Dear community,
We have a special episode of Spread the light with Dr Devika B for you this month — with the wonderful
— who offers many important nuggets about how to foster healthy masculinity and emotional fluency from a young age to optimize both educational and health outcomes. #MillionMaskMovement💫 Spread the light with Dr Devika B. Conversations that dispel stigma and stereotypes and instead, spread hope and light — also on YouTube, Apple, Spotify
Because stigma festers in the dark and scatters in the light
About Ashanti Branch:
Ashanti Branch has over 20 years of experience in building healthy relationships in schools — he’s a pioneer in reforming education, youth mental health, and traditional masculinity. Ashanti is the Founder and Executive Director of the Ever Forward Club,* a non-profit organization that takes students who are disengaged and dropping out to 100% graduation rates, 90% college enrollment, and 0% incarceration, using tools like the Taking Off the Mask workshop. Ashanti has received the US Surgeon General’s Medallion for his work (2023; the highest honor a civilian can receive from the Surgeon General).
*Ever Forward Club just celebrated their 20th year and here are some photos of a 5K my son and I did (using a wagon) to raise funds for them.
Trigger warning: In this episode, we talk about systemic challenges inherent to working within the US public education system and youth mental health issues.
Above, you’ll find the audio and video recording of the podcast episode and below, a transcript. The written version of the conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length. If you’d prefer to watch this conversation on YouTube, please click here.
Click here to catch up on other Spread the light columns, in addition to other posts organized by column type, going back to our newsletter’s launch in January 2023.
If you or a loved one needs help for a mental health crisis, don’t hesitate to call or text 988 — or reach them online here. Find other resources here, search for a US treatment facility here, and find a US-based therapist here.
Wishing you light,
Dr Devika Bhushan
DB: Can you give us a picture of who you are and how you came to this work?
AB: So I was raised by a single mother, in Oakland, California. My Dad died three months before I was born. My grandfather — my Dad's father — died a week before my father died. So leading up to my birth, I lost both my grandfather and my father.
And my Mom, in her grieving and her worry and her 22-year-old college student self, she just began to stress and grieve and I picked up all of those chemicals of feelings.
I was a boy growing up in Oakland, California, and I felt everything in a society where men are not supposed to feel, and if you do feel, you better just not show it.
And I'm like, 'Wait a minute, you don't feel this sadness, fear, worry? You don't feel this stress, doubt? What's up with people around me not feeling this stuff, not feeling the hardship of friendships breaking apart?’ You're supposed to just get over it really quick.
And I felt so many things that I was often told, 'Suck it up; man up; boys don't cry; be a man, man…' And it wasn't always happening from adults. It was a lot of time happening from peers. That was the sauce that kind of created this boy growing up.
So elementary school, [I] got in a lot of trouble. Middle school, was following some of the same trouble — got bullied. High school, I finally got my act together.
A teacher in middle school really helped change my life… from my educational focus.
And then [I] went to college, graduated as an engineer, started making good money.
And then teaching called me. And I was like, 'Nope, you got the wrong house. You got the wrong civil servant. Because this guy wants to be rich and teachers can't be rich, as far as I know.' (My Mom was a teacher. So I knew that.)
There was no way that that was going to happen. So I ran from that job to make more money. So I was driving, say, an hour and a half each way. That's just on a regular day, just to fight and get away from this calling on my soul that you should be doing this teaching job.
I thought if I would drove further and made more money, it would make the feeling that you're doing the wrong job go away. And it actually made it worse. And so I said, 'Well, look — the Peace Corps — they go two years and they go back to their real life… I'll do that.'
So I was going to go teach for two years and then come back. And that was 20 plus years ago.
I guess it doesn't always happen the way you envision it. But I'm thankful. There were some hard times in that journey — like, my salary dropped 66%. I'm a math teacher. So I did the math. Probably shouldn't have, but I did.
And to imagine like when students would like mild off and say something like, 'Oh, you only here for this check!' And I could, with proof, go over to my desk because I still have the check stubs from engineering that I would look at once in a while, and I would show them: here's my teacher check stub, and here's my engineering check stub.
Now that's a little petty. Sometimes, for those mildy kids, you know, sometimes they just need to have proof. And sometimes it was because I was like, ‘How dare you think I'm here for the money they pay us here for this work?’
And I think sadly, they don't pay teachers a salary where you feel happy or proud about sometimes. I mean, maybe after you teach for 20 plus, 30 years, you move up this little scale and you finally have made it to some kind of salary, but it's nowhere measuring compared to professions that pay because those professions are seen as more important.
I want people to know that we can't expect that schools are going to continue — are going to work and get better — if we continue to pay teachers just enough to keep them from quitting.
And it was painful and it was sad at times, but I look back and I'm like, 'Okay, that was part of my journey.'
DB: That was definitely an important part of your journey. And it's so striking because we don't pay teachers enough to sustain the best talent, right? And it's exactly what you just alluded to: People say, 'Okay, I'm going to put in my service time. It's going to be two years. It's going to be five or 10 years.’
But nobody says, ‘I would love to be in this for my life because it's a way that I can support myself, support a family, support people that come next after me.’ And it is such a shame that we lose the best and the brightest in so many ways out of this profession where we really need you — you're going to be shaping our most impressionable young people — at such a critical time in their lives. And you're going to be spending day in and day out with them so many hours in a day — more than their parents, more than grandparents — more than anybody else. And to not value that is just despicable.
AB: And people who don't know, don't know, right? So you have to help educate people. Some people think that as a teacher, you get paid for summers.
You don't get paid for the summer. You get paid for the time you teaching. And if you're not careful, if you don't stretch your check out… if you don't do summer school, if you don't work in the summer, there is no money and that's two months.
And then on top of that, you don't get another check till after you've worked a month. So it's like you got to stretch three months out over the summer if you don't work.
So I think just as there's a lot of misunderstandings, and there's a lot of lack of empathy and understanding.
Like the fact that schools are so jacked up, teachers get a lot of the blame. They don't often blame the people making six figures in the offices wearing the suits who walk around the schools with film crews around them taking pictures of kneeling next to a kid saying ‘hi,’ right? Those people — they're not so worried, right?
And they are the ones who negotiate on behalf of the teachers in the classroom.
On top of that, schools look like they did a hundred years ago [and] we are surprised why most of them aren't working. I mean, what other industry do we know of that looks like it did a hundred years ago?
There's a teacher in the front of the room, there's students in rows, the teacher tells them some information. Two weeks later, the students tell the information back to the teacher, and then I grade you based on how well you memorized the stuff I told you over the last two weeks. And then we repeat the cycle over and over again.
And if you're bad at that process, then you must be a bad student. What? What other industry are we looking at that is still operating like it did 100 years ago?
And we wonder why it's not working. We should not be surprised. It's evident that it's not working. It's working exactly as good as it should, based on the times we were in.
Same thing with the battle over AI technology. There are people getting ahead in this AI race, and there are people getting further behind. There's plenty of schools saying, ‘You can't use it; you can't touch it; don't worry about it.’ And what's happening? The people who are learning it are going to be the next billionaires, trillionaires.
Why? Because they're figuring out what's possible.
We oftentimes just keep recycling these patterns, right? That’s how long it took some schools to finally get computers. When they finally got computers, their new technology was already out, right? They finally got these big boxes on every desk, right?
DB: Oh, I remember the big boxes. Definitely. It's so true. If schools aren't evolving and they're not keeping pace with what's happening externally — and really helping students thrive in the ways that suit them, right? Rote memorization as a model works for some kids, and it leaves a lot of other kids out and behind.
And we have to find ways to recruit, retain, inspire more of the kids. And so speaking of effective changes, can you tell us about the Million Mask movement? Where did that idea come from?
AB: So as a first-year teacher, when I started the Ever Forward Club, I wasn't trying to start a nonprofit.
I was trying to help some young men pass algebra. Fast forward 15 years, we get a feature in this documentary called The Mask You Live In. It came out in 2015.
In that documentary, when they asked to come film, I was at my alma mater, Fremont High School in Oakland. I was working with some young men.
I said, 'Well, you should probably go to our other club at this other school — those students, they're youth leaders — they're leading the clubs. I've been there for two years. The young men I'm right here with, they're not really taking over the leadership.’
And they're like, 'No, we want to see where you're at.' I said, 'Okay, well, just know you're not going to see young men opening up, deeply connecting. I'm battling just to get them to listen to each other sometimes, you know?'
They can't talk about their feelings without creating a fight… It's [out of] fear. If you believe that to let people see your true feelings is dangerous, then you're going to fight against that danger. And since I'm the person bringing this experience to them, they will fight against me.
So I said, 'What if they don't have to talk about it? What if they can just write it?' And so the first activity, I actually printed out masks.
I said, 'Write words on the front and write words on the back: the front of the things you let people see — the back of things you don't usually let people see, that are harder to let people see.'
And then we threw the papers at each other. We mixed them all up. And that's how the activity first began.
I'm still waiting to see what's going to happen because I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know if they wrote real stuff on it. Cause I had never tried this activity before.
And what ends up happening is they open these pieces of paper up and they start reading them. And man, that room dropped in. I mean, it dropped in, like I had never been able to drop them in.
And as you start reading them off, you were hearing similar words: fear, anger, worry.
That powerful deep connection of like, 'Oh, wow. It's somebody else in here is going through this. How is that possible?'
Everyone is always, on the outside, so cool. We don't realize that so many things are happening.
In the early days, I was just collecting the mask at the end of workshops. It felt like I couldn't throw [them] away. Like, I got one right here.
And so this one, the front of the mask: happy, smart, smart, outgoing, and caring.
And I'm gonna show you the back. You probably saw some of the back bleeding through the front — for a good reason. Cause look at the back. Oh my gosh, just so much anger, nothing else. Eighteen times.
I still get goosebumps when I think about it. How many of our young men are walking around smart, happy, cool, outgoing, and yet behind, they're carrying all this stuff that they don't let anybody see?
And it's coming out somewhere. It has no choice. Like, there's only so much you can store. All that stress and worry and anger before it either takes out your organs, it takes out your health, it takes out people you care about because it's energy in motion. That's what we tell our young men: Emotions are energy in motion.
Most of our young men — they turn everything into anger. They turn sadness into anger, they turn fear into anger, they turn doubt into anger, they turn embarrassment into anger.
Because the anger in our community is accepted.
It's safe. It's almost respected. You get angry enough — no one's going to mess with you. You get angry enough — no one's going to say nothing bad about you. You can command enough [respect with] people being worried, some fear of you.
I've been there.
What we try and help them see is that, man, there's so much [more].
So this was where it started, these pieces of paper. And then: the long story short, a teacher from some school called me and said, 'Hey, your activity is not safe.'
They were like, 'Well, the thing you did in the documentary.' And I was like, 'I didn't teach anybody how to do that. What do you mean? Are you telling me you did that activity with your students?' I've been working with these young men for months and we were in that room for an hour plus; you saw a five-minute clip and you tried to do it with students?
Thank goodness that teacher blamed me out loud, but how many teachers are blaming me in silence? And so I talked to some of my mentors and we decided we're going to have to give it away — figure out how to teach people how to do it the right way.
And so long story short, it became what is currently called the Million Mask Movement. We have a goal of engaging a million people around the world in this self-reflective tool.
And now it's a four by six card. It's that words on the front, words on the back of the mask. And it's been amazing. It is amazing wherever community I'm in. I was just in New York this past week doing some workshops with some high school students and some middle school students, and just watching them find ways to find those words and sometimes not even have a word.
One young man said, 'I don't know myself well enough yet to know what I don't show.'
DB: That's really insightful.
AB: Yeah, so powerful. He had a really soft voice, and part of me was like, 'I should tell him to yell,' and I didn't do it. He — his voice — has been blocked. But it was my first time meeting him. So I didn't want to push too hard. So I just told him, 'I see you brother. I just want to let you know, I see you. I had a hard time hearing you, but I see you and I hope that you can let yourself be heard more.'
And he heard it. He didn't say anything really back, but he heard what I said. And that's all I could do is just plant a seed. That you were seen today, right?
And how many people don't ever — either they don't believe it or they don't ever hear it — [know] they're seen? And I think that's so important.
DB: That is really powerful. And as you were thinking about how to operationalize the Million Mask Movement, what elements needed to be in place for it to feel like a safe experience for people? What does it entail from beginning to end besides the front and back of that mask?
AB: When we created the first activities that we gave out, we started telling teachers, 'Hey, there's a free tool. Sign up for this.' We had over 600 teachers sign up around the country to do the activity.
Once it leaves you, people are going to translate it to mean what they want it to mean. As a former teacher, I've made lots of curriculum. I've helped people create curriculum. This is what I think I'm somewhat good at: is helping create experiences.
So we try to be as thorough as we could. One of my mentors was like, ‘Ashanti, you got to decide: do you want to make an impact or do you want to make money?’
And I was like, 'Can I have both, please?' He's like, 'Well, yeah, but if you know that this activity got to get out, you can't put a money barrier because you know how schools are; they have no money, really. They barely are operating in themselves.' And so we want to make an impact.
So I first, ask this question: how much time do you have? Really trying to make it so teachers would use it the most healthy way and not make it unsafe, right?
It's supposed to be anonymous for a reason. It's anonymous because we want students to be able to have their paper out there and no one knows it's them. But even if you tell somebody is anonymous, they may not still believe it. So they may still be hesitant about what they would write on the paper.
And so we gave them the steps: Ask your class what they understand about the concept of wearing an emotional mask.
And so it was really giving teachers a step-by-step guide to how to make that space. And if you're a teacher who is afraid of doing your own work, it's going to be hard. Because if you haven't yet [been] willing to look at your own mask, and I'm just telling you to do this as an activity, I'm trying to make it a grade for you.
You're trying to build connection. So it can't be connected to a grade. So I'm going to trust that you're going to give your best.
I don't care about what you draw — whatever you feel comfortable drawing. I don't want people to get into their head that, 'Oh, I have to have a perfect drawing,' or 'I can't draw like these people.'
And it becomes a trying to get people to say, 'Oh, this is me. This is me as best as I can demonstrate on this piece of paper. This is me.'
We've learned a lot over the years of how we grow the movement. In 2019, we got a grant from LinkedIn, a Compassion Award. It gave us enough money to build the first prototype of the website.
We put it online so the teachers didn't have to worry about mailing anything back to us. But a lot of teachers wanted the tactile. They wanted the touch of the hand.
Then 2020 came and it was like, 'Oh boy, they have to do it this way because everyone is remote learning. That's when the website took off. And it was so helpful during that time that teachers could use it with their students — figure out what was going on with their students in a really safe, anonymous way and really begin having healthy conversations with students about those masks.
DB: It's so interesting to hear about all of the different elements that went into this journey. What is the youngest you think that a kid might be able to experience this and really understand and use it?
AB: We know in elementary school, around fifth grade, is probably a good age.
We've done workshops with fourth graders. They get it, too.
If they're too young, they're not yet used to being metacognitive. They're not used to thinking about their thinking.
So when you ask them, 'What is it you don't show?' the younger they are, [they say]: 'I don't let people see my socks. I don't let people see my feet. I don't let people see my underwear.’ They're very literal.
DB: They may also not be in that place of intentionally shielding parts of themselves. So my almost three-year-old, right? There is no level of artifice. What he's feeling is what he's going to be displaying and whatever it is, is fully there in the present moment.
And at some point we lose that. We begin to build up these walls — like you’re saying, it's somewhere in that elementary school zone. It's very interesting to hear about these examples of socks, feet, underwear. That's very cute.
AB: And imagine that the age is also depends on what type of school they're in.
Is it a school that's very caring and nurturing, or is it a school where there's a lot of like, 'I have to put on an edge,' because it's not safe to be too nice and too kind? And you start learning that early. I was at an elementary school, they were doing a documentary screening for parents of a second grader.
At the end, a second grade parent, she says, you know, 'I have a question about just how do I help my son? I don't want him to be treated badly. Like I don't want him to become a bully. And I also don't want him to be a victim, right? So how do I help him learn?’
She's a second grade parent. So those are boys about seven.
He was having lunch with his best friend. They're just sharing lunch. And some bigger boy said, 'Oh, you two are gay.' And this second grader didn't even know what that meant.
So he came home that day, asks his mom, 'Mom, what is gay?' And she's like, 'Huh? What's going on here? What are you talking about?' And he told her the story, what happened. And she felt this pressure — how do I let him continue having a best friend where they're so kind and caring with each other, and then worry about what the bigger boys or the playground are going to say and do? Because he doesn't fit the mold of what these other boys [expect]... and who told this bigger boy that that is not okay? Where did he get that language from? He's beginning to box those boys into a system that he has been told that is not okay.
And imagine how often that happens. Something happens with other kids on the playground: 'Oh, wait, I can't sit close to my friend. I can't. I don't want the other boys to treat me like this.'
There's a Belgian film called Close. It was nominated for a Oscar. And it was about these two boys. They left middle school, best friends, — they pretty much spent the whole summer together. They go to high school. And now the pressure to fit into the high school. And one of the friends joined the ice hockey team. One of them didn't.
And man, it just began that pressure of them separating from each other, that friendship that was so close, then it had to get ripped apart.
And for some, it's so hard to accept it and to understand it. ‘How did I just lose my best friend? Did I change? Did they change?’
How do we help young people have those feelings that they handle them in a delicate way — [that] they don't try and ignore them? And I think parents, teachers, adults in our lives, have a responsibility to really channel back. ‘What was it like to be 12 and to lose a friend?’
But if you've erased your childhood memories, you tell him, 'Just get over it,' like it was that easy. And I think that's what sometimes gets missed.
DB: Yeah, how huge those moments are the first time it's ever happened and it means everything because it's your sense of self and your identity. So how many to the way of 1 million are we so far?
AB: We're at over 80,000. The original campaign came out as the 100,000 Masks challenge. So we were like, 'Okay, we're going to get there fast.' So we started getting close and we rebranded it as the Million Mask Movement. So it's almost like we took the goalposts and moved it 10 times further away.
I started with a group of young men at Fremont High School in Oakland, California, making these masks. Something told me to hold on to them. It didn't start with this big strategy. It was like, 'I can't throw these away.' Like this one, this wrinkled one, this is from 2004. I think this is 10 years old.
I didn't start this as a researcher. I started this as a practitioner working with young people. And so we're gonna put out our first research paper. It's the tale of two schools. We're looking at this private school and this public school: sophomore boys and how their masks showed up, how they looked. And, people would think that public school and private school — they're so different.
Like, these kids have all these resources and these kids have no resources. And you may think that their masks look different, but there's amazing similarities between just what they don't talk about; what they do. We're super excited to put that out.
DB: One question that I think always comes up around all of this is: what if you learn anonymously that somebody is struggling with thoughts of suicide, or somebody is really struggling with aggression that might burst out in some real way in the real world? How do you help with that?
AB: You know, normally we don't know until we get back to the office with all the cards. If, when we do an activity in a workshop and we, you know, bring some volunteers up and they read off some cards randomly, those students get to read what words they want to read. If I got a card that says something really harsh on it, I may not feel comfortable reading, so I may read one of the easier words. So we don't know when we do a live workshop. It has happened a couple of times.
Because it's anonymous, we first see how students are going to respond to it. Like, did a student notice that word that showed up? Because I don't want to bring undue, unnecessary attention to it, but I'm listening to all the words that are read out.
And so, let's say someone does mention thoughts of suicide. Once the students read off cards, we say, 'What did you hear? What did you notice? What are you feeling?'
And either someone would bring it up or someone won't bring it up. And I'll say, 'Well, maybe someone noticed that there was a word there that was pretty hard to hear. Did anybody hear that word?' And people will raise their hand.
They heard it, but no one pointed out. And I say, 'you know, we don't know who that card belongs to. We made this anonymous for a reason.'
And what I think happens in that moment — a couple of things happened. They saw that the reaction wasn't like, people laughed. I don't know who wrote it because it's anonymous for that reason, and it gives the room and the freedom for me as a practitioner, but also for the school to say, now that you are aware that this is here, it is important that you begin to do some kind of learning, some kind of poster campaign, some kind of experiential opportunities for students to come to safe places.
Because guess what? If I don't think people can handle it, maybe the only time I've ever been able to write it was when I got to write it anonymous and throw that piece of paper away. Now I've wrote it.
Thank goodness they mixed them up with all the other cards, because the students are seeing us collect them all. They're like, 'Okay, it's out of my hands.' And they're wondering what's gonna happen next. And so, if we do come back to the office and we do start seeing some of those words, and we just type the words out — we send an email to the teacher or the school and say, 'Hey, we just want to let you know some of these things came up. And we want to support you to do the next steps.'
Sometimes I find schools are action-oriented to do it. And some are not. The tricky part is, I get really frustrated when they're not, when they're not taking it serious to take next steps to do something.
It's easy to be like, 'If it's anonymous, then I don't know who it belongs to. So there, I can't do anything.' That's a easy out if you were looking for an excuse. If you don't want to really do something, any excuse will do. ‘We're not going to go ask every student, no, you don't have to do all that.’
How about you make sure that students know, here's where you go if you need some support. Where are the posts around campus that tell students who are struggling? So who they can call, who they can go to, what room in the school they can go to anonymously and what are the ways that they can get the support without you having to figure out who it is?
Now, when we were in the virtual world, we had a student who changed their name on the computer. It was Zoom time. Changed their name — wrote a really heartfelt statement about what they were thinking about doing, and then changed their name back. So by the time the message got to the box and people noticed it, that person had changed their name back already.
It was wild. It was in middle school. It happened so fast, and I was like, 'Okay. All right. Everyone take a breath.' Everyone's taking a breath because somebody in the comment was like, 'Why would somebody write that?' We didn't know if it was somebody being a jokester or somebody just need[ing] to see how the room was going to respond.
Some kids said, 'Hey, you're not alone.' And we had another meeting with the school, and we actually found out the student actually told one of his teachers that it was him.
And so I think what happens is sometimes people are wondering who can they tell these things that they're battling with and wonder how not to make it worse. I mean, I think people want to have those deep relationships, those deep connections. But if you don't trust that people can handle it, then we keep it to ourself.
If you live in a home where secrets are the norm: 'Don't talk about what happens in this house.' [How] do I talk about the stuff that I'm going through if I can't talk about it? Therefore, I get good at just performing what I need to perform so that everyone is good around me.
Maybe I'm taking care of my parents. Maybe I'm looking out for their needs so much that I don't think they have time to deal with my needs. And so therefore I operate like that. And I think those are the ways that so often, we miss the opportunity.
Because me growing up, I was the oldest. Always working, helping take care of my siblings. So a lot of stuff that I was dealing with, I didn't talk to my Mom about it. I just kept it to myself. Not that I didn't think she loved me. I believe she did, but I was like, 'She ain't got time. She ain't got energy. She got to take care of the littlest ones.’
And so I'm always trying to look out for others. And so therefore, some of those needs went unmet. Not because I don't think somebody could have helped, but because I had made the decision, or I felt the need to make the decision for the adults in my life.
DB: And what you're doing here is you're really making space for people to have their needs, their emotional needs, at least be heard and feel like there is a space for that. And that's a big, big thing.
AB: It's been beautiful. What I hear from students when they do a reflection is that I didn't realize that so many people here were going through the same thing. 'I'm so glad to know that I'm not alone.'
I wish I knew who that these cards belong to so I could go and talk to them and, you know, listen to them. The depth of how students understand this has been so beautiful. And I think just this awareness that we sometimes get judged from what we see on the outside, right?
People judge us from what they see. But there's so much more to me than you can see. That's one of the taglines of the movement, right?
DB: Yeah, there's so much more to me than you can see! So with that in mind, what is a mental health myth out there that you want to settle the score on?
AB: Beautiful question. Well, I was just talking about how my community handles it, that to have worries and thoughts that people can't name doesn't make anything wrong with you. That as humans, we feel.
And if your feelings have been twisted around because you have been having to not fully be able to feel them, you may not be able to explain them.
So when I ask you, 'What's going on with you?' And I'm like, 'I don't know. I can't explain it,' it doesn't mean nothing's going on with me. It means, I don't have the words. And I think sometimes think people think that if something's going on with you, you should be able to explain it. And I think we have to take a break and take a moment of just quiet and calm and say, 'Actually, I don't know what I'm feeling.'
And when we rush people to try and come up with a description of the feeling that is hard to name, it's not fair to make a person who never got a chance to talk about how they feel, to now want to come up with it right away and then blame them for not being able to do it.
I think the myth is that because you're feeling odd or you're feeling some type of way, that you should be able to explain it clearly to somebody who asked you how you're feeling. I think we have a society that has told us not to show a lot of feelings.
And so we need to give each other time and say, 'Okay, well, you know, like, I'm not a therapist in that way, but I am a person who listens.' And so when somebody is coming to me, a young person and they're like, 'Man, I don't know how to say it.' I'm like, 'Oh, take a breath. Let's just slow it down. Don't be in a hurry to tell me what it is.'
And I'll just name off some emotions for them to think about. ‘Like, are you sad? Are you worried? Are you afraid?’ And a lot of people have very limited emotional knowledge, or at least, how many emotions can they list? And if you're going to list five emotions, then it's going to be really hard to explain.
'I'm not angry. I'm not feeling... no, I'm not angry. I'm not sad.' Then you're like, what word is in there? There's a word out there for it.
And so I think that's one of the myths is that we should be able to explain always at the drop of a dime when someone is asking us when we're feeling something.
And I think the other side of that is we need to be giving more emotional education to young people. They should be able to list 15, 20, 30 emotions. Now is that a vocabulary lesson or is it a human lesson? Well, sometimes people think, 'Well, if it doesn't fit in the curriculum, then we can't do it.'
Well, that's part of the problem. That's why the curriculum ain't working. Cause you got kids walking around feeling all these things they can't talk about.
And you're wondering how you're going to make it an assignment, right? And so I think our schools continue to sometimes perpetuate these things.
DB: You're essentially saying the most important thing that young people need to understand and learn is really a set of deeply layered skills. Like you have to name the emotion. You have to have enough vocabulary and enough ability and practice to do that with yourself.
And then building on top of that, what do you need from another person to help you feel differently in that moment? Emotional fluency, or just emotional awareness, right? Around yourself and other people. And then what makes things better for you or worse?
AB: That's right — absolutely; it's huge.
DB: One final question, which is: What do you hope to see for us for our future?
AB: You know, I'm a big feeler. So my hope is that we find more ways to love. I just think we — our communities, our world — is lacking so much love.
And I think maybe that we're not lacking the love; we're just showing so much of hate, you know what I'm saying? I think the love is in there. I think we've let hate take over the voices of the loudest speakers. And it is devastating our youth in ways that we are gonna keep finding out later.
And we wonder why our communities are ravaged by young people who don't seem to care. But I think the young people are going to help us figure it out. I hope that our communities will continue taking care of our schools. I hope we will make it a priority — talking about our feelings in healthy and safe ways.
I hope for our world that people take that journey from the head to the heart. The longest distance most people travel is the 18 inches between their head and their heart. But most people get stuck in their heads. And so we invite people to just take that journey down to our heart.
And I think if we stay up in here, we can find all the things wrong with other people out there. We can keep pointing fingers, but when we come into our hearts, we're like, 'Man, what is that person dealing with? What are they going through?'
And so I just hope we can find more love. I think we need it.
Ashanti Branch on taking off the mask and redefining healthy masculinity