On Asking For Help
The first time I learned life is rigged for the powerful was during the first boss level of Nintendo 64 classic Diddy Kong Racing. You, a racecar-driving cartoon creature, were to race a triceratops to the zenith of a mountain. What you didn’t realize until the race started, to my dismay as a 4-year-old, is that the triceratops is allowed and even incentivized to step on your car, edge you off cliffs, and do everything beyond the scope of fairly beating you up this comically large rock formation.
My mother and I would spend hours of time together, as I played and she coached, but I never flinched at the unfair challenge. It was only several days afterward, when she suggested we buy a strategy guide, that I protested with cries of “we shouldn’t need help to beat this!” or “that’s cheating!” We nevertheless bought the book and were able to beat the pesky dinosaur that same day. She stressed to work smart, not hard, through levels of Super Smash Bros., Banjo Kazooie, and Diddy Kong Racing. She emphasized in this context and myriad others to learn the intricacies of the rules so as to not break, but bend them to your advantage.
Though I always loved playing with my mom in my corner, I could never quite shake the feeling, even at 4, that our success was somehow tainted. As I grew older, me playing N64 with my mom was gradually replaced with me playing Playstation with friends from school. The 1-2 punch we created that I would not realize until years later was about so much more than video games, gave way to, well, not much more than playing video games. I don’t remember the last game my mother and I played collaboratively, or even the last Prima Official brand strategy guide we bought.
But I do remember making the conscious decision at that young age to never believe in a rule or convention more than I believed in myself to outsmart it.
Over a decade later, 16-year-old Miles was again reminded that the Real World™ spins on a loaded axis. The SAT is widely regarded the most important standardized test of one’s K-12 education. And, while there is copious evidence that it is biased and reinforces racial, gender, and class disparities in university populations, it remains a big deal—or it certainly was among the 100+ kids in my junior class who spent the previous two years preparing for the exam. We all were apportioned blocks of times throughout our first and sophomore years for college prep sessions. As someone who had done well my first two years at a new school, and for whom school came naturally so far, I did not take my first SAT score well. Even upon staring at what I perceived then as failure, I was not nearly as dispirited as I was when my mother suggested that she pay for an SAT tutor. I doubt I would have been excited about requiring a tutor for anything at all, but the fact that my mom would then have to shell out hundreds of dollars per hour for someone to tell me how to take a test that would (allegedly) prove to (white) strangers that I belonged at their (even whiter) universities was humiliating.
Before I possessed the words to articulate why, I knew the SAT was a scam. I knew because I’d heard stories from family about teachers discouraging studying for it, as it was a test that gauged your natural aptitude. Please. Behind every apparatus to determine entry into places of exclusivity—like U.S. colleges and universities—there is someone gaming the system. We are not so virtuous as a people to allow everyone deserving of opportunity to receive it.
Plus, there is not a bubble above or below sea level I could darken to prove my Black ass deserves to be wherever my Black ass happens to be at the time.
You can then imagine my reaction to discovering many of my classmates studied with professional SAT tutors for months before even the first round of practice exams. Hiring an SAT tutor wasn’t among the more shameful secrets for the kids I went to school with, but neither was anyone exactly forthcoming about how they navigated a school known for having one of the more rigorous academic environments in the DC metro area. Still, I felt betrayed, and a little foolish for feeling that way. Here I was, denying myself help to save face in front of people who, by all accounts, not only did not care if I did not receive help I needed, but also surreptitiously benefited from the same assistance I regarded beneath the unspoken terms of engagement of the standardized test.
I would have been extremely privileged had these been the only examples of life being unfair and arbitrary. The racism, violence, illness, and death that punctuated periods of my adolescence far outweighed losing a race to a virtual dinosaur or feeling embarrassed about receiving help from a tutor. But both are unique in that they illustrate the divide in access to resources as well as avenues to opportunity, along lines dictated by institutional privilege. The fact that the SAT tutoring service I spent months wringing my hands over was privately contracted by my egregiously wealthy high school meant that none of us had to even spend time finding a quality tutor. It was a time-saving leg up handed to us, provided you could afford the extra cost. Even knowing at the time this benefit wouldn’t be available to kids whose families couldn’t afford elite prep schools, I balked at being able to take advantage of it myself.
In retrospect, I doubt this was even born from the shame of benefiting from a system I knew could only exist at the expense of people who look like me, not my white classmates. I still went to football games, wore sweatshirts with our school’s name on it, and above all else, felt relief and satisfaction once college acceptance letters started to arrive in our mailbox. This was, if not the reason you went to a private high school in the first place, generally accepted to be justification for doing so. And yet, simply placing Black kids in fancy white private schools, or to put any group of marginalized people into environments with greater opportunity, ignores a key component of inequality between those who have and those who do not: that among the most crucial barriers to obtaining resources is the lack of information about the scope of available resources, and guidance for navigating stigma that surrounds even asking for help in the first place.
I explain all this to confess that when it came time for me to seek help for a problem much larger than a Nintendo boss, I was not at all equipped to do so. After several consecutive months of constant, extreme anxiety (and most likely several additional years of milder anxiety), I was no longer in a place to function even as I had previously. There is only so long that you can live constantly nervous, lashing out at people for the most innocent mistakes, before seeking help becomes less of a suggestion and more an imperative. The community I worked to create for myself did its job in holding me accountable to improving as a person. This, while unable to quell feelings of inadequacy that stem from seeking mental health services, took the decision out of my hands by making clear that my being part of that community would not be sustainable without a commitment to improving my health.
Today, stories of Black people dying because of complications in receiving access to prompt, quality medical care—for high-profile tennis stars, or those in distress on airplanes, for example—are frequent. Similar concerns—and more fears born from learned ableism—bounced around in my head in the 15 minutes before my diagnostic appointment with the woman I would soon (briefly) call my psychiatrist.
(“What if something really is wrong with me?”... “What if I am prescribed medicine that dulls me down, or levels the peaks and valleys that comprise my personality?”... “Shit, what if my Black ass gets committed?”)
Even with knowing that the idea of being abducted and held against my will simply because I told the doctor I was anxious was perhaps specious, the problem with being Black is that deep down you know that the more unbelievable the scandal of injustice, the more likely it is to be true. The mistrust of institutionalized medicine is rooted in histories of racialized violence, as medicine has been weaponized against Black people for centuries. If there were no Tuskegee Trials, if there were not robust and repeated sterilization efforts in places like Boston City Hospital across the country, if the story of Henrietta Lacks unfolded more ethically, then perhaps there would be fewer Black folks genuinely terrified of going to the doctor.
Receiving a diagnosis of any kind demands a shifting of perspective. Even if nothing has changed symptomatically, you now have corroboration that something is supposedly wrong. I will forever be able to mark time before and after my diagnosis, even though I’d lived with intense anxiety long before that fall afternoon. That shift in perspective has a lot to do with how I value myself, preconceived notions about mental health and vulnerability that I’m still working to unlearn, and less concrete, easily defined steps on a lifelong journey. But being Black, and growing up not being taught to value emotional honesty or prioritize mental health meant that all of the necessary concrete, literal procedures were ones with which I was unfamiliar. Researching medications so you can choose which of the psychiatrist’s suggestions to try; keeping a diligent log of how your anxiety responds to changes in food, sleep, exercise; the very process of finding the right website to use to find the right psychiatrist and therapist, only to go and discover you were completely wrong and have to start all over again: all are incredibly daunting.
This is of course only compounded by the fact that, even the perfect version of a healthcare industry—one that would allow free or truly affordable care in accessible locations, prioritizing patient wellness and comfort—would still leave all the factors that contribute to Black people and people of color needing treatment in the first place, untouched and intact. Food insecurity will endure. The police will continue to shoot, maim, and kill those they are allowed to, with impunity. Without addressing poverty, white supremacy, or larger systems of power, our wounds will simply continue to be lightly washed, rather than cauterized, bandaged, and healed so they can grow into the scars we know too intimately.
Some are fortunate. Some find a therapist they really like, and at least have that positive to hold onto when considering the overall process. Finding the right doctor or even just finding the right balance to manage your mental wellness takes incredible effort, and even then does not guarantee relief, especially for those who continue to face mistreatment and marginalization when they leave the doctor’s office. But for me, after striking out with therapist #5 and enduring an awful withdrawal experience after deciding the drugs I’d been prescribed could not meet my needs, I often find myself searching for reasons to continue asking for help. I have shed (some of) the shame that clouded decisions to speak openly about having obsessive compulsive disorder, taking medication, or going to therapy. I have even gotten better at coping with having to disclose my largest secrets, fears, and insecurities to white women (I still have not brought myself to hire a white man to be my therapist). And still, the path toward a future of mental wellness seems both endless and insurmountable. If Sisyphus was also burdened with the petrifying fear that the boulder will crumble into rubble if it rolls back down the hill, I think eventually he stops trying.
Moments when I don’t pity myself allow for some clarity, though. I am not burdened with an impossible task, for eternity. My OCD will exist until we both don’t, but even before then, there are victories to strive for. And in these moments, I consider the kids in my junior year SAT course. It is easy and accurate to chalk up their privilege to their whiteness, affluence, and gender: rich white boys well on their way to decaying into rich white men, triumphing only over any semblance of justice or equity. But right there, in that room, the machinations of white supremacist capitalism were far too complex and sophisticated to be at the forefront of the imbalance. The truth is, though they were perhaps even knowing participants in much grander social stratification, it is likely that them playing their figurative cards close to the vest about private tutoring was little more in that moment than a repetition of learned behavior.
Calls for education to be the driving force behind eradicating racism are misguided. The idea that we have to wait for older generations of white people in power to die, giving space to supposed new-wave whites exposed to allegedly more inclusive curricula hopefully withered for most in November of 2016 2020, but even if it didn’t, thinking this way neglects the reality that racism is etched in policy. Racism cannot be toppled by trying to change hearts or minds. But there is something to be gleaned from considering education’s place within changing larger social structures. At its root, if we accept that there is some value in teaching anti-racist thought and rhetoric, we have to also acknowledge that the truth and potential impact in the reverse. Racist attitudes white people hold toward people of color are taught institutionally, certainly. But they’re also just literally taught by parents, friends, teachers, coaches, or other adult authority figures. For my former high school, that meant It was not sufficient to sequester yourself on a hill upon the city and make sure that most people cannot afford to attend, hoarding the best teachers and supplies your endowment can afford. No, you are also told within that environment to keep quiet about any other potential boosts or benefits from which you may benefit. It is taught, from an early age, to ask for, receive, and then deny the very existence of, institutional assistance. In adulthood, after years of practice, it is perhaps more evident from where biases about things like public assistance programs actually originate.
So then maybe the help I find myself asking for isn’t even mostly for me. Maybe, forcing myself to continue to endure the process of finding doctors, taking medicine, practicing wellness is about the next person. This isn’t about replicating systems of abuse or following in white folks’ bulldozing footsteps. But similar to those who are the first in their families to go to college, there is an uncharted territory to traverse when you are the first in your family to seek mental health therapy. The challenges that must be navigated by the former—time management, how to best take advantage of resources or what those resources even are, how to love yourself when things inevitably go wrong—are all ones that exist when trying to navigate the latter. The more open, honest, and frequent we are with providing information and affirmation to those on their own mental health journeys could make all the difference in the world. Information sharing alone could save countless Black lives. And while this should, of course, happen in ways that are just as organized and institutionalized as the very things we seek mental health treatment to cope with, we should also be open and honest in informal settings. There should be no more fear of having one’s “business put in the street,” or that there will be (even more) social punishment by disclosing your relationship with your mental health. Just maybe, the strength that must be summoned to endure in seeking help is used for the person who simply does not have the energy to do so themselves, and the exhaustion you feel is a shared tax we pay for centuries of brutalization and destruction—the one tax we can re-invest fully in our own communities.
And then, maybe, it’s worth it.
20 years after my mom and I crossed the finish line at the top of the mountain, I was in bed working on an essay to submit to a writing competition, and came across this headline during a period of procrastination:
DIDDY KONG RACING WORLD RECORD SPEEDRUN
The piece contained a video clocking in at just under 39 minutes, the amount of time that it took one user to beat the entire game. Instinctively, I copied the URL into the group chat I share with my mother and brother and was in the middle of typing a short message about how we thought we were really good, but clearly nothing on this world record holder. And then, right before I hit send, I erased it all and turned back to actually watch the whole video.
I should have been less surprised to see what I did once it started, but it’s admittedly unexpected to start a race by immediately hitting a U-turn and going in the opposite direction of the other racers. But that’s what happened, as the video showed the driver slam into the base of the mountain once, twice, three times—and then a glitch interrupts the video for a split second before a gold trophy appears on screen, the driver having been (not so) miraculously transported to the top of the mountain. The same happened on the course within the volcano that required you to fly your plane off screen until discovering a secret concentric track, one that allowed you to pass the finish line without covering nearly as much of the distance. These small quirks, ones that were hard to spot for me two decades after the game was created, let alone in the moment for my 5-year-old brain, were exploited in every single level until the video ended and the world record was claimed.
I never showed my mother the video, mainly because it was evidence of something she already knew well enough to teach me in 1998. I do wonder, though, whether the current record holder, now immortalized in this peculiar way, made that run with a loved one guiding them from over their shoulder.