Joy Is Not Safe. Do It Anyway.

Nobody told us that joy is a medical necessity.

We were told to rest when we burned out. To pour into ourselves when we ran dry. To practice self-care, which in practice meant bath bombs and boundary-setting and the occasional weekend off.

Nobody said: the absence of joy is a clinical finding.

That it has a name in the body. That it shows up on a tongue, in a pulse, in the dim quality of someone's eyes when they walk into a room they are supposed to feel safe in.

I have been a practitioner for 7 years. I know what it looks like when a woman's Fire is out.

She is not sad, exactly.

She is flat. Functional.

Present but not quite there with us.

She does the work, she shows up, she handles everything that needs handling. But the good things stop registering the way they used to. The wins do not land for her.

The moments of real beauty pass by like scenery she is watching from a moving car.

That is not burnout.

I call it Fire deficiency. And it has a root.

THE FIRE ELEMENT AND WHAT IT ACTUALLY GOVERNS

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Fire element governs the Heart.

Not the organ that pumps blood, though it does that too. The Heart in Chinese medicine is the residence of the shen.

The spirit.

The part of you that knows whether you are flourishing or just functioning.

The part that registers delight. That connects. That makes you feel like your life is actually yours.

When the shen is settled, joy arrives and stays. You can feel it. It has texture.

When the shen is disturbed, you can be doing everything right and feel almost nothing. Not grief. Not pain. Just a persistent, low-grade flatness that nobody else seems to notice because you are still showing up, still producing, still being everything everyone needs you to be.

I see it in the eyes.

When the shen is disturbed, the eyes go distant.

A little glassy. Like the person has been checked out for a long time and nobody noticed because she kept being competent anyway. That quality of light that should be in the eyes has gone somewhere else.

This is not depression the way Western medicine defines it.

This is not a serotonin problem.

This is what happens to a woman who has been dismissed so many times she stopped expecting to be believed.

Who has been strong for so long she forgot what it feels like to receive.

Who learned so early that joy was a liability that she stopped letting it fully land.

The shen responds to safety.

WHY JOY FEELS DANGEROUS. AND WHY THAT IS PHYSIOLOGICALLY ACCURATE.

Here is the thing I want to be careful about saying, because it is true and it matters and it is not the whole story at the same time.

Black women are not suppressing joy because something is wrong with us.

We are suppressing joy because history showed us, in precise and repeated detail, what happened when the wrong people noticed what we had, what we built, what we loved, what we were proud of.

Researcher Cheryl Woods-Giscombé at the University of North Carolina gave this pattern a clinical name: the Superwoman Schema. She identified five obligations that Black women are socialized to embody across generations.

Among them:

• The obligation to manifest strength at all times.

• The obligation to suppress emotions.

• The deep resistance to being vulnerable or dependent.

She was documenting a survival system so precisely adapted to its environment that it had become invisible.

Just the water we swim in.

But survival systems carry costs.

A 2024 study published in Sleep Health tracked 405 Black women between 30 and 46 and found that the emotional suppression subscale of the Superwoman Schema specifically predicted poor sleep quality and daytime sleepiness.

That same year, another study found it associated with higher perceived stress and measurably worse cardiovascular health outcomes.

The body keeps the record of what the mind learned to hide.

And the body does not distinguish between hiding pain and hiding joy. It registers both as suppression.

Both as a signal that something in the environment requires containment.

Both as a reason to keep the nervous system on alert.

WHAT THE NERVOUS SYSTEM LEARNED

In 2024, a research team at the University of Wisconsin published something that reframed how I think about the phrase prenatal Qi.

They imaged the resting-state brain activity of newborns. Babies less than two weeks old. And the babies whose mothers had experienced more racial discrimination during pregnancy showed stronger connectivity in the brain regions associated with threat detection and sustained vigilance.

The alarm system was already coupled before the baby had a single experience of her own.

In Chinese medicine, prenatal Qi is the constitutional inheritance that arrives before your first breath. The energetic foundation everything else is built on. It comes through your mother, her mother, her mother before that. For generations of Black women, that inheritance has been built inside a body running a security protocol that never got to fully stop.

Researcher Arline Geronimus spent thirty years documenting what this does across a lifetime. Her weathering hypothesis established that the cumulative biological cost of navigating racism accelerates aging at the cellular level.

By 2010 she had measured it in telomere length, the cellular clock: Black women between 49 and 55 were biologically 7.5 years older than White women the same age.

Not older looking. (cause we know, Black don't crack)

Older at the level of the cell.

By midlife, more than half of Black women in her research showed high allostatic load, which is the measure of everything the body has absorbed and compensated for over a lifetime. By 64, more than 80 percent did.

The Kidney system in Chinese medicine is what holds our deepest reserves. Our hormonal regulation. Our sleep architecture. Our basic sense of safety in our own body.

And Kidney depletion, which is what I see clinically in woman after woman who walks through my door, is what happens when a system has been running on high alert for a very long time without enough restoration to match the output.

The weathering hypothesis does not surprise me.

The COST OF NOT LETTING YOURSELF FEEL GOOD

There is a 2021 brain imaging study from Emory University published in JAMA Psychiatry.

55 trauma-exposed Black women.

The researchers looked at what racial discrimination alone, separate from PTSD, did to the brain architecture governing threat response and emotion regulation.

It did something.

Three years later the same group published a finding that sits with me.

They found that racial discrimination was associated with stronger connectivity between the locus coeruleus, which is the brain's primary alarm node, the structure that floods the body with the signal that something dangerous is happening, and the region of the brain involved in sustained self-monitoring and vigilance.

And this connectivity pattern directly predicted accelerated epigenetic aging.

The alarm running on high is aging the body at the cellular level.

Not the alarm going off once.

The alarm as baseline.

The alarm as the thing that has been running so long it stopped feeling like a condition and started feeling like just personality.

Always half-ready. Never fully exhaling.

Calm that itself feels suspicious because calm has historically been followed by something being taken.

That hypervigilance is the body doing exactly what it was designed to do in conditions that were genuinely dangerous.

It was not a mistake. It was brilliant adaptation.

But adaptation has metabolic costs. And the body cannot run a security protocol indefinitely without pulling from something.

What it pulls from, over time, is the Kidney system.

The reserve. The deep well.

And when the Kidney goes thin, the Fire goes with it.

Because you cannot sustain genuine joy on a depleted foundation.

This is the part nobody names as a collective pattern.

We talk about it individually, why do I feel so flat, why do the good things not land the way they used to, why does something that should feel like a win pass through me like water through a cracked cup.

But it is not individual. It is the entirely predictable result of what happens when a nervous system has been running a security protocol for generations without enough restoration to match the output.

I closed my clinic last month. 7 years. And then I went to the beach — twice in one week — and I almost didn’t let myself count it. Almost moved past it the way I move past most things that feel like joy, efficiently and without ceremony, because the body learns what the history teaches.

What we built got stolen.

What we showed got exploited.

What we loved got used as leverage.

The silence around Black joy was never small-mindedness.

It was accurate threat assessment. The body remembers even when the mind has moved on.

But here is what the body also remembers again, that suppression has a cost.

The locus coeruleus does not know the difference between hiding pain and hiding joy. It only knows the alarm is still running. And an alarm that never gets to stop is an alarm that ages the body at the cellular level — that is not a metaphor, that is the 2024 JAMA Network Open finding.

The suppression is physiological.

And so is the cost.

The Fire element does not do well contained.

Joy that is always modulated, always kept just low enough that nobody gets uncomfortable, eventually stops arriving. Not dramatically.

Quietly.

I’m saying all this out loud so you can stop believing it is permanent.

So you can understand that a body that learned to suppress joy in order to stay safe is the same brilliant body that can unlearn, slowly and with the right support, that safety and joy are not opposites.

That grief and joy are not opposites either.

That both can be true in the same body on the same day.

Joy feels dangerous. Do it anyway.