Don't Hurt Yourself
Thank you for keeping up with my blogposts if you have! If you haven't, please feel free to look at my past ones. They're totally available and I would say still relevant to read.
Also- I still have a super comprehensive "Follow" button for the web version of my blog. Please hit the follow button so that you can get notifications for my posts.
I'm still super open and craving comments and questions from my posts. I love talking to people about them.
Anyway... welcome to my March Post!
This post is going to be pretty short because I'm currently hanging out with my family at home and I don't feel as inspired to talk about this topic as much as I have been about other topics.
As usual, I'm going to talk about the Beyoncé LEMONADE song that inspires this post and provides symbolism first.
"Don't Hurt Yourself" is the third song on the LEMONADE album and is part of the chapter on Anger. Throughout the song, Beyoncé expresses to Jay, "Don't Hurt Yourself." She tells him that lying to her, not loving himself, not loving her enough; not being a true husband to her, only causes pain to him as well as her.
The Anger chapter further supports this with preceding poetry, most notable for me right now: "Why can't you see me? Why can't you see me? (Why can't you) Why can't you see me? Everyone else can."
In this period of my life, I'm not necessarily experiencing any intense anger. I described a lot of anger and disappointment in my previous post, specifically with society being against me as a black man, and with my friends not necessarily giving me what I need. At the same time, I talked about how I needed to continue focusing on loving myself more than any other people could ever love me. Focusing on this has been hard, but I think I've been getting better at doing it.
A lot of the time, though, I tend to try to avoid anger. In the past I've told people "Oh. I don't get angry- I just get upset." And I honestly need to stop kidding myself on that. It's simply not true at all. I've gotten angry and I get angry. The reason that I don't like being angry is because I associate anger with yelling and there just seems to have been a lot of that between my family members while I was going up and while I'm still around there. Being angry and yelling isn't an effective form of communication and it's unfortunate that a lot of people use anger in order to communicate with people, especially young people. It most cases, the opposite effect happens when someone yells at someone else.
I want, one day, for Anger to be foreign to me, but for right now it's something that I'm working on. When communicating with my little cousins, I've noticed myself responding in anger less and less throughout the years and I'm proud of myself for that, but there's still a lot more patience that I need to practice.
The quote I pulled from LEMONADE's Anger chapter highlights a problem that frequently makes me angry. As I've been trying to work on my own emotional development over the course of my collegiate career, I've noticed that I have a really big issue on attention and whether or not I'm receiving enough of it from my friends and family.
Part of this is on my end and realizing this and working through it, but another part of it is not feeling recognized enough by my friends. There are times when I feel like the inside part of me isn't able to be as visible as the outside part of me; like I have to hide parts of myself in order for people to feel comfortable with me and it sucks that I feel that way, but it's something that I'm trying to be more communicative on.
Anyway... I'm gonna go hang out with friends and enjoy home. I'm sure next month's post will be more thoughtful and insightful.
Thanks for reading.
Also- I still have a super comprehensive "Follow" button for the web version of my blog. Please hit the follow button so that you can get notifications for my posts.
I'm still super open and craving comments and questions from my posts. I love talking to people about them.
Anyway... welcome to my March Post!
This post is going to be pretty short because I'm currently hanging out with my family at home and I don't feel as inspired to talk about this topic as much as I have been about other topics.
As usual, I'm going to talk about the Beyoncé LEMONADE song that inspires this post and provides symbolism first.
"Don't Hurt Yourself" is the third song on the LEMONADE album and is part of the chapter on Anger. Throughout the song, Beyoncé expresses to Jay, "Don't Hurt Yourself." She tells him that lying to her, not loving himself, not loving her enough; not being a true husband to her, only causes pain to him as well as her.
The Anger chapter further supports this with preceding poetry, most notable for me right now: "Why can't you see me? Why can't you see me? (Why can't you) Why can't you see me? Everyone else can."
In this period of my life, I'm not necessarily experiencing any intense anger. I described a lot of anger and disappointment in my previous post, specifically with society being against me as a black man, and with my friends not necessarily giving me what I need. At the same time, I talked about how I needed to continue focusing on loving myself more than any other people could ever love me. Focusing on this has been hard, but I think I've been getting better at doing it.
A lot of the time, though, I tend to try to avoid anger. In the past I've told people "Oh. I don't get angry- I just get upset." And I honestly need to stop kidding myself on that. It's simply not true at all. I've gotten angry and I get angry. The reason that I don't like being angry is because I associate anger with yelling and there just seems to have been a lot of that between my family members while I was going up and while I'm still around there. Being angry and yelling isn't an effective form of communication and it's unfortunate that a lot of people use anger in order to communicate with people, especially young people. It most cases, the opposite effect happens when someone yells at someone else.
I want, one day, for Anger to be foreign to me, but for right now it's something that I'm working on. When communicating with my little cousins, I've noticed myself responding in anger less and less throughout the years and I'm proud of myself for that, but there's still a lot more patience that I need to practice.
The quote I pulled from LEMONADE's Anger chapter highlights a problem that frequently makes me angry. As I've been trying to work on my own emotional development over the course of my collegiate career, I've noticed that I have a really big issue on attention and whether or not I'm receiving enough of it from my friends and family.
Part of this is on my end and realizing this and working through it, but another part of it is not feeling recognized enough by my friends. There are times when I feel like the inside part of me isn't able to be as visible as the outside part of me; like I have to hide parts of myself in order for people to feel comfortable with me and it sucks that I feel that way, but it's something that I'm trying to be more communicative on.
Anyway... I'm gonna go hang out with friends and enjoy home. I'm sure next month's post will be more thoughtful and insightful.
Thanks for reading.
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