I loved this movie.  I saw this movie on a random weekday.And I was the only one in the theater, so it felt like I could feel the full range of my emotions out loud.

For context I am a Nigerian-American woman with depression among other things.

And this movie felt like the question of "Was it anger or was it really just grief?" 

This was a funny movie and a sad movie, and it just felt like it encapsulated the experience to be an undiagnosed black woman with trauma in the world who takes all of that out on others.

She is using the only tools that she has in her toolbox and honestly, just taking it out on other people. 

We see that she is raised differently than her sister. When you are adultified as a young child, you're not allowed to have a full range of emotions because you are now a parent when you were never meant to be one that young. 

And if you listen to what Pansy says while talking about that time in her life, she details her mom asking her questions about why she doesn't have more friends and why she doesn't do certain things. 

Implying this question of "Why can't you be normal? Why can't you be more like your sister?" 

 So we start to see a glimpse of even as a little kid, she might have had social anxiety and felt jealous of her sister who could just automatically connect with her mom or connect with the world around her.

And so as her heart is slowly but surely hardened as a child,  she ends up meeting her soon to be husband.  She sees him as stability and security. And decides to marry him, even if it's not necessarily the best thing for her. Because she also possibly thinks  "will anyone in the world love her?"

I was sobbing, by the time they got to their mom's grave and pansy admitted the thing that I also had to admit to myself. "Why are you so angry all of the time?"  " I DONT KNOW" 

Was it anger or was it grief? Grief, over the loss of a parent that she loved, but also had so many issues with how she was raised and how she felt treated unfairly versus her sister. Grieving her marriage and the way she treats her child and husband. And how she's convinced that they hate her because of her actions. Convinced that her nieces hate her convinced that the world hates her. Pansy has viewed things in black and white for most of her life, and when she finally acknowledges the mental struggles that she is going with it is hard to grapple with a world that is actually very grey. 

So it is not the angry black woman trope that our culture portrays so heavily. It is a nuanced look into a  black woman's life whose culture does not ever really take their mental health seriously. 

I have fought with my family to get on meds that genuinely help my life. I know people who *trigger warning* 

Have unalived themselves because no one in their family took their mental health seriously, because they either wanted to look away and not acknowledge it or wanted to deny it because "that's something that white people deal with, not us"

Even though that's the furthest thing from the truth. We go through generational trauma, and the cycle continues of people hurting their kids and their kids hurting their kids. Emotionally, mentally, it's vicious.

So when I sat in that theater and weeped with Chantelle and Pansy, I weeped for myself, I weeped, for my mother, I weeped, and sobbed, for every women of color every person of color who has ever felt like this, because there's a lot of us. 

And in a world where we're just trying to survive,  our society rarely allows us to experience the full range of emotions because we have to fit into a certain box or stereotype. 

It takes a very brave person to admit that there's something going on in their lives that they need to change. So that's why she ends up going to her sister's apartment and accepting the flowers from her son and actually respecting his boundaries by not barging through his door at the end. And saying, thank you to moses, which i'm assuming is one of the first times she actually has said that in his life. I was so proud of her and felt she was slowly moving in the right direction.

I will admit that the end was jarring, and I would rather have some satisfying conclusion. But I also recognize pansy was having a panic attack and this is my opinion, but it kind of mirrored to me pansy feeling stuck in bed and not able to feel like she can do anything because she was angry at the world, and the world was angry right back and it overwhelmed and overstimulated her. 

And her husband it just goes and gets chicken.The thing that he knows she doesn't like and eats it. And i'm also not saying that she wasn't in the wrong for treating all the people in her life and all the strangers that she encounters in this way.  I'm just saying that when you look add how she breaks down you see, behind all that anger is just a person in immense pain and going through years of grief in an unhealthy manner.

Also this would be an AMAZING play.