It’s Time to Be More Than Good. Let’s Be Well.

This September is more than awareness. It is a call to action. Let’s move beyond the easy refuge of “I’m good.” Let’s take a risk at being vulnerable, being authentic, and connected. Let’s be well for ourselves, for each other, and for the brothers who didn’t get the chance. From Today Forward, Be Well. 

Each September, during Suicide Awareness Month, the statistics flash across our timelines like neon warnings: Black and Brown men are dying in silence. Suicide among men continues to climb, yet the language we share to describe our emotional lives remains painfully thin. Ask a brother on the block how he is, and the default answer dribbles out: “I’m good.”

“Good” has become emotional armor: simple, efficient, safe. It blocks follow-up questions. It doesn’t invite pain, confusion, or the need for comfort. But “good” is also a factory setting, a single box that flattens the wild complexity of human feeling into something palatable. As men, we’re taught to reduce ourselves to this one note until silence swallows everything else.

James Baldwin once wrote, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” Baldwin knew that living in Black skin meant grappling with contradictions: injustice alongside joy, rage alongside love. Yet our emotional range is stunted, everything beyond “good” or “angry” rarely gets room to breathe.

Modern Black thinkers continue this push. Dr. Tommy J. Curry, in his work on Black male studies, shows how the vulnerability of Black men is too often dismissed or pathologized, trapping us behind masks of toughness. Cornel West reminds us that integrity requires “a courageous confrontation with death” not denial, but an embrace of life’s fragility that opens us to love fully and be loved in return.

The Be Well Bro initiative rises directly from this need. We insist that men deserve more than “good.” We deserve wellness. We deserve the space to acknowledge sadness without shame, to claim joy without apology, to admit exhaustion without fear of judgment. To be well is to resist the shallow emotional scripts handed down like assembly-line parts.

In our communities, silence has often meant survival, so breaking it can feel like betrayal. But silence is killing us. Being well means writing a new script, one that says: “Bro, you don’t have to be made of stone. You don’t have to carry anger as your only language. You don’t have to end with a period when your story deserves so many more chapters.”

This September is more than awareness. It is a call to action. Let’s move beyond the easy refuge of “I’m good.” Let’s take a risk at being vulnerable, being authentic, and connected. Let’s be well for ourselves, for each other, and for the brothers who didn’t get the chance.

From Today Forward, Be Well.