There is a particular kind of praise reserved for Black women. It usually arrives after something difficult has happened, when a crisis has been managed, a family has been held together, or another responsibility has been absorbed without complaint. Someone looks at her, shakes their head, and says, “I don’t know how you do it all.”
She smiles, maybe shrugs it off, and keeps moving. There’s usually something else that needs to be done.
For generations, Black women have been celebrated for their ability to endure. Our grandmothers kept households running under circumstances that offered little room for exhaustion. Our mothers found ways to provide stability while managing disappointments of their own. The aunties made sure everybody had a plate at the repast before finding a quiet place to cry. These women deserve every bit of the admiration they receive. Their strength kept families together, often when there was very little else holding things in place.
But somewhere along the way, we became so accustomed to what Black women could carry that we stopped paying attention to how much we were asking them to hold.
Think about the woman in your family who knows everybody’s business. She remembers the doctor’s appointments, keeps track of who isn’t speaking, and knows which cousin needs a little extra money before the cousin gets around to asking. When something goes wrong, her phone rings. She handles it because somebody has to, and because she’s usually the one who knows what to do. Over time, people stop thinking of her efforts as work. They simply expect things to get handled.
The praise continues, of course. She’s the backbone of the family. Everybody knows they can count on her. But underneath all that appreciation is an arrangement nobody has much incentive to question. As long as she keeps everything moving, the people around her can remain comfortable with how things are.
The same thing happens in workplaces and communities. A Black woman who consistently takes on extra responsibilities becomes the person everyone calls when something needs fixing. Her ability to manage difficult situations earns her a reputation for being dependable, which often leads to more difficult situations being placed in her lap. At some point, you have to wonder whether being recognized for your strength is worth much if the recognition never comes with actual support.
What makes this difficult to untangle is how deeply the expectation becomes part of a woman’s identity. Many of us grew up being praised for maturity, responsibility, and the ability to manage ourselves without needing much attention. A little girl who learns that being helpful makes life easier for her mother may carry that understanding into adulthood. The daughter who becomes everybody’s confidante may find that being needed gives her a sense of closeness she doesn’t know how to experience any other way.
Eventually, she may have trouble separating her desire to help from the expectation that she always will. She loves her family. She takes pride in being someone people can depend on. She may even enjoy being the person who knows how to get things done. Those feelings are genuine, which makes it harder to acknowledge the resentment that sometimes sits right alongside them.
And resentment has a way of showing up when a woman keeps giving people access to parts of herself she no longer has the energy to offer.
We often respond to this exhaustion by telling Black women to set boundaries, learn to say no, and make time for self-care. That advice has its place, but it doesn’t quite reach the deeper issue. If a woman has spent most of her life understanding her value through what she does for others, changing her behavior may also require changing how she sees herself. There can be real discomfort in discovering that the people you love are capable of managing things without you, especially when being indispensable has become such a familiar part of your life.
Our mothers and grandmothers didn’t necessarily have the luxury of examining these patterns. Many were navigating economic hardship, discrimination, and family responsibilities that demanded immediate attention. They developed ways of surviving that made sense for the circumstances they faced. We inherited their resourcefulness, along with some of the expectations that came with it. And because those expectations arrived through women we loved and admired, questioning them can feel uncomfortably close to questioning the women themselves.
But we can appreciate what their strength made possible while being honest about what it required of them. The women who came before us did not endure everything they endured so we could spend our lives proving we can endure it too.
There is room to reconsider how much responsibility we accept, how freely we ask for help, and whether the relationships we have built allow us to be cared for without first reaching a breaking point. Some of those changes will require difficult conversations. Others may begin with the uncomfortable realization that we have been volunteering for work nobody actually asked us to do.
Black women have spent generations demonstrating what we can carry. We have earned our reputation for strength, although many of us would have preferred circumstances that required less of it.
Perhaps we can begin to measure the lives we are creating by something other than how much we manage to survive. There is more to a woman than her ability to hold everybody together, and she deserves the opportunity to discover who she is when she finally has room for herself.
AJ Williams is a Spiritual Wellness Architect and Educator and the Managing Editor of the Michigan Chronicle. A thought leader at the intersection of spirituality, astrology, psychology, and identity evolution, she is the founder of Sunday Communion, a quarterly live transformation experience held in Detroit. The Inner Architecture is her editorial column on the work of becoming.
