This piece isn’t about travel, but about a film that left me thinking long after the credits rolled. I felt it deserved a space here.
It took me two weeks to gather the courage to watch Straw, by Tyler Perry (spoiler alert!). I hesitated to watch it because of everything I’d seen on social media. So many people were shocked by its raw portrayal of a single mother’s struggles. I remember thinking: if I ever become a mother, I definitely don’t want to watch this kind of film, it just sounds too discouraging.
To my surprise, the message I took from the movie was far more unsettling than I expected: that mental health is a luxury, an aspiration reserved for those who can afford to eat, to sleep, to live in safety.
The movie portrays a single mother, Janiyah, who became a mother against the odds. Having no access to healthcare in the United States, she was instructed to (unsuccessfully) abort when her water broke, and her daughter was not supposed to survive for long. The story highlighted other issues though, from how she couldn’t afford rent for the two of them, nor the medicine of her daughter, all while on the edge of eviction. On a given day, all her worst fears come to reality: homeless, with her daughter taken into foster care, and charged with double homicide after her boss fired her and ignored her pleas for help.
When things couldn’t get worse, they did. Janiyah ends up in what looks like a bank robbery trying to cash her last check for $521 to pay for her daughter lunch program at school. She uses a gun to threaten the cashier as they wouldn’t let her cash it out without an ID, which she hadn’t. Hours later, she would become viral telling the story of her own struggles in a live one of the hostages secretly hosted. She provoked empathy from black crowds, and hatred and indifference from some others who simply saw her as a criminal.
When the hostage situation resolves, she obviously gets arrested by the end of the movie, and accepts she has to spend quite some time in jail. It was sad all around, but turned out shocking when I found this situation spiraled down into chaos out of a completely different reality: her daughter had died the night before in a seizure, and there was no lunch to pay, there was no daughter to love. This is the moment I realized this story was not only about the struggles of single motherhood, or being black in a country with a lot of racism even today, but something deeper: that mental health can break us down in ways we can’t even comprehend or anticipate.
The crimes Janiyah committed were the result of a physical body that couldn’t cope anymore with hunger, poverty, and indifference. Her mind was pushed to the extreme under consistent survival mode. She acted like an animal, not because she was one, but because hunger, grief, and poverty reduce us all to instinct. When our basic needs go unmet, we stop functioning like citizens, like parents, like humans. We survive.
There’s no doubt that motherhood can become a trigger for many and exacerbate stress and struggles. But for me the main moral of this story is: We can’t aspire to be fully human when we’re starving. Until then, we’re just cornered animals doing what we must to survive. And the most devastating part? We live in a world that could feed us all, yet still lets people break.
If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Writing this helped me process something I didn’t know I needed to, maybe it can do the same for someone else 🧡
Random Lessons 