Episode 9: Leave Your Toxic Men and Their Indifference Toward You Behind

Don’t mind me while I rant.

“He is a gaslighting piece of shit who has no respect for you. You needed to see this. He’s misogynistic, emotionally unavailable, and emotionally immature. He promised you the world then changed his mind without even telling you, leaving you to unceremoniously discover the truth. What this man cannot deny or ignore and what he refuses to confront, he will always blame on you. His faults will always pale in comparison to yours, even though he’s spent a lifetime neglecting and disrespecting you. You’re not a priority in his life. His expectations are unrealistic, and he can’t forgive you. It is easier to be angry than to have empathy for you. He doesn’t even believe the gender wage gap exists.”

Being a black woman was a sentence with no commute until I realized I could divest.

Last night I heard my grandmother’s voice telling me to pray.

If we’re honest, men were our ideal, she reminded me. We saw ourselves through them, as extensions and ribs. As women, our identities were defined by reflecting their perspectives. (As black women, why wouldn’t we want to be desired? Why wouldn’t we want to be in demand?)

When your men neither want — nor want to help you, you often live in denial just as they do. You deny the fact that to other people, your culture is as good as dead. Its identity and respective reality are not objectively real. Nothing you know is real, and you (as you know yourself) exist only to you.

Yet as a black woman, you define a black man’s perception of themselves. Their perception does not define you. Hence their animosity, which verges on the narcissistic.

Do you really know what makes a woman, outside of what a man says? Don’t you, as a woman, know better?

Why can’t we be ourselves, we wonder, without Black men inflicting upon us their hatreds, and blame for things we never did to them?

“How do you tune out the world when it grows so loud you can no longer hear what you know to be true?”

When the time comes, my dear, you make the leap. You let go. You learn to walk away, even though it means leaving him — and the rest of them — behind.

It may take years of practice to learn to walk away. But remember, we’ve learned from the best: black men have mastered walking away, and in so doing have taught us well.