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.

"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.

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.