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Excavation: Why We Must Dig Past the Surface to Find Ourselves [1]

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Date: 2025-07-01

If there’s one thing I’ve learned—writing, teaching, listening to stories, watching new generations—it’s that most people only see what’s right in front of them. Not because they lack curiosity or depth, but because the world is designed that way. When you’re Black in America, you learn early that the surface is a kind of shield, and a trap.

I start with the past because nothing in our lives was invented yesterday. The places we call home, the ways we talk and walk, even the dreams we let ourselves have—they all come with history. Sometimes that history is sung or shouted, handed down in story. More often, it’s unspoken, too heavy or too painful or too complicated to name. So it lives as silence. It lives as habit. It lives as a kind of blindness to what made us who we are.

That’s the trick, isn’t it? When you’re young, you inherit the world as it is and call it normal. You learn the boundaries of your neighborhood—not just the blocks, but the rules. You pick up cues from the music on the radio, the shows on TV, the way your family acts when the police drive by. These things become part of you before you even have a name for them.

But so much of what feels natural isn’t. These “normals” were constructed, sometimes long before you were born. Some of them are the result of policies written in city halls and courtrooms, others the outcome of violence or migration or the slow grind of poverty. The lines on the map—redlining, highways carved through Black neighborhoods, the placement of factories or liquor stores or failing schools—these weren’t accidents. They were decisions.

And if nobody tells you the story of how those decisions were made, you grow up thinking it just is—that your world is small because you didn’t dream big enough, that your anxiety or depression is just a personal failing, that the odds are long because of something you did or didn’t do. But none of this is a coincidence. None of it is random.

Now, a lot of young people want to create themselves anew. They turn to what’s available—social media, music, whatever the culture feeds them. I don’t blame them for that. When you’re cut off from your history, you grab whatever identity feels powerful, or at least possible. But that’s dangerous, because the images they receive are shaped by people who do not know them, love them, or care for their wholeness. The culture is engineered for consumption, not for self-knowledge.

This is where things get complicated. When your sense of self is built from fragments—memes, soundbites, viral videos—you live in a state of perpetual reaction. The algorithm feeds you what is already popular, already profitable, already packaged. And if you never look further, you become what you consume. Your world is narrowed by the imagination of others.

It’s only when you start digging—painful as it is—that you discover there’s more. Sometimes it starts with a question: Why do we live here and not there? Why did grandma never talk about her parents? Why does everyone flinch when a certain topic comes up? Sometimes the answers are hard to take. You find out about the riots, the displacement, the laws that moved your people from one place to another. You learn about color lines, about doors that were closed, about ambitions that had to shrink for survival.

And the deeper you dig, the more you realize that so much of what you thought was personal is actually structural. Your anxiety is not just a “chemical imbalance”—it’s the echo of generations forced to adapt, to shrink, to hide, to defend. Your depression is not just yours—it’s the logical response to a world built to undermine your sense of worth and possibility.

This is why, for me, the work is never just about “self-improvement.” It’s about excavating the systems that built the walls around us. Mental illness in Black communities isn’t just underdiagnosed or undertreated—it’s misnamed. What gets labeled as pathology is often the cost of adaptation. We survive by silence, by toughness, by not letting the pain show. But all of that comes from somewhere. All of it has a history.

And that history, if left unexamined, will live inside you as destiny.

But I want to be clear: not every young person’s life is defined by pain or confusion. That’s not the whole story, and it never was. There are so many who find joy in small moments, who invent themselves from scraps and laughter, who build something beautiful out of what little they’ve been given. There are classrooms full of kids who dream out loud, neighborhoods that still pulse with music and pride, and families who manage to pass down love and wisdom in ways that textbooks will never capture.

It would be a lie to say every young person is adrift or disconnected from their roots. There are those who are already digging—sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident—who stumble onto a story, a name, a song, and suddenly feel that electric jolt of recognition. For some, it happens in a classroom with a teacher who cares enough to teach what matters. For others, it’s in a conversation with an elder, or in the discovery of a faded photograph, or the rediscovery of a language half-forgotten but still alive in a grandparent’s mouth.

And there are those who, despite every obstacle, manage to carve out space for themselves. Who find fellowship, or art, or faith, and refuse to let the world tell them who they are or what they can be. For every narrative of loss, there is a counter-narrative of creation—a refusal to be erased, a decision to keep living out loud, to keep pushing for more.

But even in those spaces, even in moments of pride and celebration, the digging never really stops. Because history is always moving, always pressing in, always asking new questions. Even those who feel rooted still have to defend those roots against storms—gentrification, the churn of the job market, the constant noise of a culture that would have you forget who you are.

So digging isn’t just for the lost or the hurting—it’s for anyone who wants to know themselves, anyone who wants to stand on something solid. The work is not about shame or nostalgia. It’s about clarity. It’s about giving yourself the tools to decide what parts of your inheritance to keep and what to let go. It’s about finding a foundation sturdy enough to build something new.

And there’s more to this work than just unearthing pain. When you dig, you also find resistance, ingenuity, love, and moments of unexpected grace. You find the ways people made a way out of no way. You find stories of survival and invention, of music rising from sorrow, of communities that protected their own even when the world turned its back. You find the laughter that survived the hardest winters, the traditions that slipped past the guards of time and policy.

Sometimes you find anger, too—a necessary anger, the kind that fuels movement. Sometimes you find grief, or stories so heavy they make you sit in silence. But if you keep digging, you also find hope—not the kind that floats above reality, but the hope that comes from knowing what you’re up against and deciding to fight anyway.

The process isn’t linear. Some days you’ll want to run from the past, and other days you’ll want to wrap yourself in it. You may never get all the answers. Some stories are lost, some silences too deep to fill. But the search itself becomes its own kind of power—a daily practice of claiming space in a world that is happy to let you disappear.

It’s easy to say, “Change starts with you,” and leave it at that. But real change starts with knowing—knowing what made you, what shaped you, and what you still carry. Only then can you decide, with intention, what you want to become.

The work of digging is not just about surviving the present. It’s about rewriting the future. It’s about refusing to let someone else’s version of your story be the final word. And if you’re lucky, the more you uncover, the more you realize you’re not alone. There are others digging, too—some right beside you, some ahead, some yet to come. Each of us with a shovel in hand, each of us trying to reach the root, each of us carving out a space where we can finally breathe.

That’s why I keep digging. That’s why I write. Not just to remember, but to imagine. Not just to expose what’s broken, but to make room for what could be whole. To find, beneath all the noise and rubble, a self—and a people—worth fighting for.

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