Where Do I Go from Here

Speaking with a counselor at Berklee's counseling center was definitely necessary in order for me to work through my grief. This was the first time that someone I was close to had died. There had been deaths of relatives, but those happened when I was very, very young. Plus this was the death of someone with whom I was in love. I was in counseling for the rest of the school year, then I went back to Georgia for the summer. In some ways it was easier being home than it was being in Boston. I was around my family, which was nice. My mom and I are very close, so it was great to get to see her every day for three months.

Once the summer was over, things were kind of tough. Pretty much everywhere around the campus of Berklee was filled with memories of Mr. Nice Guy. I would come to a street corner and be reminded of the day that he gave me the last bite of his biscotti. To this day that's a memory that makes me smile. He was such a sweet person.

Although I was coming to terms with my grief, October was a hard month for me. The time around my birthday was hard, too, because he died a little less than a month after my 21st birthday. For a long time I would fall into a depression during the autumn months and it would last through the winter into spring. Sometimes it even stretched into summer. Sometimes it didn't end for a year or two. During my senior year of college I continued to see the counselor, but he had gone into private practice, so I had to pay to see him. I ended up in tears during at least 80% of our sessions, if not more. It was something that I needed at that time in my life because it helped me work through much more than the grief I was feeling.

I'd Never Been So Low

The words you regret most in life are the ones that remain unsaid. The untimely death of Mr. Nice Guy threw me into a tailspin. For the first couple of weeks, not a day went by that I didn't cry. To know that I would never see that smiling face or feel his arms around me again was almost more than I could take. All I wanted to do was sleep. When I wasn't in class, which I was now known to skip, depending on the class, I was sleeping. Food and sleep were my escape from the pain. Whenever I had to interact with anyone in class, I felt like I was standing outside myself. The world was a movie, and I was a mere observer. I felt very isolated. To a certain degree I shut down. My friend who always pointed out my accent didn't understand the amount of pain I was feeling. She kept trying to get me to go out and do things with her and her boyfriend, but I was grieving. Because I didn't know how to vocalize my pain I froze her out.


My schoolwork had started to suffer, and one of my professors said something to me about it. I told her what was going on with me, and she suggested that I visit Berklee's counseling center to talk to a counselor. At this point I want to stop and tell you that for pretty much my whole life I've felt like I needed to be in therapy. You know my background. Though I was never abused, actually, what my paternal grandmother did to us could be considered verbal abuse, as well as emotional abuse. Regardless, I've always felt different, not only because I was a little black girl in a mostly white environment, but also because of the way my parents (more specifically, my mom) raised me. A lot of black children are raised to be angry and to hate white people. As soon as they step out into the world, they assume a defensive posture. I wasn't raised to hate white people, and there was very little anger in my household toward whites. Sometimes my dad exhibited it because of some of the prejudice he endured while growing up, but for my mom it was different. Her views and her tolerance are what shaped me as a person.


That being said, I grew into a kind, sensitive, loving, shy woman with a strong sense of morality. That doesn't play very well when you start going to school with more black kids and they think that in order to be black you have to be loud and obnoxious. I didn't really fit in with most of them, and although I was very comfortable around white people, they weren't necessarily all comfortable around me. Another thing that contributed to my feeling out of place is the fact that before I left for college my mom recommended that I stifle the sarcastic side of my personality so as not to alienate people in my new surroundings. I know she meant well, but for a really long time I wasn't sure who I was supposed to be. Yes, sometimes my sarcasm could be hurtful, but it fell more under the category of not suffering fools gladly.

Back to seeing the counselor. I made an appointment with a counselor at Berklee's counseling center. Although I naturally thought if I was ever in counseling/therapy it would be with a woman, my counselor ended up being a man who wasn't that much older than me. He was also very attractive, but once I started talking about my pain, his attractiveness was an afterthought.