominess, a condition of deep grief where dark thoughts of impossibility, hate, rage, confusion, and shame live as a single entity. Some of what I hold is shaped by intergenerational melancholy, as my inner world is not separate from the broader Black collective.

Yet, I find this melancholy to be a beautiful open wound; this wound functions as a portal where one accesses genius (Durham, 2023). Melancholy calls for a process of retrieval through “forensic imagination” (Best, 2018, p.21). To be melancholic is to be an archivist of the self: uncovering, retrieving, and preserving the memories and essence of history, culture, the self, and existence. It is through these various processes that melancholy is lifted and put to its purpose.

Black melancholy holds a distinct experience that deviates from the dominant perspective. According to Hope Draped in Black by Joseph R. Winters, [Black] Melancholia is:

… a state of diremption, a painful dis-membering, a condition of active grief and separation from oneself and others. Our memories of others (now gone) construct who we are (today) through a reflection on who we once were (and were not) in the matrix of our social lives. Such a condition “involves wrestling with death, suffering, and absurdity while also affirming moments of freedom, joy, and pleasure” (20).

If melancholy is a “dis-membering,” a falling apart, then the forensic imagination is the act of re-membering. It is the vital work of putting the memories of your history and yourself back together.

In a Black context, we do not have to let the misconceptions of passivity or debilitation drive our understanding of melancholy. To be Black and melancholic means to be at your most aware of how the legacies of our past remain present in our everyday ways of knowing. It is a state so vital to the Black experience because it grants the stillness to rightfully grieve—to simmer and then solidify grievance into a demand, a need, or an action. In his book Stay Black and Die, Augustus Durham sees melancholy as a gateway to accessing one’s genius, granting a certain aesthetic level to the creative process.

What if we stopped trying to outrun the dark and instead asked: what beauty has this melancholy been preserving for me all along?

I embrace all of my melancholia, and I love all my saddie baddies who refuse to mask the depth of their melancholy. We are the archivists of the afterlife, the ones brave enough to turn a sorrowful mood into a forensic search for the soul. Melancholy tells us it’s time to get to work. It is the starting point for recovery and for reclamation…of something.

Check out my website for identity reclamation coaching for my fellow saddie baddies at soulspacestrategies.com. I want to meet you.

References

Best, S. (2018). None like us: Blackness, belonging, aesthetic. Duke University Press.

Durham, I. A. (2023). Stay black and die: On melancholy and genius. Duke University Press.

Winters, J. R. (2016). Hope draped in black: Race, melancholy, and the agony of progress. Duke University Press.

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