My undergraduate studies at Tufts University were in psychology, where I studied culture, race and identity. It was there that a visiting sociologist, Dr. Lee Garth Vigilant, introduced me to medical sociology. It gave analytic language to what I already knew from growing up in Trinidad and Tobago, a postcolonial society where race, gender, ethnicity, class, and power shaped daily life whether or not anyone named them. Medical sociology taught me to see health at the intersection of the personal, social, and structural – at least, that’s what the theorists say. How did I interpret it?

My movement from social psychology to sociological social psychology was also a movement toward understanding health as embodied social life. Health became, for me, another language to interpret life itself. Not as the absence of disease or stress, but rather as one of the clearest ways we can study life itself. Health reflects the conditions under which people live: the physical and mental disease and stressors that squat in the body and resist eviction, the resources one can access, the relationships and institutions that sustain or constrain them, and the extent to which they are able to experience dignity, stability, and mattering. I have worked on health inequality, stress, identity, and mattering since.

My biggest hurdle was that I left the program, and for a long time I believed I might never finish. I was carrying responsibilities for extended family, working through personal trauma, and holding the belief that this “strong Black woman” will just manage. I had made a career out of helping others find support and yet could not ask for it myself. I knew the sociology of cumulative adversity, but knowing the literature did not protect me from the very inequities I had organized against. That was especially raw because, as an undergraduate, I had organized against Black student attrition at predominantly white institutions and understood, even then, that attrition was not an individual problem but an institutional pattern.

Leaving academia was not the end of my work. In the years away, I became a mother, built a business, and did nonprofit community work in rural New York. I learned how different institutions operate outside the academy, and I began to see the patterns more clearly. When I finally saw myself within those systems, with the recognition that came from both training and experience, I knew exactly what I had to offer and where I wanted to continue putting my energy.

I knew I had overcome the hurdle when I finished the first draft of my methods chapter. I had not yet written the introduction or returned to the proposal, but the methods chapter, for me, required a steady kind of discipline. It asked me to reset my mind to academic prose after a long step away, a step that was partly my choice and partly outside my control. I wrote it amid major life transitions -  moving states, settling my sons into a new school, managing family life while my husband was working in a different state, and recovering from surgery. The challenge was not only intellectual; it was also logistical and emotional. The methods chapter is usually the one I hear people moan about, but perhaps the structure of it kept me steady. I finished it focused, exact about what was left to be said, and proud of the detail I had insisted on. When I turned it in, considering all that I was managing, I felt as if I had finished a marathon. That was when I knew I was ready to write the rest.

This question made me laugh out loud. Knowing what I know now, it is truly remarkable what I was able to accomplish and the spaces I was able to inhabit without losing myself or my mind. Had I known then what I know now, I probably would have been consumed with anger and gotten nothing done. So perhaps it was meant to be this way, for a young person to be young and a little clueless, excited to learn, to grow, and to grow up. In some respects, I am glad that there were some things that I did not know.

I knew, as most Black people do, that I had to work this much harder to get “half as much,” but the promise attached to that lesson was a lie. I believe Black excellence gets you crumbs and we are so far from equality. I did not know that my talents and merit should have brought much more bounty, opportunity, power, and influence into my life. What I did not yet know was how to claim what was God-given, humanly owed, and already mine. Finishing this degree became part of my claim.

What I understand now, and wish I had known, is just how powerfully systems of inequality shape a life, and how far their reach extends: through the body and beyond, well after we are laid to rest. With children now, that is the part that haunts me. So, it would not be advice. It would be a warning.

Silent endurance is a tool of the enemy. Keep fighting.