Epilogue

“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

“Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.”

“There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.”

Nelson Mandela’s words and his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom (Mandela, 1995) remind us that true freedom and leaning into the role we have chosen is both a personal and collective (relational) responsibility.

He also reflects on the power of focusing on our personal growth, which inspires self-awareness and activism.

Nelson Mandela’s powerful words set the stage for me in thinking about you and what I would want to say to bring a close to this inaugural journal issue entitled: We Are Human first, Black Psychoanalysts Write. In my mind, we are beginning a journey of learning and gaining new understandings of what it is like to be and to practice not only as a psychoanalyst who is Black, but as any healer or clinician in mental health who is Black, living in uncertain, racially and culturally turbulent, and often chaotic times. Nelson Mandela’s life story helps me to want to remember and to ground myself in truth-telling and hope.

Imprisoned 27 years, Nelson Mandela began and evolved as a freedom fighter, as a global inspiration of perseverance and hope for all human life, despite the ongoing/enduring turbulence and trauma in his own life. An activist, he began as courageous and also as an outraged and outspoken rebel, defying South African history of colonialism and apartheid, “a system of racial segregation that privileged Whites;” he stood and fought initially quite militantly with the goal of crashing and burning down to the ground and through the South African government’s systemic apartheid hold on Black Africans.

Although he became the first Black president of South Africa, it was over the course of those 27 years in prison tha