Courage isn't the absence of terror—it's what you do when you're shaking. Learn how fear actually works in your nervous system, and why picking up the phone when you're terrified is the bravest thing you can do.

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.

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.

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.

Suicide rarely arrives without warning. It whispers first. A sudden withdrawal. A phrase dropped too casually. A reckless shift in behavior that doesn’t quite fit. Yet in communities where strength is defined by silence particularly among Black and Brown men those whispers are often ignored until it’s too late.