My name is Susan L. Taylor. I'm 63, and I am the founder and CEO of the National CARES Mentoring Movement and Editor in Chief Emeritus of Essence Magazine.

As a child, they always said you're gonna come to a bad end, and I was like why would you ever say that to a child. I've heard that … I heard that from the time I was a tiny girl. You're gonna come to a bad end, just like … baby Rhoda. I heard it all the time.

My mother was really depressed all of my life. And I thought that a lot of it had to do with me. And so one day my uncle straightened me out … the one male of my grandmother's six children. He said, Susan it's not you, Bab has been depressed since she was a little child, so don't take it personally. And that was clarifying, and also liberating.

But there were something that I did that relieved me of the pain that I really would have held, feeling that my mother and father didn't like me. Not love me, but like me. And it was investigating their own lives. Going back to St. Kits where my father was from, going to Trinidad where my mother was from. Speaking to family members trying to understand their issues. And once I began to understand their issues, I realize as I always say … hurt people hurt people. They were hurting. Both of them were depressed, and that's what they brought to their union, and to their household.

My sadness and depression grew out of a hormonal shift through menopause and giving myself to my career before I would give myself to myself. I would leap out of the bed into the newspapers, into manuscripts, not gonna skip a beat for Essence. Everything for Essence. Me? I'm not even on the schedule.

Not going to the gym, not working out, not meditating, not doing anything for me. Just giving myself totally away. And I began spiraling downward, downward, downward and further and further into a depression that I couldn't pull myself out of.

But my memory issues were really frightening to me … frightening to me. I didn't have hormonal shifts, I didn't have PMS. But through menopause, I couldn't explain it. I didn't want to be married anymore. I couldn't remember … I know I've worked with you for ten years … what the hell is your name? I just couldn't call it up. And I felt like everything that was coming out of my mouth was incorrect. It was wrong.

And then I am out there speaking in front of thousands of people, with a smile pasted on my face, but dying on the inside, you know? And so, I went and sought help for the memory issue, and everything just began to unfold.

And then I was like, oh now you need to leave the magazine, you need to really shut yourself down and shut yourself away. And you know, it really taught me this – that whatever you believe about yourself becomes true. And this is what I was thinking about all the time. So that was all I could see … what I was not. And that I was losing my way, and that I couldn't remember anything, and that just magnified itself.

It was very confusing, I think, for my husband Kafra, when I started, you know, going through menopause and was feeling depressed, and my memory issues, because I didn't want to be married anymore and I couldn't tell him why. And he was like what did I do, you know, what's going on? And I think up until that period of time, I was just really very very steady, very steady, but he's just, he's really an amazing man who demands very little. Nothing really, just that I love him. And I do.

You know, and I think that being able to talk about it is so liberating. Hiding sadness makes you more and more sad because it closes you off, you know. It closes you off from your healing. Giving voice to what you are feeling is part of the healing, you know.

You know, our challenge I think for all of us is really self care. For every … if you need medication, take it, you know. If it's a spiritual practice, if it's getting to the gym, if it's, you know, saying mantras, whatever it takes to know your joy. And it's available to all of us, you know.

And if I didn't work out, if I don't meditate, if I don't know the books to pick up and the readings that I have to do, the world begins to depress me. The things that are going on in my family, you know, that would way heavily on my shoulders. No matter what's happening in my family, it doesn't affect me anymore.

We're dying. And the most revolutionary thing and healing thing that Black people can do right now is to love one another. But that love, as my mother would say, charity begins at home. And that's what we have to practice. We haven't grown up taking care of ourselves. Nobody said that to Black men and Black women – you must take good care of yourselves. Not people of my generation.