Crack the Shell, Drain the Soul: On Stanleys, Coconut Water & the Quiet Cost of Black Womanhood
A personal reflection on quiet compliance, emotional labor, and the unseen cost many women carry.
It was a small moment. The kind that would be easy to brush off. I was at my daughter’s dance convention when the security guard stopped me.
“No outside drinks,” he said.
I looked down at the rectangular carton of coconut water in my hand, something simple to stay hydrated.
He pointed. “You can bring drinks in Stanleys or similar cups, but not those.”
I didn’t argue. I turned around, tucked the coconut water into the car, and came back in with my Stanley cup. A small adjustment. No big deal.
But then the guard returned. “Can I share something with you?” He leaned in. “I’ve stopped over 50 people today. When it’s people of color, Black women especially, they just listen. They comply. But when I tell white people, they ignore me. Some curse me out. One woman looked me dead in the face and said, ‘I’m bringing it in anyway.’”
Then he asked, “Why do you think that is?”
And something in me went still.
I wasn’t upset he enforced the rule. What left me tired was that he chose me, a Black woman in a quiet moment with her daughter, to process his discomfort about white resistance. And the part I didn’t process until later? I never considered pushing back. I just complied.
Automatically. Because I already knew the cost.
If I had looked him in the eye and said, “I’m bringing it in anyway,” would it have been the same story? Or would I have been labeled angry? Difficult?
That’s the quiet math. Comply, and we carry the burden. Resist, and we become the “problem.”
Either way, the cost lands on us.
He was trying to offload a weight that wasn’t mine. It was a confirmation, yet again, that my body, my presence, is too often treated as public property. My teenage daughter jokes, “Mom, who’s going to talk to you at the store today?” She’s laughing, but she’s learning what I carry.
I’ve started thinking of that coconut water as a metaphor. Coconuts are hard on the outside, soft on the inside. They protect something nourishing. But to get to it, you have to crack it open. We are the coconut: quietly cracked open, not for our own nourishment, but for someone else’s relief.
And the Stanley cup? It’s trendy, approved, polished for display. That day, it was allowed in, while my natural, gently nourishing self was told to wait outside.
We are taught that being a safe space is a blessing. But this is spiritual bypassing. There is nothing holy about becoming invisible so others can feel seen.
I took the coconut water back to the car. But I never stopped carrying everything else: unspoken burdens, unsought confessions, the quiet exhaustion that comes from survival. And I am learning, with intention, not just to set it down, but to stop picking it up in the first place.
Because peace isn’t found in compliance. It’s found in boundaries. In self-possession. In refusing to be everybody’s emotional landing strip.
I came for pictures of my daughter. But I left with a reminder: What you carry matters. And so does what, and who, you choose not to carry.
Demetria M. Jackson is a licensed trauma therapist, owner of Free to Flourish Counseling and Consulting, LLC, and the Free to Flourish Instigator who explores the emotional labor women carry.