Black men don't do therapy. Or so I thought.

In 10th grade, a Jewish child who had just been admitted to the high school I attended - a magnetic school created to combat racial segregation by admitting students from all over Los Angeles - showed up in my Japanese class. We were a group of Korean, Black, and Latino kids who had been drawn into the classroom by curiosity about Japanese culture, and the sudden presence of a white student in the middle of the semester piqued our interest. In skinny jeans and stylish glasses, he reminded me of Rivers Cuomo; we became friends quickly.

So I don't know why, when he and I were talking about the afternoon plans, his offhand mention that he was going to follow therapy pissed me off so much. Therapy? I had known him long enough to capture the details of his family life - two working parents and a younger sister living about a 20-minute drive north of my own family on a quiet street in the Miracle Mile neighborhood. What did a white child living this kind of life need with therapy?

Thinking back to that exchange, I'm embarrassed by my presumption, but also surprised at what it seemed to record. Some people really needed therapy, I realized, and didn't seek it; like my extended family, many of whom were haunted by drug addiction and the pain of gun violence. But seeking it in the first place felt like a stain, an admission of defeat.

My aversion to therapy was probably the result of a misunderstanding of what therapy is for. In my mind, it was a crutch for those whose spirits and hearts were broken, who had something fundamentally wrong with them. I can't say how I absorbed those thoughts, but somehow it was clear to me that someone's need for therapy was tied to my perception of their strength and integrity of his personality. I admired my parents, a couple of Latter-day Horatio Algers who grew up in South Los Angeles and Detroit during the height of the civil unrest of the 1960s and witnessed some of the most heinous, demoralizing and horrors in the history of this nation. My parents went through it all and came out the other side, hurt but proud. There was dignity in that, I felt, a quiet strength that you exerted by biting your tongue, as hard as you had to, even if you cut it.

Unfortunately, my inner life did not correspond to the relentlessness of my parents. I was a moody child, prone to fits of melancholy. My mom loves to clown me about how, at age 6, I would put an old Don McLean LP on her – the “American Pie” album – and put the needle down on “Vincent”, the mournful anthem of McLean to Vincent van Gogh Volatility. Sitting in a chair next to the record player, I played the song over and over and over, listening in tears. When my favorite TV characters died, I mourned them, remaining in my feelings for days at a time. When I became a teenager, I spent flat, sunny days in LA listening to Radiohead, trying to create a vibe closer to my baseline emotional state. Culture has become a prosthesis, a way to manage and explore my psychology. If I had no idea how to develop an intimate relationship with myself, art was an acceptable way to understand feelings.

In adulthood , this dissonance between how I was and how I wanted to be – or how I thought I should be – weighed on me. Things peaked in 2015. Mentally and emotionally drained after passing my qualifying exams while in grad school at Cal Berkeley, I returned all my books to the campus library and went to bed for a week. I ate Trader Joe's cookies and ate "Arrested Development" before returning home to Los Angeles, where I crawled into bed and ate Ben & Jerry's while rewatching "Mad Men" for a few more weeks. What at first looked like lust in success began to look like misery, a desperation that left me confused and embarrassed. Something about the process of studying for the exams had lowered a screen between me and the world. The obsessive analytical framework that had been a boon in one part of my life became a burden in all other respects. It was as if I had a vindictive second head on my shoulder, a lousy party guest whispering clever skepticism in my ear. The fear of failure that characterized my prep year deepened rather than dissipated.

I returned to Berkeley in the fall, the tongue between teeth, worried about what admitting my difficulties might mean for academic progress. It turned out that a few of my friends - mostly white women - had had similar difficulties and had started using college-approved therapists. When they t...