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| Jae Nichelle's "Friends with Benefits" |
By LaMaiya Wright
“Friendswith Benefits” performed by Jae Nichelle brings viewers inside the non-consensual, intimate relationship between herself and the dreadful disorder of anxiety. Throughout this work, Nichelle personifies anxiety to mimic something like an abusive boyfriend; whose choke hold prevents her for functioning in her day to day life and maintaining healthy relationships with the opposite sex.
What Nichelle evokes through this work is a call for society to address the heaviness of mental illness in the African American community; more specifically speaking, its effects on African American women. What Nichelle does here is make it clear that anxiety is not just feeling, emotion, or fear. Anxiety is a paralyzing, sometimes unbearable illness that prevents African American women from being fully present in a world that neglects their presence anyway.
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