As a Black man working in mental health and walking closely with young men in communities shaped by trauma, poverty, and emotional suppression, I've seen firsthand how disconnected many of us become from ourselves. Not because we are broken — but because survival often forces people to disconnect in order to keep going.

That's where spirituality entered my life differently. Not as performance or pretense. But as awareness. Awareness of my energy. Of my thoughts. Of how trauma lives inside the body and mind — and how healing requires more than surface-level motivation.

This is the most common and least talked-about pattern in expectant fatherhood. The second trimester looks okay from the outside. And "looks okay" is exactly when a lot of brothers coast.

She may not say it right away. But she is keeping track — not maliciously, but the way anyone keeps track when they are going through something life-changing and wondering if the person they love actually sees it.

The second trimester is the quiet season. Nobody is watching as closely. Nobody is checking in the way they did at the beginning.

This is exactly where character is built.

Let me tell you what most fathers get wrong in the first trimester. They see a woman who looks the same as she did three weeks ago. No belly. No visible signs. And they think — consciously or not — that nothing has really changed yet.

They are wrong. And that wrong reading costs them — and her — in ways that are hard to undo.

The placenta is being built from scratch. Her blood volume is increasing. Her immune system is suppressing itself. And her hormones have spiked to levels she has never experienced before in her life. Those hormones directly affect the same neurotransmitter systems that regulate mood.

She is not being difficult. She is being flooded.

There is a particular kind of unease that Black and Brown men know intimately.

Not hunger, exactly.

More like a hollow.

A restlessness that keeps you moving, filling, performing, achieving all while feeling like something essential is missing.

We fill it with whatever we can reach.

Work. Substances. Screens. Relationships. Titles. Noise.

We stay busy because stillness is terrifying when you haven't been told that you deserve to rest in yourself.

But busyness is not groundedness.

And filling a hole is not the same as healing one.

Every June, we wear orange. We hold vigils. We say names. We grieve. Gun Violence Awareness Month is a necessary ritual — a collective pause to honor lives stolen and communities shattered. But this year, I want us to do something more than pause. I want us to look deeper at the root of what we're mourning — and ask ourselves what it would mean to truly intervene before another trigger is pulled.

Because here is what I know from more than a decade of working alongside young men of color in Brooklyn and across New York City: unaddressed pain is one of the most predictable pathways to violence. Not badness. Not a weakness. Pain. Grief that was never named. Shame that was never processed. Trauma that was never tended to. When we fail to provide our communities — especially our men — with consistent, culturally affirming spaces to heal, we should not be surprised when that pain turns outward.

THE SUMMER HEAT ISN'T THE PROBLEM

When you found out she was pregnant —

What was the first real thing you felt?

Not what you said. Not the reaction you performed for the room.

What actually moved through you in the first thirty seconds?

For a lot of brothers, the honest answer isn't what they expected. It's not pure joy. It's not a clean, movie-scene moment of arms around each other and tears of happiness.

For a lot of us — if we're real about it — the first thing that hit was something harder to name.

Something sitting between "I can't believe this is real" and "what am I supposed to do now?"

And then most of us buried it.

Here's what I need you to know:

Your reaction to that news does not predict what kind of father you're going to be.

The brother who cried isn't automatically more ready than the one who went quiet. The one who got hype isn't more prepared than the one who had to sit in his car for twenty minutes before going back inside.

Fear is not a red flag.

Fear is proportional to how much you care.

And when your brain tells you "I'm going to fail at this" —

That is a thought. Not a verdict.

A thought that feels true is not the same as a thought that is true.

Every father's story starts here.

Not at the birth. Not at the first step or the first word.

It starts in the quiet — when the test comes back positive and you look at yourself and decide what kind of man you're going to be.

Everything in The Brothers Size is deliberate. From the weight of the African names given to its characters, to the way soundscapes of blues and soul breathe through each scene, this isn’t theater for spectacle. It’s theater for truth. Raw. Real. Unapologetic.

"Bigger Thomas doesn't announce himself. He enters a room already aware of how much space he is allowed to take up — and exactly how much will be taken from him if he forgets."

This is not a film review.

This is a wellness intervention.

Rashid Johnson's Native Son is not a film about a crime. It is a film about what happens in the body, the mind, and the spirit of a young Black man before the crime — in the thousands of invisible moments where he is being read, classified, and assigned a role he never auditioned for.

At The BRO Experience, we sat in the room with our brothers and watched it together.

And what we saw — through the Seven Dimensions of Wellness — was a young man whose full humanity was never given permission to land.

"You spend roughly 90,000 hours of your life at work.

That is more time than you will spend with your children, your partner, your friends.

And yet so many of us — especially men of color navigating workplaces not designed with us in mind — spend those hours simply surviving instead of thriving."

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from working too hard.

But from working without meaning.

For men of color, the cost is even higher. Code-switching daily. Carrying the invisible labor of representation. Being the only one in the room. Being told — through a thousand small signals — that your authentic presence is a liability.

That is a wellness crisis. And it deserves to be named as one.

"No one ever gave you the steps for blooming.

No one hands you an instruction manual for the work that happens in the dark — the sacred, unglamorous labor of going into a broken place and deciding to fill in the cracks."

For Black men, we arrive at the conversation around mental health standing between two chasms.

One tells us that vulnerability is weakness. That to name your pain is to surrender to it.

The other is quieter — but just as dangerous. Men who use the language of healing without ever submitting to it. Who post affirmations but still can't look themselves in the mirror.

We All Deserve To Be Well. We’re speaking it into existence. We’re putting our hands, our hearts, and our work behind it. And we’re inviting you to join us!  not as a consumer, not as a follower, but as a member of something that actually gives a damn about whether you make it through.

We have spent too long treating men’s mental health as a crisis to manage. May and June ask something different of us. They ask us to celebrate. They ask us to feel. They ask us, especially us, Black men to choose joy with the same intentionality we were taught to choose strength.

The Brother From Another Planet, explains the Alien Effect: the moment when a young Black man's developing body, evolving mind, and shifting social role collide with a world that has already decided he is a threat. He hasn't changed his heart. He hasn't changed his intentions. But the world has changed its gaze, and that gaze reshapes everything.

We screened it at Bro Space on Marcus Garvey Boulevard a name that is itself a statement in the heart of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. The room was mixed. Not everyone in those seats grew up here. Some came recently. Some came from somewhere else entirely. And that tension between the people the neighborhood made and the people who moved into it after it was made sat in the room like a third character. This review is written through that tension, and through the Seven Dimensions of Wellness, because that is how we hold things here.

Men are not emotionally void they are emotionally avoidant. And avoidance is a strategy. Many men were raised to be tough, not weak, in order to survive in what was perceived as a chaotic world. Emotion was stigmatized with shame and often characterized as feminine. Thus, masculinity became positioned as the opposite of emotion.

"Turning 40 got me thinking about all the lessons I've learned over the years things I wish someone had told me in my 20s and 30s." By Max Maxwell

As cultural norms evolve, men are increasingly reclaiming fashion as a valid and powerful form of self-expression. This shift reflects a broader understanding that confidence is not only built internally, but also shaped by how individuals present themselves to the world. Clothing has become a tool for men to communicate identity, creativity, and self-respect without compromising their masculinity.

There’s a particular kind of violence in being asked to save the world when you’re still trying to save yourself. Westside Boogie understands this intimately. His 2024 album No More Black Superheroes functions as both confession and manifesto, a 12-track meditation on what happens when Black men, particularly Black fathers, refuse the cape society insists they wear.

As 2026 begins, healing requires more than resolutions it demands honesty. For men of color, stress, anxiety, and burnout often go unspoken. This piece explores how true wellness spans emotional, physical, financial, spiritual, and environmental dimensions, challenging old patterns and inviting a deeper commitment to healing. Moving beyond being “good,” it asks: what does it really mean to be well?

Growing up in the hood often comes with pressure to fit in, even when it means losing yourself. This piece explores the hidden cost of following the crowd, the emotional toll of inauthentic living, and why choosing your own path takes courage. Being different isn’t weakness it’s the first step toward peace, purpose, and breaking generational cycles.