What does a “good day” look like when the world adds extra weight to your shoulders? A reflection on mental health, collective healing, and five cultural practices that help carry us forward.
“More Good Days, Together” — four words that carry enormous weight when you belong to a community that has historically been denied even the most ordinary good days.”
This May, Mental Health Awareness Month invites all of us to pause and ask: What does a good day actually look like — for me, and for my community? It’s a beautiful, expansive question. But for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), answering it requires honesty about the particular storms that are woven into daily life.
The toll of racism, sexism, and social stigma is not abstract. It is cumulative, embodied, and exhausting. It shows up in the meeting where your idea is ignored until a colleague repeats it. In the store where you’re followed. In the doctor’s office where your pain is minimized. In the comment section, the headlines, the legislation. It shows up in the mirror, when the messages of the world start to feel like the truth about who you are.
Research consistently shows that experiences of racial discrimination are directly linked to higher rates of depression, anxiety, PTSD, and other mental health conditions. This is not a character flaw or a weakness in BIPOC communities — it is the predictable human response to living under sustained, systemic stress.
For Black Americans in particular, the concept of race-based traumatic stress has been documented and studied — a form of trauma triggered not just by individual incidents of racism, but by the vicarious trauma of watching others in your community be harmed, and by the chronic hypervigilance of moving through a world that can be hostile without warning.
Indigenous communities continue to reckon with intergenerational trauma — the lasting psychological wounds of colonization, forced assimilation, and the erasure of language, land, and spiritual practice. Asian and Pacific Islander communities face the double bind of the “model minority” myth, which renders their pain invisible while demanding impossible standards of silence and achievement. Latino and Latina communities navigate layers of acculturation stress, fear, and family pressure across generations. And for BIPOC women and femmes, the intersection of racism and sexism compounds each pressure into something uniquely brutal.
” You cannot think yourself out of systemic stress. But you can build the internal and communal resources to move through it with greater dignity, support, and self-compassion.”
On top of these real external pressures sits one more obstacle: stigma. In many BIPOC cultures, mental health struggles are framed as weakness, as something to be handled privately, or as a luxury concern for people who have “easier” lives. Phrases like “push through it,” “pray about it,” “don’t air your dirty laundry,” and “we don’t do therapy” have become cultural inheritance — well-meaning attempts at resilience that, over generations, have built walls around vulnerability.
Distrust of the mental health system itself is also entirely rational, not paranoid. BIPOC communities have historical cause to be wary of institutions that have misdiagnosed, over-medicated, pathologized, and even weaponized psychiatry against them. Finding a culturally competent therapist who understands your lived reality — not just your symptoms — can feel like searching for something rare. Because it still is, too often.
But here is what is also true: silence has a cost. Untreated depression doesn’t disappear into stoicism. Unprocessed trauma doesn’t stay buried. It surfaces in our bodies, our relationships, our parenting, our communities. Healing is not a betrayal of our strength — it is an expression of it.
To choose, against all odds, to pursue mental wellness — to protect your peace, to seek help, to rest, to feel joy without guilt — is not indulgence. For BIPOC communities, it is resistance. It is a declaration that our inner lives matter. That we are worth more than our productivity and our endurance. That we deserve to not just survive, but to flourish.
The 2026 theme, More Good Days, Together, reminds us that this work is also collective. We do not heal in isolation. Our ancestors did not survive in isolation. Community has always been one of our greatest medicines.
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Long before Western therapy existed, your ancestors had practices for processing grief, marking transitions, and restoring balance — through ceremony, storytelling, music, herbal medicine, prayer, and communal ritual. These are not superstition; they are sophisticated technologies of the spirit, refined over millennia. Reconnecting with your cultural roots is a legitimate and powerful form of mental health care. Healing does not have to look like a couch and a clipboard.
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Not all therapy is created equal. A therapist who does not understand your cultural context, the impact of racism on your daily life, or the complexity of your family structure may do more harm than good — not through malice, but through ignorance. Seek out providers who share your background, or who have invested deeply in culturally responsive care. You deserve someone who sees the whole of you, not just your symptoms.
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The African proverb “it takes a village to raise a child” extends far beyond childhood. As adults, we still need village — people who check in, who cook when we can’t, who sit with us in grief without rushing us out of it. In an age of digital connection and physical isolation, building genuine community requires intention. Invest in relationships that reciprocate. Create or join spaces — mutual aid groups, affinity circles, cultural organizations, faith communities, book clubs — where you are truly known. Chosen family is family. Belonging is not a luxury; it is a mental health necessity.
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Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, says that rest is resistance — and for BIPOC communities that have been overworked, exploited, and told to “hustle harder,” this is a revolutionary truth. Rest does not only mean sleep (though sleep matters enormously). It means protecting time that is yours: time without productivity pressure, without the labor of code-switching or performing safety, without consuming news that traumatizes. Sabbath, siesta, afternoon tea, slow Sunday mornings — every culture has its version of rest. Reclaim yours. The world will try to fill every moment; choosing stillness is an act of self-love.
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Narrative has always been central to healing. Journaling, spoken word, visual art, dance, music, and even honest conversation across kitchen tables — these are not hobbies. They are how we make meaning out of suffering, how we bear witness to ourselves, and how we pass wisdom forward. Too often, the stories of BIPOC communities are told by outsiders who extract the pain and leave out the beauty, the humor, the complexity, the joy. Take back the pen. Participate in community storytelling spaces. Share your experience — in whatever form feels safe — not because you owe the world your trauma, but because your story, told in your own voice, is both medicine for yourself and a gift to those who come after you.
What does a good day look like for you? Not an ideal day, not a perfect day — but a day with enough breath in it, enough softness, enough of yourself in it that you can recognize yourself at the end of it.
You are allowed to want that. To build toward that. To ask for help in getting there. Your mental health is not a distraction from the bigger fight — it is the foundation it is built on.