4 Self-Care Practices For When Working As A Woman Of Color Has Got You Down

Practicing self-care at work, or in response to issues at work, can be the difference between feeling hopeless and isolated or inspired and optimistic.

flickr/WOCinTech Chat

By Alisha Acquaye

Originally published on Everyday Feminism.

Self-care is the battle cry of our generation. It is a realization that — in order for us to be better activists, feminists, and friends — we have to take time out to check in with ourselves, heal wounds, and feel loved.

It is especially significant today as we socially, politically and culturally exist in a war with a goal of dismantling the white heteronormative patriarchy and achieve true human rights and equality.

Self-care is a testament to the ability to understand, nourish and identify with our complex, layered and ever-evolving selves. It is a self-centering decision to acknowledge, address and cater to our bodies needs — spiritually, emotionally, physically, mentally and more.

I’ve been intentionally practicing self-care for a few years now, first starting by cleaning and clearing my mind, evaluating friendships, and recognizing personality and relationship patterns.

But, more recently, I’ve been considering how to practice self-care in response to toxic or traumatizing experiences and environments.

Self-care is the battle cry of our generation.

As you’ve read in my last articles, working as a black woman in predominantly white offices can be mentally and emotionally exhausting.

While working on this series, I began thinking deeply about how women of color and marginalized identities can practice self-care when they find themselves in these environments.

When I felt alone, exhausted by microaggressions, or undervalued or frustrated at work, I developed a few self-care methods to cope:

• Arriving early to enjoy breakfast and a cup of tea in the silence of the office.
• Scheduling lunch or coffee dates with other people of color or employees I wanted to learn from.
• Going for walks or taking trips to the roof during my breaks.
• Planning trips, which gave me something to look forward to on long weekends or holidays.

Most significantly, I formed a group of close friends of different backgrounds and sexualities who gave me even more life. We held each other down, provided support and offered billions of laughs.

We validated each other when we endured daunting racist, sexist or ageist experiences at work and inspired one another to take on new projects or assert ourselves in our teams.

Most of all, we made each other feel less alone: we were reflections of each other that affirmed one another’s existence and importance.

I found that these remedies — especially my friends — guided me towards more positive outlooks and peace of mind, which, coincidentally, helped me refocus on what I was really passionate about: the work I was doing, and the next chapters in my career.

Practicing self-care at work, or in response to issues at work, can be the difference between feeling hopeless and isolated or inspired and optimistic. It can help you refocus and realize what you value in your work experience and how to obtain it.

While writing this, I realized that not everyone has access to these self-care solutions and even less may have strong friend connections at work. So I wanted to explore different steps that people can take to care for themselves and make a difference in their communities. Here are four of them:

1. Engage in passions and projects that reaffirm your greatness.

One of the best decisions I’ve made as a post-grad working girl is signing up for writing classes. As writing is what I do for a living, it can sometimes feel like a job and less like a passion.

Writing classes — especially creative writing ones — allow me to exercise my imagination and strengthen my talents as a writer. The result: empowerment and freedom.

Going to work can be that much more daunting and depressing if you’re not only experiencing microaggressions but on top of that, aren’t in love with your job.

For those whose work doesn’t align with their passions or whose job is for survival and not creative stimulation, participating in projects or activities outside of work can be instrumental to your emotional health and confidence.

For this reason, one of the keys to self-care lies in impressing yourself, harvesting your talents and energies into something that’s meaningful to you, and watching yourself excel.

It’s especially important for women of color, LGBTQIA+, people of different abilities and more, to find creative outlets that empower them and strengthens their skills and confidence.

It’s one step to being better leaders and more expressive and assertive professionals. It’s going after what you want and recognizing your power and potentials.

2. Find a mentor — or become one!

One of my long-term goals is to find a mentor who can help guide me on my professional journey. Ideally, I’d love for her to be a Black woman who works in media, who understands the challenges of having an intersectional identity in professional spaces and who’s learned to navigate these setbacks in exponential ways.

Of course, I’ve had several mentors of different genders and backgrounds who have assisted me personally and professionally, but I imagine a bond with a Black woman mentor would feel more personal and inspiring.

How To Survive A White Workplace As A Person Of Color

Mentorship is a transformative force in marginalized communities. Having a role model who looks like you and has achieved something you aspire to makes your dreams feel more possible, tangible.

If you’re able, I also encourage you to become a mentor. Being a mentor to someone else is just as important as having one of your own. It’s a small but significant way of giving back to your community and helping another person reach their potentials.

3. Organize meetings to address workplace microaggressions

It is no secret that women and people of color can experience microaggressions at work, ranging from someone inappropriately touching your hair to a male coworker belittling or ignoring your ideas.

The challenge, however, is addressing these issues in a healthy and productive way.

Sometimes, talking to your manager or privately confronting a coworker isn’t enough. And as a marginalized person, taking this action can feel like our jobs are at a greater risk than the person who inflicted the microaggression.

Mentorship is a transformative force in marginalized communities.

A coworker at my last job — a Black woman — took initiative by organizing inclusivity workshops for the whole company to attend. To be sure, this is not an easy responsibility, but the payoff can lead to productive conversations and greater awareness of office issues.

Meetings and workshops can also be safer alternatives to speaking to a superior or confronting an employee directly. It opens space for conversation without having to put yourself on the line.

If you do decide to organize a meeting, it could be a great opportunity to discuss how to make company culture safer and more welcoming for marginalized people and strategize inclusive hiring methods.

4. Start meetups for women of color.

Self-care can mean building community or actively surrounding yourself with people who nurture your soul.

This year, I co-founded a bimonthly brunch series for my friends of color, where we share food and engage in conversations about self-care and our lives.

It has been the highlight of my year: not only do I feel a stronger sense of community with women of color in my city, I’ve also gained a renewed sense of leadership, therapy, and event organizing.

I have a friend who engages in dinners for Black women in media. She says that some of the highlights of these dinners is the shared community of expressing work and career-related frustrations, as well as the casual networking.

Not only does she feel validated and comforted, she meets people she can possibly collaborate with in the future.

Organizing a dinner, brunch, book club or any other social gathering for your specific groups and identities is a great way to strengthen your bonds in those communities.

The suggestions above are meant to serve as methods to empower and excite you when you’re down about work or try to eradicate office microaggressions you may face. However, they are in no way meant to entirely resolve any unhappiness, unfulfillment or discriminations you may experience in response to your intersectional identity.

Things can get really tough and, if they do, I hope you are able to consider finding a new job or going the entrepreneurial route — maybe you’re meant to create or start something new within your field.

Ultimately, I am no expert on self-care — I’m just a passionate self-care enthusiast. But there are many people who do have expertise.

Originally, I hoped to interview Gianne Doherty, a wellness maven, for this story, but unfortunately did not get her reply in time. She recently held her first W.E.L.L. Summit: a convention promoting self-care and inclusivity amongst women of color.

There’s also Lauren Ash of the Black Girl in Om podcast and initiative, who frequently discusses the importance of women of color practicing and implementing self-care into their daily lives.

Ash and Doherty are two wonderful resources who inspire me to use self-care as an innovative and personal form of resistance during these trying political and cultural times.

I hope you’re able to find peace and comfort — whether through my advice and others’ — especially in the one place where all you want to do is make money, or make a difference. After all, negative vibes and oppressive forces should never get in the way of stacking your paper.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/how-to-survive-a-white-workplace-as-a-person-of-color-4c41c9949187/ Fri, 29 Sep 2017 21:43:50 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2948 Read more]]> Vent. Fight the fight good. Take care of yourself. And, if need be, GTFO.

I was retrieving a pen under my desk when I heard the unmistakably tight voice of my HR manager. Jerking up, I banged my head on the underside of my keyboard — a precursor to the equivalent headache I was about to receive from his words. He was here to force me to go to a mandatory “diversity training” — the very one I’d been avoiding by hiding at my desk.

Dragged to the hour-long training, I sat sullenly in the back like the class punk while my worst fear was verified. The teacher was a white man who gave merit to reverse racism. Leading a diversity training. Repeat that to yourself: Ignorant White Man Teaches a Diversity Training. I kept waiting for my HR rep to jump out from behind a stack of chairs and yell, “Got you!”

I was the only person of color in the room. After an hour of opinions that could’ve given my Asian-American Studies professors heart attacks in less than 60 seconds (including an assertion that we must be doing well because our company had “so many” Asian-Americans), I started thinking about getting out. Not just out of the training by faking severe gastritis, but out of mainstream corporate America entirely, because it was definitely giving me internal distress.

When Your Workplace Gives You PTSD

I had been in the rat race for a decade on and off, where I’d seen that Asian-Americans were often given a messed-up model-minority pass. However, having been burned before, I carefully code-switched my speech, concealed my radical political views, and cloaked my Korean tattoos in modest dresses and my undershaved head with hair I had grown out over the top to provide cover-up as needed.

But there’s more to surviving a mostly white workplace than disguising the real you with a Harry Potter invisibility cloak. Here are a few ways to survive.

Rest, replenish, and vent.

Talib Kweli said it right: “Job one is self-preservation; I gotta stay healthy.” Have you been run ragged — in body, mind, and spirit — by your job? Get yourself some R&R.

If you’re a workaholic, skip those supposedly career-advancing coworker drinks once in awhile and book a dance class after work instead. Use lunch like a mini-vacation, if you can. Make recurring weekly lunch plans to do something quirky (I like to act like a kid on the swings or carousel in the park) with people who lift you up. Head to the gym during lunch and forget your worries on the treadmill. Watch Dear White People or Hasan Minhaj on your tablet while on said elliptical and laugh your ass off. Eat comfort food by a fountain (if yours is kimchi jjigae like mine is, you’ll also get fewer weird stares outside the lunchroom). Duck into a beautiful cathedral to pray or meditate. Spend one hour reading authors who uplift you and/or make you laugh. Get a mini-massage at the nail salon. Unfollow an ignorant Twitter account. Pop outside for sanity-lifting phone calls with friends. Ask them to send you funny memes to take your mind off work microaggressions (or specifically to make fun of those exact microaggressions). Complain to your friends about the corporate schmuck who tells you Syrian refugees are terrorists when you tell him you’re organizing a fundraiser for them (yes, this happened); then, forget him for a moment while you enjoy your life. When you come back to work, have a Teflon mantra for deflecting him every time he says dumb shit. Say it out loud or in your head, depending on how likely that is to get you fired.

No one needs a memo re: your 5 to 9.

Your outside life can be your outside life. If you just happened to write a The Office-style musical where the co-workers critique the protagonist’s “interesting,” stinky, spicy Korean fish stew in the office fridge, you do not have to invite any of your coworkers or even tell them what you’re up to. You can choose to befriend and trust coworkers if and when you feel it is safe to. If you need privacy, use a nom de plume at work or in play. Keep those activities on the other side of town, or in a town where none of your coworkers live, if you need complete compartmentalization. You owe no one your “extracurricular” self, unless you feel comfortable sharing and want to do so. This Onion article may assist you in faking a really boring weekend watching Scandal when what you really did was stage your own radical musical, attend an anti-ICE protest, party with your favorite band, and throw a food pop-up.

Bolster yourself and fight when it’s right.

If you’ve never worked in an all-white workplace before this (Where are you, Hawaii? Can I have your job?), it’s going to take strength to keep you going day to day. This part is not about rest and relaxation and fun; it’s about #hwaeting, as the Koreans say. Put inspiring books, photos, mementos, and quotes around your desk to remind you of who you really are (I had an Audre Lorde quote, a Sandra Cisneros poetry book, a framed photo of Aung San Suu Kyi, a Rita Dove poem, a gif of Grumpy Cat pressing the escape key, and a portrait of my grandmother). Put a dollar in a jar to donate to a non-profit every time someone at work says or does something stupid and watch that money grow. Form alliances with people of color (PoC) and allies, and be an influencer, if you can, to create a more truly diverse and inclusive workplace. When it’s morally incumbent upon you (and if you feel safe), fight the good fight. That could mean going to HR to witness for a person of color (including yourself) who’s being bullied or sexually harassed; it could mean asking the company to take down signs that are sexist, racist, or anti-queer; it could mean asking that the work charity of the month be an explicitly anti-racist org.

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Put a dollar in a jar to donate to a non-profit every time someone at work says or does something stupid and watch that money grow.
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Support your Black coworkers.

Recognize that different PoC are treated differently. I’ve had white people in workplaces mistakenly believe that because I am Asian, I am in on the racist patriarchy and they can crack that racist joke around me using the word “thug” or “ghetto” and we will all slap our knees and laugh together. Uh, no — I’m about as okay with that as I am with you stealing my kimchi fried rice from the fridge. #Notyourmodelminority, okay? Non-Black PoC, as well as straight-passing folks like myself, people with “perfect” 2.5-kid families, and people who consume white culture may be given preferential treatment in a white workplace. It’s important to not deny this and to work to change it. If a Black coworker is continually passed over for a promotion or her statements are ignored in a meeting, recognize her achievement with this shine technique that President Obama’s female staffers used.

Fight for your place at the table.

Looking to move up? You already know you have to work 10 times as hard. The authors of Good Is Not Enough: And Other Unwritten Rules for Minority Professionals advocate that PoC stay current on company pursuits and work to be visible in meetings where dominant forces may slate them as ghosts. Clearly state your career goals out loud and in writing to bosses, mentors, and top executives. If you don’t have a mentor, socialize with and recruit allies who will mentor you. Lastly, you can gracefully take credit for what you did, instead of watching white coworkers take credit, by documenting what you’ve done via statistical progress report emails and making it clear that a project’s success was in large part due to your excellent work product. Statistics are hard(er) to argue with, and companies love them.

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Looking to move up? You already know you have to work 10 times as hard.
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GTFO.

If you can’t take it anymore, make an exit plan complete with monthly and weekly benchmarks and start looking to dig yourself out. Start auto-saving via a CD, so your money is locked up until the year you’re due to leave, or join Digit, which I call “Easy Savings for Impatient Millennials.” As far as where to go, look at Glassdoor reviews and message folks on LinkedIn and Facebook about what companies have the best environments for PoC. Join every online networking group for PoC you can find. Forbes, Fortune, Essence, Black Enterprise, and other pubs also have lists galore. Fast Company even made a list of the best tech companies for folks of color.

And, if you’re ready, the authors of Black Faces in White Places: 10 Game-Changing Strategies to Achieve Success and Find Greatness encourage entrepreneurial pursuits, because if you own your own business, you can set your own rules and uphold ethical standards. While starting your own business is easier said than done when loans are hard to come by as a Black or Latinx entrepreneur, sometimes entrepreneurship and freelancing are the best option when you’ve hit your corporate limit and are not located in a large, progressively liberal city with better workplaces. Is it worth it to cash out that 401(k) to start your own business? If you have a solid business plan, the answer could be yes.

Here’s to whatever path works for you: scaling the corporate ladder, finding a more inclusive workplace, finally securing that loan for your own business, or freelancing from home while lying down Ali Wong-style — it all works so long as you never have to sit through a corporate diversity training led by an anti-reverse-racism advocate.