Keeping the Mind Alive
Updated: Sep 3
Because Sometimes It Only Takes a Minute
I am interested in what people do to keep their minds alive when formal mental health systems do not see them, cannot reach them, or were never built with their lives in mind.
I question what counts as mental health knowledge in societies that have spent generations enslaving, controlling, and extracting from Black people while rarely treating our inner lives as equally worthy of care.
Research priorities are human decisions. What gets funded, studied, published, and taught reflects what human beings have decided is important. If something has not been studied, that may reveal a gap. It does not prove that the question—or the practice—does not matter.
What I Have Used
I am not offering treatment. I am sharing what I have used: gratitude as a tonic, talking therapy, books, repetition, creativity, games, and the small distractions that took enough weight off my mind to help me reach the next minute.
I was practising some of these things long before I had academic language for them. I had read many theorists, and Freud affected me for reasons I was still trying to understand. I loved The Secret. When the film came out, I played it repeatedly. Listening to it distracted me from listening to my own head. At that time, that distraction helped keep me healthy.
I am not presenting my experience as a prescription. I am saying that it happened. It belongs to the story of how I kept myself going.
These experiences helped lead me to university, even when friends and family did not think I needed to go. Society responds to credentials. Saying that I was an entertainer or a stripper did not muster support, at least not in traditional ways.
University did not create the knowledge. Credentials made some people more willing to listen to it.
One Minute Is Not Nothing
A word game will not remove racism, grief, debt, loneliness, or despair. I am not claiming that it will.
But getting your mind off your problems can lessen their weight for a minute. That minute can be vital. Minutes multiplied, I believe, save lives.
This is why the games on Grandma Knows Best need to be actual games. People cannot play if I solve the puzzle for them. The art is in the tease: enough curiosity to move the mind, with enough space for the person to make the next move.
The game offers no diagnosis and promises no cure. It offers a pause.
Research can sit beside this lived knowledge without taking ownership of it. A 2023 paper reporting five studies on rumination, distraction, and gratitude found that both distraction and gratitude reduced negative feelings compared with dwelling on a problem, while gratitude also promoted positive feelings. That doesn't prove a word game is therapy. It helps explain why briefly directing the mind somewhere else may matter.
Where This Meets Existing Knowledge
What I am reaching toward has connections to existing traditions, but I am not simply repeating something already packaged.
The psychology of radical healing moves beyond individual coping with racial trauma. It centres collectivism, critical consciousness, radical hope, strength and resistance, and cultural authenticity and self-knowledge—connecting healing to liberation and community rather than asking individuals to adjust quietly to oppression.
Research on Black women’s mental health also acknowledges a serious gap: scholars report that it has rarely received sufficient attention across several relevant fields, and they call for work that recognizes gendered racial oppression and examines forms of resilience and resistance that may protect mental health.
These traditions tell me I am not alone in the questions I am asking. They do not tell me that every part of what I am building has already been studied. There may still be something to investigate in the connection between brief games, curiosity, gratitude, cultural knowledge, lived survival, and moments of mental respite. I will not claim that nobody has done it. I will keep looking, asking, and sharing what I find.
What Grandma Knows Best Is Becoming
Grandma Knows Best is becoming a place where lived knowledge meets research. We can find what has already been studied, identify what remains unasked, and share what people have learned through surviving—without pretending that credentials created the knowledge.
I want this work led by love, gratitude, forgiveness, patience, intention, and responsibility.
I did not begin with a plan, and I do not need to pretend I know the final destination. I do not need the site to make me rich. I need it to make enough to keep serving.
Because sometimes it only takes a minute.
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