Enjoyment Is Mine: Why Black Women Need More Than Survival

"Your word of the day is enjoyment." Enjoyment is mine.

There has always been a subtle cloud of guilt that followed me whenever I allowed myself to experience enjoyment; a guilt that came from my lived experience as a London-born, working-class British-Nigerian girl, now woman, who grew up in Hackney. Looking back, I can see how deeply that guilt shaped my relationship with pleasure, rest and happiness. It convinced me that enjoyment was something to be experienced cautiously, something to be rationed, something that should never take precedence over responsibility. The strange thing is that I knew what enjoyment looked like. I grew up surrounded by it.

I can still hear the soundtrack of my childhood; Queen Salawa Abeni on a Saturday morning, Sir Shina Peters filling the house with energy, Bob Marley and Jim Reeves drifting through the speakers. My father's eclectic music choices that made perfect sense to him and less sense to me. There were hall parties and house parties where everybody arrived in their finest clothes, ready to dance until the early hours of the morning. There was the excitement of dancing competitions, the smell of fried rice hidden away in coolers, the taste of Supermalt and Babycham and the joy of being handed a crisp £5 note by an auntie or uncle before immediately being told to give it to my mother for safekeeping. There were Nollywood films playing in the background, Eddie Murphy making us laugh, freshly fried plantain, stolen pieces of meat from a pot of stew and the simple comfort of being surrounded by people who knew how to find joy even when life was not always easy.

The enjoyment of those moments was real. It still feels real when I think about them now. What I did not realise at the time was that there was a difference between experiencing enjoyment and believing that you were entitled to it. Enjoyment existed all around me, but actively pursuing it for myself was another matter entirely. There was an unspoken understanding that enjoyment was acceptable as long as it came after the work had been done, after everybody had been looked after and after your responsibilities had been fulfilled. Enjoyment was something to be fitted around service.

As the eldest child, as a Black woman and as somebody raised in a family and community where collective responsibility mattered, I absorbed the idea that my role was to contribute. I was expected to share, support, help and give. None of those things are inherently negative. In fact, many of the values I hold most dearly come from those lessons however the problem is that when your identity becomes too closely tied to service, you can begin to see your own needs as secondary. You start to believe that pleasure must always be justified and that enjoyment for its own sake is somehow selfish.

I think many Black women will recognise this feeling. We are often celebrated for our resilience, our work ethic and our ability to carry extraordinary burdens. We are praised for showing up, holding things together and keeping going when circumstances would cause others to fall apart. Yet there is far less discussion about our right to enjoy ourselves. The narrative surrounding Black women is frequently built around endurance and what we’re rarely encouraged to do is centre our own pleasure and happiness without attaching a condition to it.

This matters because survival and enjoyment are not the same thing. Too often, Black women are taught to view joy as something that comes after the struggle ends. The problem is that the struggle never fully ends. There will always be another responsibility, another challenge, another expectation and another demand on our time and energy. If enjoyment is always postponed until everything else is taken care of, it risks becoming something we never fully allow ourselves to experience.

At some point, something shifted for me. I cannot pinpoint exactly when it happened. Perhaps it came with age or it came through faith. Perhaps it came from reaching a stage in my life where I was no longer willing to accept narratives that required me to minimise myself. What I do know is that I began to question why enjoyment had to be earned in the first place. Why was I so willing to encourage other people to pursue happiness while placing limits on my own? Why did I find it easier to celebrate other people's joy than fully embrace my own?

The answer, I suspect, lies in the stories many of us have inherited about what it means to be a "good" woman. Good women are selfless. Good women put everybody else first. Good women sacrifice. Good women give. Yet very few people stop to ask what happens when a woman spends so much time serving others that she forgets she is worthy of care too.

The older I get, the more I reject the idea that enjoyment is a reward for exhaustion. I enjoy brunches with friends, reading books, travelling, watching reality television, eating different foods at fabulous restaurant. I enjoy my plants. I enjoy laughter. I enjoy silence. I enjoy money. I enjoy all of those things and more. What has changed is not the enjoyment itself. What has changed is my willingness to embrace it without apology.

As somebody who works in personal branding and communications, I often talk about visibility. We spend so much time discussing how Black women can be seen, heard and recognised in professional spaces. Those conversations are important but I increasingly think we need to expand them. Visibility should not only be about our achievements, our expertise or our ability to overcome adversity. It should also include our humanity. It should include our capacity for pleasure, rest, softness and joy. If people only ever see us through the lens of struggle, they never truly see us at all.

That is why I have come to view enjoyment differently. My enjoyment is not a distraction from my purpose. It is not evidence that I have become less ambitious or less committed to my work. It is a declaration that my life is not solely defined by what I can produce, contribute or endure. It is a reminder that I deserve to experience the fullness of life, not merely survive it.

For Black women in particular, I think there is something quietly radical about that idea. In a world that often expects us to carry more than our fair share, enjoyment becomes more than a feeling. It becomes a decision. A decision to embrace pleasure without guilt. A decision to reject the notion that struggle is our natural state. A decision to believe that joy belongs to us too.

And so I return to where I started.

Your word of the day is enjoyment.

Enjoyment is mine.