The Next Pandemic
The War From Within and the Disproportionate Mental Health Toll on Black Women
Girlies. Honeyeees. DreamGirlies. Fellas too.
We keep looking for the next invisible virus, but the real mass-casualty event is already here. It isn’t a contagion spread by coughs, but by coded language, a rhetorical plague infecting our national spirit. And for the first time in modern history, the broken-boy-commander-in-chief is acting as the carrier.
This isn’t just politics; it is a declaration of domestic war. When a national leader names American citizens, your neighbors, your friends, the very residents of our inner cities, as “animals” and “vicious people” who need to be “straightened out” by the military, the emotional fallout from that rhetoric becomes a public-health crisis. The next pandemic isn’t coming; it’s already waging war on our mental health.
The psychic wounds of this “War From Within” do not fall equally. While the tension touches everyone, the primary casualties are those who have always been defined as the enemy. For Black women and men in America, this political rhetoric isn’t new; it’s merely an amplified version of our lived reality, broadcast from the highest office.
We talk about recovery from economic downturns, but for Black women, recovery is a myth layered over trauma. Unemployment, underemployment, the endless weight of being both breadwinner and emotional anchor, and the daily exhaustion of code-switching and deflecting microaggressions each compounds into crisis.
This mental-health pandemic is driven by systemic stress, not personal failing.
When a national “leader” calls inner-city residents “animals,” he isn’t just hurling an insult; he’s authorizing indifference to Black pain. The result is perpetual hypervigilance, the brain wired to stay on guard. This is how systemic racism translates into anxiety, depression, and burnout. Your lack of peace is not a weakness; it’s a tactical outcome of the war being waged against you.
The war on humanity is never just economic; it is spiritual. The pain is magnified when political violence comes wrapped in the flag and the Bible.
This emotional manipulation of faith, fueled by white Christian nationalism, is an especially cruel weapon in the mental-health pandemic. When the words of GOD are twisted to justify exclusion, they inflict moral and psychological injury. It forces believers to wrestle with impossible questions: Is my identity inherently sinful? Is the divine order built on my oppression? That tension between faith and reality becomes a wound of its own.
Meanwhile, the rhetoric of “quelling civil disturbances” and militarizing domestic life is psychological warfare. It is designed to traumatize citizens into silence. The message is clear: resistance will be met with force. What’s sold as order is, in truth, a siege on the soul.
When the powerful declare a “War from Within,” the most radical act is refusing to be collateral damage. Our minds become the battlefield, and protecting our peace becomes rebellion.
Self-care is political. The trauma wants you isolated, exhausted, and silent. Your defiance lives in the small daily acts that push back: reaching out when isolation calls, choosing joy over doom-scrolling, holding fast to truth when the world feeds you lies.
The war from within doesn’t win unless we surrender our capacity for care. We resist by building stronger communities, by honoring the burden Black women carry, by amplifying their voices, by dismantling the systems that demand their suffering.
The next pandemic will not defeat us if we declare our own counter-war—a campaign of radical love, stubborn hope, and the untamed joy of being defiantly human.
Guard your peace. It is the greatest weapon we have.
Selah.
The world may wage war on your body, your joy, your sanity, but meaning will not die here.
We are the survivors of every silence meant to erase us.
Guard your peace like gospel. Protect your joy like scripture.
With defiance and faith,
Ms. Maine
Girl, Why|Girl, Yes —YESD Confidence.
There is truth in what you wrote about exhaustion and coded language, it’s real. The danger is letting that language define the borders of our strength.
The Law of Reclaimed Language says we cannot afford to speak in terms of what is done to us. The language of blame becomes a refuge, not a weapon.
When we start saying “We practice systemic integration” instead of “We suffer systemic racism,” we flip the script. Victims point to causes. Builders create conditions.
That shift right there is where sovereignty begins.
I've never been this mentally exhausted. It feels like we're all working towards something, but also carrying the anxiety of thinking things can change instantly. The Pandemic has taught us this: one minute, we're all sympathetic and understanding to one another, and the next, hell breaks loose, and you're back at square one.